Archive for the ‘gear’ Category

recent DIY/repair projects: guitar pedals, Bliptronic 5000

Here are some recent projects I’ve been working on. After receiving a Big Muff guitar pedal from my cousin Jamie (from The Press Delete), I started thinking more about building up a pedalboard again for my guitar playing. I’ve been quite happy with the Line 6 PodXT Live, but there’s something special about guitar pedals: [...]

Posted February 24, 2011 by Bill Van Loo in gear

34/52: DIY bottleneck slides

This week’s project was a fun one. I’ve been playing lap-slide guitar for a long time. After college, I put it down for a while, and then picked it back up again 10 years ago or so when I was strictly making electronic music, as a way to make some music that was much more [...]

Posted August 21, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, music

32/52: new studio setup, new music

This week, I spent some time moving my music studio into a new space in our house. I know it seems like I just reorganized my studio, but this time it was different – my family has a renter coming to stay with us for a few months, so I’ve temporarily relocated. Along with moving [...]

Posted August 8, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, music, photos

30/52: DIY servo-powered pan/tilt camera mount

This project is one that has been in my “to do” list for well over a year: a servo-powered pan/tilt camera mount! My intention in making this is to have something that I can use for several purposes. First, it seems like it would work great on my DIY Camera Crane (although I haven’t tried [...]

Posted July 23, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, photos

26/52: studio cleanup, and some reflections

52 things is now at its official halfway point. Not coincidentally, here’s what my studio looked like at the beginning of this week: After 26 weeks of weekly projects, my creative space has been in pretty active use! For reference, take a look at what it looked like after a similar cleanup in May 2009. [...]

Posted June 25, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, music, photos

24/52: Church Music Rig

This week’s post is a look inside my music rig for my church. I spent some time this week getting things set up the way I want in order to expand my musical capabilities, so I thought I’d document and share it here for this week’s project. Here’s the overall rig, once it’s assembled: My [...]

Posted June 11, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, music

19/52: Gibson SG Junior photos

This week’s post is late, for several reasons. I did the majority of the work on Wednesday night, shooting photos for this week’s project, but fell asleep while trying to edit them on Thursday and Friday nights. After finishing up the edits Saturday morning, our house’s power went out due to a storm! However, this [...]

Posted May 9, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, photos

17/52: DIY Vivitar to 2.5mm Sync Cable for CTR-301p

This week’s post is both late (I usually post on Friday) and less complete than I’d hoped. However, here it is: a DIY Vivitar to 2.5mm sync cable for the CTR-301p flash triggers. I bought a new set of flash triggers several months ago, the Yongnuo CTR-301p. They are a cheap set of triggers, and [...]

Posted April 24, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, photography, photos

16/52: DIY Camera Jib/Crane

I was recently inspired by several things: Chase Jarvis’s “Cameras at Risk” blog entry, and a cheap DIY camera jib/crane at colvins.ca. This week’s project was building my own DIY camera jib/crane for getting interesting shots when shooting video. I basically followed the same idea as the colvins.ca version mentioned above. This is very much [...]

Posted April 16, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, photos, videos

11/52: DIY USB foot controller, part 1

For this week’s project, I decided to turn an old wireless USB number pad into a foot controller for Ableton Live. Here’s what I started with: I was partially inspired to take on this project after seeing this thread on Create Digital Music last year: Sexy DIY Footswitch for Music, Using the Brain of a [...]

Posted March 12, 2010 by Bill Van Loo in 52things, gear, instruments