It’s tax prep weekend! Well, for us at the Lair, anyway. So that’s where I’ll be for the next few days.

There is a good part: you stumble across fun reminders, like receipts for cosplay supplies, mixed in with all the boring things. They’re little happy moments. ^_^

(What, you don’t think supervillains pay taxes? Damn right we do. We’re not stupid. That’s how they got Capone, and unlike some people I could mention, some of us can learn from history.)

A disturbing related stat I read last night: 75% of the iTunes music library has never been downloaded. Not ever, not even once. I’m… kind of disturbed by that. Whenever I get discouraged, I should remember this number, because hey, apparently I’m at least ahead of 75% of bands who have managed to get albums recorded and online.

And I don’t even put my free tracks on iTunes, because y’can’t! iTunes is pay only! (But you can get the new free/tip jar single, “Thirteen,” off Bandcamp just fine right now. ^_^) So I guess that’s something.

Anyway, back to sorting zillions of little pieces of paper, all alike. See you next week!

Give this little Class-T amplifier a proper power supply, which I’ve finally done, and suddenly it’s MADE OF LOUD.

Yes, these are the monster stage monitors that I blogged about rebuilding before. But they’re still “passive” mains, which is to say, they need external amplification – like essentially all concert gear before about 15 years ago.

What I’m doing here is spending $23 (holy crow $23?!) each on bare-board Class T amplifiers, and $26 each on high-quality 24 volt power supplies, and making them into active monitors. This will let them be useful with modern mixers, which tend to not include amplification, expecting that to be bundled into the speakers themselves.

Being me, of course, I’ll leave the old-style functionality exposed. So they’ll be usable with both old and new-style gear.

Funny thing is, these monitors… they were famously terrible, but at this point, they’ve become actively pleasant to listen to. I’m doing an extended power test of the amp and power supply right now, and I’m staying in the room and listening to it on purpose, because hey, why wouldn’t I?

I know where the beat is at,
‘cos I know what time it is
fishin’ in the rivers of life
 

This post is part of a series on restoring infamous vintage stage monitors. Spoiler: they made good, in the end.

Social, which echoes posts between the band blog and several social media sites, and – even more importantly really – consolidates comments back so people can actually find them all, is losing support in I think three more days.

That wouldn’t be so bad because I’m happy maintaining my own code bases, but it relies on some sort of back-end intermediary, and they’ve been ignoring my requests to release that code so we can try to run it ourselves. They haven’t said no, they’ve just said nothing.

I’ve been trolling through the plugins site looking for a replacement, and I’m not seeing anything. This is kind of terrible, to be honest – my readership isn’t bad but most people who comment comment on Facebook and Twitter rather than using the comment system, here, which makes the blog look dead without that comment consolidation.

So… have I missed something? Do solutions exist? It’d be nice if solutions existed. Particularly for the comment consolidation. I don’t mind reposting manually if that’s what needs to happen, but wow I will miss that comment collection. I’ll miss it a lot.

Off to Vancouver for a show! Not one of mine tho’, we’re seeing Le Vent du Nord tonight at the Rogue.

I mentioned that the instrument pickup I built last week sounded really good if I used my finger, but terrible using their standard attachment methods. I tried attaching it using a plastic clamp, but at first, that didn’t seem to help, so I rebuilt the piezo portion of the device, without the double-sided tape which had confused me the first time around.

That’s had an interesting effect. Held on by hand, the sound is definitely different – lots more low-end – but I think I like it less. But at the same time, using the clamp now works – it sounds the same with the plastic clamp as it does held on with finger, which is a huge improvement, and makes it usable on stage.

This is definitely something which requires more tinkering, but I’ve got it far enough along to try using during Friday’s show. Because SURE UNTESTED GEAR WHY NOT right? Well, you have to test it sometime. XD

Time to fly. See you at the Rogue?

I’m making a backdrop! Not for the big show Friday evening, but for Conflikt opening ceremonies a few hours beforehand. What it’s specifically for will have to wait until then, of course – but I can say it’s Vaudeville-style, for foreground-style action. Which is part of why it’s so painterly. Those backdrops tended towards that sort of treatement.

Oh, and here’s a short follow-up to that pickup build report from last week: I’m going to have to redo the piezo disc. I wasn’t able to make a clamping solution work, and I’m hoping that a clean disc will pickup the low-end frequencies without so much fiddling. Fingers crossed!

Seanan McGuire posted an article today on why you need to leave reviewers alone. Authors Behaving Badly is kind of a perennial lol-topic in reader circles, and a stunning percentage of those stem from authors reacting – badly – to negative reviews.

She has a bunch of good reasons why you don’t engage such reviews, even if they’re just being mean. And all that’s fine. But a couple of people have posted about how hard that is, and I realised there’s something Seanan didn’t say, to wit:

If you’re staring at a negative review and itching to say something, don’t, not just because of all the obvious reasons, but because being reviewed at all – no matter how negatively – is a kind of compliment in and of itself.

Remember that. Even vendetta reviews are compliments, really, because they mean the reviewer thought you were important enough to talk about, even if just to try to take you down.

And leaving aside vendetta reviews – like the Rabids attempt to game Goodreads – a sincere but negative review also means they thought you were worth the actual time they spent. Even if they don’t admit it, the facts on the ground are that you were worth the time they spent actually reading or listening to or watching your thing, and the time they spent writing a review about it.

Remember: no matter how much they may’ve hated whatever they’re hating – and let’s say they hated it a lot – they still cared enough to take the time to write and post a thing about your work. In a world flooded with opportunities to read/watch/listen to/react to material, they listened to yours, and wrote about yours, which means that you’re worth that much to them, at very least.

And it’s not symmetrical. They’ve handed you the big advantage. After all – you’re not writing about them, now, are you? No.

Good. Keep it that way.

Since I’m starting to play Anna’s octave mandolin in concert occasionally, I want to get a pickup of some sort attached. Yeah, I can play into an instrument microphone, and I’ve been doing so, but wow I hate that. I hate being tied down into a single place on stage.

A couple of months ago I ordered a Zeppelin Labs “Cortado” pickup kit. I’d planned to try making it into a boundary microphone/PZM – and I probably will order another kit to do that – but since hey, I need a pickup, I have a kit, let’s see how this works when built as actually designed!

I started working on it during yesterday’s DIY Music Chat on Twitter, mostly because it seemed fitting. It’s a small kit, and one of the easier builds I’ve made. Here are all the parts except for a missing ground wire. I don’t know what happened to it, but I have lots of wire so it was no big deal:

Populating the circuit board was very trivial. They did warn you about the transistors, which is good – I have a grounding strap so I used it. But it really was just insert-into-holes-solder-on-backside work. The instructions do walk you through technique, so if you’re new to this, the detail they provide is nice.

The only surprise was that my serial number was in the series that needed a small mod to the circuit – instructions were in a service bulletin. This was only an issue with some of the units in my run, so this may’ve been optional, but I went ahead and did it. It just consists of adding a second resistor in parallel to the included one.

Assembling the piezo pickup is probably the closest part of any of this to being difficult. First – and I’m a little confused about this – you attach the double-sided tape to the back of the disc, and trim it. This doesn’t seem to have any function and I’m not 100% convinced this isn’t an error in the instructions.

Then the red wires which come already attached have to be removed, and replaced with leads from the shielded cable they provide with the kit. That involves stripping the end of the multi-lead cable, bundling the shield together into a connector, and stripping the ends of the other two wires.

The two central wires get attached to the piezo disc, exactly where these are attached:

Then you put a layer of electric tape on either side of the discs (for electrical isolation, which makes the double-sided tape redundant, which, again – instruction error?), then wrap the whole thing in the provided copper tape. It’s important to make sure the bottom side – which is how it attaches to instruments – stays very flat:

Then that aforementioned shield ground is soldered to the copper tape. Also, you should make sure the joins on the copper tape are nice and conductive, which means lots of weird-looking not-actually-random solder spots.

Shielding is pretty important in applications like this, because you’re dealing with small signals at the pickup, no matter what. So it’s important to get that right, and right throughout. Which is why the circuit board gets mounted inside the tin which is provided with the kit.

Drilling that tin was the biggest problem I had, honestly. You need a 3/8″ drill bit, and I didn’t have one of those, so I had to go buy one. And I bought a nice one that was supposed to be super-good at drilling smooth holes in metal. That did not go well, but since that’s not the kit’s fault, I’ll not dwell on it. Anyway, I managed to hide the damage.

The next step is connecting a ground connection on the board to the tin itself. Again, not difficult, but important – what you’re doing is grounding the entire circuit and pickup, to block radio frequency noise. That connection is in the upper right, here:

Once you’ve done that you bring in the wires from the XLR connector, to attach to the circuit board. Those wires are also shown in the picture above. Then on the other side of the board, you do the same thing with the leads from the piezo pickup, just like that:

…and screw the board down inside the tin. There’s a spacer to keep the board from touching the metal case, which is now a shield housing.

And that’s literally all there is to it. Throw in a couple of tight zip ties to keep cable stress off the circuit board, and you’re done with construction.

Now, use is another matter. For long-term attachments, they say to use the included double-side sticky tape – it’s permanent, though, so be sure you know where you want it before applying. But, as above, they already told us to use that sticky-tape. So… I’m not sure what’s up with that.

For temporary attachments, they suggest things like holding the pickup down with painter’s tape, or poster tack. I don’t have any poster tack, but I tried the painter’s tape, and that didn’t work very well at all. It collected sound, but it sounded really midrange-heavy, really tinny – it didn’t pick up any of the low end at all.

So then I tried poster-weight “command adhesive” strips, the removable ones 3M makes. I didn’t expect that to work well, and it didn’t – though I did pick up some more of the octave mandolin’s low end that way, so it was a step in the right direction.

I was starting to get worried that I’d done something wrong in the pickup at that point, so I tried just holding the pickup against the octave mandolin’s face. That worked just fine (10 second mp3, open strumming) so I think it’s just issues with making a good attachment.

Since the user instructions say that you can try plastic clamps to attach the pickup, and those are cheap, I’ll be buying one to try that. I’ll have to space the clamp off the pickup itself with a layer of foam or something, because of wires, fragile pickup disc, etc., but I hope it works – I really don’t want to be playing into an instrument mic even for one song at Conflikt. And held in place by hand, the pickup really sounds good.

Also, the noise level on this thing is hilariously low – they promise a low noise floor and they really overdeliver. VAST TRACTS OF SIGNAL – _{tiny noise floor!} Well done there.

I am still wondering if the difficulty I’m having is caused in any way by the double-sided tape being inside the pickup bundle. I know I didn’t get that wrong – there are photos of how to do it in the instructions. But I’m wondering if you’re supposed to skip the electric tape on that side if you use the double-sided tape, and they forgot to mention that.

I’ll drop Zeppelin a support note it. If I was supposed to leave it out, well, I have more copper tape. I could re-do this pretty easily if that’d help. I’ll report on that, too.

Anyway, if the plastic clamp test goes well, this will definitely turn into a recommendation. I’ll try that this Friday, and report back. Given that this kit only costs like $25, it’d be a good addition for very little money, so I hope I can end up recommending it.

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio and other DIY audio projects.

Now that mobile view is working again, I think we’re about 99% back to normal here at the Lair. Some of the old comment sections are weird – items like “likes” and “reblogs” have moved from being little summaries at the top of the comment section to showing up as actual comments, but only in old posts, not post-rebuild ones. But we’re at about 99% now.

We also discovered that the blogroll is entirely depreciated at this point unless you’ve had one since 2012 or so, which means that’s gone now. (Sorry!)

But on the plus side, nested comments have been a thing for awhile, apparently? And I didn’t even know because they weren’t showing up as such because of the same kinds of legacy reasons. WHELP THAT’S FIXED NOW, so here we are. That’s nice, so it’s not all bad.

In other news, we sure do have a lot of brute-force root login attempts coming from mainland China IP addresses now. That’s neat. Also, some script kiddie toy is making amusingly wrong guesses about the structure of crimeandtheforcesofevil.com, and looking to apply exploits that simply can’t exist because welcome to l33t hax0ring 102, blogroot isn’t always system root.

Now we just have a zillion other websites to get back online…

Anyway, if you see anything too weird, let me know. Thanks.

We had to bring the webservers down due to a rather disconcerting situation wherein we still aren’t actually sure what happened, but it very much was a burn-it-down-and-start-over situation.

Most things here on the band blog are working, but site-wide, we’re a bit of a mess. We’re doing what we can as we can do it. Performance is impacted at the moment and will continue to be.

And yes, we’re all too aware that the Thin White Duke has left us. Here’s something from his brand new album, Blackstar, released just three days ago, on his 69th birthday.

Today and tomorrow are the last days that the “cyber2015” code will work at checkout. It’s for 20% off everything on our Bandcamp site – not just Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album, but everything, including the Free Court of Seattle books, Faerie Blood and Bone Walker. Plus everything else on the merch page.

plus other stuff too

Also, I’ve just handed off the single to Conflikt. I wish I could just throw this out at you now, but I can’t, it’s a 2016 release and I did it for them, so I have to be good and have to wait. Which is really hard, because I’m not good at that. I MADE SHINY, LOOK AT IT!!!1! is just too much of my nature, I admit it.

ngngngngngngngh oh well. I guess I’ll just go bury myself in some other project. (but shiny!)