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).

So I have this guitar. Or is it a baritone? Or is it a 6 string bass? The latter two terms I’ve always thought were interchangeable, but it seems this is not the case. I’d been using what D’Addario called “guitar/bass” strings (XL156), made for things like this one and Fender’s Bass VI. They’re like guitar strings, but an octave lower. Fun? Yes, but the two lowest strings sound like pure butt.

It was then that I had the idea of trying baritone strings, which are halfway between the guitar’s and bass’s range. I have tried many sets (OK, just two: D’Addario XL157, Ernie Ball 2839), and all of them are too short for my Teisco’s unfeasibly long neck. Hence, the literal anger/rage concoction that is my current emotional state.

After yet more research, I discovered that it was I who was ignorant, and not the rest of the world. Guitars have a neck scale of around 25 inches. I previously thought baritones and basses could be anywhere from 27 to 30 inches. Turns out baritones are around 30 inches, and basses can be anywhere from 32 to 36 inches. Guess what scale my “guitar/bass” thing has? Hint: the same one as a bass.

NOTES, FROM THE NEAR FUTURE

Robert Smith used a Bass VI extensively while recording Faith and Disintegration, aka the Best Cure Albums EVAR.

I’ve had this thing for almost exactly ten years. I saw it in a shop in Seattle. The pickup switches used to be the kind you found on Wurlitzer organs, but I kept knocking into them, so I had them replaced with toggle switches.

After years of no information at all, I eventually found out this was made by Teisco, in the 60s. This guitar, a TB-64, is a later model and cousin of mine.

NOTES, FROM THE VERY DISTANT FUTURE

1) The “sounds like butt” problem ended up being due to my “apartment rock” setup: a Pod and headphones. Earlier in the distant summer of 2010 I played this through my amp(s), and it was GLORIOUS.

2) Thanks to dumb luck, a Japanese website, and a sweet forum, I finally have some decent info on this thing. In Japan, it was known as a TB-64. Those were rebranded as “Del Rey” in the US. They were also sometimes rebranded as “Rhythm Beat”. This is what I have, and the one I NEVER see pictures of on inter-net. Later models went from the oval pickups to the square ones.

3) I recently got rid of the toggle switches, because they were either turning the pickups off or gashing my fingers when I strummed too hard. Now they’re just always on, as they should be.

4) I added/updated a few links up above in the main part of this post. Because I am from the future and that’s how we roll in our time.