“The Scream” is starting to look finished, but it has two more steps to go. Chase’s “Good Vibrations” tremolo pedal is starting to look like a Jamaican flag. Oops. I think it will still be cool. It needs text, and then it will be done.
Charleston is a pretty cool town. We rented bikes and cruised around on the beach, chasing seagulls, flying kites, and generally having a good time. Beaches in winter, who would have thought?
January 19, 2011 – 7:03 pm
So I was sitting at a fairly kitchy mall-adjacent caribbean-themed “seafood” loud hookupy barstaurant tonight, trying to amuse myself alone on business in Orlando, and suddenly, some dude started playing steel drums: Yeah. That. I was also drinking wine, reading Barbara Kingsolver, and destroying a Cuban sandwich. It was PREPOSTEROUS.
December 4, 2010 – 6:51 pm
Thanks to Jeff Potter of Cooking For Geeks, I’m building my own DIY Sous Vide rig with a thermostatic controller and an off the shelf cheap slow cooker. Mains wiring is scary as heck though. Work in progress. I have to get a couple more parts to make sure it’s safe before I’ll plug it [...]
November 21, 2010 – 12:03 pm
I was scrounging around yesterday, looking for something I could build/make… When I realized that with but one quick trip to Radio Shack, I could be the neato PWM guitar effect pedal that Collin Cunningham video demo’d for Make Magazine. So I did: Here’s the guts: It’s a really cool pedal. Way different animal than [...]
October 18, 2010 – 3:04 pm
My tremolo pedal is done. This is my version of the Baja Trembulator, which i have christened “Good Vibrations.” A little overspray on the text stencil, but that’s okay. I’m not very good at this kind of thing, so I’ll take what I can get. It. Sounds. Awesome. Homemade “Vactrol” using a red led and [...]
October 13, 2010 – 4:07 pm
My newest completed pedal, based on Beavis Audio Research’s Trotsky Drive. Real simple circuit. I didn’t even have the special Russian transistor Beavis used, but it still sounds cool. But I kept with the Soviet theme, and named it after one of my favorite composers, Dmitri Shostakovich. Though, if good ol’ Shosty were really distilled [...]
Some of you may remember the Song-A-Week project I had going for a while. Writing and demoing a new song (almost) every week was a great experiment and left me with like… 60? some odd songs to pick through in various states of completion – mostly really rough, but some a lot more fleshed out. [...]
February 22, 2010 – 11:12 pm
I got myself some ribbon mics the other day. Here’s a few clips of the first time I used them for any actual recording. I played my junky old Sorento guitar through my Fender Prosonic on the dirty channel with a heavy dose of amp reverb, and stuck an sm57 about a foot away through [...]
February 12, 2010 – 7:28 pm
Kristin and I had a bet going about which was bigger (geographically): the U.S. or China. Right now, the bet is still unresolved, as they appear to be closely-matched enough to produce different results depending on the calculation method and assumptions. In the process of looking for a definitive answer, I stumbled upon this soul-crushing [...]
