We’ve known it for years that you can’t fully trust anything you find on the internet. Information is delivered to as as “fact” when enough people believe that “fact” to be true. The exchange of ideas dreamed up by Tim-Berners Lee and his colleagues in Cern has in many respects come true. However the explosive impact on the planet of the “world wide web” has rendered us with a knowledge-base often lacking evidential support, academic research and peer review but instead relying on here-say, consensus and popularity.
The “influencer” is not necessarily a scholar or even deep thinker, but instead someone who effectively markets their ideas in the manner deemed most beneficial to their clients – the tech companies who set the algorhithms, measure and promote these ideas above others with less followers, less likes, and less audience retention.
The internet quickly surpassed many research materials some of which are of an unimaginable scholarly achievement. Take the biggest work of music history and theory, The Grove Dictionary Of Music. 29 volumes, 30,000 articles. Now out of print and instead tucked away on the internet with a pay-wall turn-styling us into a huge series of clunky web pages that are of a different internet age.
These masterpieces of scholarly efforts form some of the key source material for our blagsheets. Single A1 sized quick-look reference guides that are not garnered from Wikipedia, or in this new era, from consensus-based machine learning. Organised into logical and symmetrical distillations of the knowledge now gathering dust in libraries and tired websites and offered up as an entry-point for us all into further adventure and investigation.
I’ve dreamed of making these for years and they are very much a pet project, so one step at a time we’re putting them up here for you to download in .pdf format usually supported by some form of video content. The .pdfs are designed in an aspect ratio that suits phones and tablets, and the images and text are fully SVG allowing you to zoom in until you find it comfortable to read.
Check out our blagsheet merch page HERE to order fine quality, well printed information that you can see at a glance as opposed to a pinch.
Here’s the .pdfs currently available and coming-up with links to devoted web-posts, downloadable files and accompanying videos.
012 – STRINGS (and how to program them)
VENUES, PEDALS & SEQUENCERS coming soon, make sure you’re on our MAILING LIST to be notified when we drop them.
And if you guys have any suggestions for future Blagsheets, pop them in a comment below.