I’m not sure if this is going to be a rant…or a guitar sermon…or just a little sharing of where I’m at. But here I go… As a guitarist who is also very much into gear, I too have been on this “quest for tone.” It sounds dumb, but I’d say every musician probably holds this facet of their sound to a very high regard.
diy - electronics - guitar - music gear - pedals
Maxon OD-820 Clone: Aion Electronics “Nimbus”
Pictured here is my newest completed pedal project.  It’s the Aion Electronics Nimbus Overdrive.  Recently I had built myself a Klon clone and found it useful enough to include in my rig. If you didn’t know, the Klon is kind of known for it’s prominent mid-hump EQ. At first, I wasn’t really too crazy about this, but ultimately I decided that the contrasting nature of the Klon to my other OD tones was a good thing and this secured it a space on my board. While browsing the Aion Electronics shop, I came across the Nimbus. The one thing I really like about this site […]
diy - guitar - music gear - pedals
Klon Centaur Clone: Aion Electronics “Refractor”
Shortly after sharing about my new mini-board (here), I acquired a Pluetoneum Chi-Wah-Wah V2 (careful…oddly nsfw) to complete and maximize the usefulness of my new mini setup. I didn’t really feel like posting about it, although I may do a more lengthy demo in the future. Other than that acquisition, it’s all been Boss mods and new complete builds. This one pictured above is one of my proudest completed projects.
diy - guitar - music gear - new - pedals - tech
Pedaltrain Metro-16
Here’s my mini pedalboard mounted on a Pedaltrain Metro-16, one of their new offerings for 2015. Previously, I had the old Pedaltrain Mini. Apparently, my model had gone through a couple of revisions. One of them is publicly known and visually obvious. The other, more or less nobody knows about and you really can’t tell just by looking at it. What it comes down to is that my Mini doesn’t accept any non-daisychain power supplies.
diy - electronics - guitar - pedals - tech
Another boost
  Nothing new here. Just another Sho ‘Nuff I built for my mini board. White enclosure, pink LED and black knobs (I may swap the knobs later).
diy - electronics - music gear - pedals - tech
First Pedal Build – Sho ‘Nuff Boost
Here’s my first ever guitar pedal build. In the past I’ve modded my gear and replaced components here and there, but I’ve never built one “from scratch.” The PCB was purchased from guitarpcb.com and this is the Sho ‘Nuff Boost.
electronics - music gear - tech
New Mini Board Setup
Following my new-found appreciation for compression placed post-dirt, I decided to redo my mini rig. I also swapped out the TU-2 for the Polytune I had sitting around. To my surprise/delight, the rearrangement even allowed me to cram in one more pedal (added Hall of Fame reverb). For some funny reason Jesus’ miracle of the feeding of the 5000 came to mind… Here’s the signal chain: TC Electronic Polytune MXR Analog Chorus Lovepedal Amp11 Boss CS-2 Boss DD-5 (w/ Monte Allums mod) TC Electronic Hall of Fame
cables - electronics - music - music gear - pedals - tech
Lava Cable’s Solder-free Patch Cables
My current set-up. But what I wanna highlight are the new patch cables. Previously, I had George L cables installed. I had been using them for about 8 years, I think. They were great, but there were a few occasions when the connections became insecure, causing me to spend anywhere between 10 and 45 minutes to figure out where the kink was. A couple of times the issue occurred right before a live set. THE WORST. Anyway, I was drawn to the Lava cables because of a couple things: 1) They had the smallest plug of any patch cable I […]
diy - music gear
tap-tempo make-over
one very important effect combination in my line-up of pedals is the boss dd-5 delay coupled with an external tap tempo. below is a picture of that isolated set-up back when i realized how much i liked it (think where the streets have no name). the fs-5u did its job and did it well…but it took up more space than it needed to. so one day as i was browsing around ebay for pedals i came across a seller who offered a tap pedal that would occupy a much smaller footprint – it was $20 so i snatched it up. […]
music gear
music gear
i’ll let my first “official” entry be about my effects pedals… this is new: RC-2 about this little box: it really packs a whole lot into a small package. it holds 16 minutes of recording time and 11 slots to save those recorded samples to. what you do with it is basically record something you play in real time, let it play back, and then either play on top of it or overdub another line onto it. and what you put in is what it spits out, so there’s no loss in quality (at least not from what i can […]