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Well now you did it.....
I've been practicing sending "Ben's best bent wire in Tennessee" with the paddle, all night.
It sounds pretty good, but t's not quite the same. It doesn't have that "clackity, clackity" sound, that you get from a bug.
Now I might have to get a bug.
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Now add in the beginning: 2 2 U U 2 Bens Best Bent Wire TENNESSEE
Obviously an electronic keyer is programmed to send precisely timed morse elements with correct character spacing. A bug allows you to take some editorial license to make this more of a musical thing rather than precisely sent morse code. Yeah, when you send this, it isn't good correct code. It is just more of a ditty. Feel free to hold out the dahs longer and ignore the correct spacing.
Then to add to the knowledge base, do a search for BANANA BOAT SWING, and LAKE ERIE SWING.
HERE is a little bit about them.
With a bug, and to a lessor degree, a straight key, you can add a little style to your sending. AKA your "fist". Back in the day, people were recognized by their fist. Someone would know who was sending just from hearing it without the other operator having to identify. Something interesting about this: I have a buddy who was a CW operator in the US Navy. This whole fist thing was a security concern. Foreign listeners would learn various operators fists and if they could find out what ship they were on, they would then be able to keep track of the other side's ships by listening to what operator was sending. When they heard that fist, they knew what ship they were hearing.
Therefore, when electronic keyers such as the
Hallicrafters TO Keyer (HA-1) came out, a lot of the military operators bought these keyers out of their own pockets because an electronic keyer doesn't have a fist. It all sounds the same.
He still uses that TO Keyer to this day and because of that, I bought one to use with my boatanchor gear. As a side note: old tube rigs often have high voltage on the key contacts and if you connect a modern solid state electronic keyer to them, you will smoke the keyer. This isn't an issue with the TO Keyer since it uses vacuum tubes. The TO Keyer does not use iambic keying. It just makes dots and dashes. In a string.