Please enjoy this cover of the classic Chuck Rio tune, Tequila!

I’ve been teaching myself to play saxophone for about the last 4 months. Here is is my debut recording. I couldn’t finger the guitar chords, so my pal Eric graciously provided the excellent guitar work. I laid down the drums, handclap, and a temporary sax track in garageband, exported it as an MP3, and emailed it to Eric. He imported the MP3 into a new garageband project and recorded the guitar parts, then exported his parts and emailed them back to me. I brought his parts into my project, recorded final saxophone and vocals, added lime, salt, and mixed to taste.

Tequila!

Percussion, tenor saxophone, vocals – Steve Lodefink
Guitars – Eric Wolfe
Vocals – Ivan Lodefink, Harlan Lodefink

Superheros, Evil Mad Scientists, Supervillains, Trilateralists, Bilderbergers, Meteorologists, Oligarchs, Generals, Demographers, Spymasters, Epidemiologists, and well, who couldn’t use a retro sci-fi command console to monitor and control their worldwide concerns?

My son Harlan and his friend love to play “agents” and he asked me if we coud build “a panel that has a bunch of switches that turn on some random lights”. We worked on it for about 3 weeks, and this is what we came up with. The panel boasts the following features:

Main power switch
Home base indicator
World Cities indicator (blue)
Cluster1 (red)
Cluster2 (orange)
Global Red Alert Situation (backlit 555 flasher circuit)
Message record and playback ($10 Radio Shack digital recording module)
Larson Scanner ($13 from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

We used a combination of ready-made, kit, and custom circuits to achieve the lighting effects. The Larson scanner on the right – so named for Glen Larson who developed the effect for the Knight Rider and Battlestar Galactica TV shows – is available as a kit from Evil Mad Scientis Laboratories. The voice recorder module is sold at Radio Shack. The “Global Red Alert” flashes thanks to a circuit built around every beginning electronics tinkerer’s favorite little chip, the 555 timer IC. The flasher and it’s LED’s are mounted to the inside of the back cover, and shine onto some diffusion material which covers the map holes. The rest is just, well… a bunch of switches that turn some lights on and off. These other LED groupings are made up of 3mm blue, red and yellow LEDs that poke up through the holes in the map, Light Bright style, and triggered by thwacking some mini toggle switches.

The cabinet is made from some scrap Ipe wood, and some scrap aluminum. Ipe is beautiful wood, but very difficult to work with. It contains lots of natural waxes and resins that gum up drill bits, and no glue seems to stick to it. If you don’t have your pilot holes just the right size, screws will either bind, or snap right off like mine did.

Build photos on Flickr

I picked up this great Play Guitar with the Ventures “guitar phonics system” record album. I can’t wait to spend time with these lessons.

So, dust off your Moserite and learn with the Ventures!. Click the charts to enlargify. Click the links above each chart set to hear the instructional play-alongs. Enjoy!

Raunchy

Raunchy rhythm mp3
Raunchy bass mp3
Raunchy lead mp3
Raunchy play your part mp3

Tequila

Tequila rhythm mp3
Tequila bass mp3
Tequila lead mp3
Tequila play your part mp3

Memphis

Memphis rhythm mp3
Memphis bass mp3
Memphis lead mp3
Memphis play your part mp3

Walk, Don’t Run

Walk, Don’t Run - rhythm mp3
Walk, Don’t Run – bass mp3
Walk, Don’t Run – lead mp3
Walk, Don’t Run – play your part! mp3

As noted in Variety at the time of it’s release:

Oranges. Acrylic on fruit.

These oranges are ripe, but not overly so. They were painted by my multi-talented friend, Billy Watts.

In a turn of events only slightly less fortunate than Mr. Jalopy finding a Bally Captain Fantastic just sitting there in the gutter, I just got myself a Gottlieb Road Race pinball machine!

I’ve always liked pinball. When I was a kid, I would gravitate toward pinball in favor of Asteroids or Space Invaders. I love the clicking of the score reels, the relays, and the musical tone of the analog chimes in the old Electro-mechanical machines. Iv’e always wanted a machine. But It’s the kind of thing that you don’t normally just go out and buy. For the few people that I know who actually have pinball machines, the machines seem to have found them.

This one found me when my friend Roya and her man Greg (who met in some pinball related context) decided to lighten their material load and expatriate themselves to Sweden. Many of their games are either going into storage, or going into the care of friends. This particular game was not really functioning when I got it. Roya and greg rescued the machine from a friend who apparently kept in in their garden shed for a number of years, but they never got around to refurbishing it. When Roya asked me if I wanted to buy it for an undisclosed paltry, token sum, I just about wet my pants.

When I first turned the machine on, it didn’t really do much. when I finally got it to come alive, the score reels were actually running backwards, few of the lights worked, and it certainly wouldn’t go through a game cycle. I went through the machine pretty systematically, aided by the excellent troubleshooting guide at This Old Pinball. Once I got the steppers cleaned and adjusted, the score motor turning freely, and a whole host of switches and solenoids clean and moving freely, things really started to happen. I replaced all of the lamps, repaired most of the lamp sockets, and replaced all of the rubber bumper parts, cleaned and cleaned, and well, it’s now a pretty happening pinball machine. I am still waiting for a coil to arrive so that I can fix the last major flaw, a broken pop bumper.

Ding! ding! ding! ding! ding! ding! ding!

Belated Garage Sale Report – August 21, 1010.

My son picked up this cool, oak themed, hand tooled, youth sized leather belt at an estate sale a few weeks back. The proprietor of the sale said that her father had made the belt himself, and would have been very happy to see it go to a boy like my son. The belt maker had also carved the 20 foot tall totem pole that adorned one corner of the yard. I wish that I had gotten more of his story.

Here are some pictures of a “box guitar” that I recently built. It’s sort of like a cigar box guitar, only rather than finding a pre-built box and scratch-building a neck for it, I bought a guitar neck, and scratch-built a box for it.

I picked up a neck from a new, but broken Cort acoustic guitar, and a cheap soundhole style pickup on ebay. The pickup came pre-wired to tone and volume pots (tone doesn’t seem to do anything though) and knobs were included. The rest of the materials I had on hand, so build cost was under $40 dollars for this project, including paint and a set of 10’s.

The sound is kind of banjo-twangy unplugged, and it has an interesting howl when plugged in. Here is a Garageband sample. (forgive the playing).

Garage Sale Report – Sunday, September 9.

Unless I spy a 1962 Seattle World’s Fair decanter, I normally look with disdain at a table full of Jim Beam bottles at a garage sale. But this table was different. All the bottles were still full, with unbroken seals. I knew that the price of whiskey went up dramatically with age, so I figured a 30 or 40 year old bourbon would either be really good, or really bad, but certainly worth a gamble.

I selected this “Black Hills” edition, which featured a rather handsome depiction of Mount Rushmore on the front.

It turns out that “Black Hills” was issued in 1969, so the whiskey is roughly 41 years old. I have a hunch that the aging that really improves a whiskey is probably done in the cask, not the bottle, but hey, I was still excited about finding a 41 year old bottle of whiskey.

I was worried that the cork might have decayed and contaminated the contents. I was also worried that the cork would have lost its sealing capacity, allowing the volatiles to escape, and the rest to go off. I honestly had pretty low expectations.

Upon un-corking the bottle, I was a little alarmed at the shape of the cork. It appeared to have shrunk quite a bit, and left behind a ring of cork residue inside the neck of the bottle. But it was definitely airtight, because it gave a little sheeewwwp! sound when I pulled the stopper out.

I gave it a sniff and it didn’t smell like paint thinner or rotten eggs or anything horrible, but had a pretty normal smell for a bottle of whiskey.

I poured a glass, fully expecting to see a cloudy mess of bourbon not-quite-right, but in fact, out came a nice clear amber fluid. I gave it a nose, then took a taste, and what do you know? Good!

My whiskey palette is not sophisticated enough to really know if it was 41 year-old-whiskey good, but It was definitely not bad. My friend Adam who had actually once attended a bourbon tasting, and was therefore more qualified than myself was visiting, so I gave him a glass, and he concurred.

Not Undrinkable Good whiskey.

Here is a free Rock-n-Roll download for you.

I recorded this cover of Link Wray’s 1959 song Comanche.

Enjoy : Comanche

Guitars, percussion, vocals: Steve Lodefink

Vocals: Harlan Lodefink, Ivan Lodefink.

UPDATE:

A lot of people have asked me about my recording process for this song, mostly wondering if I used drum loops, and where I got them.

No loops. I just played all the parts all the way through, using a metronome with the first drum track to keep me in line. I only have a single cheap dynamic mic from Radio Shack, so I laid down 3 percussion tracks, and 3 guitar tracks, then mixed in the “comanche” cries.

I am a novice guitar player, so I had to do about a dozen takes with the lead parts to get 3 that sounded ok.

I actually recorded the kids vocals first, the night before the main recording, since they were going to be away for the weekend (which is why I had so much free time to mess around in GarageBand).

Here are the tracks in the order that they were recorded:

• Vocals
• Snare/hi-hat/bass drum
• Tambourine
• Floor tom
• Main guitar riff
• Bendy howl guitar riff
• Guitar lead licks

I remember filling out the application that came stuffed in the liner of my copy of Duty Now for the Future.