Tonefiend Book Week is Coming!

Next week at tonefiend we’ll be talking about our favorite guitar/music books. I’ll write about some of the titles I find especially useful, inspiring, or entertaining, and I hope you’ll chime in with some of your recommended reading.

Since there’s so much potential material here, I suggest we focus on a different book category […]

Acoustic Strings Search: Update

Holy crap! Now THAT’S a guitar string!

Man, it pays to curate a blog frequented by smart people!

I wrote last week about my experiment with silk-and-steel strings.

It’s the latest chapter in my ongoing search for the right acoustic strings. Most available options simply sound far too harsh and bright to […]

Fretboard Heatmaps:
A Lifetime of Playing in One Graphic

Saw this today on the Guardian‘s site: A clever programmer named Joe Cannatti decided to visualize the fretwork of a 22 well-known players. He used Ruby on Rails code to search the internet for tablature files, and then depicted the data as “fretboard heatmaps” β€” fretboard graphics with frequently played notes depicted in red. (The […]

Silk and Steel Strings Revisited

Silk and steel β€” bad-ass, or strictly for wusses?.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve tried silk and steel strings.

I’ve always thought of them as a transitional set for students migrating from nylon to steel strings. At least that’s how my mom used to explain them to me back […]

Were the Shaggs Medieval?

Were the Shaggs born 600 years too late?

Here’s reader Freddie Lenzel, writing in response to my post on the bizarre late-medieval composition Fumee fume par fumee:

To me, it sort of sounds like The Shaggs from the Dark Ages. But seriously, it’s really interesting. Greetings from Spain, love your blog. And I […]

DIY Club Help in the Forum

Despair en masse in the Forum!

Mitchell “Super-Freq” Hudson, creator of our DIY Fuzz Face project, made a smart suggestion: Dedicated Forum sections for each of the Tonefiend DIY Club projects.

You’ll find them here. Thanks, Mitchell! πŸ™‚

[…]

14th-Century Freakout!

Codex Chantilly: the electrifying page-turner that blew the lid off the perverse musical excesses of the late Middle Ages!

NOTE: I am a known perpetrator of musical hoaxes, but this isn’t one of them. This bizarre composition really is over 600 years old.

As Marsellus Wallace once quipped: “I’m’a get medieval on your […]

The Fuzz of a Thousand Faces

Lon Chaney was an early Fuzz Face user.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a guitarist in possession of a single Face Fuzz must be in want of cool Fuzz Face mods. (Sorry, Jane.)

Case in point: The comments section for the new Fuzz Face project.

We’re far from the first to […]

The “Super-Fiend” DIY Fuzz Face!

You can purchase a kit, or source your own parts.

UPDATE [06.16.2013]: Build instructions updated to v02. The Fuzz Face has inspired countless spinoffs since Ivor Arbiter unveiled the device in 1966. Some introduced meaningful improvements. Many didn’t.

The goal of this project, created by my friend Mitchell “Super-Freq” Hudson, is to create […]

Fuzz Face:
The Daiquiri of Distortion Pedals?

Most sentient guitarists love Hendrix, but not everyone is equally fond of his signature distortion pedal.

So what’s your take on the Fuzz Face?

I used to hate them β€” but only because my sole exposure to them was via the crappy reissues of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. They sounded so brittle and harsh! […]