Towards the end of the schoolyear, Jason was happy about his progress as a luthier. After a philosphic tutoring session from Ha on voice, voicing, and electronics, everything was a hazy challenge of nowhere else to go but plunging into... delegating matters about microprocessors and microchips to Ha. He could not take it anymore. Very well, he had more to go on matters he could do: reading blueprints and drafting schematics, ignoring logic gates and ohms and watts and all that, woodworking, making the MK3 a less weird trench art non-mandolin--but it was going to start out as a mandolin anyway. And he liked graphic art and design and playing with baubles and trinkets. No more simple board carpentry. Ha likes a good woodplane blade and could not wait to shave wood.
She introduced him to how people enjoy singing in the shower with ceramic textiles and surround-sound acoustics and running water and playing with soap bubbles. She went to the bathroom and got some shampoo, poured the right amount into a cup, got back to Jason and demonstrated blowing bubbles. He could do it to with the right breath exhaling and not popping the bubble but letting it detach from his cupped hands. He liked the
rainbow colors. Ha asked, and Jason picked his color out of the rainbow would be turquoise.
While he was winding Ha's condensed pickup, a poor journeyman's grunt job, Ha gave a seminar lecture on Rgo Trio and 'switching voices'. By the end of the lecture, he remembered he had heard of a P90 pickup. He was sure some of the properties and attributes she was referring to was that style of guitar pickup. She asked him whether he needed to read a catalog brochure or a textbook. He said No, he did not. Using lead-on syllogism about tactile pressure and hardware, he correctly concluded that a spring toggle was what everybody else referred to as a push-pull switch. A toggle stayed out of the computer mainboard, and that was important for him to remember: Blackbird supersonic stealth Pentagon aerodynamics and astronomical radio signals to planet Saturn. She liked the design of the toggle. Pause in between, click two times. Pause in between, click five times. But what is wrong with Greg Lemond's Schwinn gears thumb switch LEVER (Amer.
leh-ver, not Brit.
lee-ver)? Nothing, according to Jason. Oh, gears! They even have 3-disc mountain bikes with 18+ gears. Times 2, 3, 5, 7, 11? Yes. Stop at five, for the Pentagon. And then
they add two of those together with an unknown X and Y, and
they want people to take the square root of that and call it authentication. Primary binomials is not the strongest encryption. He wanted to ignore Ha, he wanted to remember what Ha said. Nevermind. He understood that the government could swap authentication and authorization and put the burden of the more expensive work onto the people, write up gobbly gunk law that says the government is not allowed to profit while watching China chunkbite through the shared secret and Americans waste time crunching symbolic numbers that are not real dollars attached to anything. He surmised it would only be benign if they did that to children in school. Keep winding that wire, measure again, do you know where you are going to splice it? Not yet, within ten minutes. He held up the scissors, showing he knew the next step was a cut, he said, Cut cut. If they make a mistake, he had a whole spool of fresh copper wire. Yet his father had told him not to squander the material, even if he makes mistakes.
He guessed the pickup would be too hot and did not want to proceed. If Ha had plans for a 7/8 dense humbucker, he would have to unwind back to... Ha picked 5/8. Okay, it was going to be a pickup. And then they would have to
pour ceramic onto the assembly. _____
Nevermind. Were they making amp tubes, telephone pole equipment, carrying digital signals? Ha said No, only sound as 'voice' and 'voicing', not reading out like digitization. He understood the difference. What is a condensor? Ooh! Like they do that for microphones! Nifty. She spoke about ambient and aural effects of sound sculpture, like some music with headphones on. The bass-treble from amps was not noticably there in a nonenvironmental track but a closed studio track with controlled geometry and pushed back into the recording, going beyond the stereo “point-one” effect, capturing the amps on record. He stopped right there, not too interested in going into Ha's explanation of point-four digitally manipulated effects. He misunderstood. Just like the early days of the German group Kraftwerk, she mentioned, point-four was analog-to-digital pre-programming for live musicianship, not all-computers, pumped back out through analog amps. There were many keyboard appliances doing the mixing. In Ha's rectification, there had to be a live musician to help the controller-operator on the mixer-equalizer general shaper. Losing the geometry of a good mix was the agony, so all a computer was really good for was retaining a small portion of the soundwave information, the nuanced settings and programming, so Rgo could work without other people's digital library and only Rgo equipment; everybody else could balloon a digital file by trying to save the tone of their glorious Super Stupendous Monster Strat also. That prospect dovetailed with Ha's tip to Gretsch that they could consider Gretsch aesthetics when it comes to a studio guitar, one catered from Gretsch's sensitivity to how the company approached technical problems in sound design for fixed medium recording. Ha cited to them a place to start would be Abbey Road Studios, the one the Beatles used. She told Jason about her recommendation. He liked that idea more than live performance transduction, Wasn't that the guitarists job with better amps? Or a different pickups paradigm, she said. It was cheaper to skip the studio and put the Casio-JVC-Bose-Technics DJ turntable rack into the (ladies' French powder) Transcendental Compact for the Cooper guitar as proof of concept than to build out an Rgo studio.
Like Gretsch for Ha, a “Is this what you mean?” moment happened to Jason. He had scoured the niche luthiers market and ordered a pickup-humbucker set from a little R&D lab called Fishman, because he had advanced with Ha. It did not matter at that point that Ha's work on pickups was to let the humbucker swallow the single pickup in his education track in modern electricals theory and music. He joked it was fishsauce that made Vietnamese people smart. So were the Romans, who had fish sauce, she said. Now he had to reverse-engineer what Ha did and get the humbucker to vomit the pickup. That was too wild! Had she done it the other way around, pickup swallowing humbucker vomitting tap line... Oh! He liked Ha's surprise ready for him. There was a way to do it without using microchips. Yes, and he and Ha wanted it on Thomas's Gibson. That would be so cool on the Rickenbacker. Okay, if Jason said so, ocean waves and everything for a boogieboard surfer.
Not so fast. Then again, reverse-engineering a semi-hollow body into full acoustic was more proper for a journeyman luthier. By the time Rgo went beyond wound copper wires, Ha was tuckered out planning Jason's involvement with Tommy Shoegazers, the other teenagers Rgo placed with the artHaus group. The rainbow was easy to understand. The accumulated spread of electric guitar technologies through the decades had to be consolidated and meted out. That side portfolio of loose ends more appropriate for an R&D lab would be labeled
interradii, the part that required DJ-attended radaring. Perhaps the Navy could relax and sponsor vocational education for geeks down at the Research Station. Jason wanted a small, private radio station he could give to the artHaus community, not gosh darn nuclear codes!