In my opinion the best demonstration of the role of magnetism in guitar pickups: 

If you're hip to this particular brand of guitar nerdery, check Waylon out. Seriously a force of nature.

Low volume suitcase drum kit - Part 2

 Done! :)

I'm pretty stoked with the result. 

The snare and low tom are made from the same old 13" tom shell.

The high tom I had to make a shell for.

The 300 million holes in the heads I made with my soldering iron and dremel.

Bass shell is from an old 16" floor tom.

I'll elaborate more later. Gotta go now!

Low volume suitcase drum kit

Alrighty. Here's another idea. 😆

I swear at some point I'm going to have time to actually put some of these ideas into practice.

Anyway, some five years ago I've meddled some with Arduino powered drum triggering. The idea was to build my own electronic drum kit. I had come pretty far before running out of building time and attention.

I had a working concept with piezo triggers feeding into a multiplexed Arduino spitting out MIDI commands to a DAW on my laptop. Works like a charm with no perceivable latency. So at least under 10 ms, but probably shorter.

But nowadays, I'm less keen on the concept of dedicated electronic drums and leaning more towards low volume, real acoustics. Also, conforming to a small form factor so I can pick it up and go play somewhere else.

So, things to tackle are:

• Butcher old shells into shallow shells without reso heads.

For a snare mat I'll try the Pearl Traveler solution of cutting one end off the snare mat and pressing that side to the underside of the head.

• Make low volume heads.

There's a slowly expanding gamut of commercial options out there. From ultra silent, ultra bouncy, no tone single ply mesh heads to slightly louder, slightly less bouncy, slightly more tone double ply mesh heads to again slightly louder slightly less bouncy, slightly more tone mesh heads with stuff stuck to it. A milar center dot for more attack and pieces of foam to absorb the bounce.

So there is an inverse relation here between quietness (and bounciness) and tone. The available low volume options are in my opinion a little to much on the quiet side still. I'm aiming for a kit that is not too loud for unplugged situations but certainly not quieter so as not to sacrifice too much tone. 

I'll be experimenting with different combinations and sizes of mesh plies, milar plies, center dots and foam.

• Make low volume cymbals.

I've seen some attempts on YouTube with old cymbals to get an idea of the feasibility. Looks doable. There is some hesitation in respect to durability of the alloys used in normal cymbals when you poke 'em full of holes. And reviewers of commercially available options all note that they are a good deal thicker then the normal cymbals. Manufacturers of commercially available options say they use different alloys all together.

So I'm inclined to try with normal cymbals, but to take like an inch and a half off the circumference so they will be thicker proportionally to their diameter.

• Make "suitcase" 

The suitcase will get a piece of 14" floor tom integrated as a kick drum. I've looked at some actual second hand suitcases. But decided to make my own so it will end up with exactly the right dimensions to pack everything in nice and tight.

Building a harpejji

 I'm going to try and build a harpejji! 😄

Jacob Collier on a K24 harpejji

If you're not familiar with the concept:

It's basically a really big fat guitar neck that's played (tapped) from the headstock side with two hands. 

Sprouted from the brain of Tim Meeks of Marcodi who took a long hard look at the Chapman Stick and the Starrboard.

I think it's an awesome concept.I really admire the thinking and perseverance they employed to get to where they are with this.

It's:

Like a keyboard:

- Two handed playing to accompany yourself.

- Able to play dense and close harmonies.

Like a guitar:

- Expressiveness from real strings.

Like none of the above:

- Isometric layout! This must be such a turbo charge for beginner musicians grappling with music theory. And quite frankly also for more experienced guitarists/pianists for whom the wonky layout of their instruments keeps tripping up their harmonic game, if you will.

See:

https://www.marcodi.com/pages/learn-more-copy

"So you're definitely going to buy one?" Well, I'd like that. Would be a nice way to support their business, but man, it costs a f**k ton. Thousands. Marcodi are the only manufacturers and sellers. Of course they patented the heck out of their beautiful idea, or it would slip from their fingers before they could move out of the garage. They're a small American business, it's not made in China. Of course it's not gonna be cheap. 

Second, I'm actually not that happy with the way it sounds. It's like some acoustic guitars can be on piezos. Just a really thin sound, kind of void of character. I wanna find out whether magnetic pickups are a sh*t alternative to their piezo pickups. I foresee some potential issues with crosstalk maybe. But worth experimenting on.

And third, I got some neat ideas I wanna try to float with this thing. 

- Active EQ including resonance (Q) control. Done this once on a guitar with low Z pickups. Having been inspired by Helmut Lemme's wonderful book on electric guitar lore. You can literally turn a low impedance pickup into any other pickup. Of the same form factor, that is. You still cannot mimic the slim sensing area of a single coil with a humbucker, or vice versa.

- Per string overdrive/distortion. For sweet harmony leads man!

This doesn't (yet) strike me as a hard build. I have a fair amount of amateur luthier chops.

Quite a lot can be reverse engineered from online resources. Although, surprisingly, I did not find many "diy" attempts to learn from. (cinematic, brooding sound of imminent foreboding..)

So, lots of experimenting ahead. Specially in the electronics department. Stay tuned..

Thoughts on the modern electric guitar

As I've built, modded and set up increasing numbers of guitars over the years, one can't help but notice the astonishing amount of conservatism in development and design.

This is by no means an original thought. Many would tell you the same. But compared to the sheer number of "traditionalists" we are few and far between.

Of course the Broad/Telecaster and Les Paul have stood the test of time admirably. But I can't escape the notion that we decline to stand on the shoulders of giants here. With today's choice of materials, production methods and knowledge we can simply do better.

Consider:

• Weight

We don't really give it much thought (or at least I haven't in the past) but electric guitars are generally a lot heavier than they ought to be. 

Consider the huge slab of wood that comprises the body of a Les Paul. How much wood would it actually take to extend the fretboard to the bridge, house a pair of pickups, pots and other electricals?

You could argue we need this to counter the combined weight of the neck with truss rod and tuning machines way over on the headstock so as not to infer neck dive. But there's no law that says tuning machines belong to headstocks. Headless guitars -FUGLY!!- (sorry, allergies.) don't care ever since the eighties, so why should any other?

At any rate, building guitars from just wood (and a steel truss rod) will always result in heavy-ish guitars. You simply need quite a lot of it to counter the deformative forces of the strings. So why not ask bowyers how they roll? They've always been in sort of the same physical predicament. They'll tell you to (duh) go with composites. Or ask Ken Parker, and he'll tell you to (duh) go with composites.

• Neck stability

Today's neck constructions are part of a bit of a hairy solution to suspend strings between two points and be able to wrap your fingers around the part with the frets.

We've gotten so used to it. But just take a step back and consider this. With today's options, having never seen a guitar, would you fancy a solution that would require a big slab of wood, glued or screwed to a skinny part that's too thin to support the load made of wood so yeah, put a steel rod in there.

This results in the various parts of the load bearing construction inhibiting different moduli of elasticity and creep (deformation beyond elastic capacity).

Or, marry some kind of fiber with the wood (and, while we're at it, use a lighter kind) and make the complete string load bearing part one piece. Uniform modulus and virtually no creep.

I'll later elaborate on the practicalities here.

• Fret wear

Why we still use "nickel silver" fret wire? (I.e. copper with a splash of nickel) Well, slap my ass and call me Shirley because I honestly do not know. Worn out frets are no fun at all. And coincidentally, fret leveling and crowning is also a royal b**ch. Let alone, changing them out for new ones. I can do it no problem, but it's a lot of tedious work. Especially in the knowledge that you have to do it again a year or so on.

I'd rather do it once per guitar and never look back again. Weird, right?

• Playability

There's a few no-brainers here. Like getting rid of the huge chunk of wood where the neck meets the body.

But also, and take a step back again, what shape would you have a neck be? Having never before held a guitar in your hands, try imagining a neck that would be 6mm (~1/4 inch) thick. Assuming this is too thin for anyone's liking. How much thicker would it need to be? Twice as thick? Thrice?

This is very much subjective of course, but also hard to make up your mind with the ingrained mental picture noise of  a 'modern C' neck for instance.

Balk city racer

My bicycle commute is quite a long one at 15 kilometers. After wrecking two beaters (usual means to get around town here) in one year I decided it was time to upgrade.

In order to cut commute time it had to be fast but sturdy. No cables, derailers, brake levers, et cetera but not a fixie. I want to be able to brake and a low gear for traffic lights would be desirable.

So I bought a second hand steel Batavus or Gazelle frame (which of the two is not known) refurbished by Balk bicycles in the late eighties.
A SRAM Automatix internal gear hub which, in a 700c rim, will change gears (1/1.37) at around 15 km/h.
Mavic Open Pro rims, DT Swiss competition spokes, an All City track hub for the front wheel. I was able to keep the bottom bracket and cranks (Sakae Ringyo Royal, 144mm BCD) but got an All City 42 teeth chainwheel to go with a 22 rear sprocket.

Spoking my own wheels for the first time was a lot of fun and made easy realy with Sheldon Brown's directions at hand.

I later tweaked the Automatix hub as per Dave McCraw's instructions to shift a little later. I'm guesstimating it now shifts at about 21 km/h. It's easier on the knees, especially considering that on bumpier terrain the Automatix is often knocked in high gear far earlier then it would of it's own accord on flat tarmac.

The hub is very cheap and functions perfectly but you can kind of hear that it's cheap. It's shifting weights make an audible rattle over bumpier roads. I would spend lots more money on a more sophisticated version of this hub if it only existed. It would probably be a lot lighter too. But at current pricing this thing really is a steal.

Black Pearl kayak - Maiden Trip

She floats! I am so happy! :D And it truly is one remarkable boat. I was really very excited to try her out. I've spent well over 300 hours to build this boat and was able to make it a good looking one at that. But whether it will track straight or just in any manner do what you've come to expect from kayaks in general all comes down to the moment you take it to the water.


To say this boat does not disappoint me would be a tremendous understatement. I'm still grinning from ear to ear and I'm so anxious to be on the water again. Wich is going to be this evening! Yay!!


Some photo's of last sunday's moment of truth:

That's one happy camper.

Thanks Angela and Joost for the pics!