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Blackbird Guitars
Blackbird Guitars is a musical instrument company that manufactures acoustic guitars and ukuleles from composite materials, including carbon fiber and ekoa, a flax linen reinforcement fabric in a bio-epoxy matrix. The company has made contributions to both the field of luthiery A luthier ( ; AmE also ) is a craftsperson who builds or repairs string instruments that have a neck and a sound box. The word "luthier" is originally French and comes from the French word for lute. The term was originally used for makers of ... and the field of composite design, notably with the composite all-hollow unibody instrument design used on all Blackbird models, as well as the development and use of Ekoa in the construction of fretted instruments. Blackbird is located in the Mission District of San Francisco, Northern California, and as of 2015, produces about 400 instruments per year History The company was founded in 2005 by Joe Luttwak and Kyle Wolf in San Francisco with the int ...
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Musical Instrument
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who plays a musical instrument is known as an instrumentalist. The history of musical instruments dates to the beginnings of human culture. Early musical instruments may have been used for rituals, such as a horn to signal success on the hunt, or a drum in a religious ceremony. Cultures eventually developed composition and performance of melodies for entertainment. Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications and technologies. The date and origin of the first device considered a musical instrument is disputed. The oldest object that some scholars refer to as a musical instrument, a simple flute, dates back as far as 50,000 - 60,000 years. Some consensus dates early flutes to about 40,000 years ago. However, most historians be ...
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Acoustic Guitar (magazine)
''Acoustic Guitar'' is a monthly magazine published in the United States since July/August 1990 by String Letter Publishing. The magazine offers information, inspiration, and instruction related to acoustic guitars for players of all levels from beginners to teachers. Each issue includes three or so songs with notation and tablature, lessons, product reviews and interviews of prominent acoustic musicians. History ''Acoustic Guitar'' was founded in the summer of 1990 under the editorial direction of Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers as a publication of String Letter Publishing of Richmond, California. String Letter had previously been established in 1985 as the publisher of ''Strings'', a magazine oriented towards players of bowed string instruments. The first issue featured the first in a series of columns written by Sharon Isbin, a biography on Robert Johnson, a profile of Bruce Cockburn's song craft, and commentary on the "new" MTV Unplugged series. The issue also included musical ...
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Manufacturing Companies Established In 2005
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products (such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles), or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers (usually through wholesalers, who in turn sell to retailers, who then sell them to individual customers). Manufacturing engineering is the field of engineering that designs and optimizes the manufacturing process, or the steps through which raw materials are transformed into a final product. T ...
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Manufacturing Companies Based In San Francisco
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products (such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles), or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers (usually through wholesalers, who in turn sell to retailers, who then sell them to individual customers). Manufacturing engineering is the field of engineering that designs and optimizes the manufacturing process, or the steps through which raw materials are transformed into a final product. T ...
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Ukulele Makers
The ukulele ( ; from haw, ukulele , approximately ), also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings. The tone and volume of the instrument vary with size and construction. Ukuleles commonly come in four sizes: soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone. History Developed in the 1880s, the ukulele is based on several small, guitar-like instruments of Portuguese origin, the ''machete'', ''cavaquinho'', ''timple'', and ''rajão'', introduced to the Hawaiian Islands by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde. Three immigrants in particular, Madeiran cabinet makers Manuel Nunes, José do Espírito Santo, and Augusto Dias, are generally credited as the first ukulele makers. Two weeks after they disembarked from the SS ''Ravenscrag'' in late August 1879, the ''Hawaiian Gazette'' reported that "Madeira Islanders recently arrived here, have been delighting the p ...
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Guitar Manufacturing Companies Of The United States
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A plectrum or individual finger picks may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant chamber on the instrument, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier. The guitar is classified as a chordophone – meaning the sound is produced by a vibrating string stretched between two fixed points. Historically, a guitar was constructed from wood with its strings made of catgut. Steel guitar strings were introduced near the end of the nineteenth century in the United States; nylon strings came in the 1940s. The guitar's ancestors include the gittern, the vihuela, the four- course Renaissance guitar, and the ...
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United States Patent & Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexandria, Virginia, after a 2005 move from the Crystal City area of neighboring Arlington, Virginia. The USPTO is "unique among federal agencies because it operates solely on fees collected by its users, and not on taxpayer dollars". Its "operating structure is like a business in that it receives requests for services—applications for patents and trademark registrations—and charges fees projected to cover the cost of performing the services tprovide . The Office is headed by the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a position last held by Andrei Iancu until he left office on January 20, 2021. Commissioner of Patents Drew Hirshfeld is performing the funct ...
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Industrial Designers Society Of America
The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is a membership-based not-for-profit organization that promotes the practice and education of industrial design. The organization was formally established in 1965 by the collaborative merger of the Industrial Designers Institute (IDI), the American Society of Industrial Designers (ASID), and the Industrial Designers Education Association (IDEA). However, its origins can be traced back to the 1920s, prior to the founding in 1938 of the American Design Institute (ADI), which was the predecessor of IDI. Its first chairman was John Vassos and its first president was Henry Dreyfuss. The society publishes a quarterly journal, ''Innovation'', in which Klaus Krippendorff coined the term " product semantics" in his 1984 article "Exploring the Symbolic Qualities of Form", as well as books such as ''Design Secrets: Products: 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered''. In 1980, the society established the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) ...
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Wired Magazine
''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online magazine, online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has been in publication since March/April 1993. Several spin-offs have been launched, including ''Wired UK'', ''Wired Italia'', ''Wired Japan'', and ''Wired Germany''. From its beginning, the strongest influence on the magazine's editorial outlook came from founding editor and publisher Louis Rossetto. With founding creative director John Plunkett, Rossetto in 1991 assembled a 12-page prototype, nearly all of whose ideas were realized in the magazine's first several issues. In its earliest colophon (publishing), colophons, ''Wired'' credited Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its "patron saint". ''Wired'' went on to chronicle the evolution of digital technology and its impact on society. ' ...
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Mission Local
Mission Local is a bilingual local independent online news site that also publishes a semiannual printed paper that covers the Mission District of San Francisco. Early history The Mission Local began as a hyperlocal project of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, focusing on San Francisco's Mission District. As some of the mainstream newspapers in San Francisco were shrinking and downsizing, it was believed that local media sites might fill some of the holes in reporting that were being left. The new media site was in fact also a new experiment in hyperlocal journalism. With funding from the Ford Foundation, it was launched in 2008, purposely aimed at covering the underserved neighborhood of the Mission. Berkeley Professor Lydia Chavez was its founder. It is one of the few university projects that has been turned into a fully functioning community news site. Many young journalists have worked and trained at this media news site. And in 2009 it began translating all of i ...
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Northern California
Northern California (colloquially known as NorCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers include the San Francisco Bay Area (anchored by the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland), the Greater Sacramento area (anchored by the state capital Sacramento), the Redding, California, area south of the Cascade Range, and the Metropolitan Fresno area (anchored by the city of Fresno). Northern California also contains redwood forests, along with most of the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite Valley and part of Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta (the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range after Mount Rainier in Washington), and most of the Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. The 48-county definition is not used for the Northern California Megaregion, one of the 11 megaregions of the United States. Th ...
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Ekoa
Ekoa is a natural Biocomposite available in dry fabrics, pre-pregs, as well as cores and resins. Ekoa has been used in a variety of applications, including musical instruments, such as a ukulele and a guitar, as well as sports equipment, including a bicycle frame, and a lacrosse stick. History Ekoa was initially developed by Blackbird Guitars, a company that has made musical instruments out of Carbon fiber reinforced polymer, but started working on a biobased composite material that would work well for musical instruments. Blackbird worked with Entropy Resins to develop Ekoa, and released the first production musical instrument in 2013. Joe Luttwak of Blackbird and Desi Banatao of Entropy formed a separate company, Lingrove, LLC, to further develop Ekoa and expand applications. Luttwak filed for a patent for "METHOD FOR MAKING LIGHT AND STIFF PANELS AND STRUCTURES USING NATURAL FIBER COMPOSITES" on November 18, 2014, which was given A1 Kind Code status on May 15, 2015. Lingrove f ...
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