Summer is winding its way down, as school has already began for some counties. Cobb starts next week, so Jack will begin 6th grate at his new school, Dickerson Middle School. Spencer will remain at Sunshine House where he will be enrolled in Pre-K, his first official school regimen. I will continue on and report my progress. I had been frustrated at using a pedalboard yet also having to set up differing auxiliary units depending on my instruments. I had a vision of encapsulating all of the gadgets into one floor unit. I emptied out the ol' closet under the stairs and found my old pedalboard I had bought from
NYC Pedalboards. It was a bit worn and neglected, but i did my best to re-secure the wrap and clean it up. Mine was a 2-tier unit with an area for a Ernie Ball volume pedal. I have since lost the 2nd tier and shall make do with the available real estate. I mounted the Boss ME-50B (thus creating the pedalboard within a pedalboard concept) onto it, along with some other often-used gadgets: my wireless receiver, SansAmp Bass Driver, an eq, and a Line Selector. The Boss LS-1 is rather useful as a switch with level controls or as a mixer. The mixer function can be used for the Stick, to blend the bass and guitar range signals together. It also can deliver power via a daisy chain to other pedals needing 9 volts. I also spray painted a power strip, as I could not find a black one with a 15-foot long extension cord. I've since found a larger one at Sam Ash, made by Furman, but it didn't have a price. Looked expensive. It took a while to do all of this, as you can probably imagine. Laying out the pedals and getting the cables to fit is certainly a big challenge, at least for me. I had a buzz in the system after everything was wired up. Ugh. It turned out to be one of the power supplies. Replacing it with a Boss supply made all of the difference. I joined the power and signal cable together to form a snake - hope that is okay to do. I had done it before on my older Pedal Train board that was primarily stomp boxes. Here's are some pics of the finished product:
Absolutely riveting, I know.
Tuesday, Platinum held a rehearsal at
Crossover Studios for the wedding reception this weekend in Buckhead. I had been practicing my acro technique on the NS WAV 4 electric upright bass for a couple of newer things we're trying. One is that ubiquitous pop ditty
Call Me Maybe, aka Carly Rae Jepson's 30 minutes of fame. It may be a simple pop song, but I took that as an opportunity to get more comfortable with the bow, as the rhythm section is sampled strings and such. It is fun to saw away and try to generate a beefy low end on a dance tune. We are joining it with Katy Perry's
Firework, which I also planned to play a chunk of using the bow. I installed my bow quiver onto the bottom of the NS stand to facilitate quick changes. We'll see how that works out! Don't forget the rosin! I seem to need a lot of rosin to get a good tone. Also, that Boss bass eq pedal is going to help as well. Boost the lows a bit and roll off that highest frequency to suppress the scratchiness. I had intended on mounting the Fishman Platinum Pro EQ onto the pedalboard, but I came to the realization that I would want that enhanced DI in a more portable fashion. Thus, the Boss pedal was put into active service once again. Doncha love those Frippian moments of clarity? We also went over the Peter Gabriel orchestral version of
The Book of Love. I was planning to play arco on this as well, but it was decided to just have Glen do it. Oh well, perhaps for the best as it is a father/daughter dance and we don't want any timing issues. Here are some nice shots taken by Lexxi.
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Anton laying down the fat riff on the Rihanna tune Where Have You Been
utilizing his sweet little microKorg XL.
I've been since working on getting it tight on the Stick using a synth patch
on the Boss ME-50B - not quite the same but the Stick really is nice to use on this. |
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| Lexxi came over and took this with me. Sweet! |
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