Sad music, ironically, seems to make us happier when we listen to it. The explanation for that could be either scientific or philosophical.
Sad songs make me happy like drinking makes me thirsty. It’s a strange paradox most of us share; nobody enjoys being sad in real life, but boy do we love to listen to a song that makes us miserable. It’s magic, or maybe a better word is “alchemy”: If you take a few inert ingredients (one C major scale, one D#, a 3/8 time signature), then arrange the ingredients in the right order, like Beethoven had in mind, and play dynamically with a flowing tempo that breathes a bit, the final product can tear your heart out.
Für Elise starts with this motif in A minor, full of longing and melancholy, then lifts with the contrast of the C major—creating a sense of whimsy, unpredictability, and playfulness. Then it goes back to the legato A minor, which now sounds even sadder by comparison to the happy, whimsical relative major.
“Although writing music was his livelihood, he wrote this as therapy, or a private declaration of love and loss.”
I recently worked up a guitar arrangement of Für Elise and played a version while filming a PG video of the Godin Multiac Mundial. It’s an embarrassingly rough, semi-improvised performance, but what I wanted was to take this epically sad melody and play with it, adding some fun jazzy/bluesy American improvisation to put a wry, crooked smile on the tragedy. That’s part of the magic of this piece; it’s a simple melody that can be musically reinterpreted as blues, ragtime, anything. Even Nas used a sample of it in his song “I Can.”
After filming the Godin video, I said to my colleague Chris Kies: “I don’t know who Elise was, but boy did she do a number on Beethoven.” The always well-informed Kies told me that Für Elise was discovered 40 years after Beethoven’s death. Beethoven had never published it, and the only clue to the song’s inspiration were the words “Für Elise” messily scribbled on the top of the forgotten page. There were apparently three Elises in Beethoven’s life, so no one alive knows for sure, but what it comes down to is Beethoven fell in love, it did not go his way, and he dealt with it by writing this music. Although writing music was his livelihood, he wrote this as therapy, or a private declaration of love and loss. Perhaps it was so soul-crushing that he did not go public with the music. We turn to music when words fail, right?
Hearing the rest of the story made the whole thing even sadder to me, which led to my spontaneously breaking into tears, thereby turning a normal product video into an awkward workday for me and the very tolerant Chris Kies.
Weird, right? I never want to cry, particularly in front of people. It’s horribly embarrassing to be that vulnerable in public. I’d rather be seen going to the bathroom in public than crying, and yet I’m drawn to sad songs like a moth to a flame. I’ve broken into tears while performing and turned my back on the audience or buried my head in my pedal steel until I could take some deep breaths and pull it together. So why do we voluntarily submit ourselves to this kind of torture?
There may be some science that helps us understand it. One study suggests that music, particularly sad music, stimulates the release of comforting hormones like prolactin. There was a study where scientists played sad music for people and then measured their prolactin levels and, as you guessed, listeners who felt some positive effects from the sad music had just released a heavy hit of prolactin. Other listeners who report feeling sad without the accompanying positive effect, as it turns out, already had a higher level of prolactin to begin with, “suggestive of a homeostatic function.” It seems our bodies are using music to self-regulate our chemical balance. If you need a boost of prolactin, music will give it to you. If you don’t need it, it saves it for later. Another study suggests that sad music can also stimulate that feel-good bringer of pleasure and rewards, dopamine. In short, listening to sad music can flood your body with happy chemicals.
Maybe another reason we willingly subject ourselves to the beautiful sadness of melancholy music is to engage in a fictional sadness to help deal with that vague malaise that we all carry around but never unpack. A lifetime of quiet heartbreak that we don’t even understand and try not to think about. Music releases the steam valve before the boiler blows.
But the more I looked into the appeal of sad music, it seemed to ask more questions than answers. Like, why do we connect to the songs we connect with? Does it remind us of someone? Is it empathy? Is it self-pity? Do we connect with the artist? And perhaps the most puzzling bit of it all: Why does flattening a 3rd, 6th, and 7th in a scale make a melody universally sadder? That’s the magic, the mystery, the therapy.
We’re giving away more gear! Enter Stompboxtober Day 24 for your chance to win today’s pedal from Maxon!
Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Pedal
The Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Effects Pedal may look like your old favorite but that's where the similarity ends. Improved circuitry with a new chip yields the ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive guitarists crave. Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume while the Hi-Boost/Hi-Cut tone controls adjust brightness. Features true bypass switching, a die-cast zinc case, and 3-year warranty. From subtle cries to shattering screams, the Maxon OD-9 delivers a huge range of tones.
Features
Improved circuitry with a new chip yields ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive
Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume
Hi Boost/Hi Cut tone controls adjust brightness
True bypass switching
Die-cast zinc case
AC/DC operation (order optional Maxon AC210N adapter)
Product Specs
Input: 1/4" mono jack
Output: 1/4" mono jack
Power: 9V DC, 6 mA, center pin minus (not included)
Dimensions: (WxDxH) 74 mm x 124 mm x 54 mm
Weight: 580g
Founding Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh has died at 84.
Official statement from Phil Lesh's Facebook page:
He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.
This is a developing story.
Vintage-style reverb, tremolo, and vibrato sounds abound in a 3-in-1 stomp that might be the only box you need.
Here’s part two of our look under the hood of the funky rhythm guitar master’s signature 6-string.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this edition, we’re continuing our journey through the Fender Cory Wong Stratocaster wiring, bringing it all together.In the previous installment, the last feature on the funky 6-stringer’s signature axe that we discussed was the master volume pot and the corresponding treble-bleed circuit. Now, let’s continue with this guitar’s very special configuration of the tone pots.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!