As an artifact of industrial engineering, it is very hard to beat the Fender Telecaster:
durability, repairability, usability, fitness for purpose (sound), and low cost
are all hallmarks of its design. Take a moment to admire a
particularly fine specimen.
In a sure sign of quality, the Tele patinates well. People try to fake
patination, which is the nadir of cringe yet the expression of a yearning to
replicate the outward signs of timeless quality.
The Tele is at the top of an uncanny peak: like a Dutch bicycle, it is
possible to improve on the design, but only by incurring severe trade-offs.
You could use humbucking
pickups, but you’d lose the characteristic bright sound of the bridge
pickup.
You could put a humbucker in the neck pickup position only, but might have
have an output balance problem relative to the bridge position. Compensating
with a high-output single-coil pickup in the bridge position would also
compromise the signature treble clarity.
You could add more frets — traditional Teles have 21 or 22 — but the closer
you move the neck pickup backward toward the bridge, the more you lose its
distinctive sound.
You could ease playability by shortening the scale
length, but that would also reduce the overall snappy, ‘tight’ sound of the
instrument.
The key, and perhaps sole, trade-off-free improvement available in the design
is in the usability of the controls. The traditional Tele has a 3-way pickup
selector switch, with the volume knob behind it, and the tone (treble
attenuator) behind that. The pickup selector switch is a bit too close to the
volume knob when it’s set all the way ‘back’ (toward the bridge). And it’s nice
to be able to adjust the
volume with your pinkie while picking — but the Tele’s volume knob is too
far away to make that easy.
The Tele is also very efficient in its use of materials (which are plentiful,
non-endangered, and cheap: maple for the neck, and ash or alder for the body).
Little of the wood is thrown away when sculpting the neck and the body, relative
to the manufacturing techniques used in other instrument designs. For example,
in hand-carved archtop
guitars, the top begins life as a 1”-thick chunk of wood. By the end, no
part of it is more than 0.15” thick. As beautiful works of art as they
undeniably are, they are not parsimonious. Another popular guitar design calls
for a CNC machine to sculpt a neck that is at most 1” thick, out of a 3”-thick
block.
Unlike almost all other musical instrument designs, the Telecaster is
incredibly hardy. It is 0% fragile — and yet also readily repairable and
modifiable.
There are implementation (not design) improvements possible in the
Telecaster. Noiseless single-coil pickups, a tapered neck joint, chambered body,
and locking tuners are standard for most manufacturers now (except Fender). The
changes increase the cost a little, but increase usability a lot.
The Tele, like Lisp and Algol, represents the very best that could have been
done with the technology of the (roughly same) time, and remains very hard to
improve on. For example, modern languages like Python and JavaScript are
basically Lisp, but without the macro/DSL wonderland that Lisp’s trivial syntax
affords. You get better everyday UX, but at a significant cost in
functionality.
I’m fascinated by this uncanny quality peak, in whatever type of engineering
object, in which further improvements are few and far between. I wonder what
peaks we could be climbing now but aren’t. Is there a better systems language
than Rust, which we should be running on... what? RISC-V? Could we get the
benefits of Rust, but with a more gradual learning curve? Could we get the
performance of x64 without the cruft?
It might be easier to get to the uncanny peak with simple machines like
musical instruments and bicycles — there are perhaps fewer decision points and
trade-offs and things that can break. But I’m reminded of this Twitter
exchange:
@taber@woof.group @cakesandcourage Nov 18,
2021 a popular myth is that people who are Very Computer have computers that work.
nothing could be further from the truth. the Very Computer are capable of
generating much more novel and fascinating ways to make computers not fucking
work and exercise this capability wantonly
celphase @celphase Nov 18,
2021The
Blessed Valley Of Mild Proficiency, by @celphase.
Maybe, for Terrible Machines like computers and programming languages, the
Blessed Valley Of Mild Proficiency is the uncanny peak.
