On the Breadboard

Maybe this will be a recurring series. It should be possible if I’m actually Making Things.

Bazz Fuss

Information about the Bazz Fuss can be found here.

A few years ago I tried out the Bazz Fuss and was very disappointed. Being careful with transistor and resistor choice seems to be much more crucial than People on the Internet imply.

I actually fried one transistor by using a variable resistor that was allowed to vary down to zero. Was quite amusing to turn it down, then up again, only to find the tone was drastically different. Somewhere in the middle of this process I made an instagram video. Bazz Fuss fried video.

The “best” version I created consisted of a clean boost followed by a standard BF with high gain, then a tone stack, then a BF with lower gain and emitter degeneration added. This allowed bizarre octave-up effects with tone high and big muff-esque tones when low.

Double Bazz Fuss with Tone video.

Chance that I’m develop this further? It *was* pretty high before I built the next Thing. Now, slightly less.

Harmonic Percolator

The Interfax Harmonic Percolator is an legendary (or at least notorious) fuzzbox mostly associated nowadays with the music of Steve Albini. Albini has several youtube videos on the subject. There’s some info here.

Tried out a Harmonic Jerkulator, an all silicon Percolator clone developed by Tim Escobedo. Details available here. It sounds amazing. It doesn’t sound Albini, but neither do “faithful” clones or any other variant I’ve heard, so whatever. Sounds like a germanium fuzz-face to me except despite being boomier it never gets muddy enough to where you can’t hear all the notes.

Chance that I’ll develop further? 100% chance I’ll youtube it, 50% I’ll box it up, 20% I’ll try and market it.

Ruby

The Ruby amplifier, from runoffgroove.com.

Built this LM386-based 0.25W amplifier. It sounds suspiciously good. Even when plugged into my upcycled computer subwoofer. I’m definitely gonna box this up. This is an extremely high-margin Thing if it were ever to be Etsy’d.

100% chance it’ll get boxed up. I’ve never sold on Etsy before so … if I ever decide to this’ll probably be the first thing I do.

Anyway, those are the three ideas I’ve been monkeying around with over the past week.

Disappear (old Porcupine Tree cover)

Another old recording from January 2011. This one is an old Porcupine Tree b-side that has somehow stuck with me. Acoustic guitar vs. dobro guitar. :)

Jegus, I used to have so much hair.

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The New Year (old Death Cab for Cutie cover)

On December 31, 2010, I recorded this cover of “The New Year” by Death Cab for Cutie. Still probably one of my best mutli-track video+audio recordings to date. All acoustic instruments. :)

This was before I got my Flip cam and I recorded stuff with my old Canon point-and-shoot.

Four years ago is a strange amount of time.

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Ambient Binary Bass

Made this video on Tuesday. I’m thinking the idea needs to be expanded to >30 minutes before the idea will go viral. Not really, but the idea does make me want to cut and paste together a one chord krautrock song of that length. Could probably only have three or four minutes of actual playing in it cut and pasted in weird ways.

The lower bass is counting binary numbers from zero to fifteen. Like if it’s playing A A E E then that’s 0011, which is three. The higher bass is playing five-digit numbers, so it’s actually in 5/4 time juxtaposed directly with the 4/4. Not that you hear the metrical mishmash because all the notes sound random anyway. The higher bass counts from 00000 to 11111, or zero to thirty-one. Thirty-two measures of 5/4 is 160 beats and sixteen measures of 4/4 is 64 beats, so I had the lower part repeat the count three times, but 3*64=192, so the higher part finishes 192-160=32 beats early. Math rock? Sort of?

The higher bass plays C# for a 0 and high A for a 1, so at any point you’re just hearing an A major chord: A C# E A, but with different notes missing at any point in time.

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Polymetric Generative Aleatoric Music

The other day I mentioned making polymetric generative aleatoric music. I was able to get the guitar part recorded but I can’t actually play keyboards well enough to actually play the melody. I guess I’ll be working on it and practicing.

Anyway, here’s a camcorder-quality version of just the guitars.

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Tapping Exercise Tab

I was asked to tab out my tapping exercise. I didn’t actually have it tabbed out, so I just looked at my hands in the video.

[redacted]'s Tapping Exercise #1

The goal for me was to be able to play it just looking at a chord list.

First eight bars:

Gmaj7 Cmaj7 Gmaj7 Cmaj7 Gmaj7 Cmaj7 Gmaj7 D7

Here’s how I arranged each chord:

Gmaj7
e —————————————-
B —————————————-
G —————————————-
D —–9-12——9-12——9-12——9-12-
A 9-10——9-10——9-10——9-10——
E —————————————-

Cmaj7
e —————————————-
B —————————————-
G —————————————-
D —–9-10——9-10——9-10——9-10-
A 7-10——7-10——7-10——7-10——
E —————————————-

D7
e ——————————————–
B ——————————————–
G ——————————————–
D —–10-12——10-12——10-12——10-12-
A 9-12——-9-12——-9-12——-9-12——-
E ——————————————–

Minor part: (0:22)

Am7 Em7 Am7 Em7

These are the chords for this part:

Am7
e —————————————-
B —————————————-
G —————————————-
D —–7-10——7-10——7-10——7-10-
A 7-10——7-10——7-10——7-10——
E —————————————-

Em7
e —————————————-
B —————————————-
G —————————————-
D —–9-12——9-12——9-12——9-12-
A 7-10——7-10——7-10——7-10——
E —————————————-

Back to first part, but with a secondary dominant:

Gmaj7 Cmaj7 A7 D7

Here’s the only one you haven’t already used:

A7
e —————————————-
B —————————————-
G —————————————-
D —–7-11——9-12——9-12——9-12-
A 7-10——7-10——7-10——7-10——
E —————————————-

Then end on G like this:

For notes in , tap and then release quickly enough that you don’t mute the harmonic.
e ————————–
B ———————-
G ———–12———
D ———————-
A ————————–
E ————————–
*let the last note ring

Thanks.

Tap Guitar Practice

I’ve been trying to teach myself to play tap guitar. I’m pretty bad at it, but I wrote and recorded this exercise. Maybe I should arrange a tap guitar version of some pop song just for fun.

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One-man band mopho + guitar noodling

Just having some fun noodling around as a one-man-band. Long release times on the DSI MoPho make it easy.

 

 

Oh yeah, also give me song requests and subscribe to me on youtube. :)

Youtube

Anyone newly following me, make sure you’re subscribed to my youtube. It’s not the most happening channel yet but there are good things to come.

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Projects and project statuses

Whale Boost production
Two chassis are tooled, labelled and finished. Circuit board design needs to be reviewed, then boards populated, then everything assembled. I’m estimating two hours for each step. I’m wanting to have both board designs reviewed by friday.

Son of Screamer variantDo not work on this until Whale Boost is done.

Arduino Synth ModuleDo not work on this until Whale Boost is done.

Baby Whale Amp
I want to implement a tone bypass, to replace the useless preamp plate starve. I also need to design and construct cabinetry for the amp. I’m looking at an hour of planning the bypass, then I need to source a DPDT switch. And install it. Planning this should take 30 minutes. Installing up to an hour. I hope I have a suitable switch laying around, otherwise sourcing will be annoying. I want to have the switch in hand by Saturday.

For cabinetry I need to make measurements, come up with a design, then build it and finish the wood. I’m looking at an hour of measurements, two hours of designing, and then god knows how long with the rest since I’m not a woodworker. I’m going to make those measurements by Sunday.

School Project
I’m on a team with three others on a project. We have to select a project by Monday.

Exciting post with multimedia for all of these things coming very soon.