What are You watching on YOUTUBE?

by **dubkitty** » Tue Jan 30, 2024 9:07 pm

i got an email today from one of the local venues announcing onsale for a concert by Three Dog Night. seriously. apparently one of the originals was sacked due to drugs in the mid-80s and one passed in 2016, but Danny Hutton who sang "Black and White" and "Liar" is still at it. i'm not planning on going, but Wiki-ing to find out who was in the group reminded me of one of their songs i used to like, and then the algorithm spat up one of my favorite songs in the sidebar.

by **friendship** » Fri Feb 02, 2024 5:45 pm

dubkitty wrote:as if. he's a pseudoscientist doing experiments designed to yield the desired result and not measuring anything that would contradict his pre-drawn conclusions. it's the precise equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" or COVID denialism. but people who have no experience with anything other than high-gain playing lap it up because it means their shitty shredder guitars are actually great because they eliminate every distinguishing characteristic of a particular guitar other than the pickups. as someone noted on Reddit the other day, you never see jazz guitarists saying that only pickups matter. it's another example of one of my least favorite things about 21st century thought, the tendency to reduce complex multi-factorial questions into a simple binary. in any case, i have over 50 years of experience that conclusively prove to me that he's full of shit. styrofoam cabinets? y'all actually believe this shit?

I dunno, that's one way to interpret those videos (i.e. it's reducing multi-factorial questions into a simple binary), but that's not what I took away from them. I took away the question that while there are a lot of factors that might make small differences, how much thought and energy do I want to put towards them? If I were a real scientist trying to pinpoint the difference in resonant properties of alder vs mahogany in a guitar body or whatever, then yeah there are probably a lot of questions unanswered by these videos and these experiments aren't very thorough. But when I'm going down a rabbit hole to find out the differences in fingerboard wood or power tube type, I'm not doing it as a scientist, I'm doing it as a musician. And I think the videos are a pleasant reminder that I while I could spend a lot of time and energy delving into that stuff (and it's valid to do that!), it's useful to me to know where the biggest impacts are, e.g. I know that I need to think about what kind of pickups I'm using and how they are adjusted way before I need to think about whether the guitar has a maple top; e.g. I need to think about my mic placement and proximity way before I need to worry about whether it's tube-powered. I happened to learn those things from IRL experience, but videos like these would have helped a much younger, less-experienced me bypass a lot of unnecessary waffling about things that don't make so big of a difference that I need to spend too much time on them. I'm a mortal with an increasingly limited amount of time on this planet, after all.