Most dystopian futures are kind of absurd, to be honest. But the best absurd dystopias are the ones which A) reveal something about the world we live in today and B) set up a great story about real people in an impossible situation. And judged by those yardsticks, Snowpiercer is a great dystopia.
via io9
Just picked up the Electro-Harmonix B9 Organ Machine. Fantastic and fun pedal that turns your guitar into an organ. Watch my first try on youtube. Ignore my sloppy playing and the string scratches as Zach recorded it with my iPhone up close.
When I first plugged it in and strummed, I thought "it sounds like a synthesizer pedal". But the more I played I realized it responded to my picking dynamics and sounded very "organic". There were absolutely no tracking issues. In fact I think that it may use a filter processing the original guitar sound. I could be wrong but it feels like it.
[update]
Day 2 - After playing with it more today and answering some questions from friends, I wanted to update this short review.
As I noted earlier this pedal does not seem to be tracking my playing and triggering the organ sound. Much of my picking dynamics and articulation translates directly to the organ sound. In fact, changing pickups or tone settings on the guitar will affect the tone of the organ sound that comes out of the pedal. This is a good thing, aside from changing the organ selector to a different organ type, I was able to darken what I thought was an overly bright organ tone by flipping from my bridge pickup to my middle Strat pickup.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that if I plucked the note lightly the pedal seemed to only generate the fundamental organ note, as I struck the note harder the higher fundamentals would start to sound. This felt and sounded very natural. The decay of the note would cause the reverse to happen, again, this felt and sounded very natural while playing.
Back to the "tracking" question... I did not need to alter my playing for the notes to sound, but I did need to play differently to try and get the "organ technique" to sound right. I had picked up the sheet music from "The Wedding March" and made sure I played the voicings as written for most of it. This caused me to use a few odd chord grips. If you watch the video, you'll notice a few choppy sections as I changed chords. I expect an experienced organist would sound very smooth. This reminded me of a quote from Johnny Smith regarding how he was able to play fast chord runs very smoothly:
The song opens with a virtuosic six-chord sequence that has become the stuff of legend and lore in guitarist circles. In it, Smith voices chord and melody off the same string -- a technique that came to him while listening to someone play the Hammond organ.
"The hardest thing to do on the guitar," he explains, "is to play a melodic chord progression in smooth, even fashion without leaving space between chords. Then one day I noticed how an organist managed to keep a tone going between chords by holding down one of the notes of the chord while he pivoted to the next chord. I picked up on that and applied it to chord progressions on the guitar."
from csindy.com
Also, note that I used heavier reverb than I would normally to help my playing sound a little smoother and gave it a churchy feel.
Again, I'm very impressed and happy with the EHX B9 Organ Machine. I would not be surprised if EHX released a deluxe pedal next year. Features I would like to see are:
- Added foot-switch to change organ selections on the fly
- 1 or 2 jacks to allow the Mod and Click settings to be changed using an expression pedal
- An LED to indicate the organ selection