Corina

 I can feel the strength coming back to my brain as I get into blogging again. The literary muscles are a tad sore but it feels good to be back and writing again. As I've explained in an earlier post, I got back in to the blog after making my brain "flabby" by using Facebook as shortcut to getting validation through the "like" button. On a related note, I've mothballed my other blogs, because it just seems to be a lot more work having more than one blog and even more disorienting trying to decide what posts should go with which blogs. So from this point forward until I have a very good reason to do otherwise, this blog is going to catch everything - whether it be my travels, about the development of my mad luthier skills (should that be with a "z" as in skillz?), some electronics project I'm working on, or just a random post that may or may not involve something to do with robots.

You're all old enough to do a search so I'll leave it to you to sort things out.

Who is Corina?

A guitar. Corina is my first "real" guitar. Now, I have built a functional guitar out of a 2 x 4 block of wood that I mounted a telecaster bridge and pickup to the top. If there's been one thing I've learned from all the other things I've built over the years its that if you're trying to build something for the first time, make a prototype. Besides being useful for design considerations and a proof of concept, prototypes provide a very unique and invaluable function. They allow mistakes to be made. I made a lot of mistakes with the 2 x 4and each one was an unforgettable lesson. I made routing mistakes, I made wiring mistakes, I made alignment mistakes, I made mistakes with the decals, the finish, the knob. And each time I made a mistake, I made sure it was one I wouldn't repeat when I made Corina.


Corina started out as a few scraps of pine that were glued together and routed in to the shape of a Telecaster body. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this process, but I do have some photos of my next build that uses a single plank of yellow knotty pine. The template I used for this build and Corina came from Ron Kirn. A quick google search of that name will get you to the site where his son-in-law sells these templates. Actually, the templates ore not of a Telecaster but of a 1950 Broadcaster. Technically the same body and dimensions, but Ron makes the distinction.

 

In the photo above, I've taken the router template off and will use the edge already cut as the template to route the rest of the body from the blank.

Here's the body cut away from the the blank. This is the same procedure that I followed to make Corina. Routing out a body from a blank is technically simple on paper, but in actual practice there are a lot more considerations. I made a lot of mistakes and very expensive sawdust and firewood. When I received the Ron Kirn template, it was advised that I use it as a master to make "working templates." You could use the templates to make your body and route out the cavities, but one slip and you've ruined your template and will have to buy another. I made a working template from some inexpensive MDF I got at the local Home Depot. 9 bucks is cheap insurance.

The neck was a purchase from eBay and I spent less than $100 dollars on it and that includes shipping. Considering that it is a Japanese made Fernandes neck made from a single piece of quartersawn maple, I seriously underpaid. The neck is easily worth two and a half times that. It pays to use eBay alerts to get what you're looking for if it isn't listed.

Here's what Corina looked like before I installed the clear red pickguard:

Her she is after I installed the pickguard:

Corina is modeled after Fender's Telebration branded La Cabronita. Instead of a TV Jones pickup in the bridge position, I decided on installing a humbucker-sized P-90. People who have played her and have had a lot more experience playing love playing her, and I've had a few offers to buy my first guitar and requests to do custom builds.

 

Why did I name her Corina?  Well she's named after a girlfriend I had when I was going to junior college. Very cute, very sweet, but what I remember best was that she fit very nicely in my arms. Makes sense to me.

Next time: Travels.

Leo Fender never learned to play the guitar. But I will.

I have no idea what fuels my recent obsession with building guitars. Well, I sort of do. For the last few months, I've been buying parts on eBay and bolting together different guitars. Why would I do this, even though I can barely play three chords? First and foremost, I just wanted to see if I could. Musical instruments have been something of a mystery to me. I never understood the how and why and the mathematics of musical instrument construction. Why are the frets on a guitar's neck spaced the way they are. Why are some necks shorter than others? What is intonation? How the hell did Jimmy Page play a guitar with a freakin' bow?

Second, I thought that to truly master a musical instrument, you have to be able to build one yourself. I may be geeking out here a bit, but if Jedis had to build their own weapons in order to master them, it only made sense to build my own guitar and then learn to play it. Good thing I didn't have an overwhelming desire to play a harpsichord.

But years before I learned to build a guitar, back in 1999 when I was working in Thousand Oaks, I had gone into Guitar Center and bought a cheap beginner's Squire Strat. Not the ultimate guitar, but not a bad starter either. It cost me a whopping $99 bucks. Today that same instrument would cost a guitar noob at least $140. Along with the guitar, I bought a computer program that came on a couple of CD-ROMs that promised to teach me guitar so well that I would be able to play an entire song after only a few weeks of instruction. What they didn't tell you on outside of the box was that the song was Frère Jacques. But being eager to learn to play a guitar and becoming a rock god chick magnet outweighed my embarrassment of learning such a dorky song. After all, even rock gods had to start somewhere, right? I would have been just as ecstatic if I the first thing I had to learn was Marsey Doats.

The downfall of the program was that it emphasized incorporating rhythm into learning notes which entailed tapping my foot in time to my strumming. I don't know about you, but learning to play something as complex as a guitar is difficult enough. Throwing something in that requires additional physical coordination is for me like trying to learn how to tap dance while field stripping an M-16. The program wasn't very good and a few days of trying to play something as lame as Frère Jacques while tapping my foot became tedious and made me feel like an idiot. Not to mention that at the time I was staying with my sister so she was driven insane by my ham fisted attempts at playing and then mangling an already idiotic tune. I quit playing after about 8 days. I despised that program so much that weeks turned into years and it was over a decade before I even touched that guitar again. For some reason, either guilt or the fact that I have a hard time letting go of something for which I've paid over 50 bucks, I dragged that guitar along with me through three moves over 10 years.

What finally got me back in to learning to play was a confluence of several events that essentially kicked my interest into high gear. One event was completely random. Being somewhat bored one day and doing what I normally do when I'm somewhat bored, I came across something that caught my eye while I was surfing around the internet. It was a guitar shaped like a shark.

Normally I would have looked at this and said "Oh. Coool. A guitar shaped like a shark." But as luck would have it, before seeing the awesome Jay Turser Shark guitar, I had also seen that a new XBox 360 game was going to be released called Rocksmith. Knowing that these two things existed made me say "Oh, cooool. A guitar shaped like a Shark. That I can connect to an XBox 360. Must. Have. Now." Now before I get too far into this story, let me regress a moment and go back a few years. When some of my friends got a Wii back in 2005 or so, the games that they loved playing were Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I tried playing a few times and even though the gameplay was good, I kept wondering why they didn't incorporate a real guitar. How difficult was it to make an interface that would let you use a real guitar? I knew that USB cables existed that let you connect a guitar to a computer through the instrument jack, so why why why isn't there a game that would let you use a real guitar?

Flash forward a bit to around the end of the year in 2010, when a game called Power Gig came out whose gameplay was something along the lines of Guitar Hero except it used an actual 6 string electric guitar as a controller. I almost bought it. But at the time I had just gotten off of unemployment and had found a job in San Diego that kept me there for a few months doing some contracting work. I didn't have my own permanent place or a game console so dropping a few hundred on a game and console after starting a new job didn't make any fiscal sense. On top of this, I didn't even have a television to connect a console. As it turns out, Power Gig and the game controller/guitar were an immense flop, lost in a sea of music rhythm games that were saturating the market at the time.

Flash forward again a few more months to the beginning of 2011. Sometime around April, I stumbled on an announcement from Ubisoft about their release of a game called Rocksmith. What was exciting about this game release was that any guitar with an instrument jack could be used. Better yet, it was more of an educational tool than a game. Perfect. Even though it wasn't scheduled for release until September, knowing this sparked my interest in playing the guitar again. This knowledge, coupled with my discovery of the Jay Turser Shark, and the spoils of my new job formed an idea in my head: I would learn to play the Shark guitar using Rocksmith. It was so simple. Why wouldn't I want to learn how to play a guitar shaped like a freakin' shark? Unfortunately the JT Shark was a discontinued item. It was really hard to find them new. I would have lost hope if this were the year 1999. But it's not and there's eBay Alerts. So, after just a few weeks, eBay sent an alert message for a Jay Turser Shark. Better yet, the auction had a "Buy It Now" option. Without hesitation, I bought it.

By this time it was late June, and Rocksmith wasn't going to be available until after Summer. I had a guitar shaped like a freakin' shark in my possession. I did not know how to play it. This is where the last piece of the puzzle that would launch my journey to guitar rock god status fits in: Groupon.

I had excitedly signed up for Groupon when I saw that they were offering guitar classes at Guitar Cities in San Francisco. For a mere 98 bucks, I would get 6 lessons.  Deal. That should get me started and learning the basics before Rocksmith is released. By the time I finish those 6 weeks of lessons, I should only have to wait mere weeks before I could start playing Rocksmith in the privacy of my own home. So I went to my first lesson, with my Shark in tow on the BART, on the 26th floor of California 101 in San Francisco. I had a great teacher named Nikolay who got me through the basics. Upon first seeing my unorthodox guitar he said that he had never seen anything like it, but he thought it was pretty damned cool. Then he asked if he could hold it so I handed it over to him. Now what he didn't know was that even though I didn't understand much of what I was doing, I did know that there was something very wrong about the guitar when I first got it. The strings seemed too high off the fretboard, even when I tuned it, the notes sounded wrong after I played the few notes I did know, and wasn't quite what I would expect coming from an electric guitar. I compared it to the aging old Stratocaster that I bought 12 years earlier which was in tune and had been set up correctly for me all those years ago by a tech at Guitar Center. So, after some trial and error, some fiddling around with the saddles, and a lot of back and forth comparisons to the Strat, I managed to get the Shark to sound right, at least to me. 

So after handling it and actually playing it for a few moments, Nikolay said that the action was good, the intonation was spot on, and the neck felt really good in his hand. I had absolutely no idea what he meant when he said "action" and "intonation." None at all. I wasn't completely clear on what makes a guitar neck "feel good." So when he asked me if I had set up the guitar myself, I asked him what that meant.

"It means that you've set up the saddles so that the intonation is correct and that the action on the neck is low."

Still not quite understanding what he meant I just said "Yeah, sure, I did all that. Uh, I just fiddled with the saddles and made sure that the strings weren't high on the fretboard and that it sounded right when I placed my finger on each string at one of the frets."

"You've never done this before, have you?" Nikolay was on to me.

"Well, not until last night. It just seemed to make sense that a guitar string shouldn't be a quarter inch off the fretboard and it should sound right and not buzz when you place your finger on the 12th fret. Did I do it alright?"

"Yeah, you did pretty well for someone who didn't really know what they were doing."

The rest of the lesson was just basics; pentatonic scale, finger positions, that sort of thing, and as soon as I got home I looked up what it meant to set up a guitar properly and it seemed that my instincts were correct. Encouraged by Nikolay's assessment of my noob luthier skills, my interest in building an electric guitar was sparked now that I had a rudimentary understanding of what makes a guitar sound good. And that got me to wondering: just how hard would it be to actually build one?

Next time: Corina.

August 25th, 2009

Wow, was that really the last time I even posted to this blog?

Seriously?

I guess that I can blame my lack of posting to the fact that during that time away I've been unemployed, traveling in Mongolia, doing rally stuff, re-employed, living in Carlsbad, living in China, and then getting another job, getting terminated from that job, and being rehired again at the same exact place in a different role and title. All that since I last posted to this blog.

So yeah, I've been busy.

So why a return to this blog? Because I saw myself getting lazy. Facebook lazy. It was a simple matter to post a funny quip, a lame photo, or an even lamer status update on Facepile and reach a wide audience of my friends. So lazy in fact that I slacked off in my writing skills and very nearly forgot that I had a few blogs that I used to regularly update. Forgot about the fun and challenge in writing for the sake of writing. So I'm taking up blogging again in an effort to flex my literary muscles and firm up the area of my brain to the left of my lateral cerebral fissure.

Facebook made me realize that I was taking shortcuts in being what I thought was creative. Instead of posting original content like I used to in these blogs, I was instead copy-pasting some item I had found on Failblog, or linking to a news story, or worse yet, hitting the "Share" button on other people's posts. How lazy is that? Lazy-ass indeed. I also found, with some consternation, that I was posting things that I thought other people would react to in hopes that they'd hit the "Like" button or post some comment. Gone was my desire to write for writing's sake and in its place was an attention whore who needed people to press that "Like" button for validation. There was a time that I would blog things because I liked the freedom in not caring what other people thought, when it wasn't about the number of hits I got in a day. It was more about getting things out of my head and out on (virtual) paper and maybe for the occasional reader who stumbles on my posts and gets it.

It's not that I hate the Facepile of social networking per se, but when it comes to maintaining the creativity and the thought process that comes with actual writing, Facebook is to my writing what a McDonald's Super-sized McMeal is to my physical fitness. Sure, it satisfies a basal need but it's not something you want to be doing every day, especially when you want to write or run a marathon. So after using Facebook for the better part of the time away from this blog as my near-exclusive method of updating the world of what I was doing, I found myself trying to condense complex stories and experiences into a couple of sentences and maybe a photo taken with my iPhone. (Yes, I caved and got one. Best device ever. EVER. Shut up...) Being limited to just a couple of lines had reduced my normally verbose descriptions to:

The sunset was awesome today. So awesome...

When I really wanted to say:

Yesterday,  as I was coming through the Caldecott Tunnel, I caught an amazing view of the sun setting over the Bay. The clouds had turned the color of orange embers, reminiscent of the color of charcoal briquettes on a summer night right before that first steak hits the grill. It was the perfect beginning of summer backdrop for the silhouettes of The City and the bridges. The view reminded me of the reason I came to live here in the Bay Area and symbolized the rich panorama of experiences I've had since leaving Sacramento almost 20 years ago. I don't think I ever want to live anywhere else.

I take it back. I do hate Facebook. Damn you. (Fist shaking)

Facebook does have its place, and though I most likely won't abandon it completely, I'll be posting more to my blogs. I think that my left brain will be thanking me for doing that. The three people that subscribe to this blog's feed might want to thank me too. If they existed.

Also, go to hell McDonald's. (Fist shaking)

Taking the HTC for a spin around the blogs

I'm testing out the new HTC mobile blogging device I recently got. Kick-ass device with q "qwerty" keyboard. Nope, non of that virtual keyboard iPhone crap for me, I like it when my keys click. I don't have a full-sized virtual keyboard so why should I settle for something like that in miniature. With this HTC Ozone I can get positive feedback about whether I keyed in a character or not. I'm in seriously deep like with my new HTC.

Building the beast

I did some cleaning and sorting through stuff recently and found - or rather re-found - some things that I had purchased years ago and either forgot about or just didn't have the time to fiddle with.

I found a couple of high-end audio transformers from Taiwan crammed into the corner of one box. After seeing those again after I had put them away 9 years ago, I felt compelled to either use them or sell them on eBay. You can probably guess what I decided to do with them.I spent most of that weekend designing and building a small amplifier around them. The sound, however is much bigger than the 1.3 watts per channel it puts out. The transformers have surprisingly good bass extension down to 15Hz and when coupled with the Klipsch LaScalas can play uncomfortably loud if I wanted.

Another gem I found was the burned-out carcass of an old Dynaco ST70. I had been planning to recover the transformers and whatever else I could use. I had a brand new spare front end board lying around and mounted everything to a chunk of plywood.At 50 watts per channel, it'll be considerably louder than the 1.3 watts my other amp will have. But instead of the nice finished appearance that the other amp has, this one will look like something out of a mad scientist's lab.

Which, of course, was the exact look I was going for.

Acryl-iPod

Sometimes one person's blunder is my chance to make something cool that everyone wants. Case in point: one of my friends here at work inadvertently threw her iPod Shuffle in the washing machine when it was attached to her laundry, effectively bricking it. (Does this term even apply to something as small as an iPod Shuffle? I guess it's akin to saying that you have footage when you've taken video on a camera that has no film or tape. Ah, this modern world...)

After futiley trying to dock it in hopes that iTunes might recognize it and allow a reset, I decided to open it up and look inside. I didn't expect that I'd find anything that looked wrong, as these small circuit boards are almost completely composed of surface mount components and are washed after their wave soldering step, so I knew that the electronics were probably still good. I suspected that the lithium ion battery was probably not that happy to be dunked in soapy water and was rendered useless during the wash cycle.

It wasn't very easy opening the tiny case and removing the circuit board, but I found instructions online that helped me along. Once I had the thing open and put a meter to the battery, I discovered that it held no charge whatsoever. Still, I decided that the only way to see if the shuffle was still functional was to connect a battery to the terminals. I didn't have any tiny lithium ion batteries handy so I used the next best thing: a battery from a cordless phone whose charger I had lost years ago. It had almost the same voltage as the old battery, 3.6V instead of 3.7V and knowing that the iPod probably wasn't going to be that picky, I went ahead and soldered the battery in. I connected a pair of headphones and to my surprise, music started playing.

My next action was to see if iTunes would recognize the tiny skeleton of an iPod Shuffle. I had a docking cord from Monoprice.com that allowed me to plug the Shuffle into the USB port of my computer without the annoying docking station that normally comes with an iPod Shuffle. After a few moments, the Shuffle appeared in the menu. I decided to restore it so I could find out if I could upload music to it. After it restored, I found I was able to load it with music.

So now I was stuck with the tiny circuit board of an iPod with a battery 5 times bigger than it. What to do? I decided to glue it to a block of acrylic approximately the size of a normal iPod. After carefully removing the navigation disc from the shell and attaching it to the buttons on the circuit board with some super glue, I carefully aligned the headphone/USB jack, circuit board, and battery on the acrylic block. I bought the block at a local craft store; normally they're used as a stamping block for clear acrylic stamps and as such, had an alignment grid etched onto the back. The grid comes in handy for aligning the various components on the block before glue and high-strength double-sided tape attaches everything permanently.

Once I was done, I ended up with a rather cool looking device. Since the new battery has 7 times the capacity of the old one, I decided to see just how long it would last. After fully charging the batteries, I connected a pair of headphones, turned it full blast and let it run. I left it in a spare bedroom with the door closed and check it everyday after I came home from work. It ran this way for 7 days. I charged it again and tried to see how long it would run at half volume. I got impatient after 10 days and turned it off.

I tried giving it back to my friend, but she told me to go ahead and keep it since I had put in so much work into it, and besides, it was a lot bigger now and didn't have the clip that made it perfect to take along on runs. Other friends did want one and have been offering their dead Shuffles to me to convert into Acryl-iPods.

Kitten for Hoku

Well, Hoku's been kinda bored. I'm gone most of the day and she's left to sort out her own way to relieve the monotony until I come home from work. Despite being the brilliant conversationalist that I am on the evening and weekends, she's still alone 40 hours a week.

What Hoku needed was a companion to keep her company (I know that was redundant, but it was either make a parenthetical comment here or interrupt the flow of my freeform writing and think of something more clever, thus derailing my train of thought. Crap. Now I've done just that. Anyway...) and I thought that I would get another dog. But that in itself presents problems. It's not bad traveling with one dog and a simple matter to take Hoku to my parent's home when I have to travel, but 2 dogs complicates matters a lot more than one. Hoku is already a handful at races and meets, and having two dogs to look after would be a challenge. Addtionally, I thought that dumping off two canines at my parent's home would be too much for a couple of retirees, and seeing as I'm going to be gone for three months next year, making my dad take care of 4 dogs was too much.

So, what then? Something between a dog and a gerbil that is mostly independent, won't destroy the place and won't mind at all if left alone while Hoku and I go to the races. The obvious choice was a cat. Hoku loves cats and not in that "they're delicious" kind of way. That decision made, I went off to the Berkeley Human Society in search of a pet for my dog.

Right away I was drawn to a very cute kitten whose colors were described on the tag as "dilute tortoise" whatever that meant. Here's what a dilute tortoise looks like:
She's already integrated herself and made the apartment her playground and she's only been here 2 days. Upon meeting Hoku for the first time, she made the requisite hissing sound, something I would probably do if I'd never seen a dog before, but she didn't run or even growl at Hoku any further. It was probably more like a hiss born out of surprise more than warning. After that, the new kitten's curiosity got the best of her and later that evening she went and gave Hoku a very close sniff. Hoku, being the dog she is, treated the new cat as almost dangerous, and has been taking great pains to give her a wide berth, until she figures this new roommate out.

It didn't take long, and after 48 hours in the same apartment together, managed to conspire against their benevolent mutual guardian to hijack the couch.
Funny thing is, they even have similar facial expressions.
My next dilemma, one that has bugging me ever since I decided weeks ago before I got a kitten, was what to name her. Getting out a pen and paper (I recently re-discovered writing with pen and paper, something that lends itself well to brainstorming in a way that a neatly arranged keyboard can't) and played around with a few anagrams. I wanted something unique that would be a combination of letters from the names of other pets I've known over the years. I thought of Shandy and Isis. Shandy was my very first pet, a rat that I had while I was living in the dorms. She was perfect in every way except her lifespan. Isis was a cat that I adopted when I was living in my first off-campus apartment. Everyone loved her and she was a great cat, capable of some extreme cat toy driven stunts. Rearranging the letter in "Shandy" and "Isis" gave me a number of interesting combinations, however the only one that made any sense as far as being a name for a cat was...Daisy Shins.

It made sense in some weird way. Hoku and Daisy Shins are going to get along just great. They're already beginning to emulate each other.