How I wasted 2 months
I keep telling myself I need to manage my time properly. What with the beard mostly white and the brain leastly grey, I need to ensure I’m spending quality time on whatever it is that I’m spending time on.
Which is all nice, but then I decided I needed to build one of these things to manage my guitar effects:
Hey, I’m no electrician and I’m no technician, but boys will be boys even when they’re men and more so when they’re kicking the wrong side of 40, and so I plunged into this crazy business. The fact that I could not get the product ready-built anywhere in Malaysia sort of justified the adventure.
And from that diagram (which took a couple of weeks of research to come up with), a frantic search for components across Malaysia and Singapore (why do they always have the stuff you need in that tiny island instead of over here), I built this:
Which, when completed and connected would be like this:
In the greater scheme of things, I had also been collecting various other guitar effects, got a custom-build case for all the stuff, then had lots of fun velcro-ing all things in unimaginably kinky ways, a whole bunch of cables to connect everything built by my long-suffering friend Eisubius….and everything now resides as so:
Which could have been it, really, but apart from getting all of this done I also had my old Fender Twin Reverb amp cut up, it was just wayyyyyyy too heavy to carry around so I had it seperated into a head and a speaker-cab, and now I use the Fender cab with my Marshall TSL100 head or the Fender head…..
The best of the best of 2 worlds:
Boys and their toys, indeed!
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So…does everything work? If “yes”, you didn’t waste your time.
This is what you do when you love your music.
I know your environment doesn’t inject a lot of inspiration or feed back much onto details but – believe me – to fine tune is the only way to stay happy with sound and song. And it’s the only way to eventually receive respect, too (or an intensively weird act but that’s not your style
)
Carry on, my man.
It’s been too long I’ve seen and heard you
Hey Raggy!
I like your schematic
But where are the triodes and all? What is it anyway? It looks more like a hotel switchboard than audio equipment, 555!
Puzzled,
Impala Yo
Max: yes, it works beautifully
And yes, it’s been too long. Wayyyyyyyyy too long. We got to plan something…..
Mr Stere-Yo (nicer nick!) : yup,it’s a switchbox. It’s what we call a True-bypass loopbox, basically it allows me to put a series of guitar effects units (distortions, delays etc) into different loops,and then using the switches I turn on/off the loops as required: this allows me to control 2 or more effects with a single switch, also it ensures only the loops in active use are in the signal path, therefore avoiding degradation of the guitar signal as it passes through unused effects.
That schematic,by the way…one day when I’m famous and dead they’ll be bidding millions for that sheet of paper…..
Never a waste of time, just gaining experience along the way for that better brown sound and and the unltimate band and music. Keep on keepin’ on Ragster. I listen to your CD all the time and it just keeps getting better, and I keep hearing new things I hadn’t the previous plays. Hope to see you one day in the next few months down there in Malay Land. Love that music man!
Shit, I hate typos. My fingers are too big for this damned keyboard!
Raggy! I was starting to think you jumped ship… Glad you got this done. I was keeping up pretty well with this post, even the schematic
but the more I read, the more my ADHD took over.
How’s Mel working out for you? Was glad to see the addition on your other site.
Missed you like crazy!
XO
Nice work there, way more than I would have done. Of course I am a why make it when someone else will kind of guy!
Very nice effects……your masterpiece.