Projects and Recent Aquisitions

What a great couple of days. I got a lot of work done on the pedalboard I've been working on. Just need to put on the metal trim pieces around the edges and then the metal corner pieces. I already placed all but one of my pedals on it and wired it up as it is totally functional now, just needs the finishing touches. I'll post up pictures from beginning to end once it's totally done. Tuesday night found myself and my ol' pal Pure Country picking up an organ that was listed for free on craigslist. What a find! This thing is a technics electronic organ with more buttons, features and do dads than I know what to do with on top of midi in/out, headphone jack, mic input, aux input and various other perks. It's in amazing condition and is fully functional. I took a couple of crappy camera phone pictures of it in the dimly lit rehearsal space which don't do it justice, but I'm posting them anyway. One of the pictures would be ol' Chance Jones himself hammering on the ivory a bit. Once again, what a steal! On Wednesday, my friend Adam and myself paid a visit to a west side pawn shop to shred on some axes. I ended up buying a cheapy cheapy "First Act" Walmarty guitar. I'll be working on gutting it, replacing electronics, pickups, tone/volume pots, and maybe the neck as well. Got it for $60, so who cares, right? Thing actually looks pretty cool. Life is good.

Building the Pedalboard and Miscellaneous Stuff

Had a great time at the Local First street fair this past Saturday. Everyone out in the crowd that I talked to said the sound was fantastic. I'm always a fan of playing shows outdoors on a nice day. Had a brutal day at work and then drove directly there to load in, so I think that had something to do with me playing possibly the worst set I can remember technically. I think I was still quite distracted. Other than that, everything and everyone were fantastic that fine evening.

Moving on, the pedal board project has begun. Over the weekend I began purchasing the supplies as follows:
-Sheet of plywood
-Black indoor/outdoor carpet that functions fully as velcro
-Can of spray glue
-Heavy duty metal door handles
-Wood screws

I still need to get some metal trim and metal corner pieces which should round out the raw materials necessary to complete this project. My current pedalboard is a little too small for the pedals I eventually want to get/already have, so this will be a nice change so as not to have to be concerned with spacial issues other than in the sonic realm. Tonight begins the work of cutting the board to size and so on. I'll post work-in-progress pictures as always as I tend to do nerdy documentation like that.

Onto another related topic which would be pedal and amplifier repair. If you have a tube amp, effect pedals, etc. you need to bring them to Eric's Audio Repair for any repair work. This guy is extremely friendly, knowledgable, quick and cheap. He runs his shop out of J & H Automotive garage on the corner of Lake Dr & Diamond. He came highly recommended from Mike Saunders(Farfisa commander in Chance Jones) and I can't sing his praises enough. He fixed up my guitar and Justin's(Guitar commander in Chance Jones) wah pedal quickly and at a great price. I brought down some more stuff of mine and Jeremy's(Bass guitar commander of Chance Jones) today for him to fix. Right now he is working on a vintage Electro Harmonix Small Stone, Russian Big Muff Pi, Epiphone Valve Jr amp, Ernie Ball Volume/Pan Pedal, and a Dunlop Rotovibe. Keep this guy busy. He's local and great. Life is good.

Outdoor/indoor shows and the guitar

Chance Jones is playing Grand Rapids' Festival of the Arts today at 5:30 on the outer fringe stage by the Federal Building. I always love playing outdoor shows. That being said, the Local First street party is coming up next Saturday which will be a great time as well. Tomorrow brings the expunk show at Jukes which will be a lot of fun for sure. We'll be playing with a band called 'mynewmotto' as well as Moss Folk. I've been honing my guitar effects pedal board over the years(budget-controlled, of course) and it's starting to get somewhere. Obviously there are many many many effects boxes that I would love to get, but my current setup lets me do quite a bit of sound tampering as is. Within the next couple of weeks I will begin work on building my own custom pedal board that will make for much more space(more pedals). I figured I would include a picture I snapped of my recently reorganized board for gearnerd's sake. That would be the image below. On top of that, I'm sanding down my Fender Stratocaster that I've had for 16 years now so I can change the color, pickguard, pickups, etc. Eventually I need to be getting an amp head to go with the 4 x 12 cabinet that I am also refinishing. For now I'm using an Acoustic solid state head with a matching 6 x 10 cabinet. I wasn't too sure about how the solid state would do, but it actually sounds pretty great! The Peninsular axe shall make it's public debut at Jukes for the expunk show as the aforementioned strat is in a state of disrepair. That guitar itself is sounding pretty awesome as well. Life is good.



In the gear nerd spirit, here's a run down of the effects/signal path order of my current setup:
Guitar to Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner--->Dunlop Univibe UV-1 Rotary Speaker Simulator--->Digitech Whammy Reissue Pitchshifter/Harmonizer--->Russian Big Muff Pi Black Box Fuzz Pedal--->Boss SD-2 Dual Overdrive--->Boss DD-3 Digital Delay--->Digitech Hardwire RV-7 Stereo Reverb out to the amplifier.

Shows and acquired gear goodies

First and foremost, I have to say I had a great time playing with Man Man Tuesday night. All of those guys are really cool to talk to and hang out with. They smashed out a killer set. We seemed to hold together a pretty tight set ourselves, so no complaints here. Plenty of nice folks around after the show to talk to and the crowd response was fantastic. Tonight is the 60s tribute show at Billy's Lounge which will be a riot. A whole night of 60s jams? Come on, that's a no brainer for a good time. We dropped "Waiting For My Man" by the Velvet Underground and went with "Twist & Shout." Can't go wrong there.

On a gear oriented note, I am picking up a Lexicon Lambda USB audio interface for my computer as well as a CAD Trion 6000 condenser microphone with switchable polar patterns and a 10db pad. I'm excited as this will be my first microphone that offers a figure 8 polar pattern so I can experiment with mid side recording techniques. You know, figure 8 mic pointing 90 degrees to the left with a cardiod condenser immediately above it pointing straight at the source? Of course. Just to get a bit technical, the figure 8 polar pattern refers to the microphones ability to pick up an omnidirectional sound source from both the front as well as the back of the capsule. The cool thing about it is if you place it like I stated above, you get the ability to affect the stereo spread in post production in your DAW(Digital Audio Workstation). Say, for instance, I were to assign each of the two microphones to a channel to record. After I record into or transport wav files into my computers recording software, I can copy the mid micrpohone(the figure 8) and paste it as a new track and flip the phase on that track. After doing so, the two tracks cancel each other out due to being out of phase. You then pan each track far left and right. After you do that, you link the two tracks together for consistent volume adjustment and fade in/out to your preference. What you'll find is that with only the mid microphone level up, the sound is very narrow because it was the one pointing directly at the sound source. As you turn up the level on the side microphone(copied into two channels and linked), you notice that the stereo image really starts to reveal itself as you are essentially adding in the indirect room sound reflection coming from the sound source. Sounds nice on a variety of things and I'm looking forward to experimenting with it. Life is good.

Crowd response was awesome! Can't wait to see Man Man!!!

Busy week and a new show booked...

Both HTAFM and Expunk will not be having practice this week. This makes a lot lighter load for yours truly, because it was set to be a busy week as it is. Last nights Chance Jones practice went very well as we got to run through the 60s covers a few times each as well as two new songs Josh worked on out in Portland. They sound really great too. Tomorrow night is the Man Man show at the Intersection which will be fantastic. Wednesday night is Chance Jones practice to go over the 60's songs a couple last times before the show on Thursday.

On a somewhat related note, we just got confirmation on a slot in Grand Rapids' Festival. We will be playing on Friday June 4th at 5:45pm. I'm unsure as to which stage we will be playing on as the official festival site still has no schedule, map, etc. up(kind of strange with it being May 10th today). Anyway, that should be a great time as I love playing outdoor shows. Hopefully it ends up being a nice day out that Friday. Life is good.

Not music related at all.

So I found some cards in a box downstairs. Looks like I have the complete Desert Storm Series 1 set. 88 cards in all from George H.W. Bush(#1) to The Pentagon(#87) and the checklist(#88). Honorable mention also goes out to some other randoms like Kingdom Come panoramic cards and sparse Terminator 2: Judgment Day movie cards. Yes, the date is correct on this post. I am doing this on a Friday night. Wow. My life is exciting, but good!(Especially with no hangover for work at 7 a.m.)