Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Hiram Bullock has passed away. I remember many years ago when I went with my friend John Kirkbride to see Miles Davis play at Clowes Hall in Indy in support of his Tutu album. Hiram Bullock was the featured guitarist. Of course, a lot of credit goes to Dewey, but Hiram B was fabulous on his solos and in support of Miles work. His work was funky, emotive, and beautiful.

I was saddened to hear of his illness and related demise. He was a heck of a guitarist.

I didn’t find andy Hiram/Miles videos, but I did find something pretty cool with another iconic figure I miss rather a lot.

Hey.

Wanna see something really geeky cool?

Jonathan Humrichouser is shown holding the new custom overdrive pedal he built for me.

It’s essentially a tubescreamer (TS808) with the Keeley modification and a true-bypass switch. Tell me that’s not cool. I should be receiving it shortly, maybe as soon as this weekend. I can’t wait to try it. Last year I heard the overdrive he built for himself, which prompted me to ask for one. He said that this one sounds even better. He tells me that its “so transparent and awesome.”

You can’t tell very well, but it’s green and black (I am so traditional). I’ll try to get a proper digital photo or two when I get it in my sweaty mitts.

Jonathan is a recent Full Sail grad and a fine musician to boot, playing guitars, bass, loops, and drums. If you liked Forester or Automatic or a recent lineup of the Jake Randall Band, you know a little of his work already. Except that he’s better than you think he is.

I hear he’s considering making pedals for other people as a kind of self-paying hobby and possibly a part-time vocation. His big love right now is studio work. Hopefully that doesn’t mean he *wont* be playing.

This would be a fun little project.

Duncan now is making the worlds most versatile pickup. It is a single-coil rail-style pickup paired with a P90 in such a way that it forms a single humbucker pickup. I have only seen the videos on computer speakers, so it’s hard to tell for sure, but it seems to really carry the strat sound and the P90 sound. A three-way pickup. You have to love that. It would take some extra switches to go between p90 mode, single coil mode, and humbucking mode, but I bet it would be worth the effort.

What guitar would you put these in?


I would want to put it into this Douglas Spad Natural from RondoMusic. It’s a nice, woody, understated look and it already has black humbucker-sized pickups.

Now this is all wool-gathering because I don’t even make my own instrument cables right now. I had a shop put my Duncan’s in my Ovation. But if I wanted to learn, and had a buddy close by to help guide me, I think this would be a dynamite frankenstrat-like guitar. I do worry about getting push-pull switches to work for the pickups. The ports on the back are only so large, adding a few three-way toggles would be really cool, but I’m not too sure about drilling and then refinishing the body. I don’t suppose it would matter all that much, and probably wouldn’t show from a distance. I guess that’s I should do this on an inexpensive, natural wood guitar.

The pickups are a good $USD 90.00 each, and the guitar is about $USD150.00, so it’s about $USD320.00 plus switches & supplies for a guitar that by all means should be beautiful and versatile.

Again, it’s just a dream for now, but you never know. I may decide that I really do need another hobby, probably after I regain my soldering chops by building instrument cables and patches. This whole deal would have to go down a year or so from now at the earliest. I am still building my collection of effects pedals and learning some guitar chops. But maybe I’ll have more time to work on guitar playing and toys in the future.

Here’s the official video demo of the same pickup in a different guitar:

I was really frustrated because I was working via ssh from home to a solaris box. I really don’t know much about solaris, despite having spent time as a programmer on unix boxes (my debian experiences are mostly running apt utilities, which make it pretty easy compared to real sysadmins who know what they’re doing).

So I would get a little ways into the task, pop up a google search, and when I return the session was frozen. Close terminal, open a new one, log in again, stop to think up a new password for the user I’m adding… hung up again. If it weren’t for screen I would have lost my place a dozen times.

Finally I find a bit of help from shapeshed. I figured something was going wrong during idle, but I don’t really know enough about ssh to have figured it out. All I really needed was to set up ServerAliveCount and ServerAliveInterval as directed.

Now my ssh is rock-solid. It is truly a beautiful thing.

Now if only I could get Solaris to cooperate a little. Geez, my VM doesn’t have the man pages indexed for “man -k” usage. It’s not very novice-friendly at all. Looks like I’ll have to fake or borrow Sun expertise.

Yeah the SCO thing has still been going on all this time. This is one of those “forever trails” like the M$ antitrust (are you even aware that Microsoft didn’t win that one?). But maybe we’re finally at the end of the SCO nonsense. Looks like SCO is losing outright (Microsoft was pushed into a settlement). Serves them right. It looks for all the world like someone was funding them to create some kind of FUD in the Linux community, and it didn’t really work all that well. Some commercial interests were concerned, but for the most part the world just kept turning.

Now, maybe finally, we’re done with that.

This is awful. Enjoy it.

I got my DanElectro Chicken Salad vibe effect last tuesday.

Most of the demos have it paired with a good overdrive or distortion pedal. It’s nice, and can take the place of a chorus pedal if you use it with low intensity and a higher speed, or a nice Hendrix-like vibe if you lower the speed and raise the intensity. I used it on a few different songs on Sunday and mostly liked the way it brought a third dimension to the sound of the guitar.

I did find that it needs to go near the end of the chain. I put it just before my delay for best effect, after the distortion and overdrive. If you reverse that, you’ll have an interesting effect but there won’t be much of it. The better, clearer sound is at the end.

I only ran it through a 9V adapter. I was told that battery power was not a good idea.

I put the vibe before the delay, and the two in combination were nice. Then on sunday afternoon, I had friends over. Danny spent some time with it and seemed to enjoy it as well.

For the money, it’s a good time. I can recommend it so far.

We have always maintained some link to the traditions of the denomination, especially those dealing with “family events” in our church. We’ve gone pretty contemporary in many things, even to the point of soft couches and chairs in our welcome center where our people relax and enjoy each other’s company. We’ve kept hymns in our service, though our leader tends to bring them up-to-date with a more pop style rather than playing them in their original form all the time.

While much has changed, two old things have recently returned to our services.

The altar has never been removed, and has always been available, but recently we find our congregations has rediscovered it. Where many contemporary churches have replaced altar prayer with standing congregational prayer, our people have once again regained an old Nazarene freedom to come to the altar for prayer at any time. It is not unusual for people to come during the music service outside of the ‘prayer time’ that is scheduled regularly into the service. I think that freedom of the altar is a grand thing, and I welcome spontaneous prayer. I am glad to see that the altar is back in a good way.

The other is “testimony time”. It’s really good to see the congregation welcomed back into the service. In a lot of larger churches, the people who compose the church are pushed aside in the rush to complete a complex program every week. In smaller churches, there is often more freedom for people to speak up and tell good news or voice concerns. It’s good to hear about faith at work in the lives of our friends.

There is a healthy human urge to push for more novelty, and another to conform to modern styles and forms, an yet another balancing force that clings to tradition. I think that it’s good to welcome all these elements into our worship. Those practices that belonged to bygone eras were tested over centuries of practice and are still valid and can be beautiful today. While we should not bow to a tyranny of tradition, we can still find meaning in the mix of old and new.

I’m glad to see the mix of musical styles, welcome center, testimony, and altar prayer as it continues to shape the identity of our people through fellowship and worship.

I’ve not said much about our church sanctuary and setup, so I thought I’d give my friends a little peek at how I spend my wednesday nights and sunday mornings.

This is the rig I’m using on the platform these days. It’s a tiny little Vox 15R amp (solid state) and a small collection of pedals (mostly borrowed). We find it best if we use very small, low-power amps and mic them through the front-of-house system. It gives more flexibility to the sound man (Fred) and keeps the platform a little quieter. Most of us are now low-wattage, small-footprint amp users.

The amp is on a stand, pointed mostly at the ceiling to help control reverb and loundness on the platform. The mic is really not a guitar mic, but does a good-enough job. The goose-neck stand is tall enough to bring the mic a few inches above the speaker, and I tend to keep it a bit off-center. In the photo it’s facing up, not the normal arrangement.

My signal path is kind of backward, which is to say I run it right-to-left. Leftmost is my compressor, followed by Danny’s TS5 overdrive, my SmashBox distortion, Phil’s delay, and Phil’s chorus pedal. Sometimes I borrow Phil’s wah pedal too. This is not ideal, but better than being short on any of these. I switch guitars too much, because the effects have to be reset for differences in the pickups. If I owned them all, I’d mark them with different color sharpies for single-coil and double-coil pickups.

I played my strat this week. You can see it sitting on the platform by Danny’s Martin. I was late to practice because of really slow traffic (10 mph under the speed limit) almost all the way from Antioch to Mundelein, and barely had time to tune and set levels. I didn’t have the effects set the way I would have liked, but the service doesn’t really depend on me being dialed in just right.

Hanging off the top of my guitar is a little tuner, one of those that senses the vibrations in the wood, so I can turn the volume off and tune nearly-silently. Really handy little device. I recommend them.

This is a pretty light rig, and will be quicker to set up when I use my own pedals and can use a pedal board. As long as I’m borrowing, I shouldn’t velcro-tape and mount other people’s stuff.

Finally you can see the sanctuary from “my” side. Toward the back, my rig is leftmost, then Danny’s acoustic rig, Jeff’s drum cage, and the bass rig (Tyler this week, he and John rotate). You can see Phil’s boom mic on the forward far right, but you can’t see his guitar or amp. He’s our fearless leader. Arrayed across the front are mics and music stands for the rest of the praise team. Outside the platform are some “names of Christ” banners. In the foreground is a really nice couple of people.

The platform may be cluttered by musical equipment, but the name of Christ and the good people are our real assets. The rest is just window dressing.

I finally ordered this trippy vibe effect. It’s by far the least expensive of its kind. I posted a video of a guy playing his strat through this effect recently. I got mine from Musicians Friend (who always have treated me right).

I’ve seen good reviews of the pedal, and have heard that there were negatives about the plastic construction and the way it sucks the juice out of batteries (and leaves you with a high-pitched whine). I plan to be fairly careful and it’s not like I play gigs all over the country or even have to deal with drunks staggering up on the stage. I play at church. I’ve also heard great things from people who use it or whose bandmates use it. For the money, it would be feasible to have a set of these for replacements. I’m into what it does, and all indications are that it’s just great live.

I’m expecting it to be a lot of fun. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Now my set of personally-owned effects includes:

• DigiTech “Main Squeeze” compressor (40% off in Kenosha, WI)
• Ibanez “smash box” distortion (great deal in Waukegan)
• Soon-coming Danelectro “chicken salad” vibe (15% off almost nothing at MF)

I’m currently borrowing

• a TS5 (all-plastic) “sound tank” tube screamer overdrive, and
• Ibanez tone-lock chorus
• Ibanez tone-lock delay

I’d buy a tube screamer and delay, but I’d rather have a friend build them for me (if I can get some money to him). It is most kind of my buddies to loan me their pedals. They work great, other than the TS5 having a bad switch. Sometimes it won’t turn on, sometimes it doesn’t turn off. I’m sure that’s a small thing to fix, but haven’t gotten into it yet. I’m hardly a repair man… I am always daunted.

By the time I get around to ordering and installing a P90 in my Agile guitar, I’ll have a pretty good set of effects built up.