Veronica Belmont, Merlin Mann, and the Chief TWiT himself, Leo LaPorte joined Jonathan Coulton, the ultimate geek rocker, on stage in San Francisco this weekend to mark the release of Jonathan Coulton’s song Still Alive.

If you complete the game Portal, one of the games included in The Orange Box, you get to hear this catchy little jingle.

It is super cool to see these guys and girl get the chance to rock out. I wish I could have been there.

I have heard of electric guitars, but this takes it to the HNL. I don’t know who this guy is, and I am too lazy to do much research, but what you are seeing or about to see is a guy playing a guitar through a Tesla coil. I am sure it is incredibly dangerous…he seems to be standing a long way back, but the sound it creates is incredibly interesting.

The Tesla coil makes the sound by creating bunches of tiny lightning bolts. Each bolt “pops” at its own frequency or pitch. If you string a number of those bolts together, you get music.

I want one of these. Or maybe better stated, I would like to play through one of these. After that, I don’t know what I would do with the coil.

Ok, I am looking at something that seems really cool. Line6 has just come out with a new line of effects pedals that are unlike anything you have ever seen before. These new pedals allow you to easily pluck the guts of the pedal out of the stompbox and replace it with different guts. What does this mean? Well, it means that you can easily switch an effects pedal from being a distortion pedal to a digital delay just by swapping out the brain. WHAT UP? That is pretty cool.

I will have to think about it further, but right now it sounds like really cool functionality, but with very little real world use. I mean, it is rare that I look at my pedal board and wish I could … as I am typing this I am already rethinking this. There are times that I wish that I had different overdrives, or what if you could change the order of the pedal… that would be cool.

I guess there is a place for these… I KNOW! You could have one or two of these tone cores in you pedal board run, and you that are reserved for those effects that you only need in certain situations. Maybe it is that sCrEaMiNg distortion that is only useful for that one thing… whatever… you could switch that out with something more useful for all the other times you play.