(Wow, third in a tight series of accurately predicting the future...)

Alembic has just built a prototype run of active guitar cables. 'Looks impressive.

I published my version of the active cable here over eight years ago:

Don Tillman: FET Preamp Cable

I still use this a lot today, and I still think it'd make a great product. I don't know what specific technology Alembic is using for theirs, but it's very cool to see this and I'm sure they did a great job.

The Alembic cable looks even more like my very original prototype Preamp Cable... Lessee, I have it around here somewhere...

Okay, 'found it. Here's a picture of my original prototype, built, oh I dunno, around 1994 or thereabouts.

The guts of the FET Preamp are inside the plug on the right. It's phantom powered. The little aluminum box contains a 9V battery, and the phantom power circuit. There's a power switch on the side. The output goes to that phone plug epoxied in place, so you can just hang this off a guitar amp input jack. The jack on the side is a second parallel output for a tuner.

(It turns out that this particular package wasn't very good as some guitar amps don't have the physical space for a box dangling off the input jack. I was using this with a Fender Twin Reverb at the time, and that's got a sloping panel. My current Mesa/Boogie Lonestar Special wouldn't work with this at all. And the extra connection to the tuner is sloppy at best. So I dropped this packaging scheme early on and went with the "MXR Box" style approach.)

Is the darkness of the afternoon this time of year getting you down? Well, buck up. December 8th (roughly, depending on your specific latitude) was Analemma Day. Analemma Day is the day of the earliest sunset in mid-northern latitudes, and from here on into the summer the sun will set later in the day, each day, affording you more afternoon sunlight.

Note that this is not the same as the Winter Solstice, December 21st, the shortest day of the year, because the oribt of the earth is not circular, it's elliptical, and the earth moves a little faster during the time when it is closer to the sun than when it is further away. Check these out:

Wikipedia: Analemma

Analemma dot com

Sunrise Sunset dot com

Douglas Dodds: Analemma, My Analemma

Wikipedia: Kepler's laws of planetary motion

And in celebration of Analemma Day, and of Johannes Kepler, I got my kids a Kepler Elliptical Orbit Pizza:

The cool thing about a Kepler Elliptical Orbit Pizza is that all the slices are guaranteed to have the same area. (Ba-da-bing.)