I’ve written about AmpKit and GuitarTone recently on this Blog and I’ve even shared a couple of recordings made with those pieces of software. I’ve had a few other amplifier simulators on my iPhone for quite some time now, but I have wondered recently—I’m lucky enough to have a decent block of time to dedicate to myself and my guitar fascination right now—how many other options are there for an addict like me? What am I missing? What don’t I know?
Sometimes a Blog title just works for more than one simple reason. Luckily for me, this is one of those instances. One reason, is that the technology that I am lucky enough to have at my disposal—AmpKit for recording and GuitarJack for connecting—is better than me. The technology is almost flawless. My guitar playing skills are not. Another reason the title of this article works is that I’m writing about how AmpKit and GuitarJack allowed me to record a song I wrote titled Better Than Me.
When I say I’m not a carpenter, I mean it (I did make that claim in my previous post). That’s part of the reason it’s taken me so long to add anything to this website. Even though I found a truly awesome online resource for the creation of your own pedal board (using some preassembled IKEA components) it has taken me months to build my own pedal board. But I like my Gorm Pedal board (Gorm is the name of the shelf unit I needed to buy from IKEA) and I had a great time building it.
Taking months also allowed me to slowly build upon my pedal collection. My wife assures me my collection is now complete. I’m sure she’s right. Let’s see what my pedal board—and collection—looks like now.
I did take an entire series of photos during the process, but they’re pretty much along the lines of those in the original post I was referencing above. Completed, my pedal board looks like the image in this post’s intro—because that is my pedalboard.
If you like colour—I’m trying to keep colour off this particular website—you can see this photo on my photography website. It’s sturdy, matches the colour scheme of my guitar room and has two power packs under it to power all of the pedals at once. No batteries here!
Here’s a quick rundown of my new pedal collection. Top-left going clockwise.
Boss Loop Station RC-2
Joyo Vintage Phase
Joyo Classic Flanger
MXR Fullbore Metal
Joyo Vintage Overdrive
Artec Vintage Power Wah
Joyo JT-55 Pedal Tuner
Joyo Ultimate Drive
Boss Chorus CE-2
Joyo Tremolo
Joyo Digital Delay
Lucky 11. When I started building the pedal board I didn’t have the Artec Wah or any of the Joyo pedals. I started buying them on eBay for very little money. Almost all of them are new and the most I spent on one pedal was $40.00. The last four pedals I got for $100.00. I was very pleased with that purchase. I believe outside of the Boss pedals everything else on the pedal board is true bypass.
So there you have it. It took me months, but I now have hours of entertainment at my feet. I’m really impressed with the new pedals actually. I might write a bit about them individually. I know when I was researching the Joyo pedals I found it difficult to find much in the way of useful information. I’ll try and add to that collection of not useful information.
So I wrote recently—if you consider a month ago recently—that I’d entered what I’m calling the previous century and provided electricity to my small guitar pedal collection. I was quite proud of this achievement and managed to connect all pedals in random order just to prove all their little lights worked. I’ve now decided to enter the modern era—perhaps even this century—and build my own little pedal board which will put my small pedal collection together in a somewhat sensible order (all with electricity powered lighting of course).
As I am years behind in the ways of pedal boards I have realised I’ll need assistance in the ways of ordering the pedals I have. Luckily I have a few places to source information from. Let me share some of my favourites with you as I prepare to build my first pedal board.
The first place I found useful information on was YouTube. I found a very handy and informative video on pedal placement by the Tone King. This video also made me want to buy more pedals. I am slightly compulsive though.
The Tone King video has made me wonder what would happen if you place two distortion pedals after each other (as opposed to an overdrive and a distortion pedal as suggested in the video). I have a feeling I will discover what will happen because my current pedal collection consists of the following:
Boss Distortion DS-1
Dunlop MXR Fullbore Metal Distortion
Boss Chorus CE-2
Boss Loop Station RC-2
To be honest I’m yet to find out if the loop goes at the end. I imagine it does.I’m also very sure the two-distortion combo will just be awful.
Apart from YouTube I did find other information sources on the Interweb such as this Tumblr site on pedal boards. I found it to be very informative. Some of the information seemed very similar to that in the Tone King video. Reassuring.
My last source for information was my iPhone. Not as another searching tool. Not as a way to reach out and phone a friend either. No, I had a look at the preset options in the guitar apps I’ve purchased such as AmpKit and AmpliTube. Surely the pedal placement there was done by experts. I just have to follow their leads (pun intended) to see if my intended pedal placement was appropriate. So far I believe it is.
I have my pedals and I have my single cable to power them all. I’m awaiting my new connector leads (on order) and then I’ll build some kind of framework to house the pedals. It won’t be metal as I’m not a metalworker. It will be as sturdy as I I can make it in wood. Although I’m not a carpenter either.
For many years I would replace the 9 volt batteries in each of the Boss guitar pedals I owned—of which there were three—each time the little red lights began to fade. As I’ve never been in a band or put my pedals through any kind of hard-core torture, batteries used to last me for quite some time. Then my wife and I started a family and I momentarily lost track of my guitar infatuation.
When I came back to the obsession, my Boss DS-1 distortion pedal decided to punish me for the time apart. It used the acid from its battery to commit a form of suicide. I felt bad. But like the evil scientist who refuses to let the dead be, I made the decision to use electricity to power my pedals.
Sadly for me, my budget didn’t allow me to purchase anything new. So I did not go out and get myself several Boss power packs. Nor did I get myself a pedal board (for my huge three guitar pedal collection). Nope. I made the decision to rob a few of my own household appliances of their power packs when it was time to play guitar. That worked quite fine. But you needed a power board to plug the power packs into as each power pack was so bulky.
And for many years I got by like that. I was happy to have come up with a solution that involved spending no money. I had accepted the lazy solution to my initial problem. Until recently when I decided to get myself some of the technology that others had been using for probably as many years as I’ve been alive. Perhaps not that long, but a long time none-the-less!
It’s messy—with more pedals today than I had back then—but it fills me with joy. Today I plugged in my favourite pedals just so I could stare in wonder at all their pretty lights. The pretty lights you can’t make out because I like to strip all images of colour on this website. But it was cool! The order was all wrong and the sound would have been terrible, but I had the power—pun intended—to use all of my pedals at once with just one power pack thanks to my 5 to 1 power cable. All for under $10 thanks to my love of eBay.
One cable that allows my one Boss power pack to power all of my guitar pedal units! Awesome.
Why I’ve had so much fun I might even get myself some new pedal connection cables and build a custom pedal board for my own pedal collection. If I should attempt this project it also would be messy—I’m no carpenter—but I’d like to think it would also be cool.
A while ago I posted this article on my custom-built and twice-hacked website. I put a lot of effort into the website and a decent amount of work into the article. It seemed logical to me to keep at least one of them. So, with minor edits that make the content relevant to this new website, here is the saved article.
While designing for Mater I created the Redlands Clinic logo. The logo needed to represent the medical aspect of the business while still appearing community oriented. The use of the colour red ties in with both of those requirements as does the logo’s font pairing.
I used to run a website dedicated to random articles that were about anything and everything. That website was maybedaily.info. Written daily … maybe. The concept was to be a news source where the news was all daily activities that had an element of humour about them. It was almost news without being news. Therefore the logo needed to represent a news source logo without being totally serious.
Prior to dedicating my Scarebear website to my guitar fascination, I started a small website called 47 Guitars. The aim was to post weekly guitar related articles for 47 weeks straight. I later decided to incorporate that concept into the main Scarebear website instead. The logo for 47 Guitars was intended to represent the guitar subject matter which was achieved by using the plectrum shape.
