I had a go with the Philstick last night after putting the electrics, one electret mic preamp and piezo preamp, from the celljo into it yesterday.
It took a few hours to get the stuff in and when trialing it I realised that having a .040 string and such a small drum area added up to not much amplification before feedback as well as the electret being unable to properly get the bass frequencies but there was enough to play with so I took it along to Vit S to have a go anyways. I was also kinda having problems with the output impedance of the preamps making the effects pedals kinda not work as they should, possibly the level was too hot….?
It’s funny but sometimes that occurs. You don’t really get enough signal, voltage wise, but your getting too much current and it’s basically not right for guitar fx inputs but anyways I took it all along and set it up and found out I was up against Rohan who is quite notorious for his high volumes… well he’s notorious in my book as my book is all about quiet.
The long and the short of it is I didn’t use the Philstick for anything more than a kind of trigger to get a bit of signal going through a phaser and the the Boss DD-7 delay. Pity really as it was alot of work to get the Philstick to where it is but this session got me realising that it still needs alot of work getting a adequate clean signal coming out of it.
So this morning I grabbed a .010 high E guitar string, and low and behold, it was long enough to go into the Philstick and immediately it’s louder acoustically as the higher note is more in accord with the size of the drum head, low strings need bigger drumheads and vice versa, with the higher notes hopefully also being closer, if not in, the dynamic range of the electret.
Electrets are a condenser type mic element but the head is only millimeteres accross so they go a bit barmy when hit with low frequency vibrations, which I should know, but maybe now with the .010 string going down to about 500Hz as opposed to the .040 going below 100Hz I might have a better chance of getting a good voltage swing at the output.
But, taken all I’ve learned so far with this thing (which Phil calls a glup), I’ve already got something else in mind that takes all I’ve learned and then adds in a whole new range of unknowns. Thats the way it goes eh, nothing ventured, nothing gained… though the idea of gain in my book isn’t so much in accordance with modern thought where they are only now getting around to thinking about a capital gains tax for housing investments… duh!
To my mind it’s totally impratical to have the housing market subject to investment when even being subject to supply and demand makes it inflated and then to add it’s potential to investers is a sure way to end up with a market that eats itself at regular intervals. If your going to have a slush fund in any economy, and thats what public investment always is, then you should make sure it goes where it’s needed and that’s into industry that supports the economy in a way that ends up with people getting better and more interesting work and conditions and a higher standard of living… but we’re not here to read stuff like this are we? No, we’re here, usually, because we want to keep that stuff as far away from this kind of stuff, art and musics, as we can while actually existing in a reasonable way… oh well!
Anyways, in the picture we can see a knob, which is a volume for both the electret and the piezo, a switch, which I thought was turning the electret circuit on or off, but is in fact some form of boost on/off (so I’ll have to change that to what I thought it was) and a small momentary on/off switch for the piezo. The piezo is directly mounted to the drum head so being able to turn off the electret then momentarily bring in the piezo is actually quite good for getting a raw boost of high voltage that is somewhat open to interesting interpretation given the drum head can be manipulated with the finger tips. Theres an interesting range of sounds in there with the piezo engaged and you use a finger tip to dampen the drumhead in and around the piezo which even gives an ability to almost play harmonics…