Hello earthlings! Today we drop the per-order for our next album and total invasion. My friends and I Lum, have gone through a transformation musically. We hope you can find the time to head over to our page and check out the funk we’ve been cooking…..13 tracks coming your way soon. Until then, please enjoy two new ones out now.
https://lumband.bandcamp.com/album/extraterrestrial-wet-dream
Peace and Funk
Lum
Hello earth. Today was a good day to put out a single. Some BirdsReturn. It’s a collaboration with author Courtney Jensen to
accompany his next book in his fantasy series. His first book, The
Crown and the Caged God is out now available on Amazon or Bonstanbooks.com. This song
takes place in a medieval type world, sung in a tavern after mourning
the loss of a desolated city. I promise it sounds much more cheerful
than that description. We tried to emulate what happens with oral
traditions overs generations, where words often get changed or
misinterpreted. So we passed the song around a few times between
each other without truly seeing the written original lyrics.
Courtney is a great writer and I promises the book is not your
average fantasy novel. So please check out all he is up to at
CourtneyJensen.com and his youtube channel.
I also wanted to announce my next album, Extraterrestrial Wet Dream which should be out before the year’s end. It’s a funk/soul/disco/jazz album. I know... a total left turn from the previous album. But this it the point of these albums. To try new things. The inspiration started from late night jams with my punk band’s (Born Shit Stirrers) founding member Paul Blair on bass
Special guest will all be announced soon, but so far we have, Trevor Brown on drums of People of the Abyss. Our first album together with him on drums in16 years, since our time together in the hip hop band Lost History. Also long time collaborator Jan Bart Leeuw adding keys and samples and Melisa Delgado on viola.
I hope you enjoy these releases. We all put a lot of work into them.
Love, Lum
Seems art and humanity are values being questioned these days because of new technology. This was 100% human made. This is a subject the author talks about from time to time on his youtube channel. Which usually has various weekly short journal subjects. Ranging from topics around writing, art, society and even old video games which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@courtneyjensen
End of broadcast for the day!
Enjoy
So I've recently been more comfortable calling myself a recording engineer and mixer. I recently got some work via England to record a local band, the Slicks, all the way here in Fukuoka (although the members are spread out across Japan now). Funny enough, when I told other musicians around town that I was recording the Slicks, everyone said, "I used to listen to them in high school!" So unbeknownst to dumb me, I was in a cool opportunity to record an influential band. The Vinyl Ep is out now on Private Scandal and put out by Connor Dobson here:https://privatescandal.bigcartel.com/product/slicks The band sounds great even if they hadn't played in many years together. They didn't miss a beat. Very 70's punk sounding.
The Telecaster. What some would call simple perfection or a blue collar working man’s guitar is a 74 year old design. While there have been many other iterations of it, the original standard modal has had very few changes to the design by the original company who launched it, Fender. As great as the guitar is, there are 3 major design flaws that really effect it’s playing ability and should have been modified on standards off the factory line many years ago. As much as I would like to blame “boomers” or the stubborn allergenic-to-change guitar community, truth is, most of us just want to emulate our heroes who owned the same old guitars with their flawed designs. So Fender keeps making them the same way. The good news is we can mod these changes fairly cheaply and easily. Here are three mods that should be standard on Teles to make them more playable.
1. Replacing the Jack Plug Dish Thingy
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| Worst ever. |
2. Intonating the Three Saddle Bridge.
While some newer models have the 6 saddle, fully intonatable bridges, the old style bridges are made for 3 saddles. Each sharing two strings and usually at a flat angle. This makes the higher positions on the guitar neck become out of tune. I know some people say this is part of the charm of a Tele, but I’d rather play in tune. No one listens to a record and hears an out of tune guitar and says, “gee, what a great Tele.” You can buy compensated angled saddles out of a variety of materials. They’re usually spot on with a little adjusting.
3. Angling the Selector Switch like a Stratocaster
This won’t bug everyone, but if you switch pickups in the middle of a song then the Tele will have you fumbling around trying. There is a reason the Stratocaster has an angled pickup selector switch. You can use it on the fly much quicker and easily. There are replacement control plates which do this plus moving the volume knob back a bit to allow for quick switching.
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| 24 years of corrosion under the old plate |
Runner ups.
The neck pickup. I tried for years to like them. Tried many types of traditional styles. I don’t like them. Personally I think replacing them with anything is an improvement.
Top load strings on the bridge. You can bend the strings better and it seems to be less bright then the through body string option.
In Series wiring for the middle position. Despite playing a lot of funk, I hardy ever used the stock parallel wiring.
Until next time space cadets
We've come a long way. From shitty closet recordings to the first vinyl I fully mixed. I think it's our most eclectic album yet. My old college roommate even pitched in with a tune he used to play at drunken parties. Hopefully everyone enjoys it, or isn't too offend at the very least. First 100 orders get a limited poster. Available on 12 inch vinyl, CD, or digital download.
In other news, in the off chance your in Japan and near me, I'll be playing my first solo gig after at least a decade. OK, back to work. I'll be back with more to say on various subjects again soon I hope...
Love, Lum
Well, here it is. 12 tracks of a genre I never thought I’d record.
Well kind of one genre. Really Americana I guess. But there is some genre bending with some heavy stuff, funk and even hip hop. Took me years to
appreciate country music and basically a lot of digging around in the
past dusting some stuff off. I think I came up with my own take on
it, although far from traditional. I really wanted an excuse to call
up old band mates as well as current and new ones, to make a kind of
time capsule of a bunch of people who I’ve enjoyed playing with
over the years. There are even some family contributions as well. If
you weren’t on this one I hope I can catch you again in the future.
This really was challenging and fun to make (even if I was getting
obsessive about it). I think I needed this. Big thanks to all of
the players on here. Couldn’t have done
it without you! Really! Sorry this blog has been quite this year. I do have tons of pedal stuff backed up to get to. I've just been in the studio a lot, which is a good thing. I'll try to get back to it soon.
Peace and Love
Ah the downtrodden Boss CH-1. It was a exciting pre-show purchase for me a 20 something circa winter 2003. Having grown up on a healthy dose of lush chorus from Nirvana to The Police, I was looking to recreate those tones. I'm sure my heart was set on a Electro Harmonix Small Clone or Poly Chorus, but the lowly Guitar Center at the time only had the Boss. It did the job, but as time went on (17 years now), as I read the bashing of it on various guitar forums, and as I played friends' Poly Choruses, I realized the damn thing didn't do all I wanted it to. I wanted the wacky quick modulation.
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| First mod attempt |
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Here's the new schematic in case you can't find it. |
This guy changed the value or the R63 resistor to around 1.8K. He also had some other interesting mods which I will get into later. I didn't want to be too invasive to my pedal, so I opted to add a 8.2K resistor in parallel to the original 15K to cut the total resistance value to around 5.3K. Worked great! Wacky quick modulation galore! However, I got greedy and tried poking around at the circuit to find what controlled the delay time on the chip. I had some luck with the R43 resistor, but dropped the pedal in doing so. The modded, very small resistor pictured above snapped off. Upon many failed attempts, I finally settled on bridging the connection for 0 resistance. I got even quicker modulation up to 99% of the rate control knob. However it folds in on itself at the very last 1% maxed position to cancel out the movement.
So, here's the disclaimer* DON'T TRY TO MOD THESE SUPER SMALL COMPONENTS UNLESS YOU'RE WILLING TO DESTROY YOUR PEDAL OR UNLESS YOU HAVE THE PROPER TOOLS AND SKILLS. Seriously this was a pain to mod. I think bridging the resistor ended up being easier in the end. Maybe next time just a small dab of solder over the resistor.
Now another mod I see a lot of people attempt is adding vibrato to a chorus pedal. They are in fact the same circuits but with chorus, it adds the dry guitar signal. Where as vibrato is just the modulated signal only. So, if you have a stereo chorus (two outputs) like my CH-1, usually you can just add a jack plug connected to nothing into the output B or second output (usually) This will make the pedal send the second output dry signal to nothing. Muting it, turning your main output to the amp into vibrato. Hope this helps some people! If anyone figures out a safe why to mod the delay time to flanging and deeper chorus, let me know. Here's a quick video sample. (of the earlier mod plus vibrato)
