MKII Tonebender

Here's my MKII Tonebender; I'm still waiting on a replacement trimpot but it sounds really good. I tried getting it to work for a while and then realized I got the pinout switched on the layout! Turned the transistors around and BLAM!

PCB Store

You can now find Hotcake pcbs at my website http://bigdippereffects.weebly.com/ . Shoot me an email if you'd like to see other circuits.
Welcome to the Big Dipper Effects pcb shop! Right now I have a small quantity of Hotcake boards. Comment or shoot me a message to make sure your order goes through. Thanks for looking.

Shortstack (Hotcake circuit)

LPB-1

Here's an LPB-1 I built for a friend. Interesting facts about the LPB-1:
-It was Electro-Harmonix' first pedal, sold in 1969.
-It's very similar to the Dallas Rangemaster and Vox Treble Booster but with different values for a different frequency response.


demo; title's a joke because I got a noise complaint from a hot neighbor right after doing this

Remembering Wes

     One of my best friends through college, Wes Bryant, passed away suddenly. He was a dedicated musician, engineer, band-member and friend. When I met him, I frankly wouldn't have thought we'd eventually be friends. He was clearly a metal-head...had a nose ring, long hair, wore metal-band shirts. But eventually I found out how humble he was and how accepting he was of all kinds of music. I remember talking with him in the studio around 2009 about crappy college food. After I mentioned how much soup and Easy Mac I'd eaten, his eyes lit up and he said "Oh yeah dude, I LIVE off some ravioli".
     Skip ahead to spring of 2011, when I hung out at the studio until around 3 am. Wes was writing a song for a recording project and I just sat in. Soon we were bouncing ideas off each other, coming up with phrases that were more brutal than before. It was stream of consciousness stuff that was about power and overthrowing it. I'd never written a metal song and he made it seem easy.
         At one point, we went to the Tapp Room every Wednesday for the taco special. He paid for my meal for my birthday. One time he talked about guilty-pleasure pop listening at Taco Bell. He played a silly-simple bass part for a cover of "Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head". I saw As Oceans do a show in a friend's basement and Wes kicked a guy while playing guitar--and it was soooo metal. He'd talk about how hard it was to promote his band in today's media--you have to constantly give little nuggets of content and make personal connections. His occasional nickname on the studio schedule was "Big Daddy Dubbya". The last time I spoke with him, he had called me for advice on drum editing. He was handed a big project for the studio he was working for and needed to use beat-detective.

I hope he's remembered for his dedication as a musician, engineer, dependable friend, and the countless hours he'd spend trying to get everything just right. He was a big guy with a bigger heart, and was a massive metalhead. But more than a metalhead. To Wes, metal was high art. Complex rhythms, pristine production, atonal parts, clean tones, and lyrics about conspiracies and subcultures--questioning everything and defiant of being different. Wes was a metalhead who, on Facebook, had just joined "National Jim Henson Day", changed his religious views to "Theism", his political views to "People over everything".




Music:
solo project
Procrasturbation Take 2
Dorito Breath Remix
ECU Pump Up Song

Dead Meadow

Real good. Thankfully not that Jack White band.
It's like Earth meets The Black Keys with Sonic Youth singing.

Delicate Steve & Short Stack PCBs

Photo by Andrew St. Clair via The Brooklyn Veegan

I heard about Delicate Steve through a friend. There's not much info on the internet besides the hilarious press kit they put together. But that's not important. What is is that Delicate Steve's music is the kind of glorious slide guitar heavy sounds that I've dreamt of doing. Maybe most important: they use tons of pedals...like the Digi Whammy. Reminds me some of George Harrison, Stephen Malkmus, maybe an indie Derek Trucks--they'll definitely be worth following.

Also here's some new PCBs I made for sale: Short Stack OD/Fuzz    Hotcake-alike. $8+S&H

Benji Hughes

     I found out about the songwriter, Benji Hughes, after getting hooked on How I Met Your Mother. Ironically enough, he's from Charlotte and has a string of gigs at Snug Harbor starting on the day I discovered him.
     His style is reminiscent of Jonathan Richman, his voice sounds like Jeff Tweedy's at times, and sometimes the production reminds me of that on Gnarls Barkley's first album. There's a rumor that his 2nd album is in the works...I know I'm looking forward to it. Enjoy

FM-2

Bigmufffuzzwizz (from the madbean forum) and I are working on getting some Acetone FM-2 pcbs/projects together. I'll likely get some more hotcakes boards made too.

vacation listening:
The Beta Band
Modest Mouse: "TLCW" + others
The Mighty Imperials
Unrest- Imperial FFrr

Got My Wheels Turning

Here's some stuff I've come across this week

Very interesting study/experiment in music creation...where music creates and evolves itself with listener feedback
http://darwintunes.org/

See also: Sonic Charge "Synplant" soft-synth plugin. cool tool

David Lowery being a badass and revealing the Bystander effect we're almost all part of (--me included)
http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Titan's debut album FOR FREE

check it out. download it. spread the word
http://titanrock.bandcamp.com/
word

Project Studio set-up

Yamaha PM1000

     We helped an old punk rocker setup his studio today. Nice guy, it was fun--relics and all--still more to do.

???

Snake? Snaaaaaaake!!

NPBD: New Pedalboard Day!

Modded Crybaby->CS400 compressor->VS Angry Fuzz->Klon circuit->Firewatch (bufferless/modded Tube Screamer)->L6 Echo Park

Finally organized these guys onto a pedal board. Some pretty good sounds here but it'd be fun to add a Big Muff, other delays, and more modulation.

Shot of just the board:

MXR M-108 EQ

     My friend brought this vintage MXR M-108 to me when it stopped working during a show. I took it apart and tested it, but it works fine! I think the problem is either faulty (non-"locking") jacks, a power problem, or the stiffened inner foam falling onto the circuit.

      Probably one of the first graphic EQs--it's a strange pedal in that it doesn't have a stomp switch and it doesn't take 9v batteries/DC. Instead, it has an AC cord and a transformer which puts out 15V.

     In my short tests through my SS amp, I found the 31.2 Hz and 18KHz sliders to have little effect. That is most likely just due to the fidelity of my amp/speaker!

Gut shot and schem:

Sound demos

Here's demos for almost everything I've built so far: demos

Still need to do one for the Hot Cake!

New Music

My friends are all very busy, talented people. Here's some new music they're planning on releasing:

     "As Oceans" is a Metal/Djent band. Always powerful, they dish out thought-provoking and surprising new sounds. I was lucky to hear the final masters and could not stop bobbing my head. They're planning on releasing their first record in June of 2012.

     "Titan" is a progressive rock power trio who is finishing up their first full length record. Complex meters and shifting textures are the name of the game. "Broken Hands" and "Answer" are my favorite tracks and I'm looking forward to hearing the new tunes.

     Alexis Worthington is a singer-songwriter from Charlotte, NC. She is signed to ASU's student-run record label, Split Rail Records, which will be releasing her debut album, "Show Me Where To Go" on May 3, 2012. On the album and live, she is backed by a very solid group of musicians. Along with members of Titan, I co-engineered the album.
     Alexis recently won a contest to open for Dave Barnes in Charlotte.

      Here's one of the last songs I finished producing. It was written and sung by Allison.


early may listening

Michael Kiwanuka - Home Again
The Budos Band - The Budos Band III
Fleetwood Mac - The Best of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac

MXR Carbon Copy Repair

     A customer (the guitarist from Bafoodus) brought in a non-working Carbon Copy. The symptoms were common: the status LED wasn't working, there wasn't any sound when the effect was engaged, and yet the MOD LED/push button were functioning fine.

I replaced a transistor and it was good to go! This is a really nice sounding delay that feels better than my L6 Echo Park

Hotcake

     Here's a Hotcake I made with a PCB that I had fabricated. Hotcakes are thick, transparent overdrives that are quite articulate. At the highest gain, it actually gets into fuzz territory. It compliments my Blues Jr. well by removing some of the muddy low end and and providing a nice British crunch.


    Nels Cline, members of Pavement, and Laura from Superchunk all use this circuit.

If anyone is interested, I'm selling PCBs of this circuit for $8 apiece

Wah

     Here's a recent repair/mod. This was a Dunlop Crybaby GCB-95 that had a broken inductor--effectively working as a volume pedal. I replaced it with the inductor from a Vox v847 and took out the buffer. It now is True Bypass and an LED indicator could be added. I took off the nameplate in hopes of replacing it with another etched/engraved one. Tonally, other mods were done, which are described here:


Here's what it sounds like with some dotted 8th note delay