then we add the volume knob, circuit board and 9v hookup. this little guy will have no battery hookup because, a) batteries suck. b) look at how small this thing is. you couldn't fit a battery if you tried. i was pretty impressed with this one.

and here she is all closed up and ready to plug in.

crap. no name country dudes from the 70's will never stop getting to me.

i'm not a big fan of guitar pedals because they cost so much. i bought three of them in 1997 and have had them ever since. but because i'm playing guitar for the cmg band, i needed a booster pedal to boost up my volume for my sweet solos. so i bought one and it cost me like $200. they retail at $315. what a drag. so opened up this thing to put in a battery and inside the pedal was the smallest circuit board i have ever seen. now i'm thinking $200 for this? i just got ripped off.

but reading into it, you're paying for the idea and circuit design. good enough. but if you read further you realize that there are only a handful of original designs when it comes to guitar circuits. so all these pedals you see are just variations of an original idea. mostly separated by a few changes in the values of resistors, ect..., which change the sound ever so slightly.

so that means all these pedal makers are hacks. and i know for certain that i'm a hack. so i went out and got a bunch of electric components to whip up a little something of my own. so what i did was download some schematics of some pedals i liked or thought would be cool and started trying to understand how they work. i knew this would take me a long while so i started on the artwork which is really the raddest part anyways.

i used water slide decal paper and just printed out some designs. waterslide decal paper is the best. i never knew it existed. you want to put some shit on a mug or on a model train, check this stuff out.

i found a lot of people making clones of famous boost circuits. so i figure i'd go the cloning route to kick it off. so the first two circuits i'm building are rooted in the mxr "microamp"



and the zvex "super hard on."



simple and sweet. real basic electronics going on here. a handful of parts and now we have a circuit.

got a few aluminum cases, drilled holes, painted them white and put my decals on them and coated them clear. introducing the deets "little man" and the limited edition "blunt mechanic krackle" made for ben barnett. if anybody needs a boost for solo's, it's that dude.

so the next step is to wire these dudes up and pray that they work.

holy crap. fermentation is done. i might have let it run a little too long actually. i take the rotten juice and fruit and throw it into this torture device. it's called a press and that's what it was born to do.

so the press squeezes the crap out of the fruit to get every last drop of wine. notice the screen filter. this is to filter out all the creatures that died when i was stomping my grapes. crickets, spiders, and tons of fruit flies are another reason why wine tastes so good.

i know this is supposed to be a blog about music but i wanted to show a bit of the wine making process for this year. i started making homemade fruit wine a couple of years ago because it sounded fun. i think i'll do it every year until i die. nothing is better than making wine. maybe because it's such an ancient tradition and i'm totally into antiquing. so here's a bit of a window into my process.

you get a couple of coolers and go down and get your grapes from 100 year old italian dudes. they laugh at you when you bring down coolers. usually there are a bunch of tough looking guys filling the beds of their pickup trucks with grapes. this year was no exception. they get meaner and hairier every year.

do you have a soft spot in your heart for 60's croatian pop music? no? well maybe you will when the dreamy bad boys from grupa 220 sing their hit single 'osmjeh'.



and speaking of bad boys.....

last night some jokers stole my car. the police recovered it the same day. they took everything inside including the radio. and it was the first time in like 15 years that i sat in my car alone and was in complete silence. and for the first time in 15 years i could hear my thoughts and really had a conversation with myself about me, my life, and my future.

so here's a shot of the vox les paul all ready to be painted, finally.



and here's a picture of the other les paul i've been working on. and yes, this is the third time i'll be painting this huge pain in my ass.



building crap always has a huge learning curve i guess. things i've learned...... for some reason unknown to anyone, the jerks who make spray shellac and nitro like to put wax in their products which causes the finish to never quite harden like it should. apparently wax keeps the nitro from cracking and discoloring, but that's why i'm using it. i'm all about cracks. all you lowlifes trying to use nitro and want it not to crack, use some poly and leave us nitro people out of your sick agenda.

pain in my ass. so i had to sand off all the shellac on both guitars and do some research. supposedly watco makes a clear nitro that actually dries. so lets try again.



a whole day of spraying small coats gets you super wasted. i have to buy a respirator soon.


so after the nitro dries for an hour, we scrape the binding. look at that thing just pop. please work this time. another setback and i'm going out of business.