“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.

Yeah.  That.

I was also drinking wine, reading Barbara Kingsolver, and destroying a Cuban sandwich.  It was PREPOSTEROUS.

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 in, but most of the guts are there.  Needless to say I’ll be doing a lot of voltage checking before I touch this thing.

I think first up will be some sous vide salmon, then hit it hot and fast in a cast iron skillet for color and Maillard reactions on the outside.  Should be one heck of a good time.  More to come.

PWM pedal (foreground) with a few homebuilt friends

Here’s the guts:

PWM Guts

It’s a really cool pedal.  Way different animal than other guitar effects.  It makes sounds that most closely resemble a synthesizer.  Hope to use it for some fake-synth parts on some of my tunes in the future.  It’s kinda “glitchy” though, which I think is by design.  But every now and then the pedal does something weird, and I can’t tell if there’s something wrong with the it, or if that’s just the way the weird pedal sounds.  For instance, it doesn’t always pick up every note, and I don’t know if that’s just how it works (it *is* glitchy) or if I’ve got something loose in there.  I’ve also got some rhythmic clicking going on when the pedal is engaged but I’m not playing.  I don’t think this is umm… desired behavior, but I checked my wiring and I think it looks good.  It’s not awful, and since I mostly do recording, I can edit it out fairly easily, but it would be much more nice if it just didn’t happen in the first place.  If I figure it out, I’ll update the post.

It. Sounds. Awesome.

Homemade “Vactrol” using a red led and a photoresistor in some heat-shrink tubing.  Very fun.  Have to build one of these for Chase now.

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 into pedal form, it would scream one or two whole hecks of a lot more than this one does.

Oh yeah, you’re not seeing things.  That is an electrical junction box you see there.

Unfortunately, it also left me overwhelmed trying to polish some of these really rough scraps to perfection.  I did work here and there on the songs, but there were so many, and I had more good ideas than good plans.  I moved away from all the drummers I knew.  In short, the songs sat around for a while.

It’s axiomatic that not making music is less fun that making music, so I eventually decided not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good and to put a song “out there” again.

Here’s a version of the song “Maybe Not” from week 23.  You may remember the original demo – it’s not as bad as I thought it might be.  Before I left Nashville, I got Seth Rouch and Ian McDermott to play drums and bass respectively on it, which is why they sound great.  Take a listen:

Maybe Not

Maybe Not by Conrad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

(That means you can copy the song and do whatever you want to it for noncommercial use.)

Sure the mix was done in just a couple hours and there’s a few edits I still might like to make.  And yes, it’s probably quieter than a lot of your other music.  I just don’t feel like squashing the heck out of my songs anymore.  If it’s too quiet, turn it up.

It felt good to work on my own music again, but it reminded me that I really enjoy working on someone else’s music much more (as long as I believe in the music/person enough).  I think that will have to be next on my list…  Need to find some triangle musicians (and about twenty more hours a week of free time).

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 one of the Octopre preamps, and used the Fat Head II on the other side of the room, pointing at the amp, and ran that through my Seventh Circle Audio A12 preamp.  So we have a close/room mix.  For the record, there is a slight EQ on the fathead tracks, mostly just a rumble (read: Heating Noise) reducer:

I forgot this was on them until I bounced out most of the tracks, so tuff luck- there’s EQ on them.

First up is a section where I’m playing a crappy guitar solo.  I have no chops.  I have clips of the 57 alone, FH alone, mixed, and then in the context of the song.  Remember the placement is VERY different on the mics.

sm57 Solo

Fat Head Solo Guitar

57 + FH Solo Guitar

In Context 57 + FH Guitar Solo

Then I’ve got the same thing for a crunchy section.

SM57 Crunch Guitar

FHII Crunch Guitar

57 + FH Crunch

In Context 57 + FH Crunch Guitar

I really like the mic.  I’m gonna try to build some portable cheap acoustic panels out of rigid fiberglass insulation to improve the room sound somewhat…  I am also planning on swapping out the stock transformers for some luhndals.  They sell them this way on their website, but I can order them and do the mod myself for less money.  And I’m going to mess around with my Little Labs IBP plugin for my UA card to see if that makes the mics play any nicer together, but even as is- with minimal fuss, I think the combination of 57 + ribbon adds a nice beefiness to the texture.

I also cut some demo vocals with the thing, and they sound pretty neat too.  If I determine the clips are suitable (read: minimally embarrassing), I’ll have some clips of that as well.

My favorite part is that the apparent justification for such an apparently obvious conclusion is “what are u talking about?”  And this is the best answer, deserving of thanks.

Well, if that doesn’t just revive your hope for the future of mankind, I don’t know what will.