I wish the Wacom Cintiq wasn’t so expensive. I am confident I could do so much if I had one, but it’s way too risky to spend on a whim in case it turns out to be not what I need after all.
It’s hardly rare, but it’s a niche item for artists who are already successful and know what they require for improving their work.
What the heck is a Wacom Cintiq?
::Google::
Ah - a digital tablet for graphic design and art use? What qualities does it have that sets it apart and makes it the best tool (potentially)?
Sorry, you’re right, I should’ve linked to it. I think of it as well known, because most of my friends know what it is, but I forget most people don’t.
It’s a high-res screen you can draw on directly. Most Wacom tablets are like laptop touch pads, but with pens, so you’re translating your drawing from what’s essentially a mousepad to the monitor, which you get used to pretty quickly but is still one step removed from what we learned with: pencil directly applied to paper. A Cintiq fixes that, letting you use Photoshop, or any art app, like you’re painting directly onto the monitor.
Recent advances in touchscreen tablets like iPads will probably shake things up a bit. The Apple Pencil, for example, is an improved stylus designed for accurate drawing, and is somewhat more affordable than a Cintiq, but it still isn’t quite as good just yet.
Helpful - thanks.
For calligraphy - William Cowley is the only company I know of that still produces proper vellum on a retail basis. Their Manuscript Vellum is the ne plus ultra of vellums for calligraphy and illumination, while their pre-treated Kelmscott is the best surface for botanical illustration.
There ya go! Thanks. So - how pricey is it vs. regular very nice calligraphy paper? In the calligraphy field, do only the tippie-top folks use it, or is there a big deal when a person discusses the fact that they are doing work on a piece of Cowley Vellum? Is there a “rite of passage” aspect to using it?
Some guitar tonewoods are so freaking dear - there are trees that have been named. A back-and-sides set from The Tree (quilted mahogany) or a top from The Lucky Strike redwood will be much, much pricier than similar wood from other trees. And a young Luthier who is building something with wood from The Tree is really looking to build a reputation-making guitar. Top Tier makers will entertain a build if the person order can get into a particularly good set of wood.
Well put!
Heh, yeah. As a keyboard guy, I can tell you a lot about this world . . . and also that much of it is full of contextual mystique. The world of synths right now is saturated with good-sounding instruments. I’d even go so far as to say that the vintage analog nut has been cracked (so to speak), both by modern analog instruments as well as digital emulations (or virtual analog).
For a while I had an Oberheim OB8, a giant beast of a ‘vintage’ instrument that did sound pretty darned good. But, it had some failing parts, and it was expensive to repair, and very heavy to cart around, and just wasn’t worth the space/money. I can play Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ on a modern digital board that weighs 1/4 as much, sounds the same (or at least not quantifiably worse), and still won’t get me any chicks! 
It’s funny, now that most keyboard players started to get tired of lusting over vintage analog, we’re now lusting over mid 80s-2000 digital synths.
I’ve read threads where guys are debating the sound of modules that carry the same samples, the same architecture programming, but maybe different stock D/A converters, and insist that the one is significantly better than the other. I think that most of it is garbage.
All that said, for a while the unobtanium was the Roland Jupiter 8. One of three or four truly lusted after vintage synths, it is all over albums in the early-mid 80s. Versatile and lush (and it looks pretty awesome as well), it sits with the Prophet-5 and Oberheim OB-X (and -Xa and -8) as kings of the hill for analog polysynths. But, their reliability and maintenance costs as they get on years, along with the proliferation of affordable modern options, has kind of quenched that fire.
(also, I should add that none of this gets into modular synths, which is its own rabbit hole of time, $$$, and snake oil!).
Easily 10x the price or more (plus the cost of getting hold of it, for me) - last I got some, it was 80 GBP/sheet, which is 20x what a nice paper the same size would cost me.
Anyone who wants to do work on real vellum will use their stuff, if not their top-end stuff, because they’re the only English supplier - there’s an Italian company but their “calf” skin is suspect I hear. Mostly, it’s not that tied to skill, who uses it, it’s tied to the intent of the work being done. It’s used by average scribes, for their best work, is the best way of putting it. I’m average, and I’ll have occasion to use a piece maybe once every two years or so - everyone else gets synthetic.
The real “tipple-top” folks in my field (SCA calligraphy) make their own vellum.
Some of the pieces are inherited from mentors and the like - I got my first skin from an SCA Laurel, for instance.
In photography it’s all about the lenses.
The widest aperture possible.
Who cares if you have >20 megapixels in your photo if the camera is peering through a F/4 zoom lens. I’ll take a F/1.2 prime any day over that. Unfortunately, such a lens often costs more than the body.
Well, it’s not indifference, it’s more a case of understanding the tools on a level where you can make them yourself, if necessary. There’s no old pieces of equipment that have a mystique because they are old or used by a particular artist. If there’s any mystique, it’s just learning how to make them. The fixation on certain pigments in the past was most likely due to ignorance of the science underlying the manufacturing of it. For instance, lapis lazuli is synthesized these days. You can get pigment made from natural stones, but there’s no practical reason to do so.
Sable brushes are actually from either a weasel or a hog. 
I’ve confirmed this with my wife. Even fairly complex items like a ball bearing baren (where the person making them has died), could be made by the printer themselves if they truly thought they needed one.
I don’t know if the mystique of certain instruments would go away if a musicians learned to make the instruments themselves, but it seems likely.
Yep, all makes sense.
To be clear, that is what happened to me with electrics, but NOT with acoustics. With electrics, I tried out a variety of guitars with different features. Then I narrowed down on the designs that worked for me and got excellent examples of them, including a '57 Les Paul Special, a Limited Edition LP Black Beauty, and some top tier Japanese replicas. At that point, I happened upon a Parts-O-Caster Tele orphan - someone put $1,500 in parts into a guitar that seemed off. I paid $300 for the parts and rebuilt and experimented based on what I cared about in my great old solidbodies. I got to a place with that guitar - and the next one I build from scratch - where I was getting everything from them. There was no “mojo” (I hate that word) - with the right parts, pickups and setup, you can get pretty spot-on with great old guitars). So I sold off and flipped my valuable electrics.
Now, with acoustics, especially old ones, you just can’t figure out you like old wood and then go out and build a DIY replica 
But that’s the thing: Have you tried?
Now, shaping an acoustic (or any guitar) from bare lumber is a large step beyond assembling a parts guitar. I’m a terrible woodworker, just making a decent table is hard. But there’s been at least a cottage industry in making high quality copies of old guitars since the 1980’s. It’s not an impossible task. I’d imagine that sometime before you became a master luthier, the mystique of the older instruments would at least start to fall away.
In the 90’s a lot of my video production buddies were pining over Fisher Price Pixel Vision cameras. They were toys but had a unique visual style to the recorded signal. Richard Linklater famously used one in a segment of his debut film.