Utterly random fact I stumbled on.

[Mal-2]

I was making a send-up of Van Halen's Hot For Teacher, and found out it's at 240 bpm. The next time you have to count seconds in your head, this may be useful -- one bar is one second, exactly. I think most performing musicians instinctively trust their sense of time when it's related to music. Now you can easily apply that to everything else. You can locate something to within about 1/48 of a second because it's a shuffle feel and the drums are playing in triplets. I'm gifting you a stopwatch. It's not an easy one to use, but you'll always have it. Whether you want to use it remains to be seen, but I've used it dozens of times in just the last few days.

The attached file is just the 8 bar drum intro to the send-up, which may be the most useful for that 1/48 second precision mode, but it's not very entertaining as music.

Here's the send-up, if you want it. I'd just attach it if I could, but I'm contractually obligated not to do so. The guy who commissioned it doesn't want it showing up in someone else's project before his official release, and I don't blame him. He's fine with me posting it on a site I control, and using excerpts like isolated guitar parts (or a simple drum loop) for non-commercial purposes, but he doesn't want to be scooped. That's also why you can't download it.

ᴇᴅɪᴛ: 1/12 of a second, not 1/48. Derp.

[Mal-2]

To make this thread more universally useful, I'd like to extend it to any songs you run in your head as a reference point for anything. Got any more? I do, like a guitar's low E is the first note of "Day Tripper", which is sufficient to let me get a guitar within 15 or 20 cents of correct without an external reference or tuner -- good enough when I'm doing a field setup, rather than playing it with other people, since that's more than sufficiently accurate to sanity-check the truss rod and fret clearances.

What do you do with the iPod in your head?

[Diane Kauffmds]

You've started an interesting thread. I'll be watching and reading. Hopefully some of the info will soak in. However, I may build guitars, but when I play them, my cats start screaming and my dogs howl. Lol