July « 2008 « Will Goldstone

July, 2008

Music — 4 Comments
29
Jul 08

DIY Guitar Pedals I: Big Muff Pi Clone

Having a snowballing interest in building and modifying my own guitar pedals I started out by purchasing a kit from GeneralGuitarGadgets.com. A fantastic site run by a guy named JD Sleep, who was really helpful when I had a few questions during construction.

From GGG as they’re known, you can buy kits to build clones of many different pedals, and i’d heard good things on a few forums such as harmony-central and guitargeek about the kits from GGG, especially their tweaked Big Muff Pi Clone, so I grabbed my trusty soldering iron and had a crack at it.

Delivered pretty speedily from the states, the kit arrives with everything you’ll need for just under £40, even spare resistors should you want to modify what they guide your through making. Then you can simply print off the copious documentation online including wiring diagrams, parts lists and get your solder on!

The ease of construction with the GGG kit is fantastic, and being fairly new to soldering I had a ready to use pedal in only a few hours of work. The entire PCB was labelled for each resistor so there was little ambiguity with wiring to confuse the beginner, and as soon as the pedal was complete I was eager to try it out, as i’d heard that similarly modified Big Muff pedals are what bands such as Baroness are using – which as you’ll know if you’ve read my previous posts, im rather taken with.

Having owned a Marshall JCM 2000 head for about eight or nine years, I’ve enjoyed the sound and warmth of the ultra gain channel, but being a metal lover, always sought alternative distortion solutions. Having own a Boss Metal Zone for a number of years and enjoying it’s density, I never really got into distorted tones until I started listening to less mainstream metal bands such as Mastodon, Baroness, Torche, 5ive etc, and realised that actually my Metal Zone is really not much cop.

Post Metal Zone i’ve been using various solutions for distortion, but the GGG Big Muff is easily the best i’ve found thus far – bettering my Marshall’s Ultra Gain channel in my opinion. I recommend you get yourself a kit and get building – you won’t be disappointed. There is a sound sample on the page of the kit here :

Sound sample

..but I found that it has a fair bit of reverb applied and so I made a quick demo myself and tried to make sure it had no reverb, compression or eq, and hopefully it captures the sound of the pedal well, its a riff from a song I did last year called ‘Disharmonious!’ and yes, its a bit of a rip of Metallica’s ‘Orion’ before you make for the comment box!

GGG Tuned Demo (guitar, drums)

Design — No Comments
29
Jul 08

Mike Rea, Amazing Woodwork Artist

Props to Simon for discovering this article at FecalFace.com (don’t worry its safe for work!). Mike Rea is an incredible wood based sculpter / artist / genius, and has made some incredible inspirational creations, for a great interview and some amazing imagery, click HERE

Design / General — 7 Comments
8
Jul 08

DIY Fisheye : Digital Lomo Wide Angle pt. II

Last time on DIY Fisheye, I experimented with removing the lens from the Lomo Fisheye (original) camera, and showed you how to remove it without having to saw or do too much work in general!

This time around I begin the refinement process, and remove more of the back of the lens, allowing a larger view through the lens for your SLR. Having completed part I of this blog thread, I consulted members of photo.net forums on what my next step might be, and got very helpful reply from David Nance, who had done a similar thing to what I was doing before, except he was working towards getting a fisheye to mount on his Sony compact. To see his results, take a look at the forum thread, there you’ll find a link to his photos – this is where I realised i’d have to make the back hole in the lens much bigger to allow the SLR lens I plan to mount this to, to focus through the optics of the Fisheye.

So, following on from the steps carried out in Part I, heres what to do next!

1) We need to cut away a few MM of the outer rim from the back of the lens, but before we do that, lets remove the optics from inside the lens, simply twist the front rim to remove it, then, gently push the back optics and all three parts, plus a plastic cylindrical support will pop out, do this carefully so as not to scratch the lenses! You should now have the parts shown below (front rim, optics piled, shell of lens) -

2) Now lets cut a few MM away from the back edge of the outer shell, take a hacksaw to it and remove a few MM until the outer rim is flush with the inner circular column -

3) Now, using a craft or stanley knife, cut down the support struts that join the outer shell and inner column. and using a file, file down the top piece of plastic at the back, I clamped the file in a vice and ran the shell over it to ensure its as flat as possible.

4) Now cut away the inside until you are leaving only the lip inside that the bottom optic sits upon. It should look like this -

5) Now lets put the optics back in! Place them back in the order you expect, with the small optic at the bottom, then the plastic cylinder, then the medium sized optic – crucially with its deepest concave side facing the front of the lens (this seems to eccentuate the fisheye effect), and finally the large optic with the flat side facing forward, and refit the front rim, twisting to lock it in.

Above : the parts of the lens

Above : the lens put back together, now with a much larger view through the lens.

6) Next comes a part you needn’t do! We did some preliminary testing, to find out how well our amputated lens would work on the front of an SLR lens. We mounted the lens inside a coffee cup as seen below, and you’ll see our results so far.

In our next part of DIY Fisheye, we’ll mount the lens onto a Lens cap, so it can sit as close as possible to the lens, allowing for the best depth of field and focus. Massive thanks so far to Nick Jones and Ed Sedgley for their continuing help in this lens based adventure!

Design / General — 10 Comments
7
Jul 08

DIY Fisheye : Digital Lomo Wide Angle pt. I

So maybe you’re like me, you love your Lomo Fisheye to bits, but are fed up with the viewfinder being rubbish and nothing like the end results (and don’t want to fork out for the expensive fisheye 2) and annoyed at having to use film when everything else you do is digital, well if you are then maybe you’ve thought hey! what I love about the Lomo Fisheye isn’t the camera itself, but the results the lens gets. So hows about whipping that lens right out of there, and modifying it to work as an SLR lens.. Sound interesting? read on.

My first thought was to grab my tired Lomo Fisheye, a small screwdriver, and whip the lens out of there, so thats exactly what I did. If you want to try this out, here’s what i’ve done so far -

1) Take the flash battery out and open the back door of the Fisheye, there you’ll see 4 small screws, remove them.

2) Now, Push the winding handle up and out of the body of the camera, you’ll likely need to pinch it together inside, and push up, it should pop right out.

3) You should now have the winder, screws and body seperate (above). Next, lets take the door out of the way, its a bit of a hassle to take apart otherwise. Simply hold the body with the door on your right, and open, and lever the main body of the camera away from the inner body, by placing a flatheaded screwdriver into the gap in the bottom right of the body, in the picture below this is just below where you can see that yellow marking.

Levering the body and inner body apart should release the door so you can continue working.

4) Now lets take the beast apart. Firstly remove the rubber ring around the lens itself – it is this that is stopping you from simply pulling the inner body, and lens through the back of the camera. You should now have something like this -

5) Now, in order to pull the inner body and lens through the back you’ll also need to remove the rim on the front of the lens, and lucky you! this simply twist-unlocks, simply turn it and you’ll feel a click, then you can remove it. You should now be able to pull the inner body out through the back, and have something that looks like the image below -

Now you can place the outer body and front rim of the lens in a safe place out o the way.

6) You should now have something like this to play with -

7) As you’ll see you can now remove the four screws on the front to detach the lens from the inner body, once done, you’ll have this..

8)) Now get your hands dirty and with some pliers, remove that plastic mounting from the edge of the lens -

9) Now with a combo of a File and some careful sanding, remove what is left of the mount plastic around the edge of the lens..

10) Finally, using Wet and Dry, tidy the edge of the lens so it is smooth, and you should end up with something like that shown below -

So thats it for part 1, in part 2 i’ll show you how i’m going to mount this into a form we can attach to an SLR digital camera so we can get that fisheye lomo effect without the middle man!

For now, heres a quick muckabout i’ve done by offering the removed lens up to a small Canon Ixus compact digicam -

Gaming / General — No Comments
3
Jul 08

Goldeneye Emulated on Wii

This needs little explanation, I even feel its pointless to point out that it is awesome.

General / Music — No Comments
3
Jul 08

MAKE! Feature Guitar Pedal Prototyping

If, like me, you’re new to the world of guitar pedal modifications, or want to design your own pedals without having to unsolder many many circuits as you mess around, then MAKE blog have highlighted a very cool guitar pedal prototyping board made by a company called Beavis Audio Research.

Called the Beavis Board it allows you to try out potential creations without any fuss or mess, check it out!

Also, read the article from MAKE here..

General / Music — 1 Comment
3
Jul 08

New Musical Antics

Have done a couple of new tracks since my last update, and placed them in the music player, found on the musics page. Go there and in the player, choose Solo Stuff 2008, there be new things, says i. Still dont have a drummer so if anyone wants to play some metal / hardcore / rock whateveryouwanttocallit, email me asap!