Media thread - 5 September 2022, 17:09

A photo of a DIY guitar pedalboard. It consists of two horizontal planks of wood screwed into two shallowly-angled pieces on either end. The two horizontal pieces have strips of velcro on them, and there's three pedals attached to it. The cables are extremely neat and tidy and mostly tucked away underneath the body of the board.

A photo of the pedalboard sitting in front of an Orange (and coloured orange) guitar amplifier.

That was a HELLA productive day off, look at my pedalboard! Everything is so neat and tidy, I'm fucking STOKED at how well it came together.

our house diy music darkroom guitar guitar amp pedalboard

Posted on 5 September 2022, 17:09

So it turns out you can control the Boss RC-5 looper pedal via MIDI instead of needing to lean down awkwardly to adjust the built-in drum machine, so I bought an (Australian-designed) MIDI controller, the Pirate MIDI Bridge4! It's pretty slick, but unfortunately Boss' documentation on how specifically to configure external MIDI devices to control it is a little lacking, so there's a LOT of trial and error going on right now.

our house music darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 9 September 2022, 22:13

A photo of a black metal box with four silver push switches and an LCD display in the middle. The display says "LOGIC PRO" in the middle with "Record", "Play", "Previous Scene" and "Next Scene" in the corners corresponding to each switch.

Yessss, got the Bridge4 configured to control Logic Pro now! So I can start and stop recording, play and pause the existing audio, and switch between and trigger live loops scenes all right from the pedalboard without needing to take my hands off the guitar. 😎

our house music darkroom logic pro pedalboard

Posted on 15 September 2022, 22:11

A photo of a red guitar stomp pedal with three dials at the top of it and a little switch in the middle.

Okay, so after a TON of reading and watching videos on YouTube (shout-out to That Pedal Show in particular), I've decided the last (for the moment 😏) piece of my guitar pedal board is going to be a Boss DM-2W analogue delay pedal. Delay pedals basically take the note you play and repeat it back after a given interval and for a certain number of repeats, and there's all SORTS of interesting effects you can get depending on how big the interval is, how much of the original note you get back, and how many repeats you've set. Analogue pedals in particular have a specific sound that's really warm and dark, as opposed to digital pedals which tend to be basically exact replicas of your sound. The original DM-2 pedal stopped being produced in the mid-80s and this DM-2W is the "Waza Craft" reissue of that original one, so it's got the same sound but also a little switch at the top that goes between "Standard" DM-2 and the new "Custom" mode that boosts the maximum repeat rate from 300ms to 800ms and brightens up the sound a little bit.

I did some playing around in Logic Pro with the built-in delays in there, none of which sound nearly as good as the DM-2W, but damn, playing without any sort of delay at all sounds so flat and boring now, haha. I was considering the Boss DD-200 which is VERY swish, but it's a digital one instead of analogue and while it's got a ton of features, it seems kind of overwhelming for just dipping my toes into the world of delay.

music guitar

Posted on 18 September 2022, 22:36

A photo of my Morningstar relay switching interface. It's a small blue metallic box with two TRS jacks and a DC in jack on the front, and three LEDs on the top marked "RING", "TIP", and "POWER".

Huzzah, the relay interface finally arrived!

Next step, figuring out how best to configure the MIDI controller to activate the interface in terms of ease of usage...

our house music darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 19 September 2022, 15:51

A photo of a Boss DM-2W analogue delay guitar pedal. It's a shiny sort-of-magenta colour, with three dials on the top for repeat rate, intensity, and echo.

Yesssss, very excited to play around with this tonight!

our house music darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 21 September 2022, 15:29

The setup is complete! ...at least until my new guitar arrives, and also until I inevitably decide I want more guitar pedals and thus need to build a longer pedalboard. 😅

Man, that delay pedal is such fun. If you set one single repeat and set the delay before the repeat occurs to the right timing, you can get it to essentially play notes in between what you're playing, so it sounds like you're playing more. Or you can set a really long delay with lots of repeats and lower the intensity, and it sounds like you're in a vast hall. Or you can go in between those and just get a much fatter-sounding tone.

our house music darkroom guitar guitar amp pedalboard

Posted on 21 September 2022, 21:52

Today's deliveries are a flanger pedal for my guitar setup (can I call it a "rig" yet?), and a replacement airbrush needle!

I was all excited to get my Kill Team terrain started last week, and I realised that my troubles with the airbrush clogging and spitting and just generally misbehaving were caused by the very tip of the needle being bent. 😞 I'm not sure exactly how I managed to do that, but I'm going to make a point to be a lot more gentle with it from now on.

our house music darkroom new toys painting guitar airbrush pedalboard

Posted on 4 October 2022, 13:25

A photo of a little rectangular black box that says on the side of it "JHS Pedals" and underneath "Little Black Buffer". There's a single yellow LED on the top of it (the input and output plugs are on the very back and not visible in the photo).

Why yes, it IS more guitar pedal-related stuff! Though technically not an actual pedal this time. Keen to see the difference it makes in sound.

(Update: it makes ABSOLUTELY no difference whatsoever because it turns out all Boss pedals already have built-in buffers to counteract the signal degradation from long chains. 😑)

our house darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 5 October 2022, 15:56

A photo of the box of a Boss FZ-1W fuzz guitar pedal, and a D'Addario "XPAND2" pedal board, which is a two-row pedal board made of aluminium that can become wider as you get more pedals.

Woooooo!

I'm waiting on just one more thing (at least until Christmas 😅), an Orange FS-1 mini footswitch so I can switch between the clean and dirty channels on the amp without having to lean over and down to actually fiddle with the amp itself.

our house music darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 10 October 2022, 13:30

A photo of a two-row pedal board with seven pedals of various sorts on it.

NOW we're cooking with gas.

our house music darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 10 October 2022, 20:44

My little footswitch arrived! It's so little and adorable. And because it can be used for different things depending on the amp it's plugged into, they give you this set of little stickers to stick onto the front of it so you know what the actual function is that it's triggering.

our house music darkroom new toys guitar pedalboard

Posted on 17 October 2022, 14:53