Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

I think I recall reading about Hendrix that he tried to emulate the sounds of cartoons with his guitar, and then when he was in the army he did the same with trying to reproduce the sounds of fighter jets. Not sure if urban legend, but cool origin story.

The first time I had an amp distorted and loud enough to cause feedback (if I wanted to) at band practice was the most magical day of my life.

I had heard it a lot in punk and pop-punk to create swells. I improvised my still-favorite solo that day.

Star Spangled Banner was incredible. The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony… that was a masterpiece.

> I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.

1,000,000%. Guitar is one of those hobbies where people mythologize and build elaborate hagiographies around players they like and the gear that they used. Hendrix was a generational talent but I highly doubt he was sitting around enumerating problem statements and systematically exploring solution spaces. The Fuzz Face was one of like four dirtboxes available during that time so he chose that one. He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model. He leveraged feedback because he discovered it naturally and realized that he could make it sound totally badass.

The man clearly had a vision and executed it but his decisions were pragmatic, not the product of grand technical reasoning. It reminds me of the student who wrote a bunch of authors and asked to what degree they were conscious of the themes and symbolism in their work [1]. Many were not - as it turns out English teachers often put the cart before the horse. This is the rock and roll version of that.

I can't knock the article though as it has a lot of sound (pun intended) analysis in it as opposed to typical guitar forum dreck about NOS tube and hand-wired turret board magic.

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-...

Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.

For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands.

Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.

Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.

The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].

There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.

EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0gED3rn2Tc

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn52b-bWfFM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYtjttnp1Rs

Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"

> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience

Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.

Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.

There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.

You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.

But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.

I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.

> All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.

Electric bass? Heck, even in synthesizers, you have the EWI or the Haken Continuum.

Guitar (and bass) are obviously and far and away the most successful, but it does a disservice to a number of wonderful inventions to say they're the only ones. Just look at what the Japanese band T-SQUARE does with the EWI to see people innovating at the edges.

I watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed.

I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.

I feel like the synthesizer--CMI Fairlight, Moog anything, Synclavier, PPG Wave, and just the general concept of modular synthesis--are pretty staunch competitors. Yours is certainly a fun and fair take, and arguably the electric guitar+tube amps birthed so many genres (blues, soul, funk, rock, punk, metal, etc) where as synthesizers remained pretty niche with their contribution to experimental music and pop music, mixing in with rock funk and disco, and the titan of EDM that grew out of that.

I generally reserve the word electronic to mean something with a microcontroller or discreet logic components. Electronic guitars exist, but they're basically differently shaped keyboards.

I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.

Ahem, just two words. Yamaha DX-7.

Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.

I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.

That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.

Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.

With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.

>"All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience."

Look at Roli Seaboard, it has insane amount degrees of freedom / expression

https://youtu.be/2fQbtp2BgY4?si=S52A-22A3GlXPajU

past the middle starts solo

I suppose you haven’t heard some really talented sitar players out there. For a traditionally non-electronic instrument, it’s got some crazy sounds.

Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...

It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.

I didn't see any LLM-isms. Emdashes I guess, but I expect those in actual articles, they're only fishy in social media comments.

LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.

I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.

It doesn't read like an LLM to me. What are you seeing?

I bailed, it just really kills my desire to keep reading.

Brian May stands out even among that group (well maybe not w/ Les Paul there)

The guy built his own guitar as a teenager and has played it for the rest of his career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special

The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.

I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.

"Muddy Waters invented electricity!" -- Willie Brown, Crossroads (movie), 1986

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHMv0ORn0hg

https://archive.org/details/05-voodoo-chile-cherokee-mist

Eddie Kramer?

I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure).

Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?

Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.

I graduated in 2020 and I took a circuit design class and was taught Nagles algorithm. I guess I could have learned more but I thought the degree was packed enough with enough when you consider all the different parts of it, from the math to systems programming to ML stuff.

Base 1, collector 2?

Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology!

And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?

We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)

It's also a standard right handed strat, which seems like an oversight for a guy famous for playing with a right handed strat flipped upside down.

That's stretching the term to the breaking point, for me. Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts? attempts to model elements of the problem? data gathering and data analysis? simulation? Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem?

Artistic endeavors come from lots of places, not just people with an analytical mindset. Historically those two are seen as opposing tendencies, which I think is unfair, but it points to the importance of intuition and navigating perception and emotion for artists.

What??? Where did you get this idea?

Any guitarist in a 1940s big band would have a big hollowbody guitar and an amp. That combination is incredibly prone to feedback. Everyone worked to reduce feedback and avoid it. That's what I do with my hollowbody when I play with a big band. It's the first thing that happens when you turn up.

Hendrix did not "discover" feedback, and in fact he did not discover the musical uses of feedback - you can hear it in BB King records that predate Hendrix, where feedback makes his notes "sing."

What Hendrix did was turn feedback into an intentional musical creation that he treated as a melodic voice.

Interesting economic indicator. But isn't Jimi playing on the radio all the time somewhere?

I prefer the Circle Jerks:

  In a sluggish economy
  Inflation, recession
  Hits the land of the free
  Standing in unemployment lines
  Blame the government for hard time
  
  We just get by
  However we can
  We all gotta duck
  When the shit hits the fan

This is my church.

There’s a git repo associated with this article?

I’m curious because to tell you the truth the novelty struck me as similar to comparisons I’ve toyed with using LLMs on my own. The AI-generated logic between comparing two dissimilar things is too sterile for my liking.

I understand that this is appearing in technical publication, but for some reason that invites even further scrutiny on my behalf.

Please share more reasons behind your suspicions.