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So I've got the man cave reconfigured with an amp corner, while it's easy enough to plug and unplug the pedal board in front of the amps (OD/comps/dist/etc), it's a world class PITA to plug and unplug the send and returns for the FX loops, where I normally put all my modulation/delay/verb.

So what I'm looking to do is run a multiple send/return box with 10 sets of send and return jacks and one loop running to my board for my mod effects.

My initial reaction would be to wire each set of send/returns to a 3PDT toggle and then run those in series to the loop, but I'm thinking there might be some impedance issues?

Anybody done something like this before?

New SL drive from Xotic, in a 1590A (assuming tall), with a freaking 9V battery in it.  I haven't bought a (new) production pedal in a long time, but I'm thinking I might have to buy this one, just to marvel at it.

http://xotic.us/effects/sl_drive/

http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Issue/2013/Jul/How_to_Play_Beyond_Compare.aspx

A pretty good read, but nothing what you'd expect from the title.  Kinda been my mantra over the last little while as I'm trying to find a teacher who gets what I want to do, i.e. I want to learn to play like George Lynch, I don't want you to teach me how to play Mr. Scary, there's a difference (and no, I don't really want to play like Lynch, but been listening to his Orchestral Mayhem disc, and his technique is just fantastic.  When his project with Michael Sweet comes out next year, watch out).

As requested by Jimi. here's a demo of Rej's Tenebrion reverb with bass guitar.  My apologies, not a bass player by any stretch of the imagination, just use them for songwriting purposes.  Turned out pretty well though, would work in some cases.

Enjoy

So, first off, up until this point I've had pretty good success with POLIDA, as I've mentioned in a number of other posts, so this one came as a little bit of a surprise.

About three months ago, I ordered ( on three separate orders on three separate, non consecutive days) some LM13600, LM308s, and some TL062s.  Not huge orders by any means, I ordered a couple of hundred bucks worth of ICs a few months back, but nonetheless orders.

So a month went by, and nothing comes.  Everything else I ordered from China arrived, except the stuff from them.  Send them a nice email saying hadn't received my stuff, got the standard "sometime it takes longer" email, yaddayadda, blah blah.

Another two weeks go by (we're now rapidly approaching the Evilbay 45 day limit), and still nothing.  Another nice email sent, another standard reply, along with "If you don't receive it soon, we'll refund you the money or ship you new."

Another three weeks pass, still nothing.  Now, if they'd all been ordered on the same day or on consecutive days, I'd say maybe they got lost, but given that the orders went over an 8 day period with shipping notices prior to the next order being placed, I'd have to say the odds of three separate orders getting lost is pretty low, and much more likely that they were never shipped.  So I send another email, asking for a refund as promised, as I had gone and ordered the parts from other places as available in order to complete some builds.  Nope, they won't refund now, only replace.  Demanded a refund as previously promised, and no further communication from them since, no product, and no refund.

Clearly something in their customer service department has changed, as I've had a couple of other shipments from them that never made it that they were happy to refund on (and I don't make false claims against sellers, not my style).   Needless to say, I've moved my non Tayda IC orders to companies other than Polida.

9 mm pots ($0.58 each), Marshall knobs (gold and silver), MXR knobs, and 10 mm LEDs.  Like I really needed another reason to place an order this weekend.

New coupon up, 555333, good to the 12th.  Haven't even got my last order yet.

Beat Jimi to it again!  Clearly I must be doggin it at work today.

So I'm building a new strat (yeah, I know, I reallllyyyyy need another guitar, even the guys are L&M are convinced I have a problem now,), and I'm thinking of putting a Fatpants into the guitar.  Since the Level pot is a 500k and I have a 500k push-pull, I'm thinking I run it like this

Five way selector into the middle lugs of the push pull

Lower lug out to the Input of the board. (Active)

Upper lug out to lug 1 of pot (Passive)

Level 1 lug from Fatpants to lug 1 of pot (Active)

Fat knob in place of Tone knob 1

Passive tone knob wired up tele style for Tone knob 2

Piece of Vero to build a gound plane for everything.

Stereo jack to kill the power when the guitar's unplugged.

This arrangmement would give me an active strat with the push pull in the down position and passive in the up position.

The logic makes sense to me, which usually means I've missed something  .

Anybody see an obvious problem with this idea?

So I was test driving a strat at the local music shop by my office, which as an aside I ended up buying and will now have to sneak into the house under the cover of darkness as my wife is home with a migraine, and I plugged into a Traynor Dark Horse 15W head, and it sounding absolutely amazing.  Only minus is it doesn't have an effects loop, but whatever, I can do without if I have to.  A/B'd the Iron Horse against it, and hands down the Dark Horse won, mainly in the 6V6 mode (instead of the EL34 mode)

So the question is, anyone else here using one, and if so, what's the experience?  I nearly bought it on first impressions alone, as I'm happy with my Traynor combo, but holding off because they usually show up used pretty regularly and looking to shave a couple hundred bucks off it.

So I built up the Stage Fright last night, and after remembering to jump CV after the first test (I swear I turn completely into a cave man when things don't fire up first time), everything sounds awesome with the DPDT in the left hand position (6).  However, in the 5 position, it does not sound like the demo, it's there, but it's barely audible, and it's mostly dry signal coming through.

Given that it works in the one position, but not so much in the other, methinks it's a POS switch, but before I go about desoldering a board mounted switch (my second least favourite desoldering job out there), is there any other likely culprit?

At work so I can't post pics right now.

888111, good through April 28.

So seeing as winter has dragged on far beyond reasonable expectations up here in the Great White North, I flipped off my resume to a large oil and gas producer in the Deep South, thinking it's time to move somewhere warmer.  Within 20 minutes (I kid you not) I get a call and they want to talk money (be careful what you wish for).

The options are either living in Houston or New Orleans.  We'd probably choose Houston as the default, as my wife's company has an office down there so she could likely get transferred.

So looking for some feedback on which city would be better to live in, if we chose to go that route.  And, of course, which one has better guitar stores.

All right, so I've been on a bit of a delay building frenzy this month, built a a ZPDX, a ZP mini, a MP Jr, a Prefondis, a second Echo base, and an Aqua Boy (have not been on a boxing frenzy though apparently, as I have a dozen completed circuits on the coffee table, yet no pedal entered into the March build contest, it's been cold and I've been on the road).  Then the Hamlet board arrived from Jon, and I figured, what the heck, let's give it a spin.

Jon has hit it out of the park with this one.  I really like 2399 delays (and not only because they're easier to fire up than analog), and this one is just glass.  Didn't even break out a strat or tele to give it a spin, hammered it with my SD Distortion loaded Blackjack, couldn't make it break up before the amp, or even running through headphones.  Great board, great build.

Will be picking up some more when Jacob has them ready.  Really looking forward using it with the TAP set.

Off on the road again tomorrow, so I won't be getting it boxed up anytime soon, but when I do, I'll post a build report (I'm only 25 or so behind), and if I get enough down time, maybe I'll setup a DIY delay shootout video.

Again, hats off to Jon, pick this board up when you can.

And drop the big Tayda order they've been holding onto in hopes of the new discount code coming out, thereby triggering Murphy's Law and having the discount code appear an hour later.  I did it last month.  Geez, it seems like a long time since January 22 already.

This is a cautionary tale for those of us who think "Instructions - who needs em"

So I was building up the ZPDD on the weekend, and in my excitement, didn't bother to read the instructions to the end.  I saw the 9V at the bottom of the board (I always try to top mount my 9V jack) and thought to myself "Great, Bean's put a 9V feed to the LED at the bottom", and my brain made the incorrect assumption that there was a CLR within the circuit, which of course there isn't because that's not what it's specifically for.

So, wired it up, gave it a quick test, everything worked, boxed it up, attached the LED and started riffing.  Smoke, burning smell, and pop of the LED in 4 seconds and I'd realized my mistake.

The good news is, you can use the 9V at the bottom of the board to feed the LED, it does work.  Just make sure you install a CLR.

So this was a necessity is the mother of invention type build.  I'd built up the Cave Dweller circuit, was rocking it before I boxed it, and was really enjoying the whole dark delay vibe it had going.  Problem is, I don't share the love for 1590A builds, I find them to be more stress than I'd like, and I didn't have any 1590B's kicking around either.  The circuit was going to look awfully lonely in a 125B all by itself.





Solution - throw two separate time knobs on a 4PDT.  FIlls the space, and gives you options.

I have D1 set for short slapback/faux reverb times, and D2 set for longer delay times.  Really easy mod with a 4PDT (dear Tayda, please restock, I've only got two left) and a couple of LEDs, strategically placed on the same side as their respective knobs so I don't have to remember what colour means what (getting old is a bitch).

Not much more left to say, nice little pedal, easy mods, less space on the pedal board.  Winning all around.

Alright, so I've been slacking it something fierce in the build report department, partially because I've been way too busy in normal life, and partially cause I've been in a little bit of a building funk as of late.  But time to correct both.

Originally, this pedal was supposed to be an Afterlife/Bloviator/Fatpants combo, however, it didn't go that way because a) I didn't have a Bloviator board kicking around b) since both the Bloviator and Fatpants are coming out as baby boards, I figured it would be an easier build with three small boards and c) because of the build funk I was in (building way too many circuits which I ended up not liking at all), I needed to really build a pedal that really made me want to play.

In the last Fatpants combo I built, it was pretty much a clean strat fattener with the Bloviator in front, I figured this would be an evolution of that.  I was wrong.  In a good way.  More on that later.

So, to the details.







I wired up the Afterlife first in the circuit.  The sustain pot is mounted to the outside (the lower single chicken head).  I ran the volume wiring to a small piece of vero with a trim pot - I didn't really see the point in having two volume knobs on the same pedal.  There's no discrete bypass for the comp or the boost, they're both on all the time.  Did this to keep the overall layout simple, and glad I did.

The output of the Afterlife is then run through an effects loop (the stereo 1/4" jacks at the top of the pedal), with the intent of being able to put an EQ/Autowah/OD in between the Afterlife and the Fatpants if I wanted to.

The Fatpants is wired post fx loop (the fx loop bypasses if no cables are plugged in).  Controls for the Fatpants are stock, and the Body switch is wired to the footswitch on the left with a dual colour LED.

I freaking love this pedal.  You can get a shimmery straight clean comp sound with the Fat at 11 oclock, the Level at 2 oclock, at the Sustain at 1 oclock, but I doubt I'll ever use it for that.  Crank up the Fat all the way, and you could almost rename the Sustain pot the "throat" pot, as the more you crank in up, the more SRV like the tone gets.  And having the Body switch on a footswitch allows you to push the tubes at will.  I was even nailing the Ty Tabor Gretchen Goes to Nebraska tone on the bridge pickup with all the controls cranked (played Over My Head for about an hour, which is about how long the live version goes lol).

I am really looking forward to putting this pedal through its paces at volume, which I haven't been able to do as the wife has had chinook migraines all week, and doesn't consider my playing the appropriate serenade.

Anyway, a great combo of effects which in the end is more than just the sum of its parts.

Figured I'd start a thread about little obscure tools we use in building that probably go unnoticed by most but make the overall process much better.  The big boys (soldering irons, solder type, wire strippers, cutters, etc) get a lot of press, so let's not talk about them here.

For me, it's the ESP multi spanner wrench, which I pulled out of my guitar maintenance kit.  You can use it for pots, jacks, switches, etc without ever having to change tools or readjust settings.  But where they really come in handy is tightening the nuts on the inside mount DC jacks, as there usually isn't a pile of room to work in, and trying to use a needle nose usually doesn't give the greatest results.

They also work great for prying off press fit knobs, just make sure you put a business card underneath to keep from scratching the finish.

They're available from Stewmac, WD, and all over ebay.  Going price is usually about $11.

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Wrenches/ESP_Multi_Spanner.html?actn=100101&xst=3&xsr=187810

So I was building a vero Orange Squeezer to bass specs, fired it up, worked like a charm, started noodling away when I get that all too familiar burning component smell.  Touched the IC and the transistor, nothing, figure I'm imagining it or having a stroke, keep playing, only to see the sustain pot (wired up externally) starting to glow red hot and smoke.  Needless to say, it got a quick bath in the toilet, and a new build will be started off a different layout, as I suspect it was missing a ground on the layout I was working off of.  Made for a fun New Years Eve.

So I've been desperately wanting to fall back in love with my strats.  I love how they play, but they're always just a little too thin for my liking.  Now, I could tweak out my amp settings just for my strats, but I'm more of a find one amp setting that works and tweak it on the the floor type of guy.

I'd built a Bloviator and a Fat Pants before, and liked them both, and figured I'd try them both in series with a buffer and try to thicken up the signal without overly colouring the tone or making it into another overdrive.





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I ran the signal through the buffer, into the 3PDT, then routed it through the Bloviator then the Fat Pants.  If I were to do it again, I might put the buffer in the circuit, as it pops a little when I switch it.

It does exactly what I want it to do.  Running my strat with SD Alnico pros in it and diming the contour and the fat controls, I get a thick old Fender-ish type twin tone to it without overly altering the initial tone.  It also takes some of the ice off the Texas Specials, and am going to try it with my Holy Grail loaded hard tail and my burst with gold Laces in it this weekend.

It also works as a really nice, thick overdrive without getting too gainy.  Threw it between my Keef-ish tele with a Jerry Donahue in the bridge, and it growls up nicely.

For shits and giggles, I tried it as an acoustic preamp as well.  Does a nice job of getting rid of the shrill end of the piezo range, and can dirty up the signal just enough to still be idenitifed as an acoustic, but still have a cool edge to it.

Going to build another one once the Bloviators are back in stock, with an Afterlife in the front, maybe a cornish type buffer, and the mode switch on the Fat Pants wired to a footswitch.

Anyway, if anyone else is looking to thicken up their single coil tone, this is definitely the way to go.

(Man was my spelling atrocious the first time, must not post build reports until after first cup of coffee).