by We’re back! Whew, after doing all that automation, static IPs, OpenHAB and printer jobs, its time to take a small break. But don’t worry, I’ll still talk about 3D printing at some point in this post. The main focus here is me struggling with my new hobby, playing Guitar…
My Guitar Origin Story
I started learning how to play. I got the idea from my co-worker, he is a big metal head. He let me borrow his guitar for the weekend, giving me a chance to try it out. He explained how easy it is to play a few songs, after you learn a few chords. Now, I’ve played my fair share of Guitar Hero, and I knew real guitar was a bit more challenging. Oh how right I was… My fingers were blistered, my strumming arm was tired, and I was addicted. The following weekend, I set off to a guitar shop to buy a guitar and begin my tone deaf journey.
Cue Training Montage
Yeah, you are only getting one video from me. What do I look like? A Youtuber? I don’t have a whole team and a million dollars to make wholesome content! </rant> (Ha, nerd jokes). All of my training and lessons have been self taught. I’ve been watching youtubers like Marty Music, For3v3rFaithful, and Chord Genome. Watching them, I was able to quickly learn chords to start playing some songs. Songs like Brown eyed girl, Island in the sun, and Save your tears. Things were progressing smoothly until I started running into songs that require a Capo. What’s a Capo?
Its basically a hair clip for your guitar to increase its pitch. The lower you put the capo, the higher the pitch gets. My problem was, I didn’t have one. Buuuuuuuuut I could PRINT ONE!
Lets get printing
Told you this would come back to printing at some point. 🙂 I set off to my favorite site Thingiverse, and hunted down a few capo designs. The first one I tried was an all in one piece capo clamp.
This capo seemed like a good design, but it didn’t have enough squeezing power to keep the strings from buzzing. Trying a different design, this one clamps down on the strings using notches to tighten down.
The notches made a huge difference, the strings stopped buzzing completely. With a proper capo, my playable song library massively expanded!
Since I was already on Thingiverse, I went ahead and printed a few more items. Like a string winder, for when my strings start to go bad and need replacement. This little doohickey saves your fingers from doing all that twisting.
Moving onto something more fun vs function, I printed out the pick of destiny from Tenacious D
The pick is a replica of the pick that was crafted from a demon tooth hundreds of years ago. According to legend, even replicas have the power to channel rock and roll from demons. Unfortunately, it hasn’t kicked in for me yet, so I have a bit of satanic ritual practice ahead of me. If you read this post backwards it’s actually a Latin excerpt from a recovered demon scroll…. Oh please, I’m not that good! 😛
Decaling the Guitar
Outside of printing all together, for Christmas my wife got a Cricut machine where she was able to make me custom decals. I’m a huge Halo nerd, so of course all of my guitar tattoos are going to be Spartan themed. So far its just a Long sword fighter, a pelican, Warthog Jeep and Scorpion Tank and a spartan helmet. After that, I’ll be most likely out of space to add more.
Well, thanks for swinging by. My next set of posts will probably have a few 3D printing nuggets here and there and maybe a few game ones. We’ll see where the blogging muse takes me!