Inspiration From Two Years of Learning to Play and Hack the Guitar
Two years ago I started to learn guitar. Two years - one week ago it was disassembled on my bench for modification.
After playing bass guitar in high school, then decades later picking up the baritone ukulele, I finally started learning how to play an actual 6-string guitar two years ago.1
How to learn guitar TL;DR: pick up a guitar up and play for a while. Repeat every day for two years. Now you know guitar.
As you might have guessed if you’ve been reading Tech Adjacent for a while, I started this journey by assembling a guitar kit from Amazon that was around $100, (electronics and all!) After hacking/playing this, and trying another very cheap assembled guitar, I actually think the DIY assembly route is a great place to start if you’re somewhat handy, and you’re not sure if you’ll continue with this art form.
It’s a Telecaster clone, which, one might call the OG2 electric guitar design. This means there is a LOT of reference material available. If you want to hack, fix, or even learn how to play one, there’s likely a YouTube video or other tutorial for what you want to do. Sort of the Arduino Uno of guitars… if that reference helps you. My progress is documented in this video, including upgrades/mods/hacks.
Musical project inspiration
So what kind of stuff does combining a (new/old) love for music with a lifetime of making things and engineering? Directly, this meant progressively more creative mods, including a fairly standard cutoff killswitch, a new mini-pedal board design, and finally, a dual-killswitch effect button setup that may be the first of its kind.
Indirectly, this likely helped inspire my previously featured auto tong drum machine. This meant diving into the world of MIDI, which led to me creating a MIDI/serial/I2C adapter for the Arduino Opta, a profitable little device in its own right! As explained in some detail here, consider what you have to invent to make a project work. Others may be interested too!
Crossover niches make riches… but not too many niches
Generally speaking, I think there’s great value to being able to combine things in a synergistic manner. Consider a engineer who’s technically competent and curious, and can write and speak decently well. Then you can/get/have to do whatever it is that I do. If you’re great with electronics and/or mechanics and music (and perhaps a bit eccentric), then you become Look Mum No computer or Wintergaten.
Or maybe you’re a restaurant owner that decides to put his programming (or prompting) skills to work to make a new ordering app that works better than whatever is out there right now. Or any number of skills/knowledge combinations that make things work better. Your invention could be quite profitable.
Of course if you pursue too many things, then perhaps your talents get spread too thin… and you end up building a Ping-Pong table out of OSB to maybe save a few dollars over just buying one to see if it can be done. That was a fun project, and a post for another day, but I probably won’t make any money with it directly!
I think there is some inherent value in being able to do a lot of things yourself, but I also don’t think that being overly broad in your pursuits is always the best way to make money. From a philosophical perspective though, is that always the point?
If I consider what would happen if I became a doctor, lawyer, professional basketball player, even an insurance agent, there is a good chance that I would make more money than I do now. At the same time, if I was too specialized at my job, I probably wouldn’t know how as many things worked or be able to make/repair things well.
That thought is terrifying to me. Even if I could pay for anything I wanted to be done, not being able to do it myself seems like a huge deficiency. And perhaps that’s just my perspective as an engineer, but I think there’s some logic to it as well. If society was to crumble, someone would then have to rebuild it. Or at least know how to fix the sink in a Mad Max future where cash is useless… and, well, maybe we don’t have clean water anyway. I could also build a still. -JC
That got dark fast. I thought it was supposed to be about learning the guitar? Well according to at least one of the Mad Max films, there are positions available for heavy metal guitarists and people that can work with cars, so I should at least be able to fit in.
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.
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Addendum/Footnotes:
Two years as of when I originally wrote that.
I’m tempted to say “as the kids say,” but I’m pretty sure the term originated when I was a kid myself as a moniker for “original gangsta.” Middle schoolers seem to be continuing its usage and/or it’s gone in and out of style like long stocks.
Like many other contemporary and ancient acronyms — e.g. EPCOT, “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” — the literal meaning and original scope are mostly unknown.