Tone....Is it also in the eyes?

Herbie Meeks · From: Arkansas, USA

Some may have explained in text that I don't completely understand,
But I keep reading, ( EMOTION ) in between the words and lines of most posts here.
I believe a Steel Player, has to be able
to express His EMOTIONS, in His sound,
Like the lyrics of a song, Only this ability sets The Steel Player. or the song apart,

Heck, You can take a Stick, and beat on a Hollow log, or on my head
and put your Emotions in it.

Herbie

------------------

George Kimery · From: Limestone, TN, USA

Jeff Newman said you could not get a good sound out of a white guitar. I was never quite sure when Jeff was kidding or not, but to him,(at least psychological) a white guitar was a No-No. To me....Black sounds the best, what can I say. But 2 out of the 3 guitars that I have owned in my life have been black, Emmon's PP. So it is a good argument that the PP is what the difference in tone is, not the color. The all pull guitar I had was a mica rosewood finish. Different mechanism and different brand of guitar, so I guess I am comparing apples to oranges. That said, Black sounds better. That's my story and I am sticking to it.

Charlie McDonald · From: out of the blue

Blue puts me in the mood.

David L. Donald · From: Koh Samui Island, Thailand

I'm feeling blue.

Yesterday I was in the pink.
Happy as the yellow sunshine.

But I am working into a black mood.
Maybe I am green with envy.

My girl I thought was a white princes,
turns out to be a lady in red.

I thought she was true blue,
but now I am seeing red.

So now my soul is in a brown out.
The world has a sepia tint.

I can't find my rose colored glasses.
I am in the darkend dusky depths.

No rainbow to cheer this gray day.
No color in my life.

My words are all off color.
Talking a blue streak.

No amber waves of grain
over purple mountain majesties,
Nothing like blue skys, coming my way.

Like a mottled lemming I have fallen
from fresh green grass
to chalky rocks,
and the dark umber sea
swallows the robins egg brightness.

_____________________________________
Naw, colors don't affect your emotions!

Matthew Prouty · From: Warsaw, Poland

This is a very interesting topic that crosses over into how a group or a musician comes off with the music they play. Have you ever seen an opera singer belting it out in jeans and a tee shirt? It just does not have the same effect. There is something they we equate to a certain sound. A classic example of this was a band a I played with. We did pop, classic rock, blues and some honky tonk. The lead singer and drummer were part of a up and coming metal band and had the long hair and wore the "metal" attire all the time. We would do a pop song and the managers of the clubs would tell us to turn down the music. When pop bands played the same club and the same song with "pop" attire they would be several dB above the level we played. We eventually lost a 2 year standing house gig at this one club and when asked, the manager responded that the repeto ir was too metal, which, literally had none.

It was the appearance that set the stage for what the audience heard not the music.

M.

Rick Nicklas · From: Verona, Mo. (deceased)

Reese, I think when you play tunes using the midi you should visualize the instrument you are impersonating. For instance, if playing the part of a trumpet you should visualize blowing through a mouthpiece and changing the notes with the 3 valves provided. No pedals or slides allowed for Harry James licks. At the end of your session, if your lips feel a little chapped and the fretboard is damp, you had a successful visualization before the playback.... he he .... just kiddin !!

[This message was edited by Rick Nicklas on 26 December 2006 at 02:08 PM.]

Rick Collins · From: Claremont , CA USA

For those who believe tone is "all in the hands" and color/appearance have no bearing on how you are perceived by your audience, do yourself a favor and buy the least expensive and most utilitarian PSG you can find; if, it is mechanically sound and can be fitted with the pickup of your choosing.

But, here is a sure cure for your misconception if you do believe the color/appearence and instrument construction has little to do with your playing. Do all of your home practicing in front of a full length mirror for a month.

I do 90% of my practicing in front of a full length mirror. It really makes you think about what you are going to deliver to the audience.

Reece Anderson · From: Keller Texas USA, R.I.P.

Rick N....Thank you for your comments. I apologize for not providing enough information to qualify my MIDI experiences.

I should have mentioned how hard I worked to place my mind into the realm of reality for the instruments I commonly selected, which only then provided me the opportunity to emulate their nuances and allow the MIDI system to become a viable musical option for me.

My achieving those nuances to my satisfaction still does not allow my mind to over ride my mental perception due to visual input/interference of looking at my steel guitar while playing other instruments. (subliminal static) For me this clearly demonstrates that vision has the power to influence logic.

Interestingly and slightly off topic....when experimenting I found that when playing things I would not commonly play on steel guitar because they would have sounded "trite", immediately provided a kinship to other instruments. In other words, the less I played and the simpler I played, the more it sounded like other instruments.

Ben Jones · From: Seattle, Washington, USA

since black (the most popular "color" for a steel guitar it seems) is actually the absence of color, what does that say about the relationship betwenn "tone" and color as it pertains to steel guitarists?

further food fopr thought....
Timbre is basically the time-varying and harmonic part of sound. A pure tone (which rarely occurs in nature) would be a sine wave at a single frequency. Real sounds generally have overtones, consisting of other sine waves at several related frequencies, and they vary in time as well. These differences (the parts other than the main sine wave) are collectively called the "timbre" of the sound.

We don't call it timbre, but light has equivalent properties. We essentially never see "pure" colors. A pure color (called "monochromatic" light) would be a sine wave at a single frequency. Real sources almost never produce this. Even a laser beam usually has several nearby harmonics present.

brown sound, blue note....Im seeing red, feeling blue, green with envy...eatin rainbow stew, color me impressed...heehhee

Reece Anderson · From: Keller Texas USA, R.I.P.

Ben J....You're right, black is not a color.

Could it be black is subliminally correct for many because the abscence of color is perceived as the beginning, or as uncluttered.

It's really anyones guess! Each of us can decide which we like best, and none of us would be wrong.

I'm convinced the combination of color, design and cosmetics each of us select in a guitar, is the key to playing our best.

Ben Jones · From: Seattle, Washington, USA

"Could it be black is subliminally correct for many because the abscence of color is perceived as the beginning, or as uncluttered."

-never thought of that but I think that is a really good observation.

Mike Shefrin · Posted 26 Dec 2006 3:20 pm

Perhaps this is somewhat off topic but it is interesting nonetheless. In the early 1900's, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin invented a "color organ", a device to project colors onto a screen. It was Scriabin's first actual attempt to synthesize music and colors, and he worked out a chart.

NOTE....COLOR

C.......Red
C#.....Violet
D......Yellow
D#.....Glint of Steel
E......Pearly White
F.....Deep red
F#....Bright blue
G....Rosy orange
G#...Purple
A....Green
A#....Glint of steel(for some reason,the same as D#)
B....Pearly blue

Greg Simmons · From: where the buffalo (used to) roam AND the Mojave

Mike's post alludes to a very fascinating phenomenon:

"Synesthesia, meaning "joined sensation", shares a root with anesthesia, meaning "no sensation." It denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blendings whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like "shards of glass," a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or, seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of red as well.

In music-color synesthesia, individuals experience colors in response to tones or other aspects of musical stimuli (e.g., timbre or key). Like grapheme-color synesthesia, there is rarely agreement amongst synesthetes that a given tone will be a certain color, but individuals are internally consistent. Tested months later, a synesthete will report the same experiences as they had previously reported."

Some famous synesthetes:

Musicians/Composers
Alexander Scriabin
Franz Lizst
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Duke Ellington

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the late A-team bassist Roy Huskey Jr. would describe certain notes as having a certain color.

Visual Artists
Vasilly Kandinsky
David Hockney

[This message was edited by Greg Simmons on 26 December 2006 at 03:46 PM.]

David L. Donald · From: Koh Samui Island, Thailand

For the eye to percieve an object as white, the object
must reflect all colors (or close to). A surface capable of reflecting all colors must be void in color itself, any color would hinder all color light to be reflected and thus would not create white percieved by our eye's. In respect to this it would be possible to create 100% black only with a surface containing all colors; this being the only way to prevent any color from being reflected back to the beholder. Most easily made mistake is to relate the concept of dark being the absence of light. This is correct, yet understand that in complete dark (the absence of light)our eyes could not percieve white or black simply because no light is present to be reflected off a "white" or "black" object and be recieved by our eye's. With that said it can be understood that rationaly the only way possible to create a visual hue considered black would be to have all hues present which causes the affect our eyes "percieve" as an absence simply because humans relate it what they believe as a similar occurence the absence of light,[incorrect considereing the very fundemental neccesity of color is light]. light of course does contain all colors which why when passed thru a prism would create all colors. Colors we see our simply a degree of how much of this color present in light is reflected. So does it not seem correct or pluasible to believe that the only matter in which to obtain "white" is to have a surface with such complete reflection that every color is reflected and seen. What color is a mirror. We see all colors yet a mirror contains none, and we see all colors only because it contains none. It is this complete absence of color in a mirror or "white" which enables a surface to be completely reflective . It is this concept where the conflict lies, to see all colors in a surface none must be present, yet to perceive no color at all, all must be present. If we can put a black object in a mirrior and see it's reflection as it really is then why can we not see the reflection of a mirror in a black object, even the light reflected off the mirror would be absorbed into the black object, not because it contains no color to reflect it contains too much to be reflective. So what color is a mirror, it's none; exactly.
-Nottuh Ttocs

Clear is the only item that can be called to have no color. color is what we make it. if we call a color white than thats what it is...white. if we call something black, thats what it is. colors are all just perseptions. for all we know, people could see everything differently. my perseption of blue could be your green to me, but since we were told whats what, we could be seeing different things,yet we call each color the same thing. point being, everything is relative. there are good arguments for both sides of the absence being black or white. but the only true absence of color is clear, possibly why a prisim (which is clear) separates all colors. yet being that a prisim separates white light and then shows all true colors this is more Lenient to prove that all of the colors together would make white. (leave your own conclusion.)

Now if light must reflect to be seen,
and black is not reflecting light,
or any part of lights bandwidth
but absorbing ALL light coming in,
as a black car is hotter than a white car
on a hot sunny day.

Then what is it?
No color because it doesn't reflect light,
or
all colors because you combine them until
they negate each other.

Keep adding color until there is no color... hmmm.

If you mix all colors of paint together,
what do you get,
black or white?
So is black no color or all colors?
Two different angles of looking at this.

White is the color of things that reflect light of all parts of the visible spectrum equally and are not dull (see grey).

The color (more accurately, it contains all the colors of the visible spectrum and is sometimes described as an achromatic color, like black) that has high brightness but zero hue. The impression of white light can be created by mixing (via a process called "additive mixing") appropriate intensities of the primary color spectrum: red, green and blue, but it must be noted that the illumination provided by this technique has significant differences from that produced by incandescence (see below).

In nature, the color white results when transparent fibers, particles, or droplets are in a transparent matrix of a substantially different refractive index. Examples include classic "white" substances such as sugar, foam, pure sand or snow, cotton, clouds, milk, etc. Crystal boundaries and imperfections can also make otherwise transparent materials white, as in the case of milky quartz or the microcrystalline structure of a seashell. This is also true for artificial paints and pigments, where the color white results when finely divided transparent material of a high refractive index is suspended in a contrasting binder. Typically paints contain calcium carbonate and/or synthetic rutile with no other pigments if a white color is desired.

Actually when you are talking about light, white light is comprised of all other light waves in the spectrum. When the entire spectrum of light hits your eye, you see white. Each color is actually the light wave reflected to your eye. Black is the absence of light.

So you have total light bandwith absorbtion
total light bandwidth relfection
and
total light bandwidth pass through.

[This message was edited by David L. Donald on 27 December 2006 at 11:24 AM.]

[This message was edited by David L. Donald on 27 December 2006 at 11:27 AM.]

C. Christofferson · Posted 27 Dec 2006 3:17 pm

David, Interesting observations and propositions. What colour is a mirror? At this point in order to arrive at a concievable hypothetical definition that could be put into words, we might have to introduce so far unspoken of 'levels' or 'macrocosms' in the order of existance. Lets call them the 'finite', the 'infinite/ finite' and the 'infinite'. References to light wave frequencies; black or white objects, would be finite i.e. observable physical phenomenon. The effect of a mirror which reflects all these finite phenomena but without introducing anything of itself into the reflection may be thought of as infinite/finite (the reflection, being totally empty of itself, the infinite part,,but since the mirror is a physical object, then also finite). The next and final (transcendental) level being the infinite...the consciousness within which all of the lower microcosms have their appearance at all.
...just had to take a stab at this one * merry decemberness.

Rick Nicklas · From: Verona, Mo. (deceased)

Why do we use the word "Color" when we adjust the Shift Knob? Are the harmonics types of colors? Most players seem to become satisfied around the 800kz range (would that make it Black)?

Murnel Babineaux · From: Mermentau, Louisiana, USA

I think that dark colors and light colors both have an effect on the human psyche.

The Brain is a profoundly complex engine. Abstract and profound elements in one package.

Dark colors absorb light.
Light colors reflect light.

Dark colors could be considered negative.
Light colors could be considered positive.

My steel turned a pinkish color once

. I couldn't have a pink steel, so I changed the color.

Murnel

Reece Anderson · From: Keller Texas USA, R.I.P.

For those interested in a consensus relative to this thread, the following is my analysis of the percentage breakdown of opinions expressed within this thread.

Color does make a difference........72%
Color makes no difference.............9%
No opinion defined.......................7%
Color possibly makes a difference..12%

I believe design and cosmetics also figure into the creation of a subliminal perception, however neither were considered in the color evaluation percentages.

Colby Tipton · From: Crosby, Texas, USA

There it is boys and girls, color does make a difference.

Bill Duve · From: Limestone .New York, USA

I would play better if you had made my MSA with black mica instead of rosewood Rolling Eyes

Forum Index > Steel Players	Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4	Next oldest topic :: Next newest topic