Distillery @ Design Before Time

I learned a few things. (1) I suck at woodworking. (2) Plywood, even the fancy oak-veneer stuff, just doesn’t work well for this type of project. (3) Routers throw up enough sawdust to leave a 1/4″ layer on everything within a 15ft radius. I bought a cheap router, hoping I can build things with it […]

I never made a formal plan. I cut out pieces of paper with the same size and shape as the footprints of the controls, then moved them around a large piece of paper until I got what I wanted. I transferred this to a sheet of wood and started cutting! What I ended up with […]

My keyboard encoder is the Hagstrom KE72-T. It offers 72 “ghost proof” inputs and an interface that converts trackball signals into PS/2 mouse signals. It also offers keyboard pass-through and easy programming. The guys at Hagstrom are pretty helpful as well. They are starting production of the “IOX36″ terminal blocks for the KE72 and threw […]

Like almost every kid of the 1980s, I played video games. In 1995 I found out about MAME, a program that uses dumps of the actual ROM chips from video games and emulates the logic chips–to reproduce the exact game on my own PC. It was cool but then I started grad school and found […]

I decided to remove the frets and make this a fretless bass.  I also broke the nut because I filed it too far. I got a new nut, but the placement looks bad (plays fine, so far, not that I really know what I’m doing). The fretwires popped right off. I filled the gaps with […]

My saga from 2010 continued: Here are some pics I took of the fretwork.   I set about trying to make the instrument play in tune.  I filed the nut (too far) to get the strings closer to the fretboard.  I rearranged the bridge components to adjust the overall string length. I also tried to […]

Here is my saga with a bass called the “Eye of the Tiger” by TL Martinson. I received the bass from a TalkBass forum member in 2010.  He was displeased with it and offered it up for the cost of shipping to the first taker, and that was me. The bass is a 4-string 34″ […]