A couple of months ago, I tried making a Cortado-based bridge pickup for the octave mandolin. It worked okay - better than the ad-hoc clamp arrangement I’d bodged together for last January’s Conflikt show, but not what I’d hoped. It was a lot more stable, but still needed lots of equalisation help.

I’ve built a new one, with a new design! It’s much ( Read more... )

A couple of months ago, I built a Zeppelin Labs cortado instrument pickup from a kit. I ended up using it on stage, attached to my octave mandolin with a plastic clamp.

It worked well enough, but needed a fair bit of equalisation, plus there was that whole “giant blue clamp” thing. It also had a fairly metallic sound, which is either good or bad, ( Read more... )

I guess I lied, there is one more stage monitor speaker post, sort of.

I’m still kind of curious about who “Lakeside Engineering, Seattle, Wash.” might have been. Here’s a scan of the logo, off the better old patch panel, now removed. (The worse one had been partly painted over. I’ve saved both, I might add. No good reason, really, but it’s not ( Read more... )

I can paint during blackouts, I can play with handheld sequencers during blackouts.

Basically, I got bored and started making theme songs for tacky game shows of the 1970s which never existed. None of these were good, of course, but this one was probably the least bad - I figure it’s circa 1977, a slot-machine celebrity-trivia-themed game show ( Read more... )

I have basically implemented a very old joke from Poland about Soviet technology:

A Pole waiting at a railroad platform in Moscow wants to know the time. He sees a man approaching him carrying two large, heavy suitcases, and asks the fellow if he what time it is.

“Certainly,” says the Russian, setting down the two bags and looking at his wrist. “It ( Read more... )

I realised this morning that I could totally add Bluetooth to this monster of a stage monitor I’ve been rebuilding and upgrading. I’ve made it self-powered and compliant to modern specs, why stop there? It’s portable! It even has a handle!


( Read more... )

So yesterday I mentioned that the first stage monitor had some physical issues, and what the big one turned out to be is that one of the XLR sockets on the new control panel extended too far into the cabinet, and rattled against the tweeter driver.

That’s really annoying and generally not good, but fortunately I have some shallower ones handy, and ( Read more... )

As per Twitter last night, installed, it’s looking a little less like Star Trek and a little more like K-9. So I’m calling it dB-90.

There are a few more physical issues to work out (something rattles when loud), but it’s getting there. Here’s a video not loud, recorded after everybody else was asleep.


( Read more... )

So following up on materials suggestions made in response to the previous post on this stage monitor project, I’ve been playing with Delrin (acetal copolymer), a long-polymer-chain plastic.

It looks even more old-Star-Trek than the diagrammes I made. Seriously, I’m wondering if they made the bridge consoles out of this stuff. Cut a bunch of holes ( Read more... )

Now that I’ve had good test results from the Class-T amp I’m using to make those old stage monitors into self-powered stage monitors, it’s time to whip up a new plug panel for the new connectors needed - power, line-level input, and so on. This process is raising more questions than I expected, so this post is partly me thinking out loud, and ( Read more... )