Building upon my successful board creation of last weekend, I have now completed the soldering of the main board - which puts me back where I was many, many weeks ago. This whole exercise is becoming somewhat episodic as work and home commitments phase in and out, preventing me from the rapid progress I had originally envisaged. Be that as it may however, I am still just as motivated to finish this as I was in the beginning, I now see that I am in this for the long haul. I will be moving house in 3 weeks or so, and everything will become frantic around here, so I doubt I will find a lot of time to work on this until after that madness is over, however, when in the new house I will have a lot more space for working and actually prefer the idea of initial switch on and testing in my well appointed new garage with permanent bench bristling with test equipment, rather than the folding table I have now.
Hmmm. If I told you this was tricky last time…it’s even trickier now! Either way - we have got some new stuff for you.
When presenting the riffs of this unnamed fast song - Marcus had an idea about a lyrical theme with the keywords “car chase, thief, crime, police“.
To me this sounded perfect along with Marcus’ speed riffs, so I started drafting on a theme which would involve some kind of car chase. To make it a little evil and heavy metal I added the theme of DEATH! (It always works - really!)
This afternoon I completed the turret board - hurrah! I’m now in a position to rebuild the board to the higher standard I crave. With the correct tools, making the turret board turned out to be pretty easy, I would say an hour from start to finish. The first step was to accurately place the plan on the board as a drilling guide.
I’ll tell you right away that this blog project… is a risky one! Today I am going to be quite daring - and present a song suggestion which might be way beyond my vocal abilities!
Either way - here is how it started: Marcus and I had just finished the previous “Historical Failure” song. We were discussing what the style of the next one should be:
It is now time for me to show what kind of article we will start this blog off with. This is a summary of the first collaboration Marcus and I recorded - called Historical Failure.
It started with Marcus showing me a couple of riffs - he asked me if I could come up with some vocals:
This is Kristofer Dahl writing - most of you probably know me from guitarmasterclass.net. To those who don’t, I would like to describe myself as someone who loves the guitar, music and the internet. These interests have lead to me being active on all sorts of different places on the web!
Today - I am very happy to announce that we have just started a blog at guitarmasterclass - which is what you are reading right now!
Busy few days … Steve Vai was awesome and the trip to Atlantic city was a lot of fun. Work reared its ugly head however and I had to cancel most of my remaining vacation. This weekend however I made some progress. First, I assembled the drill press - not as trivial a task as you might imagine! It was pretty cheap but does the job really well. Surprisingly, the laser is a lot more than a gimmick as it lets you pretty accurately place the thing you are drilling. I did a test drilling of some fibreglass board to see how it would work out. Went pretty well, but my holes were not in straight lines - the trick for that is to clamp a piece of wood to the press as a straight edge - I’ll do that for the real board. Here is a pic of the assembled drill press, drilled board and the “X marks the spot” laser sighting.
(It always works - really!)
