An electric violin is a violin equipped with an electronic sound output. The term electric violin can refer to a standard violin fitted with an electric pickup of some type, or to an instrument purposely made to be electrified with built-in pickups, usually with a solid body.

Electrically amplified violins have been used in one form or another since the 1920s; jazz and blues artist Stuff Smith is generally credited as being one of the first performers to adapt pickups and amplifiers to violins. The Electro Stringed Instrument Corporation, National Valco and Vega attempted to sell electric violins in the 1930s and 1940s; Fender produced a small number of electric violins in the late 1950s. Larger scale manufacture of electric violins did not happen until the late 1990s.

Acoustic violins may be used with an add-on piezoelectric bridge or body pickup. To avoid feedback from the resonances of the hollow body under high amplification on stage, many instruments have a solid body instead. The timbre of a standard unamplified violin is due in large part to these resonances, however, depending on how the signal is picked up, an electric violin may have a “rawer” or “sharper” sound than an acoustic instrument. This raw sound is often preferred in rock, pop, and some avant-garde genres. Several “semi-hollow” designs exist, containing a sealed but hollow resonating chamber that provides some approximation of acoustic violin sound while reducing susceptibility to feedback.

Solid-body electric violins typically have a non-traditional, minimalistic design to keep weight down. They are often seen as “experimental” instruments, being less established than electric guitar or bass. Hence, there are many variations on the standard design, such as frets, extra violin strings, machine heads, “baritone” strings that sound an octave lower than normal, sympathetic strings, and more, without even going into the many electronic effects used to shape the raw sound to suit the player’s preference.

The most interesting part of playing an electric violin, in my opinion, is twisting the sound with electronic effects. Effects units come in a variety of shapes and sizes, some of which produce subtle changes in the sound, some of which transform the instrument entirely.

Effects are being used with a wide variety of instruments these days, but most effects units were originally designed for electric guitar. Effects are sold separately as single pedals (generally an aluminum box), or as multi-effect units in a pedalboard (usually a plastic wedge box with a half-dozen pedals on it) , compact interface (some can be clipped to your belt), or rack-mount unit (a box with screw holes that let you mount it in a rack). Which form you buy your effects in depends both on budget and use. Multi-effect rack units are typically more expensive (the best effects are available only as rack units), and can be more problematic during live performances. Pedals are generally the cheapest route, and the most reliable on the road.

Reverb – The most common and useful effect, reverb (short for reverberation) allows you to control the perceived size of the room in which you’re performing. (The unit shown here is a Boss combination reverb/delay pedal.) You can sound like you’re playing in a closet, a small performance hall, or in a deep cavern. Good reverb units allow you to control a variety of parameters, including the time before the first relection returns (i.e. the time from when sound leaves your instrument to the time when it has bounced off the nearest surface and returned to your instrument), the number of reflections (how long the sound bounces around the room before dying out. A large room with hard surfaces will let sound bounce longer than a small room with padded surfaces.), the “density” of the reflections (essentially accounting for the complexity of the room. More surfaces make for more complex reflections, whereas a small number of surfaces make a fairly simple reflection.), and so on.

Good reverbs are also “warm,” in the sense that the nuance of the instrument is retained in the reflected signal. This last characteristic is most of what you’re paying for in high-end units, as they have the processing horsepower to accurately reverberate all areas of the sound without loosing any fidelity. A warm, smooth reverb is kinda like really good speakers…the feeling of “being there” is greater.

Delay – Where reverb provides a reflection of the sound that’s dependent on the characteristics of the virtual “room,” delay creates a second signal based on a preset time. Delay can be set quite short (in which case it sounds kinda like a cold reverb), or quite long (where the delayed signal comes in several seconds after the original notes are played). All delay units allow you to specify the time before the note is repeated. Many also let you specify the number of times the note is repeated, the rate at which the volume of repeated notes decays, and in more advanced units the stereo channel in which the notes are repeated.

Pitch-shifting – Pitch-shifting takes a variety of forms. The most common uses are in chorusing, flanging, or rotary-speaker effects, described below, in fixed-interval effects, and in adaptive “harmonizers.” In fixed-interval effects (most commonly found as octave or double-octave pedals) the main signal is reproduced simultaneously one octave lower. Some newer pedals allow you to select a variety of intervals for the second pitch. When using a harmonizer, you tell the unit what key you’re playing in, and it produces additional harmony parts from the note you play.

Flanging – A sibling of chorusing, flanging also works by delaying a copy of the main signal. Flanging, however, delays the copy in a much shorter span of time (1-12ms) than chorusing. This makes for a more nasal or metallic sound, or with some settings the effect of a jet airplane flying overhead. Most flanging units also allow you to specify “resonance,” in which a certain percentage of the flanged signal is fed back to the processor. In some cases you can twiddle the knobs on a flanger to very nearly get a chorused sound, albeit without all the warmth of a chorus processor.

“Leslie”/Rotating speaker – The rotating speaker was originally developed in the 60’s by Don Leslie. The speaker cone was mounted on a mechanical platform that was rotated in a circle, providing a pulsing sound based on both the changes in volume as the speaker rotated, and the doppler effect (albeit small) created by the rotation.

Wah-wah – Masterfully used by Jimi Hendrix, the “wah” pedal lives up to its name: as the pedal is rocked back and forth, the note being processed makes the sound of someone saying “wah.” Most useful in blues and funk settings because of its speechlike expressiveness, and can also find a home as a kind of limited resonance filter (slowly making the sound more, then less nasal).

istortion/Overdrive – Distortion occurs when an audio circuit is driven beyond is designed tolerances. Well, actually a whole bunch of things can occur to cause distortion, but the end result is a “crunchy” sound. Distortion can be controlled to make a sound thicker and “chewier” (kinda like a Zinfandel, I suppose). Some distortions are used sparingly to make a sound complex (as in blues), others (as in heavy metal) are used to make the sound as intense as possible.

Really good distortion, heavy or light, is generally referred to as “brown,” because it gives the sound a smooth “dirty” texture, and is complex. Poor distortions tend to be less complex, with a more strident and abrasive texture (good and bad being relative, of course, depending on what you want to use it for). Really brown distortions can only be had via tube amplifiers. Although solid-state circuits (like the chips found in computers) can approximate a controlled distortion, the physical properties of vacuum tube transistors make their sound particularly smooth, warm, and complex. The down side of tube amplifiers is that tubes deteriorate and break, whereas solid-state circuits pretty much don’t. I also gather that tube amps are more expensive to build, since they typically cost more.

Equalization – An equalizer in the purest sense simply makes all sounds equally strong throughout the frequency spectrum. ‘Course in reality this isn’t what you want, and most equalization (or “eq’ing”) is done to shape the sound to fit a particular use. EQ can be particularly important when playing or recording in an ensemble, where certain frequency ranges of each instrument are important, and others “step on,” or interfere with, other instruments.

Compression/Limiting – This effect is primarily used to prevent a signal from getting out of hand in an ensemble setting, or on a recording where an overly “hot,” or intense, signal can cause distortion on the tape. (An Alesis rackmount compressor is shown here.) Compression is also used, however, to give added “sustain” to guitars, which, because plucked, can’t produce a long sustained note without additional plucking of the string.

Digital synthesis/transformation and MIDI control – There are two effects on the market that can take a violin (or guitar) sound entirely away from the realm of traditional analog effects: digital synthesis or transformation, or MIDI control.

In digital synthesis, the signal from the instrument is used only for its “controller” aspects. That is, pitch, velocity, pressure, and so on are important, but timbre (the actual tone or “texture” of the instrument’s sound) is discarded. The synthesizer uses the controller data to trigger sounds in its memory, which are typically digital sound samples of other instruments. This kind of synthesizer does not convert the controller information to a MIDI signal, and as such can’t control an external synthesizer or keyboard.

Roland makes the most popular guitar synths (the GR-09 is shown here), but also makes a “Virtual Guitar” synth. This device manipulates the original sound, including its timbre, just as a standard effects unit does. But in this case, the original sound is altered via a physical model of a guitar. I won’t go into the details of “physical modeling synthesis” here, but suffice to say it’s a significantly different method than that used by traditional effects processors, and produces a number of timbres and sounds that no other processor can produce.

Both Roland and Zeta make “pitch-to-MIDI” converters. These processors convert the controller information (pitch, velocity, pressure, and so on) into a MIDI signal which can then control an external synthesizer. These converters have no sound-producing capabilites on their own, and serve only to translate the instrument signal to a MIDI signal.

After 2 months of writing an article and posting it on Wikipedia, my article, “American Egyptomania” has been placed into a category with a lot of other articles called “Category: Orphaned Articles.” On top of my article being placed into this category, I’ve received no feedbacks or comments on my article. I don’t really know if this is a good or bad thing, but knowing that it was filtered into the category of orphaned articles doesn’t really surprise me. In a span of two months, I don’t think there would be a lot of people searching on the topic, “American Egyptomania” as much as something far more interesting and broad as a Hollywood icon.

Throughout middle school and high school, when we were assigned topics to research and we had to write up a citation page, teachers would always warn us that a free encyclopedia such as Wikipedia was not a proper and accurate site to use. In my personal opinion however, I think Wikipedia is what it is….it is a “Free” Encyclopedia. Sure, some information may be wrong and inaccurate, but there are still accurate information that they provide which is backed up by a source or linked to another website. However it is, more of less, the Web, repackaged and reformatted. I will admit that despite warnings against using Wikipedia, I have cited to Wikipedia on rare occasions and for very similar reasons, to web searches on Google for a very open ended topic or for a specific term. Personally, the difference between citing Wikipedia and citing a Web search is just a matter of the target’s format. Wikipedia entries generally look nicer, but other that that, Wikipedia and the World Wide Web are very nearly the same thing. Wikipedia’s openess to both creation and revision, doesn’t guarantee much of an accuracy so that is one thing that users have to watch out for. The information that they are receiving may in fact be falsified sometimes. All in all,I think that searching the Web’s messy data for specific terms, if not a good way to find authoritative information reliably, an extremely helpful step in my process of research.

Nowadays it seems many people are at pains to warn the public (and particularly “students”) that everything you see on a website is not true. Clueless people were out there posting crazy things on websites, spewing misinformation. Now, it seems, we all have internalized that fact and moved on — such articles still pop up now and then, but not nearly as frequently. And–surprise!–it seems we’re all still using the Web and we all find it pretty useful–perhaps more useful now than ever, given the improvements in powers of search. Overall, I think that Wikipedia is just a reflection of the Web in regards to the question of reliability and verifiability.

For decades both men and women have been in search for the fountain of youth. But since no has been able to discover this fountain of youth, concocting potions and mixing ingredients will have to do for now to be able to reverse the signs of aging. Dating back to 1923, Boncilla was one of a few makeup brands promoting youth in a bottle. In this 1923 Boncilla ad, it portrays women in the sense that they had to be beautiful. The modern woman in the 1920’s did not want to look “old”. They wanted to be young and in style, and this Boncilla ad shows just that. It shows two women sitting in a room in front of a mirror, putting make up on. It appears as though they are about to go somewhere. One of them has the Boncilla in her hand, and her reflection in the mirror makes her look like a confident woman. The other woman looks as though she is not so sure about herself however. The confident lady looked older than the other lady as well. On the right side of the ad, it says, “If you are fifty, and your skin is clear and fresh, and your facial contour firm and youthful, you are young.” It also says, “If you are twenty, and your skin is dull and lifeless, and the outline of your face is drooping, you are old.” This is exactly what is going on in the picture. The older lady who has the Boncilla tube in her hand looks more confident than the much younger lady who is just sitting there watching the older lady apply her Boncilla. This makes an incredible statement, as it is implied that the Boncilla gives confidence. In the 20’s, confidence is something that women were keen on. They had recently won the vote, and were moving up in society. Looking good was simply another means of feeling good about oneself. By showing an older, better looking woman with a tube of Boncilla, it made the Boncilla look responsible for the confidence. That was enough to sell the product to newly liberated women of the 20’s look and feel more confident about themselves.

Now fast forward to the year 2007. In the media today, everybody is still out to promote looking young, but at a different angle. We live in a world where women and men are put on the same pedestal, where high fashion from Hollywood gets plastered onto glossy magazines such as Vogue, Instyle, etc. and women around the world try to emulate, and where even teenagers as young as 13 start wearing makeup to beautify themselves.

In this modern Christian Dior ad is a picture of Hollywood icon, Charlize Theron promoting the brand’s perfume and makeup. As you can see, just from the head shot of Charlize Theron one can say that she is definitely confident but she is also using her sexuality to promote Christian Dior’s products. As I mentioned before, in the society that we live in today, women don’t have to worry about being put down just because we are women. The concept that Boncilla created to boost up women’s confidence is still evident in this modern day ad for Christian Dior, but minus the worries.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12668431@N02/sets/72157603136333560/

With the secession of Southern states came the spread of war fever among the patriotic and politically active men of the North and South alike. Leaving their homes and loved ones for the hardships, suffering, devastation, and bloodshed for the years to come, one must wonder how the departures were for each family before they were sent off to war. In the few weeks leading up to the war, there would be secession balls, gala balls and presentation sword ceremonies held in order to celebrate the both the North and South’s new nationhood and honor the men who would soon be going to war. These balls and ceremonies ranged from being hosted by the President himself to local mayors, however served both to unite the people of the new formed nations of the North and South under a common cause to fight each other and a psychological way to motivate current soldiers to do well in battle and to recruit new ones. Many of these gala balls were to motivate and reward soldiers for their victories. In a way it is similar to a system of rewards on the broadest sense, but it has shown that it was effective and uplifting for the battles. The young men of the North were prepared to fight for the Union, while the Southerners were rushing to arms to defend their homeland. After the balls and celebrations were over however, ahead lay the ravages of war. Departure was difficult, but ahead awaited glory, honor, and the fortunes of war.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12668431@N02/

The movie, The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich was “…the best film ever made about the Revolutionary War.” ummmm NOT!!! This movie was very unrealistic about the American Revolution and was “conventionally written and conventionally directed for a conventional audience.”

Not saying this movie was horrible and that I didn’t enjoy watching it, but how this movie represented the American Revolution was just awful! Although the cinematography was great. The battle scenes really came alive with sounds of gunfire, cannon, and shouted orders.

The central problem with The Patriot was that the movie was going around in circles. It never really focused on a main idea. There were a lot of small stories within this whole main idea of the American Revolution. There is the story of the war itself, the story of a family torn apart by the war, the story of a man wrestling with his past and his faith, and not one but two love stories. It never provided an actual humanistic approach to the plot. There was a lot of usages of tired clichés which only to weakened the narrative.

Even though we all knew the British were the “bad guys”, the depiction of the Brits were very unflattering. Everything the British did in the movie seemed so evil….they were poorly portrayed. The part when we see British soldiers lock the population of a town in a church and burn it does absolutely nothing for the movie other than make the villains seem deliberately cruel.

My favorite part about watching The Patriot however, was getting to see the deleted scenes. Seven scenes are presented, which can be watched with or without commentary by Devlin and Emmerich. This section was also frustrating because it showed that some of the best, most emotional scenes in the movie were cut out due to concerns about the running time. There is one scene in particular where Benjamin Martin holds a makeshift family funeral for his son Thomas. Mel Gibson’s acting in this scene, his depiction of Martin’s struggle with his own faith and his guilt over his past, are so powerful and honest that this scene would have added a lot to the movie. The funeral scene only runs for about a minute, and in my mind it was a huge mistake to cut it from the final version of the picture.

This movie actually opened on the weekend of 4th of July which is kind of ironic because it doesn’t really depict the American Revolution anyways. This was just an average action flick in which Hollywood came along and twisted the story and left out really important parts to the movie because they were worried about the running time. I was kind of disappointed though because this was a period in our history which changed America, and they should have deserved a much better examination.

[1] http://imdb.com/title/tt0187393/

[2] http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1800353825/info

[3] http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Pavillion/3630/

After compiling information for the spreadsheet, I could see an ongoing pattern for what they wore or took when these slaves/servants escaped. Dating from September 17, 1736, Thomas Rennolds was able to take not only himself while he was running away, but a few other items such as “several Shoe makers Tools, Canvas Wastcoats and Breeches, and wore a Brown Duroy Coat, lin’d with Blue Shalloon, one Black, and one White Wigg, and, ’tis suppos’d, he also took with him a small Bay Horse, branded with a Horse-shoe, on the near Buttock” Just from reading this ad, this runaway servant planned well, and took with him things which aided him to run away. He took a horse so that during the escape he wouldn’t have to travel on foot and he also took another set of clothing so that if somebody ever wrote an ad searching for him he could change, and maybe he thought that if he was lucky and he really escaped without being captured again that he could maybe start a new life. According to my spreadsheet, a common theme that kept repeating was that these slaves/servants who escaped would most of the time escaped and didn’t travel on foot, meaning they probably stole a horse. But I only see this trend continue throughout the 1730’s, and early 1740’s. What I did see that continued even throughout the 1800’s was that the runaways would still take a lot of clothing with them as you can read from this quote in an ad which dates Febrary 15, 1803. “…robbed my house of 7 Tea spoons, 6 of them marked F. M. 2 Table Spoons, a pair of Sugar Tongs, also marked as above, a pair of large Silver Shoe Buckles, a gold Broach, Barcelona Handkerchief, small diaper Table Cloth, brown Jacket and a Sword…” Besides the clothing though, you can clearly see that this escapee took a lot more than just extra clothing. Over time, runaways took more than needed besides clothing, maybe because later on in the time period, they could pass off as a free servant if they managed to escape/runaway.

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