- Mixing a 4-song EP I recorded with Cory back in November
- Designing and testing the Falcon Heavy v2.0 pedal
- Mod work on my Sunmachine Fuzzo))) and Basic Audio Scarab Deluxe pedals
- Having fun with the new Volca Bass synth
- Listening to great new stuff from Nilsson to Run The Jewels to Martin Gore
Category: News
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January Projects
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The Best Music We Heard In 2016
Here is the best music we heard in the past year. Most, but not all, was also released in 2016.
Top 20 (in random order)
Phases, “For Life” (2015) – Z Berg from The Like, Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet, Jason Boesel from Rilo Kiley, and… Mike Runion, from my high school in Ventura. This is a super-group that put out a BANGER of a synth-pop, party-time, feel-good record. I hope they come to Denver before they vanish or whatever the eff! -C 
Autolux, “Pussy’s Dead” (2016) – Out of left field, my album of the year; stunning musicianship and craft, and just as satisfying as a casual listen. -h 
Deru, “1979” (2014) – Warm, meditative synth/tape sketches sound like rose-colored memories feel. The level of ambience is juuuuust right, baby bear. -h 
A Tribe Called Quest, “We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service” (2016) – This album is so big, both in scope and emotion, and I’m still breaking it down. It’s hard not to feel so heartbroken whenever Phife Dawg has a verse, because he died, and because he’s rapping about a lot of really sad stuff. But it’s also a funny and BANGING record, thanks to Q-Tip’s productions. They managed to make a reunion record with wall-to-wall cameos without sounding forced or inconsistent at all. That’s amazing. Jack White, Elton John, Kendrick, André 3000, and it all makes sense. Despite the fact that it slays, this is a very meaningful record. -C 
Numero Group / Various artists, “Titan: It’s All Pop!” (2009) – This archive of Kansas City power-pop from the late 70s and early 80s is for fans of Big Star and Thin Lizzy; an auditory Camaro ride to the burger stand. -h 
Klaus Schulze, “Timewind” (1975) – Wunderkid on a cosmic synth journey, and you’re invited to co-pilot. Bonus track “Echoes of Time” is my fav. -h 
Radiohead, “A Moon Shaped Pool” (2016) – Fans loved it, but I hear AMSP as a deck-clearing before whatever zig the band zags next, and that has me more excited than most of what’s here. Still a top 10 record though. -h 
Wode, “Wode” (2016) – Perfect, elemental hi-fi crossover black metal; a workhorse of a record, it always delivers. If you like anything loud, give it a spin, like I have a couple times a week all year. -h 
Run The Jewels, “3” (2016) – I doubt that they could put out a record I disliked, but even bands I love tend to drop off over time. When RTJ dropped their third record on Christmas with no warning, I was excited and wary for a record that did the same sort of thing they’d already done. But it’s different and it’s awesome and the production keeps evolving. El-P’s beats are astounding. “Call Ticketron” made me become a man in my very own car LAST NIGHT. -C 
Sheer Mag, “III 7″” (2016) – More hooks, more riffs, more heft to the lyrics than you might get on first listen; Sheer Mag continues an incredible hot streak. -h 
Carly Rae Jepsen, “Emotion: Side B” (2016) – Usually, there’s a reason b-sides are b-sides. In this case, Carly Rae just recorded a butt-ton of songs and had a big batch of real good ones leftover from the sessions. “The One” and “Cry” are as good as anything on Emotion. Embrace it! -C 
Kurt Vile, “B’lieve I’m Goin Down” (2015) – I’ve been reading his name on year-end lists for years, and finally heard “Pretty Pimpin’” somewhere – Target, probably – and was like “Damn, I gotta do that.” Aside from the fact that it’s a great record, it’s a perfect little time capsule for my summer of 2016. -C 
Tame Impala, “Currents” (2015) – Saw this on Howie’s honorable mention list from last year; filed it under “I’m resisting this band because everyone loves them and they sound like a band that’s too weird for radio but not good enough for my rotation.” Well, I’m an asshole; this record’s great. Psychadelic bass-line heavy jams with echoey falsettos and tight playing. Someone somewhere has likely done drugs to this record. -C 
Quilt, “Plaza” (2016) – There’s a kind of warm cozy spacey alt-rock that was perfected in the mid/late-90s, and I thought it was gone for good. They do it on this record and it’s perfect. It sounds like drinking tea in winter and listening to warm crackling records while restringing your guitar. -C 
Aleph Null, “Endtime Sisters” (2016) – This EP stands in for the band’s entire discography, which I devoured this year. Crushing melodic heaviness in odd time signatures; too cool. -h 
Young Bull, “Demo” (2015) – Lawrence’s finest channel Lemmy through modern stoner/desert thrash. These dudes deserve to be huge; their live sets are among the best I’ve seen ever, at any level. -h 
Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, “Stranger Things Vol. 1” (2016) – The whole soundtrack is amazing, but I could easily listen to the theme song over and over and over and over and over for a thousand-billion-brazilian years. It’s so creepy and awesome and 80s. -C 
Susanne Sundfør, “Ten Love Songs” (2015) – This was a random discovery from my pal Melanie’s Spotify “Drive Home” playlist. I cannot believe how good this record is. “Fade Away” is my favorite song of the year, hands down: I can listen to it several times in a row like I’m 12 with a “Basket Case” cassingle. -C 
Type O Negative, “The Complete Roadrunner Collection” (1991-2003) – I came to this via Pallbearer’s cover of “Love You To Death,” and was not disappointed. The Cure, sex, Sabbath, and humor blacker than a winter solstice’s midnight create a singular artistic voice. -h 
Inter Arma, “Paradise Gallows” (2016) – Raw, boundless, cavernous, sub-genre-defying, unrestrained epic heaviness. It took me a few spins to get into; looking back I realize it’s because “Paradise Gallows” is the first sui generis metal record I’ve heard in years. -h Honorable Mention:
Aesop Rock, “The Impossible Kid” (2016)
Bon Iver, “22, A Million”, “” (2016)
David Bowie, “Blackstar” (2016)
Deftones, “Gore” (2016)
Hammers of Misfortune, “Dead Revolution” (2016)
Lincoln Marshall, “Water” (2016)
Maxwell, “blackSUMMERS’night” (2016)
Operators, “Blue Wave” (2016)
The Powder Room, “Lucky” (2016) -
Larsen Expressive Feedback Loop
I finished testing and finally boxed up the Larsen Expressive Feedback Loop this morning. It’s good to have it done.
It’s more of a prototype than a finished product; while the circuit itself is really solid and I’m proud of its design, learning to work with wah enclosures was a giant pain and I had to jerry-rig several things with the hardware to get it to work.
Bit of a mess inside, but it’s loud and weird and fun.
The feedback potentiometer (what the foot treadle controls) is pretty sensitive; most of the play is toward the heel-down position of the treadle. If I were doing it again, I’d experiment with making a super-anti-log taper pot out of a linear pot and a resistor. Or, maybe I’ll upgrade this one with that in the future.
If I ever get around to making one of the doom records I’ve been writing, this thing will be all. over. it!
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Summer and Fall on the Breadboard
This week I ran across an email from July 30, telling Drew and Cory I’d started messing with a feedback loop circuit on my breadboard. It’s taken until this weekend to get it soldered up.
Testing, from about a week ago Feedback loops can be simple and fun, but simple ones have a lot of limitations. Two big ones are that many pedals do nothing in them (because the pedals flip the signal’s polarity, so feeding them back just results in a quieter sound due to phase cancellation), and that they can get excruciatingly loud, fast, if the rest of your signal chain has enough headroom for it (like if your amp is running pretty clean).
Here’s a pretty straightforward feedback loop designed by Beavis Audio I fixed those issues with a polarity inverter and limiting/hard clipping in the feedback loop. I also added expression via treadle control of the feedback amount, and two modes for the loop: always-on (regardless of feedback on or off) and only-on-when-the-feedback-is-also-on. (Mode names need work.)
Most pedals have one input, one output, and the circuit itself in a sort of loop within the pedal. A feedback loop effectively has three inputs (main input, loop return, feedback circuit output) and three outputs (main output, loop send, feedback circuit input). I hadn’t thought about all of that when I jumped into designing one, and all those signals crashing into each other results in a lot of parallel impedances and switching headaches I didn’t anticipate. Given the challenges, I’m pretty happy with the performance of the design.
It’s not quite finished yet because I seem to have burned one of the footswitch connections, so I’m waiting for a replacement part to arrive. I’ll do a video once it’s done.
That’s a lot of tech talk, but it’s pretty intuitive once it’s plugged in, I think; when you roll your heel back, you get more feedback. It’s super-fun to play and useful for anything from freak-out noise to gentle washes of added delay or reverb.
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Drew Interviewed in Moo! Magazine
http://moomagazinekc.com/static-images-drew-rudebusch/
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Drk Sats in KC Sat
2016 November 19, Saturday – Dark Satellites at Minibar, Kansas City MO, with Oh Dear Oh My, Ask an Adult, and Isaac Diehl. 9 PM doors, 10 PM show, $5, 21+
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Conclusion of the Saga of the DS-1 Lab
I’ve finished my DS-1 lab experiments (previously discussed here and here) and boxed it up. The full report is over on Mr. Furious Audio.
Insides… whoah. 5 component changes, 8 added components, 3 added toggle switches, 1 added potentiometer/knob 
All boxed up with rad art from Cole. The switch cover (silver) (but not the rest of the enclosure or the circuit/components) is from my very first pedal ever, circa 2000-01. -
Dark Satellites Mini Tour This Week
2016 October 24, Monday – Dark Satellites at Minibar, Kansas City MO, with Caroline and Walk By Sea. 9 PM doors, 10 PM show, 21+, $5
2016 October 27, Thursday – Dark Satellites at Vega, Lincoln NE, with Briner and Red Cities. 8 PM doors, 9 PM show, $5, 18+
2016 October 28, Friday – Dark Satellites at Gillies, Kearney NE, with Evanoff. 9 PM
Booking: marslightsnoise (at) gmail (dot) com
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Why Gear?
Some of us spend a good amount of time and energy on gear; searching, shopping, watching demos, even fixing, designing, and building new stuff.
Why not spend it on making music?
(I ask myself this, as the months pile up without a release… )
Making music is exploring, in many ways. Exploring new techniques, more advanced skills, different performances, writing unique material, and new gear. Gear is on the same spectrum. Different areas of exploration speak to different musicians, and gear is one that seems to speak to me.
Gear can be inspiring. For example, as I was finishing design work on my DS-1 lab yesterday, two new riffs popped out as I was fooling around and testing sounds. They emerged out of my interaction with the pedal; they wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
That validates the gear quest, for me, in principle.
Whatever keeps you exploring; do that.
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Fixing Pedals
Finished a couple of small soldering jobs this weekend.
The DS-1 (orange guy) is my very first pedal. Cole had added the Casper Electronics gated feedback mod a year or two ago; I swapped in a different transistor, changed the switching to a different leg of the transistor for quieter operation when the feedback is off, and added a “chaos” control (the knob on the side of the pedal) that can tame the feedback a little when it’s on. This transistor oscillates with the distortion all the way up; rolling back the chaos control can change the pitch of or eliminate the oscillation.
The Korg 301dl just had a broken pot; simple, though it was kind of a bear to replace. I couldn’t find a replacement pot with the same shaft as the original to accommodate the original knob so it got that clear one, which turned out to be easier to use anyway.
The DS-1 will go onto my Mars Lights board for the time being, until I finish the super ultimate modded DS-1 that’s currently in pieces.
The Korg will just hang around at home, which will be handy for times when my big board is at Drew’s. It has a cool feature set including two presets, separate high and low frequency damping on the repeats, a hi-fi / lo-fi blend, and a weird ducking control.
What’s strange is that the ducking isn’t very interactive with the input signal; it’s more like another kind of pre-delay and the control sets the amount of time it takes the delay signal to come up to its full level. That means that with the ducking maximized, if you hit a staccato note, you hear a bit of silence and then the delay fades in. The ducking I’m used to from recording and the TimeFactor is more like a compression ratio, and would fade the echo in immediately as the the input signal dropped on a staccato note.
It doesn’t self-oscillate at maximum feedback level, which is OK – I have the DE7 for that – and can make for nice ambient pad sounds.
I’d like this pedal a lot more if the delays spilled over from one preset to the other. It could actually back up my TimeFactor in a limited way if it did that, but we have songs – Nein, Stangray, Radio Edit – where I need an echo with a lot of feedback that spills over on bypass or when the preset changes.
I guess with the A/B box I plan to build and any two delays (like the DE7 and 301dl) I could back up the TimeFactor somewhat. Maybe I need two A/B boxes?
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h&s LPV Tracking Begins Thursday
Fourteen years of writing.
Five years of demos.
Fifteen months of planning.
Maybe most importantly, something like thirty years of brotherhood.
On Thursday I’ll start tracking drums for howie&scott’s fifth LP; Ten new songs plus four b-side type extras. Some of the riffs were written in 2002-03 along with the material that became signs.comets, while the newest song was composed this year. The demos sound a bit like everything we’ve ever done, plus some new elements.
It will be the first I’ve done the main drums for h&s since Bigger Sounds For Fewer Folks (!). It’s a logistical necessity given Scottie’s school schedule.
I hope to have drums done by the end of November. After that it’s anyone’s guess; a late 2017 release seems within reach, but life happens, too.
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A Rhodes To #LFK
Scott’s Rhodes piano came to Lawrence for a while.
It needed to be tuned so I’ve been working on that. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be; once I figured it out, it took about an hour. I used an electronic tuner, and a clean boost guitar pedal to increase the signal for the higher notes.
Nothing’s recorded with it yet, but it sure is fun to play.
