Building An Empire, One Optimus Prime Cock At A Time...

As those of you who follow me on the Twit-scape know, I completed the MATG last week, and began work on the third instrument, SpringThing. MATG turned out… interesting, I guess? Not quite what I expected, I’ll say that much.

As you can see, I used turnbuckles as “tuning pegs” and aircraft cable for the strings. The issue I’m experiencing is that I believe I’ve made the bridge too stiff (it is 3/32 plate steel) and not enough of the string vibrations get transmitted to the pickup. So I’m going to take it apart this week and cut out the old bridge and replace it with 1/32 steel, and use smaller gauge aircraft cable for the two middle strings. It sounds interesting, but not what I was hoping for. Easy to see where it can be improved, though. So there’s that. Here’s what it currently sounds like, but the new version should have much more body and sustain.

SpringThing is along similar lines, I guess. The frame will hold 6 different springs that I acquired at Ace. Along the bottom, where you see that plate, will be controls for some custom electronics. I’m giving it its own preamp, distortion, a compressor (Orange Squeezer type), and one of those looper things from Radio Shack. So SpringThing will theoretically be a comprehensive rhythmic looper doo-hickie. We’ll see how that plays out, and you can follow along with the hilarity on my Twitter feed, as always.

In other completely unrelated news, I’m starting a sister blog to this one that is focused entirely on music, rather than music tech. It should be up by the end of the week; (now up here) the missus is putting the finishing touches on the software, and it will also serve as a showcase for her bespoke blogging platform, of which this site is a distant grandparent. I’ll keep you posted on the progress on that front, and post here when it’s ready. I’m hoping for discussions that are more subjective in nature on that site; I generally try to avoid inflicting my opinions on you guys here with respect to actual music. That won’t be the case on the new blog. We’ll see how it goes.