The CMS Guitar

The CMS guitar turns to the Dark Side

2015-12-20T17:28:00.000+01:00

A long long time ago ... I came across the scores for the Star Wars soundtrack, one of my favorite pieces of music and a strong inspiration for me since I can remember. As I was dissecting the arrangements it was pretty natural for me to transcribe everything for guitar. I even started recording the whole Main Theme "guitar orchestra", but that project has been on hold for several years now, since I decided to do the Imperial March first.

The idea for this arrangement was to not just blindly reproduce the original orchestral parts on guitar, but to do something that makes more sense in a guitar+bass+drums situation. On the other hand I wanted to retain as much of the original parts as possible, and not just take the main melody and make a fitting heavy metal backing track.

Well, I'm happy with the final result. :)

I decided to play the main melody on the CMS guitar and to film these parts I went to the CMS Experiment itself. The backdrop is a 1:1 scale photograph of the CMS particle detector, you can appreciate the size and the beauty of the thing in the video:

P.S. the song is also available for purchase on Loudr ;)

Higgs Sonification: the musical score

2015-04-20T17:10:00.001+02:00

In case you wanted to see/play the tune yourself, I've made a pdf file with the tab, available here. Remember, the rhythm guitar here is tuned in Drop D!

This is the first page:

In the Press: Higgs Metal Sonification

2015-04-19T17:52:00.000+02:00

The video is getting quite some coverage and managed to accumulate 100k views in a week! Here is what I came across so far (will be adding more links as I spot them)

Internet (US, UK and other English speaking):

Facebook (the most active ones):

Switzerland:

http://www.20min.ch/wissen/news/story/Cern-Forscher-machen-ploetzlich-Heavy-Metal-15833575

Mexico:

Poland:

Germany:

Russia:

https://nplus1.ru/news/2015/04/17/HiggsHeavyMetal

Romania:

http://www.metalhead.ro/stiri/fizicianul_piotr_traczyk_transforma_particula_lui_dumnezeu_in_muzica-aid-132652-l-1

Hungary:

http://index.hu/mindekozben/poszt/2015/04/15/ha_azt_hitte_volna_hogy_a_higgs-bozon_felfedezeset_nem_lehet_villanygitaron_eljatszani_tevedett/

Italy:

Brasil:

http://whiplash.net/materias/curiosidades/221907.html

China:

http://www.huanqiukexue.com/html/newqqkj/newwl/2015/0423/25334.html

Higgs Boson Sonification

2015-04-14T00:33:00.001+02:00

The sonification experiment video is out!

I wrote a small guest post for The Cylindrical Onion, the blog of the CMS experiment. You'll find some more details about the sonification process there.

Higgs boson goes Metal

2015-03-24T21:58:00.002+01:00

I have a little "sonification" project coming up. Its a short piece of music made by transforming data from the CMS experiment into notes. I chose two plots that were shown during the announcement of the discovery of the higgs boson at CERN, on July 4th 2012.

The top plot above shows the signal of higgs decay into two photons, as you can see it will correspond to a descending run. I generated the musical score by assigning notes from the chromatic scale to numbers of entries in histograms. The result has a rather abstract "harmony" and in fact it sounds quite heavy metal. The higgs decay into four leptons (the lower plot above) has a lot of bins with zero entries - corresponding to pauses - so it fits perfectly as a rhythm guitar riff. This riff is played on the CMS guitar.

Cover Girl

2014-01-14T11:42:00.001+01:00

Remember the photo session in the CMS cavern? One of the pictures is now on the cover of the January edition of Physik Journal. There is also an article about the connections between music and high energy physics inside - including of course the CMS guitar. Very cool!

Jamming underground in the CMS cavern

2013-07-08T16:11:00.001+02:00

Last week I showed Jonah Kohn, Google Science Fair winner (13-14 category) around the CMS experiment cavern. Since he's also a guitarist, we arranged a little surprise for him and had an impromptu jam session with the CMS guitar!

photo: Max Brice/CERN

Now that was major fun! We jammed for 10 or 15 minutes, going through various rock "standards" and just jamming on improvised riffs.

And the guitar got to see CMS in person finally too.
Read more in the CERN news!

The CMS guitar goes to Montreux

2013-07-02T11:35:00.001+02:00

So the time has come to show the CMS guitar to some unexpecting people at the Montreux Jazz Festival this year. As part of "The Physics of Music and The Music of Physics" I will be delivering a small presentation about the Higgs boson discovery and the CMS guitar, together with Lily Asquith talking about the sound of the Higgs decay events and The Rock Doctor - Mark Lewney talking about the physics of rock guitar. We're also cooking up a wild guitar duo with Mark so this is promising to be a very fun event.

More details HERE.

Photo session again

2013-05-17T14:45:00.002+02:00

The CMS guitar and I went for another photoshoot, with Daniel Lopez-Paullada. Here's a teaser shot:

More to come...

Symmetry Magazine

2013-03-21T15:00:00.000+01:00

A very nice article on Famelab 2013 appeared today in the Symmetry Magazine, with a description of my performance with the CMS guitar. Check it out!
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/march-2013/research-with-flair-at-famelab-2013

Second place in Famelab.ch Geneva round!

2013-03-18T12:01:00.000+01:00

Last week I suddenly decided to take part in this year's edition of Famelab. The Swiss edition first round was held at CERN on Saturday (March 16th). So I had to quickly prepare a 3-minute presentation "explaining a science concept to general audience". Of course I couldn't have gone there without the CMS guitar, and in fact I based my talk on the idea of particle physics being like a jigsaw puzzle, an idea that I first showed in this blog some time ago.

photo: Tomasz Chrul

I ended up taking the second place, the winner was Divya Ail with a very entertaining talk about... Viagra, among other things. A small personal victory was having John Ellis himself tell me that he liked my open-ended puzzle analogy and that he "shall steal it for his next public lecture".

photo: Tomasz Chrul

Anyway second place means that I'm still in the game - now I have to prepare something for the Swiss Finals in May. Hmm....

Heaven on their Minds

2013-02-05T17:06:00.000+01:00

My first studio production with the CMS guitar is out! This is my version of the classic opening song of Jesus Christ Superstar - "Heaven on their Minds". I sing and play all the instruments (except the drums which I programmed). I also did all the video and audio production. Hope you like it!

You can also listen and download high quality audio from SoundCloud. (Free of course)

The CMS guitar appears for the first guitar solo, around the 3:00 mark. Playing fretless is more and more fun!

Upcoming videos

2013-01-09T11:48:00.002+01:00

The CMS guitar will have a guest appearance (for one solo) in my upcoming cover of "Heaven on Their Minds" from Jesus Christ Superstar. Here's a shot from the video:

UPDATE: the video is out, see here.

I have another music video project in the making that will feature her more prominently, I will focus on that when this one is released.

"Introducing the CMS Guitar" photo session

2012-11-06T13:26:00.002+01:00

I did a photo session at "LHC Point 5" where the CMS detector is located 100m underground. The area with the detector itself is not accessible due to ongoing collisions, but we also have a great 1:1 scale photo of the experiment there, which you can see in the photos below.

Go to this gallery on flickr to see the full set. All photos by Julia Hoffman.

Neck refinish

2012-10-05T11:45:00.003+02:00

The neck refinish is done. Here is the back of the neck, sanded down to bare wood:

And here is is a few days and about 8 coats of Danish Oil later:

The heastock had some little irregularities in the paint over the decals for some reason. I decided to get rid of that, sanded the finish flat with P1000 wet&dry sandpaper, shot a few more coats of clearcoar and leveled that. Then followed up with a set of micromesh pads and finally buffed up to a mirror shine. Here's the result:

And here's the fingerboard after a re-leveling, P600 sandpaper and some Danish Oil.

Now I can put the new strings on and do a photoshoot and then a videoshoot hopefully. Stay tuned!

New pickups

2012-09-24T11:17:00.003+02:00

The new set of pickups is here so I disassembled the guitar to put them in. These are Merlin Pickups (a Sabotage humbucker and a Twins mini humbucker), should sound awesome!

In the beginning I encountered a slight complication: the body cavity for the neck pickup was matching the stock pickup shape (the top pickup on the photo below) whereas the Twins mini humbucker has a little protruding plastic part at the bottom (which is in fact common for pickups of this type).

I had to make room for that so I used a dremel to sand away some wood in the cavity:

I painted the cavity with black conductive paint and installed both pickups:

Can't wait to hear how they sound - I just have to do the neck now. I decided I will strip the stock paint and just give it a matte danish oil finish. Should be ready in a few days.

In the news

2012-09-10T14:54:00.001+02:00

The CMS guitar is getting noticed! I wrote a small note for the CMS experiment website and we have been spotted by Discovery News. Wow!

Meanwhile I'm working on a few minor upgrades. I will change the strings to flatwound with wound G, that should help the sustain. I need to get new pickups for her - the cheap stock ones sound ok, but get microphonic feedback when playing loud (i.e. live) which I had to fight with through the Hardronic show. Finally - I need to finish the custom volume knob.

When all this is done I have some recording projects queued up for this guitar. Stay tuned!

First live performance

2012-08-30T23:13:00.000+02:00

Here it is - video from the first live performance of the CMS guitar, less than a week after I finished putting it together:

MC Hammer

2012-08-23T13:22:00.000+02:00

I'm still working on the videos from the Hardronic performance, so in the meantime I thought I'd share another video that I made recently. The song is "Hammer of a Down" - a blend of MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" together with "Chop Suey" by System of a Down. And the video is about... what happens when people working at CERN need a little break.
Check it out:

The video of the debut performance of the CMS guitar is coming very soon!!

CMS guitar @ Hardronic 2012

2012-07-27T19:58:00.000+02:00

Wow.
This year's Hardronic broke all the records. We had over 1000 CERN personnel plus guests rocking out!!

The guitar played great. I tried to play great. The videos are coming, watch this space.

Ready!

2012-07-17T11:47:00.003+02:00

Ladies and gentlemen: the CMS Guitar v1.0 is ready.

As announced earlier, the instrument will debut during the 2012 CERN Hardronic Music Festival on Saturday July 21st, during my performance with Miss Proper and the Moving Targets, around 23:30 CET.

You can watch it either in person or through a live webcast, details at http://musiclub.cern.ch/hardronic

Electronics

2012-07-17T10:39:00.003+02:00

As the neck is drying I finished up with the body - put in the switches and knobs, pickups, soldered the connections in the electronics compartment

And this is how she looks now:

Headstock decals

2012-07-16T15:03:00.002+02:00

The final touch to the headstock is the logo. Two logos, in fact. One is the official CMS logo - like in http://cms.web.cern.ch/. The other my logo - "TRAQ guitars". The second one goes on dark background so I had to make white lettering. The way to do this is to print out the black letter outline on decal paper and color the inside white. Then when the decal is applied upside down, the black lines covert the white and create nice edges for the letters. Here's what it looks like:

I had quite a number of failed attempts with this, from accidentally tearing the decal to brushing over it with nitrocellulose lacquer and ending up brushing the decal itself away. So i decided this needs to be sprayed, the only thing I had available in a spraycan was automotive acrylic clearcoat (I didn't want to fire up the spraying rig again, plus I've run out of 2K paint anyway).

So I buried the headstock face in that. This is an intermediate picture after several layers:

Since I could still see the surface having a different texture over the decals, I levelled the whole thing with P1000 wet&dry sandpaper and sprayed on a few more coats. Waiting for them to dry now.

Frets, dots etc.

2012-07-13T15:42:00.000+02:00

Getting the neck ready for action. First I installed the side dot markers:

After that the time came for the instalation of the five frets.

Hammered them in, made sure they stay put by running superglue down the slots, leveled, recrowned, dressed the fret ends and finally polished to a mirror shine:

Then after installing the nut I could finally put on two strings to make sure everything is aligned and working.

After that I've taken her apart again to do the final bits of work - headstock logo, electronics installation etc.

Announcement: First public performance coming soon

2012-07-10T15:47:00.002+02:00

I am planning to debut the finished CMS Guitar at the 2012 CERN Hardronic Festival on July 21st, during my performance with Miss Proper and the Moving Targets. The festival will be webcast live to all the world. Details will follow soon on:

http://cmsguitar.blogspot.com/
http://facebook.com/traqq
http://musiclub.cern.ch/hardronic