Anxiously Awaiting

I’m glad to finally get this off my projects list. With the help of a comrade at work, I finished wiring a LED to my BBB07. Those of you who own one know that it’s irritating during gigs to have to remember if the stupid thing is on or not. I’m not sure why Sean Michael chose to not include a LED by default.

What you will need

1. 5.1k Ohm Resistor
2. 3.6 Volt 5mm LED, color or your choice (I used blue)
3. A small length of wire
4. Some electrical tape
5. Wire strippers, cutters, soldering iron, solder, etc.

Step 1: Case Mods

This is the easiest part. You will need to drill a hole in the front cover to support the 5mm LED. I also cut a hole in the side of the BBB07 with a Dremmel to pull the battery clip through so I can connect it my power supply. I had originally intended to add a small, Boss style power jack but because the BBB07 is wired in reverse that would be a pain to engineer for a hobbyist like me.

Step 2: Finding the right LED + Resistor

In order to make the LED work, we need a resistor connected somewhere in the circuit to reduce the voltage to something more suitable. There are several LED resistance calculators on the net (I used this one), and if you wish to use a LED with a different voltage rating than I did you will need to recalculate the resistance for the circuit. I picked a 5.1k Ohm so that the LED glows nice and soft. I previously tried a 248 ohm resistor, but it was so bright it nearly burned my eyes out. One good way to preview your work is to grab a 9V battery, connect the anode to negative, connect the cathode to your resistor, and then connect other end of the resistor to the positive terminal on the battery. If all is connected properly, the LED should glow as brightly as it will when placed into the real circuit.

Step 3: Modifying the Circuit - Connecting the Anode

The BBB07, like most good fuzz pedals, is wired in reverse. This makes wiring the LED up a bit more tricky than if this were conventional polarity. The easiest way I have found is to wire the anode (negative or short end) to the top terminal in the center pole of the switch, and then connect a loose wire from the center terminal to the ground wire of the battery clip. This way, the current running to the LED doesn’t affect the signal at all. You will have to chop the battery clip negative lead in half and wire up a T. After you solder all three leads together, use some electrical tape to protect the joint–or some shrink tubing if you are less ghetto than I.

Step 4: Modifying the Circuit - Connecting the Cathode

Connecting the cathode is a bit easier. All we have to do is wire the resistor up to the long end of the LED and then connect the other end of the resistor to the hot terminal on the input jack (oddly enough, it’s not the terminal the red wire from the battery clip connects to, but instead the middle one). We want to make sure that we get the right pole of the switch so that our LED will only come on if the pedal has a cable plugged into the input. Use this as a guide:

Step 5: The Finished Product

Finally we can enjoy the convenience of knowing if our BBB07 is on or off on dark stages. Those of us without guitar techs who run our pedals for us anyway. Below are some shots of the finished product. Forgive me for not going into the gory details of why each lead goes where. More or less I poked around with an alligator clip and some basic knowledge of e-mag until I found something that works. For the newbies in doubt: just make your circuit look exactly like mine and make sure all your solder joints are clean.

I have been looking for good set of closed around-the-ear headphones for a long time. After reading tons of reviews I settled on a set of Bose Tri-Port cans. These are not noise canceling headphones–I didn’t like the idea of having to change batteries regardless of how long they last.

This was quite possibly the best sub $150 purchase I have made in a long time; right up there with my Boss TU-2 Tuner. Pair these babies with my recently procured Apogee Duet audio interface and you are enveloped in a world of aural ecstasy. Bass hits are punchy and deep, highs come through clean and crisp, and mids are pronounced, but not overbearing and muddy. The Tri-Port’s are quite comfortable to wear, and they block out some ambient noise; my new best friend during coding sessions at work =D.

So according to last post I got an iPhone–affectionately referred to as my ipwn. This is also apparently ironic because of my new job in Micro$ofts Premium Mobile Experience (PMX) group. Sweet. Irony is fun. My relationship with my ipwn has been mildly rocky, and as with all Apple products I own, they infuriate me by announcing a new one not long after I get mine–the UMTS iPhone is due out in July. Meh. Back to the topic at hand: the top five things jduv loves/hates about his ipwn.

Love (from least to most awesome):

The Camera and Photos application. One thing Apple definitely did right was in their design of most of the applications on the iPhone. The photo application is loads of fun to show off, and even play with when you are bored. The camera isn’t half bad either.

Landscape view. Turn your ipwn on it’s side and it landscapes the current application you are using–in most cases. How cool is that? Now if they could only make it work for the SMS application so I have bigger buttons to type with.

The sleek design. Face it. The iPhone is down right sexy. From it’s sleek aluminum design to it’s uber cool but mildly annoying touch based interface.

The Maps application. This little guy has saved my butt many a time–for I am known to get lost often. It will even use GSM tower triangulation to figure out where you are–haha take that GPS.

The Phone application. Calling someone is as easy as poking their name in the phone app. You can’t get any simpler than that. Plus it’s pretty. It’s also easy to accidentally call someone, so I have to make sure the phone is locked before it goes into my pocket.

Hate (From least to most annoying)

Edge is slow as hell. Being a former Danger employee I have been spoiled by the backend transcoading that the Danger Service provides for interweb surfing. This makes for an impatient jduv when surfing facebook on his ipwn. Fortunately the UMTS version of the iPhone will fix this issue–if you want to spend the cash to upgrade and deal with even crappier battery life.

Audio Quality. Sometimes it’s hard to hear people, but hopefully its a speaker issue and a decent bluetooth headset will fix this problem. The AT&T network doesn’t help either =/.

Battery life. My old HTC 3125 would go for around 2 days without a charge. If I turn on wi-fi then I can guarantee a dead battery in less than 8 hours. Okay, so that is to be expected since wi-fi chip sets are power hogs, but my battery life still maxes out at 1.5 days on strict edge browsing and a talk time of less than two hours. Pathetic.

Dropped calls. This irritates me. It has only happened two times, but both during key points in a conversation I was having with the lady and with full radio service. Not good. Of course this could be easily blamed on AT&T (strike two guys…).

Random lockups. Nothing is more encouraging when your in a hurry than a nice hard lock followed by a pretty blue screen. Oh, we aren’t talking about Windoze. So far deh ipwn has locked up completely at least 2 times, and most times it’s Safari’s fault. The radio has also died once or twice, requiring a phone reboot to get it to work again. Looks like Apple’s “it just works” mojo isn’t exactly working for this product in some aspects.

So the conclusion is, I like my ipwn, but it’s a love/hate relationship. There are things it does that it does better than any other product in the market, but it’s full of shortcomings as well. I must say that I don’t have a problem with the touch keyboard–I thought that would be at the top of my “hate” list. I have gotten used to it and I’m pretty darn fast on the little sucker. I do, however, hate the little text suggest box. It never guesses correctly when your texts are mainly in l33tsp34k.

Lastly, for whatever it’s worth, utoob is good fun when you forgot your laptop, are bored in a meeting, and on corporate wi-fi. =D

Welcome to the first post from my MacBook Pro. I’ll try to make it as shiny and hyped as Apple’s products are. Warning, contrary to my current theme this post is in fact, not green. If anything, it’s a total waste of power given the servers required to run my wonderful website.

I’m not quite a Jobs fanatic yet, but I have to admit the interface on this big guy is pretty amazing. I even have a terminal. I also don’t understand the adamant PC users who tout that Macs don’t have any good software. They must not be looking in the right places (ahem, Google) because I have found more than I can process in the past couple of days. Some of them cost a small amount of money but are totally worth it like SuperDuper backup, and others are all time free favorites like VLC.

Anyway, I took the red pill. I’m about to see how deep this rabbit hole goes. Too bad for the MacBook Air though. I can’t justify paying 2k for a computer that is totally inferior to my already beefy MacBook Pro.

Playing guitar is an interesting hobby. It’s intriguing to watch how people approach different facets of playing. For example every person has their own opinion on what the “perfect” amp and the “perfect” guitar setup is; even down to the seemingly irrelevant things such as which guage of strings to use. The naive guitarist–often young in his or her playing ability–often doesn’t think of things such as body wood, pickup height, action, string guage, and neck wood. At one time, I was the naive guitarist. My focus was on sounding like someone else: Metallica, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Satriani, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighers, my list of musical phases is quite long. These days I have focused more on building my own sound; much of which requires a decent chunk of investment captital, a rock solid resolve when things go wrong, and the will to experiment.

Physics is a wonderful science because it is applicable to nearly every physical thing in life. Since I’m a nerd (ahem, see blog categories) I like to apply science to random things in life. With that said, many of the rules of physics can be applied to a guitar to help explain the characteristics of the instrument. For example, electro magnetics are the key to how pickups work. The body mass of a guitar can and most times will color the tone of the guitar. The type of woods involved when you build the guitar will color the tone of the instrument–energy, or the vibrations caused by the strings travels differently through different types of wood. Tightness of the neck and bridge relative to the body of the guitar dictates string sustain. The applications are many.

Why all the preface? Recently I have been tweaking the Telecaster that I have “borrowed” from a good friend of mine. I added new pickups–a Lollar P90 at the neck and a Lollar Telecaster Special at the bridge, changed the bridge out to a Wilkinson, and rewired some of the electronics. Needless to say my first attempt was good, but not perfect. The P90 was very dark and muddy, and the bridge pickup was bright and ice picky. After posting on my favorite forum, I received some suggestions on how to fix the problem. So I followed those suggestions and the gutiar gained some new life. Unfortunately, it was a little too bright. Next, I ordered a custom bridge with stainless steel saddles from Callaham Guitars. Not only did that bridge fix the typical intonation problem that Telecasters with vintage saddles are afflicted with, but it darkened the tone just enough to where I am happy with it.

I used to believe that a guitar simply is, a guitar. There is no coloration of tone because of the materials. I was totally incorrect in my thinking because I was thinking only in terms of electronics. The microphonics of a pickup is more nuanced by the tone and vibrations of the body and bridge than I had previously thought. Who would have thought that the tone of the guitar would be quite darker with a bridge that is simply .25mm thicker? Who would have thought that stainless steel saddles would add some snap to my pick attack? Who would have thought that the guitar would have picked up an additional second of body sustain and an improvement to the overall bendability/playability of the strings due to the tightness of the bridge relative to the body? Not I. I am a nonbeliever no more. Components matter.

So, I believe I am finally finished with tinkering with this guitar. It’s tone is now truely righteous in my eyes. Were I to do anything else, it would be efforts to kill the 60 cycle hum that all single coil pickups suffer from. In any event, this endeavour has been very rewarding and quite fun. Every penny spent was well spent in my eyes, even for the pieces that I didn’t use or switched out. I love this hobby, and I must say it’s quite less expensive than some others =D.