My "custom" Hofner shorty

I've just dug out my old faithful Hofner Shorty travel guitar as I'm going away for a few days. I love this guitar as its been on some adventures with me over the years and is the guitar I've travelled with most, its been on planes, atop mountains, on boats, strapped to bikes and backpacks, been in the snow...the list goes on. Last year I accidentally killed this guitar, I like to play with heavy gauge flatwound strings and as an experiment I tried a set of 15's on it and the tension became too much for the original bridge posts and they got pulled out of the body....whatever I did I couldn't get the bridge posts to bind back into the body holes and whenever I restrung it it would pull them out. So in the end the solution was to buy a fender style bridge with the holes on the back of the bridge designed for through body string mounting...however I had to build up a small wooden block to bring the bridge to the correct height...took ages to get everything levelled up and getting the new bridge to mount centrally. Whilst I was at it i thought I'd fit this signature "Atilla Zoller" pickup as I wanted a more neck pickup sound than the humbucker that is in its original mount at the rear of the body. I had to dremel a groove under the scratchplate to fit the cable for the neck pickup but it's well worth it as the floating pickup sounds great. Currently the bridge pickup isn't wired up but I think at some point I'll wire it to another output so I can do dual output/effects chain recordings.

Anyway she aint pretty....but she's one of my favourites for sure...I reckon the pickup is worth about twice as much as the guitar and bizarrely the strap I always use on this guitar I bought at a fundraising auction for a music charity and it used to belong to Mundell Lowe, the great (90 odd year old) jazz guitarist who played with em all, mingus, parker, etc etc

Friday night breadboard

Just a quick post as I'm deep in the throws of breadboarding and patching ideas together to see what I'm going to build into the origami synth.

New Projects..and origami synths

So I'm making manouvers on my next projects post the album I am doing some building and also beginning to write some new stuff and try out different setups. My next ambition is to write some stuff that I can perform somewhat live, my plan being to lay down audio tracks but to have my cmos/diysynth stuff and some circuit bent stuff midi'd up that I can manipulate live....I've got lots of ideas and I'll post something as soon as something gets done!

As part of this next project I'll need more diy synth stuff as I will need to have different setups patched up at the same time as part of a single performance/piece ready to play different sections (I can't really repatch 100 tiny wires live just for the upcoming chorus/middle eight!) So I am back to building.

I've come up with this idea...I wanted my next lot of synth stuff to be really portable so I can take it out and about and play with it on location so to speak..so in order to make it as compact as possible my next synth will FOLD!

So the photo at the top of this post shows the synth in it's folded state and hopefully this next picture will explain what I mean by folding!

The modules attached in the corners aren't actually what I'll have, they are previous stuff I built and just attached to show the idea...I may even try another tier of stuff so that the folding boards fan out from the corners!

In other news the mighty Adam Walton was kind enough to play me again last night on BBC Radio Wales the iplayer of the show is available here for the next 7 days.

Finally you may notice I've had a bit of a sort out on this blog, placing some nice clicky images linking to my album and my previous ep. There's also a button for if you'd like to follow me on twitter.

The Madness of Midi Sync

A crazy video that requires speakers or headphones as theres a bassline going all the way through that is to deep for my laptop speakers anyway...This is my first succesful attempt at a hacked together midi sync solution for my CMOS lunetta style noisemaking stuff. So whats happening is on my little eeepc701 is the mighty DAW Reaper and its sequencing a simple root n fifth bassline using an old VSTi I hacked together a long time ago. Reaper is also sending midi out to my Highly Liquid MSAR kit and one of the relay outputs is then connected between positive 9v on Blarp and the clock input on a shift register, the data input of this is hooked up to a fast oscilator and I am using the 1st step out of the shift register as my clock source for skippy....I did try taking a clock source straight from the midi relayed 9v but it seemed to freak out the clock on skippy..I think it might be something to do with debouncing the relay..anyway...It ain't pretty....but it works!

Album update, Radio thanks and Skippy Video

So first off many thanks if you are one of the people who have listened/downloaded/or even purchased my album this last week...you are all amazing. Please remember to tell all about it if you can!

Last night the MIGHTY Adam Walton played the final track off the album "The Suns of Alm" on his BBC Radio Wales show last night...what a star...and what a show, I listened to it all from 10-1am and came away with about 5 things I need to seek out musically. This show will be on iplayer for the next week so if you want to check it out its here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0079gnt/episodes/player

The bit where he plays me is around 34mins20seconds....but I recommend you listen to it all, it was a grand show.

In other news I managed to get some time today to roughly hack "SKIPPY" my strange sequencer project into some semblance of shape! I've uploaded a shonky video (Take 2 as the first I uploaded decided to glitch out!)I waffle on about the sequencer for a bit so you might want to skip through it...then if its all too much...skip back to my album;) plug plug plug plug!

The Coracle and the Yellow Shell is released

Here it is, to listen to, and if you like to download or of course for a donation of your choice ;) To download click the title of the album below and it will take you to the bandcamp page. If you download the whole album you get some PDF liner notes and some free artwork....and the beautiful knowledge that you have an inquisitive and explorative chance taking mind!



I'd love to here any opinions on it and if you can talk about this on or offline please do so I'd love as many people to hear it as possible. Its all licensed under a creative commons share alike so feel free to share and remix under the same license.

Massive thanks to Jim at Warmdata for all his work and support getting this together and out.

Hope you enjoy...I enjoyed making it.

Last meeting at warm data

Just finalising a few things before the big upload session and release tomorrow....aaaah the end is in sight.