I’m very much a believer that there is a distinction between good and bad geekery. Good Geekery may be any of: messing with things for the pure pursuit of knowledge, to provide a useful service, to build a clean application, to make things nice, to tie up all the loose ends. Bad geekery is making half-arsed applications that don’t quite work, disregarding protocols, wasting time and other people’s efforts on things that are a waste, and so on.

Now. Justin Frankel (creator of Winamp) has always been on my list as a Good Geek. He left AOL/TimeWarner (who had bought winamp from him) about a year ago, for pastures new. So what’s he working on now?

The Jesusonic CrusFX 1000 Guitar Effects Processor

No, I’m not kidding.

Sadly, this to me counts as Bad Geekery, for a few reasons (and I recognise that this is still a prototype):

• It looks like it’s designed by computer people rather than guitarists


• Stick a computer in a wooden box on stage? Destined to fail the “Roadie’s Boot” test


• Switches where you can’t switch them with your feet?


• It’s HUGE


• Most importantly, the example sounds from it are rubbish! Sounds like the old Digitech RP6 that I passed on to my younger bro when I bought my Tonelab last year.

Using DSP for guitar effects isn’t a science, it’s an art. This thing looks like it’s got the science, but not the feel and sensitivity that you get from FX units from, shall we say more musically-focussed creators.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2005 at 23:26 and is filed under Geek 'till it MHz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.