Let's see your PEDAL BOARD!

[dubkitty]

Ampeg B2R head, Univox 1x15" cabinet with vintage JBL D-140 speaker. it has a line/mic level input switch which makes it perfect for use with the loopers/crossover.

the great thing about the TT-WC is that it's cheap as chips. requires 12V DC power.

the brains of the operation.

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the bass amp by itself.

bass stack Jan 2024.jpg (62 KiB) Viewed 825 times

[dubkitty]

eventually i want to go to 2 15s for the Ampeg and 2 12s for the guitar speakers. i like to move air, and more cone area does that more effectively.

the guitar head is a Hammond AO-35 reverb unit that used to live in a A-100 organ. apparently Dr. Z based the Karmann Ghia amplifier on this circuit topology...i'd estimate 18-20 watts, 2 12AX7s and 2 EL84s. some unknown body converted it to a guitar head, and it wound up with a musician coworker who gave it to me. i replaced the rectifier tube with a Yellowjacket solid-state adapter which tightened up the sound nicely. down the road i'm going to have a proper cabinet made. since it took a bit of sleuthing to find out what it was, i'm going to call it the Mystery Machine, cover it in purple Tolex, and have my girlfriend run up a control panel with her crafts gear with the Scooby-Doo van lettering. its biggest mystery, though, is a circuit mod manifested by a chicken-head knob on the back panel labeled "WHOOPASS" which i guess must be some sort of middle gain stage or bias knob, which goes from silent to ungodly noisy and distorted. someday i'm going to have an amp guy poke around in there and figure out what the heck it is and what it does.

[coldbrightsunlight]

That amp is cool as hell!

[dubkitty]

i was absolutely amazed at how it sounded vs. how it looked. Central Virginia DIY can be wild. with the tube rectifier it's vicious, with the solid-state rectifier it's more manageable. with the 5Y3 the least distorted setting was about equivalent to a distortion with the buzz backed all the way off. it made it really hard to evaluate fuzz boxes LOL. it came with a similarly basement-style cabinet with one Vox 12" GSH-1230 speaker which is OK but not as good as my Celestions and Weber. i'm keeping it because it's a 16-ohm speaker and i might need it to balance impedances as i add more odd old speakers.

[Seance]

i think we’d/ I’d be more interested in playing out if there was a change in the scene and the venues.. I was a bit disappointed actually when everything opened up and it was just the same tired people playing the same shitholes… unless you are talking about the bigger venues and touring bands.. but even that by accounts is getting close to cost prohibitive… there needs a change…. Not sure what that is though… I just know things are broken.

Private equity is buying up rental properties, nursing homes, drug companies, and.... music.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/opinion/private-equity-music-spotify.html

"Does that song on your phone or on the radio or in the movie theater sound familiar? Private equity — the industry responsible for bankrupting companies,
slashing jobs and raising the mortality rates at the nursing homes it acquires — is making money by gobbling up the rights for old hits and pumping them back
into our present. The result is a markedly blander music scene, as financiers cannibalize the past at the expense of the future and make it even harder for us
to build those new artists whose contributions will enrich our entire culture."

"Private equity firms have poured billions of dollars into music, believing it to be a source of growing and reliable income. Investors spent $12 billion on
music rights in just 2021 — more than in the entire decade before the pandemic. Though it is like pocket change for an industry with $2.59 trillion in
uninvested assets, the investments were welcomed by music veterans as a sign of confidence for an industry still in a streaming-led rebound from a bleak
decade and a half. The frothy mood, combined with a Covid-related loss of touring revenue and concerns about tax increases, made it attractive for many
artists, including Stevie Nicks and Shakira, to sell their catalogs, some for hundreds of millions of dollars.

"How widespread is Wall Street’s takeover? The next time you listen to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” and Bruce
Springsteen’s “Born to Run” on Spotify or Apple Music, you are lining the pockets of the private investment firms Carlyle, Blackstone and Eldridge. A piece of
the royalties from Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” goes to Apollo. As for Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” — hey, whoever turns you on, but it’s money in the till
for HPS Investment Partners.

"Like the major Hollywood studios that keep pumping out movies tied to already popular products, music’s new overlords are milking their acquisitions by
building extended multimedia universes around songs, many of which were hits in the Cold War — think concerts starring holographic versions of long-dead
musicians, TV tie-ins and splashy celebrity biopics. As the big money muscles these aging ditties back to our cultural consciousness, it leaves artists on the
lower rungs left to fight over algorithmic scraps, with the music streaming giant Spotify recently eliminating payouts for songs with fewer than
1,000 annual streams.

"The grim logic that shuttered the big-box store chain Toys “R” Us and toppled the media brand Vice is also taking hold of our music. Historically, record labels
and music publishers could use the royalties from their older hits to underwrite risky bets on unproven talent. But why “would you spend your time trying to
create something new at the expense of your catalog?” asked Merck Mercuriadis, the former manager of Beyoncé and Elton John who founded Hipgnosis."

[sylnau]

Just made some change.

[Chankgeez]

Syl sighting 2024!

[sylnau]

Syl sighting 2024!

[coldbrightsunlight]

Cool board Syl!

My band board got more complex because I'm now playing viola as well. Because our band already has a lot going on I'm trying to make things simpler for sound engineers, as well as retaining control of my stuff, by running it through my amp with a piezo but I do need a preamp for that because unsurprisingly it sounds bad straight into the amp without it due to impedance issues. So, had to figure out something and I realised I have the Upper which incorporates a bypass looper, so now I've got that on my board purely as a bypass looper for the preamp and I never turn the fuzz side of it on

So it's just linear board tuner-klone-chorus-delay but with the preamp in a loop before the tuner, so I can turn it off when playing guitar or lap steel. I cut this board out of ply specifically for this as well, because I had a case already but the board I made for that case has 2 levels, at lengths which didn't work for these pedals.



There is a threat of needing more pedals because of some potential songs that need a fuzz and I think for that, I'll build a riser into the board that lets me mount the power brick underneath and then there's space for another pedal up top. but one thing at a time.

For another project I'm scheming up a board with a separate looper chain, which also needs the viola preamp in a loop. This is so I can make loops for either a rhythmic or droney backbone to quite jammy pieces, that I can fade in and out to make it less boring and less jarring than loops at a constant level, that either stop or start instantly. The music is meant to be quite flowy so that didn't feel right. I might remove the ricochet (put on there in theory to do octave down looping for different texture) that would be nice but maybe more trouble than it's worth in terms of tapdancing when I'm trying to just play music.

Definitely inspired by your adventures in looping boards dubkitty!



Sorry I'm sure nobody cares about this

[Blackened Soul]

Cool! I like round about fixes! If my cello didn’t have the onboard I’d do something like that.

[Chankgeez]

That purple Upper!

[the_bright_undead]

Just made some change.

IMG_9225.JPG

Awesome board. How you like the Demo Tape fuzz?

[sylnau]

Just made some change.

IMG_9225.JPG

Awesome board. How you like the Demo Tape fuzz?

One of the best fuzz pedal I've heard. Low gain (cracking sound) and high gain stuff... awesome!

[dubkitty]

i love the In Rainbows-themed Virus! it's appropriate, too, because i can get the "Bodysnatchers" sound out of it with ease.

[dubkitty]

i think there's an unwarranted assumption in the Big Buy-Up Scenario, which is the idea that people in 10 or 20 years are going to respond to late 20th-century cultural signifiers in the same way they've always been seen. there's a big segment of the TikTok generation that sincerely believes that "the Beatles were just a boy band," and i very much doubt they're going to see Springsteen as anything other than an overstated fake workingman a decade or two down the road. so far the attempts to float holographic reboots of Elvis, Tupac, et al. have fallen flat, and IMO they always will. they can try to sell it, but will people be buying their grandparents' myths?