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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...

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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...

 

more sketches

Lately I felt that I didn't renew my sketches enough - being more busy with little variations on not too extravagant designs -, so I decided to start again from ergonomic shapes while trying to keep a certain radical sexiness together with a vintage feel... I feel that I reached something interesting there, I really wish I would find a builder out there that would try to make one of these guitars exist in the real world...

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Nicole killswitch

Since I installed a killswitch on my Dot, I've been using it happily and wondered how I could live without it for so long (I'm currently recording demos, there should be some samples to hear soon - I mean soon in my usual very slow pace...). But after a few thousands clicks, the push button started to be noisy, and I realized that the cheap piece or gear I acquired for less than 1€ wasn't designed for such an intensive use.

So I ordered a Rolls Royce killswitch from French Luthier Nicole for 9 €, and it seems to be serious stuff. The problem is that it's quite wide, and I'm not sure that it will fit on an archtop semi-hollow - because of the curve... So should I make the change or put it on a solid body with a flat front plate? Still thinking... 

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I've been sending several blueprints lately, I hope that guitars have been or will be built using these schemes, and I'd love to hear about them and show them on this blog! Contact me if you're in that case...

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