The Reverends Guitar Buffet 2: Amp Edition

We’ll begin today’s buffet with a non-guitar. Get used to it as I will be posting many other instruments besides guitars. First up we have one of the most obnoxious, but intriguing instruments ever heard. “Savart’s Wheel, designed by Bart Hopkin, is widely acclaimed for the fact that it makes the most obtrusive, obnoxious and irritating sound imaginable. The instrument is made up of a series of disks of graduated size mounted on a motorized spindle. The exposed outer edge of each disk is lined with ridged material, with ridges spaced about 1/8 inch apart. As the spindle rotates, the player holds a sort of plectrum against the ridges as they rotate past, resulting in some number of ridge-bumps against the plectrum per second. That frequency is the frequency you hear; it is what provides the pitch.” More…

Next up is a shiny gadget with many knobs and switches that I’m just dying to adjust. The guy at Beavis Audio Research has got me all excited about this ridiculously overly engineered fuzz unit. Basically it’s a bunch of different circuits in one box with the ability to adjust and blend them. I could try to tell you all about it, but just go here to let him tell you. Now if only he would sell them.

Next up is this little cutie from Simple Amps. I’ve never played one myself, but they sure look cool. The guys over at Simple amps have created some awesome looking stuff and from what I’ve herd in youtube videos they sound decent considering the low quality recordings. Once the Astrochrist website becomes a little more sophisticated we might start selling ad pace to comapnies like these and the following.

While we’re on the topic, Trillium amps look awesome too. I don’t know much about how they sound, but goddamn, wouldn’t that just look lovely in the library?

Two words: Fuck Yeah! Tone King amps is yet another purveyor of retro-liscious thermionic audio machines. Good thing I have a teflon coated keyboard. I mean to say I’m ejaculating.

Aw, look who’s back! Little Supro. I guess someone’s revived the old brand name and has begun to build amps and guitars again. I have no idea where to purchase or even try this equipment. I don’t even know if they make anything left-handed, but I’ve sent an email. I’ll let you know what I hear.

Rock over London, rock on Chicago, Pepsi, the un-cola

-Elron

I Love Stumble!

If you’re not sure what stumbleupon is go here and start using it immediately (come back here soon though). For those of you who know, here are a few links I wanted to share today in an effort to help people get to know us as a band. These are just links to things that either amuse, interest, or otherwise arouse us. Of course you can look up all of our favorite links by looking us up on stumble, but here we’ve sifted through the junk for the good stuff.

We’ll start off with this awesome site, Retro Future, that teases humans with what life could have been like if they had just kept with the goal of making life this awesome instead of pursuing football and light beer. What you don’t know yet is that much of space is actually a lot like the scenes depicted on this site.

Gas, sound waves, fire.. are we lighting a fart or are we watching a Ruben’s tube? I could explain in text here, but the man in the video does such a lovely job so just watch it.

I love James Brown! I was thoroughly enjoying his music long before his death and am upset that everyone is all weepy eyed over Michael Jackson. I don’t care that he might have touched some kids, that he mutilated his face to feel accepted, and is a complete weirdo, I really don’t… well if he did touch those children, then that’s no good, but anyway, I hate his music. Sadly, he is alleged to have inspired and influenced so many songs and dance moves. Well let’s forget about ol’ Michael. Check out this awesome clip of James Brown teaching you some groovy steps… I wonder what he’s on…

And we’ll end this post with a brief science lesson. This is a video about superfluid helium, a popular sex lubricant in space.

Haha, he said superflow!

-Elron

The Reverends Guitar Buffet 1: DIY Wah Wah, semiprecious plecktrums, and whole lotta magnets.

Since landing on your planet here, I’ve been so excited about all the guitar resources available on this interweb. I wanted to start an article that allowed me to share links and pictures to some exciting guitar stuff.

I found this page about how to build your own wah-wah pedal on the DIYguitarist website. It looks pretty cool, I’d like to try and build it one day. Yeah, that’s it, now the amateur porn I produce will be even more homegrown thanks to the live soundtrack I can use this pedal in.

So everybody who’s anybody knows that Eastwood guitars are awesome. They might not be the highest quality replicas, but when they look that cool, who cares? Of course you can go look at Eastwood’s site here, but I wanted to show you the other site belonging to the owner showing off his rather impressive vintage guitar collection. It’s not just a bunch of the same old Fender and Gibson stuff you’ve seen over and over again, it’s also a bunch of awesome and obscure European and Japanese models (my favorite!).

Okay, I would probably never pay for one of these, but I would still love to hear what they sounded like and felt like. These gemstone guitar picks from Picks and Stones are certainly advertised to be fancy and worth it. Maybe they, but with the way I lose picks, I think I’ll leave this one in the studio.

I guess I’ll wrap this up with my favorite place to buy pickups. There’s a site called Guitar Fetish that sells all kinds of parts and bodies and such, but the real reason I go there is for the pickups. Now I’ve only bought two sets, but so far they’ve been awesome. Original I bought the Dream 180s, a couple of badass lookin’ humbuckers. The double exposed pole pieces gave it a pretty tough look. I purchased them for my first Epiphone, a Dot that came with awful, muddy, toneless pickups. I was looking for something much brighter so I thought I’d try the 180s. After putting them in, they did blow the stock pickups out of the water, but ultimately they weren’t bright enough. A year or two later I purchased an Epiphone SG that came with lousy pickups comparable to those that came with the Dot. It was time again for change! This time I got brave. I knew I wanted the SG to be the beefy snarly wolfhorse that many people want it to be so I intended to take the 180s out of the Dot and put them in the the SG. I then purchased the Lipstick humbuckers a la Danelectro. I own a Danelectro repop and these pickups actually come very close to the 90s era Danelectros with a distinct humbucker flavor and output to them. They were absolutely perfect for the Dot. I wired the neck as a single coil and the bridge as a humbucker. I was worried at first about the way it would look, but ultimately I like it. It’s come to be just about my favorite guitar to play.

Well that wraps up this edition of Guitar Buffet. More cool stuff next time.

-Elron

Greeting Earthlings

So Astrochrist went and got a web log. You win universe, you big fucker. You see I, Rev. Dangerwood, just started my next HTML class and am required to keep a web log for said class. While I have my own web log under my own personal human identity, this one remains a separate entity altogether existing now as a mere experiment. Ultimately I intend to embed a regular RSS feed into our website, astrochrist.org, but until then this will have to suffice. I am not sure what Astrochrist has to gain from maintaining  an RSS feed in the immediate future, but hopefully we will build enough of a following to utilize this technology instead of having some static site… maybe it’s a bunch of crap, I don’t know yet. Anyway, now we at least have a more immediate way for visitors to leave us feedback when we actually have content worth viewing. I highly doubt anyone will be reading this anytime soon, but if you do and happen to subscribe, I suppose you’ll be updated as I update this account. Again, I appologize that there is a severe lack of interesting content here, but that will surely change as I intend to upload art, recordings, and various links I find interesting. Also, Astrochrist will begin recording it’s debut album very soon. We’ll certainly keep you updated with photos and news about the process and of course we’ll let you hear what we come up with before we release the album for sale and maybe distribution sometime in the distant future.

-Elron