Mission Accomplished

Jacob graduated and we had a party and ate food and hung out and ate more food and talked with people and ate more food....

A good time was had by all.

Beautiful Girls

Added a new track to the playlist. I'll admit that this was a second take. But otherwise no cheating. It's really hard to pull of 100% perfect takes. Hell, 50% would be good. So current system is a Frankenbradocaster > Boss Katana 50 Mk I > USB > FX Floorboard / Reaper (on Jacob's laptop that I've commandeered). Learning how to do EQ and post effects like reverb and such. Sound is still improving.

So This is Love ?

Same deal as before - first take / one take, no overdubs, no edits. And once again there are some times where I forget what's going on but all in all pretty happy.

Sounds OK

Guitar sounds pretty good. I have been obsessed with Romeo Delight from Women and Children First for a few weeks now. Eddie threw in some cool techniques like tapped harmonics and volume swells not to mention tasteful use of the MXR phaser for the swirly effects. Here's my single take with me playing over a guitarless backing track, no overdubs, no edits, going direct from my amp into a laptop. I lose the thread a couple times but overall pretty happy with it. Since it's direct input, there's no way (I think..?) to get feedback so the solo parts feel kinda thin and weird. Will need to figure out how to get a more meaty tone on the single note parts but pretty happy overall ! *EDIT - moved from SoundCloud to the playlist widget.....

It's Alive !

Just in time for April 29, the 40th Anniversary of the release of Fair Warning (the best VH album), I've got my Frankenstrat up and running. Here's some of the WIP pics and some geeky details.

As I've said before, I wasn't going for the replica so I didn't hand wind the pickups and dip them in paraffin like EVH did. I just went to Easy Music and asked if they had any Seymour Duncan pickups.

  Salesman was like, "hmm, actually we just got some in today"....they only had one in the order that was gonna work, and that was sign enough. 

Wasn't going to be able to get all of the other hardware upgrades in town so had to go online for the replacement hardware: 

• volume pot (500K low friction); 
• new nuts, washers, and locking nuts; 
• super fast action arcade button for a kill switch; 
• pickguard material blank so I could custom cut a new one; 
• string retainer bar;
• EVH D-Tuna to allow fast access to dropped D tunings
• and a Tremol-No which makes the Floyd Rose tremolo a tamable beast.

Traced out a new pickguard pattern and digitized it. Sent it to the laser cutter at work and tried not to be in the same room while the plastic was burning.

Millimeter accuracy. Super fast and works on all sorts of materials.

Had some spare holographic material sitting around and figured the guitar needed a holographic sticker in the SRV and EVH tradition so had another go with the laser cutter.

Had a brief primer on soldering and circuits and got to it. Not pretty but when I plugged it in, circuit worked.

Shielded the cavity and back of the pickguard with copper tape. Even though there's only one pickup and it's a humbucker at that, and noise shouldn't be an issue, figured better safe than sorry. A lot easier to to it when it's all in pieces. Plus kinda looks cool even if nobody will see it.

With all that done, neck could go back on as all the next steps required strings to be on for pickup placement and tremolo set up.

Since I wasn't really starting from scratch, but just disassembling a perfectly functional guitar (though with crappy hardware), I wasn't too worried about the neck pocket fit or the profile of the neck. And sure enough, went on with no issues and looked good and true.

Had to offset the pickup since the strings are slightly differently spaced than the bridge (you see this on a lot of guitars). Put on a couple spare old strings to make sure I had the pickup in just the right place and fashioned a shim to get the height just right. Fugly but effective.

Only one more component to deal with. The dreaded Floyd Rose. 

Got familiar with the back cavity with all the springs and claws and screws and OWWWW !

Yes. That's human blood (mine - don't worry). Officially a heavy metal rock and roll machine now.

Only a couple more hiccups along the way but mostly smooth sailing. 

Turns out replacing hardware means replacing fasteners, and sometimes having to get newer longer ones if the replacement doesn't match the original exactly.

Learned that Leo Fender really did put the volume knob in the right place on the Strat so had to move mine back to a more traditional location. Oh well, hole in the pickguard means you can see that sweet copper shielding.

In the end, got the FR balanced, strings locked at the nut, and stickers on....

One detail that did want to copy from Eddie's Frankenstrat was his fail-proof strap locks. Went to Home Depot and picked up some #8 screw eyes and in a nod to our dearly departed Sally Sparkle, I'll be using her old leash as the strap.

Stickers are a nod to both SRV's famous #1 as well as Eddie's 5150 guitar, both sporting super cheesy holographic stickers.

To the inevitable question "2020 ?!? Why celebrate that shithole of a year ?"

Simple. Dreaming / planning / building this guitar got me through that shithole (which, let's be honest is stretching out kinda far into 2021 as well). Can't get back Sally, or EVH, or all those too too many people. Can't have all those events we've missed out on (like Jacob having a proper senior year and high school graduation or Lily having 25% of college spent in lockdown) but this thing happened during that shithole time. A little bit of hope.

Next - so how does it sound?

A Very Good Week

Years from now, I will look back on this week fondly.

Biggest news is, of course, that Jacob got accepted into the Thorton School of Music at USC. So incredibly proud of him and thankful to everybody who made it possible. He started playing tuba in middle school, mostly because he was one of the only kids big enough to hold one. 

He tried a little violin and trumpet, but over the past four years he's fallen in love with the bass. He's only gotten more and more serious about learning music theory and found a great mentor in Dean Taba who encouraged him to pursue music as a career. 

Auditioning for the school in-person was impossible due to COVID, so Dean called in some of the top musicians in Hawai'i and we hired them and a videographer to create a short video showcasing Jacob on electric and stand-up bass playing both jazz and Hawaiian standards. Check them out (don't seem to work on mobile, so view full website version):

Kim (fully vaccinated) got to return to in-person hula activities, which in this case meant making the whole regalia of lei, dancing, chanting, and eating freshly prepared Hawaiian food in an awesome Windward side setting. 

She came home after a full weekend of rehearsals, filming, and performing and was so energized. 

How jazzed was she? Well, she started making a new drum and I helped out too. Fun with power tools.

At the Museum we safely moved a number of highly important surfboards off display in the just now closed exhibit and into a new storage location. Couple boards were over 250 lbs and more than 17 feet long so it was a logistical, engineering, and conservation puzzle to solve but the team figured it out. Plus got a great accidental renaissance  picture to boot:

Descent of the Papahe'enalu, 2021

I got my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine and made an appointment in three weeks for my second shot. I will admit that I got a little choked up. Truly awe inspiring what we can do when we focus up and work together. 

Said goodbye via Craiglist to my Monsta Carver skatesurfer. Bittersweet but it was time. I consider it a win that I skated with it for nearly 9 years without a serious injury. While I never truly learned how to drop in I managed to check off pool riding from my bucket list. Man I wish that boards were like this when I was a kid. So much fun. Carve on, my Monsta.

And the Franketstrat project continues. Pulled off all the (really really awful and cheap) hardware:

Gotta love the star inlay on the fretboard (or...not).

Took some sandpaper to the body to rough up the existing paint so that the spray paint would stick

Took the guitar to the museum so as not to inflict stinky spray paint fumes on my family and neighbors.

After some passes with black spray paint, I hung it up to cure by the butt of a dinosaur, which apparently is a traditional luthier thing. Dunno, seems weird.

Once the black was good and dry, it was time to mask off and spray the white. 

Didn't try too hard to replicate Eddies Frankie #1 but there were a couple details that I wanted to try and get in there.

I just love the those three thick and two thin stipes of black on the upper cutaway. Also there's that one little squiggle among all the straight lines....One difference was adding a painted headstock. Had all kinds of different thicknesses of masking tape from the model building toolkit, so it was fun to pull them out.

Main thing was I wasn't going to stress about it. Didn't take super long and just sort of went for it. 

Mostly 1 inch painters tape

Adding racing stripes and ready to paint

Next Step - New Hardware

To be continued

Nice text to get

 

The Frankenstrat

Instantly recognizable, lovingly emulated, crassly copied.

It's safe to say that the Frankenstrat is the most famous single guitar in the world. Yeah Clapton had The Fool; Jimi had that poor Strat at Monterey; Prince had a bunch of really cool guitars; Angus and his SGs are forever associated with one another; maybe SRV's "Number One" could give the Frankie a run for the money.

Frankie 1 - 1975

The Frankenstrat is like the ship of Theseus (or the Vision): over its life it was changed, repainted, taken apart, reassembled, until practically no original piece was left from the monochrome thing that Eddie cobbled together in 1975. 

And, as I looked into it, the Frankenstrat is the center of an almost Kabbalistic level of interpretation, reconstruction, and historiography.

Seriously. Some people have an obsession with this guitar that borders  on the unhealthy. 

There's a guy who checked VH tour schedule against the LA area weather reports to try and figure out what day EXACTLY did Eddie add the red to the previously black and white guitar. He'll tell you it wasn't March 26th 1978 !!! It wasn't rainy that day and Eddie said he painted it on a day with rain. 

On Ebay, dudes sell packages of reliced hardware (no - does not mean 'had lice added to it again' but to turn into a relic ie. stuff they've rusted and dipped into muriatic acid to age to make look 'authentic') so when you build a replica, you can have everything just like, well, a version of the guitar at some point.

People build replica Frankies and burn down cigarettes on the headstock between the tuners to get 'authentic' scorch marks. I saw one guy on a forum ask what brand of cigarettes Eddie smoked so he could nail that detail too. Considering EVH died of a recurrence of throat cancer, maybe we should not celebrate that aspect....

The best are the people who will sell you a 1971 quarter (gotta be from the Denver mint, man, none of that Philly shit)  so you can shim it under your whammy bar just like Eddie did. How much will that quarter set you back? Just $13 before shipping.

When I was deep in my model plane building obsession, I really did sweat the details and tried to make the most spot-on replicas I could. There was one F-16 in particular that on top of a $40 kit I bought aftermarket decals for another $20 and an in depth history of the Israeli Defense Force that set me back another $60 so that I could make that sucker perfect. Dropped like $120 on that hunk of plastic all told.

As I thought about it, I don't want an exact replica of the Frankie - for one thing, you can just buy those which would be the cheaper faster easier option honestly - if you bought all the same hardware, you'd wind up spending just about as much AND have to do all the work AND probably (nah assuredly)  not put it together as well as a luthier.

So, I'm not gonna yuck anybody's yum. 

You want to get the exact same Schwinn bicycle paint that Eddie used for your loving replica? Go nuts (though you're out of luck since they don't make that shade anymore - don't ask me why I know this). 

You want to throw in the same type of pickup in the neck position that Eddie himself couldn't figure out how to wire up but left in anyway just to fuck with people? You do you.

So the idea is, find a cheap guitar that plays ok, take it all apart and give it a paint job that's an homage to EVH. Throw away shitty parts and get proper replacements (not boutique, but nice solid pickups, real pots, etc) and then add some details (functional and otherwise) that I don't have on my two main guitars. 

Found a likely subject on the Honolulu Craigslist. $200 and a trip to Pearl City later, let me introduce you to the victim:

NEXT: Disassembly and paint prep

On this day

Important day, March 23. 

 On this day 79 years ago my dad was born. Called him up to wish him a happy birthday before I went down to the basement to do emails and next fiscal year's budget, since I don't go into work to, you know, work now. Socially distanced and unable to have a real get-together way over there in Arizona, my dad's birthday pretty much consisted of going to Costco and getting a mocha freeze. 

Fortunately, my dad appreciates the simple things in life: he even gave me another phone call later in the day to let me know that he was enjoying that sweet chocolaty coffee goodness. 

But more germane to this blog post is that on this day 42 years ago Van Halen II was released. 

I've been playing a lot of guitar during the COVID work from home regime, way more than I had in probably 30 years and VH II has been in very heavy rotation during the lockdown / pandemic. Which is interesting (at least to me) because I had never really listened to it very much. It came out before I had started listening to anything but pop and disco music and long before I ever touched a guitar.

 

Fair Warning has always been the VH album for me. It was dark, moody, no cover songs....definitely the least pop record of all the Dave albums (apparently there were a couple singers after DLR left....hmm...who knew?). 

But after Eddie died (and my coworker... and Chadwick Boseman....  and my dog... and those half a million Americans and untold others around the world - just fuck 2020 already), I started going back through the VH catalogue and listening to the albums that I hadn't paid as much attention to.

And man, VH II is a blast. 

Sure it has a cover but I really like their take on "You're No Good" (plus there's that Tucson / Linda Ronstadt connection) and yeah, "Dance The Night Away" is likely to induce a diabetic shock but goddamn is it catchy (Jacob says it's his favorite VH song...and he's heard a lot these past few months).  "Somebody Get Me a Doctor", "Outta Love Again", and  "Light Up the Sky" are just badass rock songs and "Beautiful Girls" is (chef's kiss) the perfect self-deprecating goofy-ass Dave song all driven by that sick RIFF. And if you spend some time (and have a delay and a chorus) "Women In Love" is fun too.

FLASHBACK

I first started playing guitar in the summer of 1986. Within a week I was playing hours a day. By the fall I somehow convinced a friend at college to let me play one song with their band in the lobby of our dorm (eternal thanks, Jimmy Bi). 

First public musical performance? 

My take on the VH cover of "You Really Got Me".  At that point the VH version of the song had only been out about 8 years, which makes my head spin now. 

I can still picture it all these years later. Wore a shirt with a Swiss flag on it and blue medical scrub pants....I guess I thought that was the most EVH outfit available to me.

I was terrible, timing was horrendous, basically sounded like I had only been playing for a couple months (well, true) but man was it fun. 

In those early days, I would go through four guitarists in a sort of cycle, spend a couple weeks on each, learning songs, and trying to get those sounds. 

Angus....Eddie....Jimi....Stevie Ray....rinse and repeat. For years. Years. 

I played along with the albums and tried to cop their sounds with the only guitar that I had.

Sure, I listened to others and loved to learn and play Zeppelin and the Clash and Clapton and Jeff Beck and Redd Kross and the Fluid and Velvet Underground and on and on, but those were the four that I would return to again and again.

But Eddie's stuff was always beyond reach....my guitar didn't have a tremolo so couldn't do all the crazy dive bombs, didn't have money for pedals, but more importantly I just couldn't muster the discipline to really nail the hardest fastest stuff. Yeah, I could fake it...play a few measures of recognizable parts of "Eruption" (natch) or the main riffs of "Panama" or "Hot For Teacher" or "Unchained" but note for note? No way.

That was fine, there was always AC/DC - no effects required, just guitar and loudness....

FLASHFORWARD

Not a poor college student anymore and also a bit more open-minded, I started to collect effect pedals. By the time COVID hit I had a board with a wah, flanger, phaser, delay, overdrive, distortion, a couple stunt pedals that make your guitar sound like organs and synthesizes (omfg they are so much fun), a looper, a switcher to keep them all working together, and even a fricking CHORUS (80's me would've been SO disappointed). Also by now I had a Strat (which I got in the mid 90's) so the Jimi and Stevie sounds were a bit easier to try and emulate. Plus a couple amps to play all those pedals in stereo. Super fun.

I'd given five instruments to Lily and Jacob (this is the Lilyandjacoblog - had to work them in here somehow) in the last 8 years (if you count basses, which some people do) but I had successfully resisted guitar acquisition syndrome for myself for decades. Actually had only ever bought myself guitars in Tucson, Arizona....

I had what I needed and all was well.

But since last October when Eddie died, I started to think....Frankenstrat....

I should totally build a Frankenstrat.....

TO BE CONTINUED

Nine years later.....

Second Obama administration.... Kim gets a new job.... first kid goes to high school.... Brad gets a new job (same place though)... Kim gets another new job... *trump*... second kid goes to high school.... first kid graduates high school and goes to college... global pandemic.... Sally Sparkle dies.... second kid applying to colleges...

The new faces of Bishop Museum

Jacob and Tutu spent a Friday afternoon in March walking around the Museum and pretending to have fun with all the cool stuff here. Not much acting required since we rock.

They were filming a commercial that will be running during the Merrie Monarch Festival starting tonight.



Jake got the full treatment with makeup and all....



Definitely cool to see Jake on tv whacking the air cannon that he helped prototype a couple years ago.

Yes. Yes. Yes. A thousand times Yes

Community is coming BACK! Lily and Jake were heartbroken when it went on hiatus. when I broke it to them and explained what hiatus was it was like announcing a death in the family - "I have some bad news you guys..."



OK. Now start watching the damn show everyone. Then DVR it and set it on auto repeat since the cable company probably tracks that kind of stuff and it'll get back to NBC somehow.


On another tv related note, we have just finished the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I'm so glad that I have kids of the PERFECT age and who ate the show up since I would've felt ridiculous watching it alone.

Amazing art, attention to detail, story arcs, sub plots, and moral dilemmas that you don't usually expect to be aimed at the 8-12 year old set.

Actually applauded and got a bit weepy during the last 4-part tie up the loose ends, climactic battle with bad guy, plus denouement episode.

The Honorable Cory Booker

Mayor of Newark responding to a reporters question about whether marriage equality should be put to a popular vote in the wake of its passage in the state legislature.



And that my friends is how a politician steps up and defends civil rights. Good to see public officials that call it like it is. Well done.

Donation sent.

Just Off the Workbench

Two recently finished planes. One old, one new.

First is an RAF Mosquito that disrupted a daytime Nazi rally as part of a three plane a nuisance raid. A black eye for the Germans but the raid cost the lives of the pilot and bombardier/navigator on this day in 1943.











Next is a F-15C from the 65th Aggressors squadron out of Nellis AFB, Nevada. The squadron is part of the Adversary Tactics Group and the planes are painted in (primarily) Russian camouflage schemes. In this case a SU-27 Flanker. This particular paint scheme is only a few months old. Haven't done an in flight model in a while. Think it turned out nice.













Geek out with all of the other pics at my Model Planes web album.