more planks

 

A few extra pics of the Plankaster...

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the Plankaster!

Here it is, just finished and almost ready to ship - just have the time to test it...

 

 

More plank guitar

Plank Guitar

The new plank guitar project goes well - a couple extra days and it's done and shipped to its owner...

more sketches

chip

I've been asked about the reference of the chip used in the noise box - here it is.

Exterminate!

The noise box is encased and works very well, as you can see in the demo down there!

a good working day

Didn't lose my time today, I've made this little video demo of the oscillator I build last week.

Then I've been busy with housing the noise box in an hemispheric case that I was saving for a pedal project (also I pillaged two tele control plates for knobs), and I'm quite happy with the result... I still have to add a couple of things - a switch to turn it of and a power jack - it works on battery - and a LED... 

And I kept working on the new planck guitar project - another chambered planck guitar as you can see...

new planck guitar!

 

Started to work on a new planck guitar for a friend musician in France - the plan is to make it as quick and as roughly than the previous one... This friend has similar music tastes as mines: huge sound, heaps of effect pedals, complete chaos, so I imagine that what he expects is more a hurricane trigger than a playable instrument!

Maybe I finally found my niche: one-off handmade cheap ugly awful guitars for noise musicians! As for the Mystery Guitar, the gear is recycled from previous projects left-overs, the body was picked in the street, the alu plate was lying around, only the neck comes from eBay - a cheap but honest strat neck with real tuners (I've seen worse!)

Hopefully to be finished next week! (and you can see that I finally have access to a band saw, so I will revive other projects and cut a couple of bodies soon, at last!)

  

Noise Box Workshop

On the weekend I did a noise box workshop - I'm so clumsy when it comes to soldering and this kind of stuff, that I thought it's time to learn it for real! On pic 2 you can see how pathetic my soldering technic was, but after a few hours I made some progress (pic 3) and I managed to assemble all the parts together to make a little oscillator that makes some noise - that was the purpose and it's achieved! 

In a couple of days I will house the thingy in an alu box and shoot a little demo - I guess that through a couple of pedals such as my Wrong Side of Uranus, it will sound terrific. The workshop was hosted at Noisy MusicWorld, a music complex that rents studios in Berlin where I rehearse regularly - there I can play very very loud and nobody ever complains.

There are two other things I learned in this workshop, outside of soldering together electronic gizmos: finally it is true that after 40 you start to get farsighted, fucking hell! I can hardly see the details on a PCB and I made an appointment to get a prescription for glasses! The other thing is that the demographic of electro-noise gadget wannabe makers in Berlin is 100% white and male - I'd tend to add heterosexual but I didn't inquire that far -, though still international. Fascinating...