Tuesday 17 December 2013

ttv - through the viewfinder photography

Something else cool I discovered a few years ago. TTV - it stands for through the viewfinder. Basically you need an old box camera with a big viewfinder. You know, the ones you might remember your mum having when you were a kid (only if you're over 50!) Well you take the photograph of the view in the viewfinder using a digital camera. You need to make a light proof box to hold the old camera in (to stop reflections) and to hold the digi camera in place. You will need to experiment a bit to get results. Vary the distance between digi camera and viewfinder and set it to macro focus. Swicth off the auto flash too. The result is a photo that looks really old due to the poor quality of the viewfinder lens and all the dust and crap that's in there (yeah don't clean the viewfinder unless you have OCD and really must. The best effects include all the crud. Maybe try setting the camera to black and white or sepia too). There's plenty of information out there if you just search for it. Here's some of mine and a link to some more.

My TTV photos on Flickr




Sunday 15 December 2013

more cool stuff from smojo

One of my other pastimes and passions is messing about with electronics. Moving on from building cigar box guitars, I started making small amplifiers to go with them. That sparked off my interest in other electronic goodies. I got into something called circuit bending where you take an electronic toy, like a child's alphabet toy and you mess about with the electronics to make the sounds different - the simplest being speeding up or slowing down the speech or music. It's a lot of fun and you can get some surprisingly interesting sounds that can be looped or put through effects pedals. I've done a few recordings using some of them and posted them on Soundcloud. Here's the link if you want to have a listen. "You remembered zero" was done using a circuit bent Speak 'n Read. "Electro Metro" and "While Giants Sleep" were done on a bent childs drivers toy.

My soundcloud music

And here's a bit of video of the circuit bent driver toy

circuit bent driver toy



Thursday 12 December 2013

Cigar box guitars and now what?

For  a few years I was heavily into cigar box guitars. I built them, sold a few, played them and recorded some of my own music with them. I created a blog about them which has been very successful, I posted videos on Youtube. The first one of me playing a cbg was recorded in a hurry and was just meant to demonstrate the things. I remember thinking "wouldn't it be cool if I could get 1000 hits?" I see now it has had over a quarter million. Mind blowing.

My first cigar box guitar video

My cigar box guitar blog

But lately I've lost some interest in them and not done much, so my blog about them hasn't had much new input. But I've been busy with many other things, some pretty cool stuff which you might find interesting. I like writing abut things and sharing my creativity so I hope to put a mixture of cool stuff on here. It could be anything but will have a strong music and guitar element to it. So check in now and then and see what I've posted for you. Hope it entertains and maybe inspires you a little.

What am I doing now creatively? I took a course last year with a luthier and built a solid bodied resonator guitar. I wanted to use some of my new skills so decided to build a Fender Jazzmaster style guitar. I'm using a neck I took off a cheap (but nice) tele-style guitar and just building the body and scratchplate and putting it together with new pickups etc. It's coming along nicely. Here's a pic of it so far. It's made from native (English) Ash. Two pieces spliced down the centre. You can see I've done all the routing ready for the electrics. I've stained it with acrylic water based ink and sealed it with nitro cellulose lacquer. Just making the scratchplate right now. The pickups I bought are hand wound and look beautiful. Not bad price either. I got them here.

http://www.mojopickups.co.uk/


Come back soon to see how it's progressing.