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.