The Null Device Blog

Exhausted Bassist.

Originally uploaded by nulldevice

When a nerdy band and a stupid internet meme collide…

L0LDevice!

With some considerable gnashing of teeth, I’ve got the blog here upgraded to Movable Type 4.  I eventually plan to start using some of MT4’s more advanced features.  I gotta get the RSS feed back up and running too.

Actually, the upgrade wasn’t so bad in terms of the software, but MAN getting my old custom templates wedged into the new format was a bitch.  Which is why I pretty much just started from scratch.    I’ll be tweaking over the next several…um, okay for a very long time but at least everything is sort of baselined so the next blog update won’t be nearly as painful.

Davey Havok is my age, and he grew up listening to the same sort of stuff I did. It’s really no secret, despite the surprise of several million american teenagers – the B-side to Miss Murder was a cover of the Morrissey B-side “Jack the Ripper” (although you can tell they’ve only heard the live version) and there’s the presence of folks like Ronan Harris on AFI’s Decemberunderground. So all in all, it’s none-too-surprising that CexCells sounds an awful lot like it was written by people who really wanted to toast their favorite 80’s and 90’s bands.

That’s probably the best thing about the album, and also its major weakness.

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(Dan tried this a few years ago – at the first Reverence, actually – on the ND Blog and I thought it was clever. So I’m appropriating the style.)

Fanale’s giving us an intro. I’d better rub his head for luck. Ew, sweaty.

Shit it’s hot already. We haven’t even started.

Cue backing.

Ooh, I see Sega. “Gimme a chaal beat!!!” entirely for his and Ned’s benefit. Oh good, he’s smiling.

WOOOOOO this is fun! WOOO! Loud! Jumpingaorund and…oh, shit I have to sing! breathe, breathe, breathe…

Rock tha panjabi.

Hmm. Can’t really hear myself in the monitors. Oh well. Just yell for a little bit.

Motion to Adam to raise monitor levels. See him twiddling knobs. I think my voice just got louder in Chuck and Elizabeth’s monitor. Hmm, I think something got rewired wrong. Oh well, be a pro man, just roll with it.

One song down! Goddamn is it hot. I’m sweating like Dan. No, wait, Dan is sweating a lot more than I am.

Strap on the dumbek. Damn, this thing is girly. Well, it IS elizabeth’s…strap’s a bit too tight…can’t find the buckle…aw hell screw it, go!

Whack whack wheee this is fun now I know why elizabeth always looks so blissed out when she’s playing, this is kinda awesome.

Hmm, I might be hitting this too hard. My hands are starting to hurt.

Ahh the kids seemed to like that one.

Did I just say “holy balls” to a full crowd? Seriously WTF? Aaaand people are clamoring for pantsless Dan.

Everyone’s groovin to Wonderland. Excellent. Hey, Chuck is grooving to Wonderland! And if Emmalee’s theory is correct…

Easy on the vocal pyrotechnics there champ, you’ve got a head cold, you can’t hear your monitors, and your voice is already starting to go. Nothing worse than a bad vocalist who thinks he can sing.

Ahh hourglass, this one’s kinda easy for me.

Start singing to Aimee…and fakeout! Sing to William! Aww I don’t think he noticed. I’m neither sweaty nor russian enough.

Hey, Fanale’s got his eyes closed! Sweet. Grab his big meaty head and serenade him. Hee hee he’s playing along, of course. Aww yeah, that’s what this festival is all about. Feel the love.

Holy shit it’s hot. I can barely hold on to the fiddle, my hands are so sweaty.

Heh, Dan just shushed a crowd.

I’m shredding on the fiddle, I think. I can’t actually hear it, so I don’t know if I’m even remotely in tune. My hands are just sliding all over the goddamned fingerboard. Now I understand why people play fretted instruments.

fuck, I can’t stay in tune. Just saw on low C and hope nobody notices. Let Dan do his thing, this is His Song.

Whoa, the crowd is really digging this one.

Okay, is this one going to end? I coulda sworn it was shorter in practice.

There we go. Wheew. I’m about to drop the violin.

Big shoutout for Dan. Crowd goes nuts. Aww yeah, well he deserves it after that one.
Announce his last show. Don’t get too choked up. Aww shit I completley forgot the poignant remarks I was going to make. I hope that rambling came off as sincere and not douchebaggy. Jeez it looks like Amy K is about to cry.

“Return” seems a bit anticlimactic. Oh well, I need a break.

I…shit…what are the lyrics for the second verse? Dunno, make something up.

Prog rock wankout ending! Hmm, I had something rehearsed for this…oh well, just turn knobs. Sounds kinda cool.

Okay, that’s done.

Annouce reverence special thing. Where’s Brian? I don’t see him. Shit! Oh there he is. He’s having some toruble pushing through the crowd. Make obligatory cowbell joke to stall for time.

Hmm. Sometimes Brian drinks.

Kick in the backing track…nobody knows what this is yet. I thought the little intro thing would be enough.

Did I miss my cue?

First verse…and oh holy shit now they recognize it.

Ah, yeah, I missed my cue. Just rest until the second verse. Brian looks confused.

Shove mic in his face. SCIENCE! Oh hells yes the crowd loves the DarkNES. Oh man this is fun.

“Good heavens Miss Lunde”…hee awwwwwwww Brian’s such a sweetie.

Can I do the Dolby histrionic voice on the breakdown? Hey, howbout that I can! Hee!

Done! SCIENCE!

Awesome. I have no idea if that sounded even remotely good but I don’t care that was the most fun I’ve had at a show ever.

Okay I’m going to fall over. Time to go change into my “Stromkern Stole My Guitarist” shirt!

 

Parts

as the proud owner of a used Alesis DM-5 I’d toyed with the idea of using the trigger
inputs in the back for something.  Honestly, since I got the thing in 2004,
there was little other reason to use it – it was old and the internal sounds were
a bit dated. 

The problem arose from the fact that I didn’t own any drum pads, and wasn’t really
a drummer so I couldn’t justify spending hundreds on a set of ddrums or pintechs
or whatever.  I started buy building a set of electronic drums out of some
remo pads, using the plans on electronicdrums.com. 
While the pads themselves worked great, it quickly became apparent that I had no idea what to mount them on. I did’t want to buy a separate cymbal stand for each one, because I have limited room for storage. I tried jerry-rigging stuff out of coper pipe and industrial screws but I ended up with horrible cross-triggering problems.

So what was I to do?  well, for about a year, nothing.  Then a brief rewatching
of some old depeche mode videos reminded me of their “spookaphone”, a odd sculpture
of pipes that triggered samples during performances on their late 80’s tours. 
“Gosh,” I thought “It’d be cool to have one of those!”  Then I came to the
conclusion that I wasn’t sure what was stopping me from having one of those. 
I did some checking, and saw that Pintech made some tubular drum triggers. 
They looked decent, but also seemed a little, hmm…small.  And kind of expensive. 
Did I really want to pay $60 for a small tube?

I endeavoured to make my own.  My goal was to cut the cost-of-ownership in
half – 2 triggers for the price of one.

 



Early prototype.

My first prototypes were encouraging.  I had some leftover radio shack piezo
elements sitting around, procuring a 1/4″ jack was easy enough, and a quick trip
to home depot provided me with appropriate lengths of 1.5″ PVC tube.  I was
able to slide the element in, hotglue it into place, and bang on it to my heart’s
content.

Then I tried to figure out how to mount it.  It was then I discovered that
drum rack tube, which I had assumed was fairly standard in size, is narrower than
1.5″ PVC pipe.  No clamp I had was going to work.  I tried using a smaller
pipe coupler – not really meant to fit in the larger pipe but a few whacks with
a mallet took care of that – but it too was still too big.   I returned to
to my now-cluttered workbench and endeavored to try again. 

I tried using pipe joints and carriage bolts to stick the thing in a standard accessory mount. This emt with some sucess, but I had the problem that it now created a rather nice pivot point and after repeated striking the trigger would slowly rotate away from the striker. That was no good.

Hey, it worked!

I tried using a smaller PVC pipe, which was now too narrow to fit into a drum rack
clamp.  It occurred to me that if I could just thicken it a bit, it’d probably
fit fine, but I’d need something with a little “give.”  Good, old-fashioned
mousepad rubber seemed to do the trick.  I got it clamped in good, I wedged
a piezo in the tube…and promptly snapped the piezo in half.  Okay, that wasn’t
supposed to happen. I needed smaller piezo elements. Back to the Shack!

By this time, the clerks at Radio Shack were starting to recognize me as “the guy who keeps buying piezo buzzers and 1/4″ jacks.” One clerk pointed out that on this trip, I was buying a differnet size than normal and was I sure that this was what I meant to grab? I assured the guy that, yes, this was indeed what I was looking for. I took a bunch of smaller piezos home, and thought about ways of affixing them to the inside of a small PVC tube without bending or breaking them.

I thought about this problem for a little bit, and decided that there was no reason the piezos had to be inside, so long as they were firmly affixed somewhere to the tube and could pick up vibrations. I could just screw them tight to the end of the tube, and I wouldn’t even need to worry about trying to pry them out of those tiny plastic cases. I quickly rationalized this with some pseudophysics about swinging pendulums and mass-dampening at the pivot point or some crap like that. I plugged in the first one, and wouldn’t you know it, I had a working drum trigger. I drilled holes in standard pipe caps to hold the 1/4″ jack, spent a lot of time with a soldering iron placing big, ugly globs of solder on various contact points, and then I painted it. To dampen the “thock” of hitting a PVC tube with a drumstick, I tried wrapping the whole tube with rubber but that dampened the strike too much. In the end I just sprayed on some tool ruberrizer, and not only did that dampen a little of the noise, but it looked pretty cool too.

Hey, it worked!

I was quickly able to assemble a few more, and the drum clerks at Guitar Center kept wondering why I was buying so many rack clamps. I didn’t think “4″ was so many but apparnelty most people don’t come in and buy that many at once. Whatever.

Total cost:

• 8ft pvc pipe: $3.25 (of which I used less than half, so about $1.50 )
• 4 PVC pipe caps: $2
• 4 radio shack piezo buzzers: $10
• 4 1/4″ jacks: $8
• One plain rubber mouspad: $4
• One can spray ruberizer: $6
• 4 rack mounting clamps: $80
• Some speaker wire I had in the basement

So about $110 all told for everything. I could make the cost/item even cheaper by making more with the resulting pipe, but I’m fine with 4. I met my goal of keeping the 2-to-1 ratio of cost to comemrcial ones, and while I’m sure there’s some difference in build quality and maybe even playability, mine are also significantly lighter. If I rule out the cost of the clamps, then the cost/trigger ends up being like $10 each.

Granted, my own experiements were more expensive since I had several false starts, tried a few different sized clamps, etc. But hey, maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes.

I have also noted that right-angle cables are probably the smartest to use with this, as they don’t stick out and get in the way.

With the leftover parts from my experiments, I am also electrifying a cowbell to work as a combination drum trigger/cowbell, and I may use one to craft an integrated piezo bridge pickup for a tumbi.

Slightly more step-by-step photos At my flickr page.