Pedalboard Progress and Speakertown

So the other day I had mentioned that I was going to try my hand at building a guitar effects pedal. Well I did and it was a success. It was a clean boost pedal which apparently is one of the easiest ones to start out on. I also just ordered a T Rex Fuel Tank Jr. so all of the pedals are running on clean efficient power thus reducing a good amount of extraneous noise created from running a lot of pedals/cables. Here's the T Rex unit:

While waiting for the power supply to arrive, I thought it to be a good idea to do some preparatory arrangement work on the board. Here is the board before rearranging commenced:

And here is the board after I removed the cruddy power strip, wall wart adapters, replaced a not so great patch cable, and added my new boost pedal:

 

My Pedal Board: Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner>General Guitar Gadgets Stratoblaster Boost Pedal Kit>Boss SD-2 Dual Overdrive(Modded)>1998 Russian Sovtek Big Muff Pi(Modded to add a Boss style power jack)>Digitech Whammy Reissue>Ernie Ball Volume/Pan Pedal>Boss DD-3 Digital Delay>Hardwire RV-7 Stereo Reverb>BBE Sonic Stomp

My Guitar Setup: Acoustic 150 w/matching 6x10 cab. Epiphone Valve Junior 5W tube amp. Blackheart Killer Ant 1/2W tube amp head(Modded with Bitmo kit to add pull boost tone knob and direct line out on front). Custom made 4x12 speaker cab loaded with Celestions(can't remember the model of speaker.)

As long as I was taking pedal board shots, I thought I would document Jef's board and get a few shots of the expunk practice space affectionately dubbed "Speakertown."  You'll see why it's called that in the pictures below:

Jef's Pedal Board: Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner>Boss PS-2 Digital Pitch Shifter/Delay>Boss BD-2 Blues Driver>Boss TR-2 Tremolo>Electro Harmonix Small Clone>Electro Harmonix Small Stone(Vintage)>Electro Harmonix Holy Grail Reverb>Electro Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man>DOD FX52 Classic Fuzz>Dunlop Rotovibe

Jef's Stereo Guitar Rig: Fender Super Six Reverb and Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue.

Northwest corner of Speakertown. Those are Joe's drums on the left.

Southeast corner of Speakertown. Jef's setup on the left and Phil's bass rig on the right. Acoustic head with a 1960s Fender 2x15 cab.

 Many, many more updates to come in the future. Life is good.

Lights At Sea, Ozenza, Shores, Ambassador 11.27.10

Lights At Sea held their album release show on Saturday of this past weekend at Mulligans. This show was easily one of the best of the entire year and then some! All bands absolutely killed it. At the end of the show, Lights At Sea had drummers from local bands Ozenza, Apostles, Shores, Ambassador, & Charles The Osprey join them onstage for a finale song of which epic does not even begin to describe. I was able to catch video of Ozenza's first song and a couple minutes of the finale with everyone on stage. I wish I could have gotten more(with better audio to boot), but the place was so packed that movement was difficult. Very difficult. Below are some pictures of Ozenza as well as the two videos:

The Plague Years, Apostles & Bullpig

Great show on Saturday night. The Plague Years were good... and loud. Unbelievably loud. Really enjoyed those guys as well as their do it yourself lighting setup. All the way around they were a pretty thorough outfit. Apostles set was really good as usual and besides a lot of pictures, I also took video of them playing the song Countach so I can splice it with other live footage and a few video clips to put into a video. Here are some of the pictures from the evenings Apostles set:

The Return of Shoegaze

Last night I saw a fantastic show at Founders Brewery. Headliners Weekend with touring support act Young Prisms and local opener Walden (Pond). What a great show. Check out all of these guys as soon as you can because they rocked my face right off. The bands were all great and it was nice to see a show featuring the shoegaze genre in Grand Rapids.

This Saturday brings an Apostles show at Mulligans. I'll probably bring my camera out and take some pictures of that show. They'll be playing with The Plague Years and Bullpig. 


That's about it for now, I think.

Studio time and pedals

Short one today. Going in to finish up work on vocals for Heavier Than Air Flying Machines tonight after work and enjoying a day off tomorrow. (Well, a day off from the day job, anyway.) Practice for both Expunk then Chance Jones in the evening.

Speaking of Expunk, Jef wanted me to make a diagram of his pedal board setup like the one I threw together recently of my own. It was a rather quick job and nothing fancy, but you get the idea. I'm pretty sure I got it mostly right even though I had to go from memory and a very blurry picture.

 Sweet stuff on there, people. Imagine both of those rigs colliding with each other very loudly.

Waiting on my boost pedal kit to arrive in the mail from General Guitar Gadgets still. I'm looking forward to assembling that next week.

Gear rules. Life is good.

Local Music: Ozenza

Ozenza is back to a three piece after the departure of their guitarist Kremo. They played at the very tiny venue Rocky's last night and sent seismic tremors throughout the greater Grand Rapids area. Unfortunately for some odd reason(poor setup/system configuration) you couldn't hardly hear the vocals even though they were the only thing going through the PA. Despite that, they killed once again. I couldn't locate my camera I had purposefully brought, so I made do once again with ye olde trusty camera phone. These are the results:

Rock.