WWWhat in the World Wide Web

I discovered my new delay/looping pedal can do continuous notes. No gaps! My old pedal (which admittedly wasn’t so hot) couldn’t do this. I didn’t think my new one could do it either, until I accidentally did the following:

1. Start a loop, but don’t actually play anything
2. Play a note with the guitar’s volume all the way down
3. Slowly fade the volume back up
4. Repeat steps 2–3 as necessary
5. ????
6. SPACE ROCK!

At some point I should really make a video of this process, so I can put it on youtube and have everyone say that it’s FAKE. Yeah, about that: see below!

Examples

1. almost three minutes of building a chord
2. about one minute of a different chord (already in progress)

Needs work

• So far my output has been really quiet for some reason
• And I have really bad line noise coming from somewhere (shitty cables?)
• Distortion makes the bad line noise even worse, so no bowel-shaking drone metal just yet

NOTE, FROM THE FUTURE: Here is a totally FAKE video I made:

ANOTHER NOTE, ALSO FROM THE FUTURE: The line noise/quiet output only seems to be a problem with headphone rockin’ (which is a problem in many other ways). I’ve been playing through an amp, really loudly, and the output’s been fine. The line noise is about what you’d expect when you also have a billion other pedals, so no complaints here.

December, 2003: My pal Ted says to me that I have ONE YEAR to produce physical evidence of my musical creations. This is because I had nothing new to show since he witnessed me and Dan jamming in December, 2002. Thus was the gauntlet thrown, and sure enough by December, 2004, I had one musical CD of brotherly compositions.

December, 2008: I’ve been sitting on a 2/3 finished follow-up. I started writing/recording new stuff as soon as I finished the first CD, so this is a lot of sitting. Sure, 2005 was off to a good start, but from 2006 on, it’s been either work, or recovering from work (i.e., sleeping all my free time away). It’s probably also a bit to do with not having a set deadline, because I wanted to “take my time” and all that bullcrap.

SO, I got an idea the other day: I need a deadline, and the threat of shame. I decided that if I wasn’t finished by December, 2009, I would have to put out whatever I had done, and I would have to call the album “Unfinished Bizznatch”. And to show myself I was serious, I told myself this would be the art:

Dan, we got some work to do!

UPDATE FROM THE DISTANT FUTURE (11/2009): Yeah, so I’m chickening out a little. Going back and listening to some of these songs has filled me with self-doubt and dread. They need to go back to the drawing board, or the toilet, or something. So I’ll just be leaving certain of these turkeys off “Unfinished Bizznatch”, thankyewverymuch.

UPDATE FROM THE EVEN MORE DISTANT FUTURE (1/2010): OK, you can now listen to the fruits of my labors by clicking the words “fruits of my labors”. You can also purchase these fruits. Act now, before I raise the price to $1000!

I was working on my song ending from a couple days ago, thinking “this is not effed up enough”, and trying to remedy that. I wanted something painful and stressful. After an hour of testing various sounds I had a splitting headache and a bad case of nausea. I am dialing back “teh pain” on the sounds right now, but if I ever need to bust up a seige or hostage situation, out come the loudspeakers…

I made some effed up sounds to put at the end of one of my songs. I had most of it in place already, but it wasn’t quite right, and I solved that today:

OUCH, MAN (New #1 Summer Jam)

The main bit was this weird “birds” preset off my sequencer (done a couple octaves lower than recommended), and the rest was just single organ notes with mega distortion and chorus added (that’s the part I was talking about earlier in this post, with the solving).