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At long last, I reveal my blog’s sleazy ulterior motive: hoodwinking you into buying my crap! Bwa-ha-ha. I exaggerate. But after several years of scheming, I’ve figured out a way to bring my stompbox designs to market that will permit me to keep doing stuff I love, like writing geeky stuff for my blog and […] Few guitar pedals can rival the cult cachet of the Harmonic Percolator, a singularly ugly distortion stompbox produced in minuscule numbers in the early ’70s by Interfax, a small company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And guess what? They sound ugly too, though they’re ugly in a cool and useful way. They don’t get […] I just recorded a solo version of one of my fave film themes: Jerry Goldsmith’s main title to the 1967 spy spoof In Like Flint. I’ve adored the melody since childhood, and I blame it for instilling the love of chromaticism that made possible my extraordinarily uncommercial career. I’d previously posted another version […] Oh man — the gods have been generous this week. I just received from Warmoth all the parts for my next DIY guitar. I loved testing eight sets of P-90 pickups for Premier Guitar, but I don’t own any P-90-eqipped guitars.I will soon, though! This one will be a bit of a platypus — […] One of the coolest gizmos from last weeks NAMM show is already in my grubby little hands: It’s the Logidy EPSi, the first customizable convolution reverb pedal. I ordered it the instant I heard about it, and it arrived right before I left for Anaheim. Convolution (or impulse response) reverbs can mimic acoustic spaces and […] Do you ever get an idea that you just know is going to work out brilliantly? And then discover you were totally wrong? That’s how it was when I finally reassembled my generic Mexican Strat with Duncan lipstick tube pickups. After I recorded a demoing of it here almost two years ago, the guitar lay […] Can you help me figure this thing out? It’s almost always a bad idea to label something a manifesto. It’s pretentious, and it makes you sound like a crank, especially if you were born between 1890 and 1990. But it is dramatic. And would anyone pay attention if I gave this post a […] Small puncture, big pain. I was trying to decide which self-indulgent experiment fascinating project to demo this week when my hand slipped, driving a sharp soldering iron tip into the meat of my fretting-hand index finger. It didn’t hurt all that much—until I tried to play. Ye-OWCH! (No, of course I wasn’t using […]
UPDATE: My Premier Guitar Heptode Virtuoso review is live. Read and listen here. I’ve got phase shifters on the brain, especially after encountering a couple of truly stunning ones. I just wrote a review for Premier Guitar of Heptode’s Virtuoso phaser, a superb clone of the old Maestro PS-1A. (I’ll link to the […] I just bought 500 germanium transistors.(Yes, as a matter of fact, I am insane. Why do you ask?) UPDATE: My Dunlop Fuzz Face Mini review is live at Premier Guitar. Audio clips included! How and when did it get so frickin’ easy to procure great-sounding germanium transistors? I’ve been building stompboxes for four […] |
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