I’m always on the lookout for impressive, extremely time-consuming ways to make a case or envelope for a newly burned CD.
Stupid Gadgets & Time Wasters
Audio company GGRP (Gordon, Gibson & Ramsay Productions) put together this beautiful little promotional mailer. It’s a cardboard envelope that unfolds to become a record player with a 100% cardboard amplifier.
Once assembled, the record can be spun on the player with a pencil. The vibrations go through the needle and are amplified in the cardboard material. The players were sent out to creative directors across North America as a creative demonstration of GGRP’s sound engineering capabilities.
- (From Ads of the World)
“It’s actually shocking how good the sound quality is,” said Geoff Dawson, associate director at Grey Vancouver, the marketing company that helped to develop the piece for direct mailing. He added that it took a long time to play with different materials and designs to get the audio just right. Dawson says they hit on the idea while creating a website and new brand identity with GGRP earlier this year.
If GGRP can do this with cardboard, I can only imagine what they can do at, you know, their actual working studios with real equipment.
I’ve run sound at a wide variety of live shows, and one of the 2 things that bothers me the most about inexperienced bands is that they frequently have slightly out-of-tune guitars (the other is that they all crank their amps up to 11, but that’s an issue for another day). One reason for this is that it’s a bitch to tune a guitar in a noisy room.
Thankfully, that is no longer an excuse! With the Stimmmoped, you can use light instead of sound to check your tuning. Utilizing the stroboscopic effect, with 2 lights flashing out of sync in specific patterns, the tuner makes the string you pluck appear to be completely still – but only if it’s perfectly tuned. Otherwise, you will see movement and/or the light dancing along the string.
You can build the Stimmmoped yourself, with a little bit of basic electronics knowledge. Fortunately, there are several pre-made options for the same thing – my favorite is the Planet Waves SOS Tuner, in a nifty little guitar pick shape.
Yanko Design gives us the MU SPACE, a pillow & mat inside “A cross between the boombox on your shoulder and an MP3 player”. I think I’d rather carry my iPod and a pillow, but maybe I’d change my mind if I got to try it out… Feel like sending out a free sample, Yanko?
