Chorus pedal

A few weeks ago, I was minding my own business whilst surfing a little on the Internet, when suddenly popped up an advert from Ali Express. I willingly confess that only rarely do I look at these adverts, and I consider them very much a nuisance. This time, however, the ad caught my eye: guitar pedals were being sold for about 3.5 NIS (as I don't recall the exact price, I'll call it about 0.75$). This of course is a ridiculous price and should be considered a loss leader.

By the time I decided to purchase a chorus pedal, its price had shot up to about 14.5 NIS (about 3.80$) - still a ridiculous price. So I ordered the pedal: how can I lose at that price? I wanted to add a phaser, but whilst I had been fiddling with the order, the price of the phaser had tripled to about 43 NIS - still about 40% of how much such a pedal from a no-name supplier would cost. I passed on this opportunity.

One might ask why I want to buy a chorus pedal (even at its ridiculously low price) when I already own the multifunctional guitar effects pedal¹ that I bought in February. This pedal has a chorus effect and in fact recently I've been using the chorus preset that I defined several months ago. But over the months I have become less and less satisfied with the multi pedal:

1. When the pedal is turned on (i.e. connected to power, although the pedal has its own power supply), the bluetooth connection is turned on. This causes a small blue light to flash continually. I don't use bluetooth. After trying to turn it off and failing (but causing something else to happen), I decided months ago to ignore it.
   
2. Again, when the pedal is turned on, the first preset is automatically selected and engaged.
3. Whilst playing guitar and operating the pedal, I occasionally hit the wrong foot switch.
4. The idea of presets is very good, but the way that it is implemented is poor - to my mind. Just getting into preset mode is difficult. Two foot switches have to be pressed simultaneously, but I can never remember which two, and anyway I have difficulty pressing two at the same time. 
5. Should I manage to enter preset mode, I have no idea of what the current values for the different parameters are. Should I wish to reduce the volume for preset 3 (the chorus), I have to redefine all the parameters and so probably end up with something else from what I wanted. It would be good if there were little displays next to each parameter - or that the knobs are automatically turned to match the saved values - but I understand that such improvements would probably cost no small amount of money, thus jacking up the price of the unit and making it less attractive than individual pedals.

So for the time being, I'm going to remove the multi-pedal and replace it with the minuscule chorus pedal. I assume that the quality of the pedal will be reasonable.

At the same time, I have been bombarded with letters from Ali Express (well, one every two days) encouraging me to buy from them again. Temu doesn't do this.

Internal links
[1] 1721

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
108	29/10/2007	New computer	Computer
517	29/10/2012	Remixing songs and playing live	MIDI, Guitars, Antibes
770	29/10/2014	Importing purchase orders	Programming, ERP
899	29/10/2015	Vinyl log 24 - 29 October	Van der Graaf Generator, 1975, Vinyl log
1542	29/10/2022	The 8-puzzle	Programming, Puzzles
1682	29/10/2023	Farewell, Avon SG copy	Guitars

Pedal board at the beginning of August 2024

I made an addition to my guitar pedalboard today so I thought that I would document it. I've just noticed that in the same way that Hebrew is written and read from right to left, the pedalboard is laid out with the signal flow going from right to left. Interesting.

On the far right is a metallic looking pedal; on its right hand side is something blue that is not easy to identify: this is a wireless receiver that replaces a guitar lead.There's a similar looking transmitter that I plug into the guitar. The receiver is plugged into the guitar tuner. The blue cable leaving the tuner goes into a black pedal, my latest acquisition, which is an overdrive pedal. More about this later. The red cable leaving this goes into the octave pedal; the white cable goes into the multi-effects box that is acting more and more like a chorus and delay pedal (I should redefine the presets to make this more useful). The green cable connects the multi-effects box to the tremolo pedal, and finally a guitar plug (barely seen) connects the pedal to the amplifier.

On the power side: the rectangular black box on the top left is the solar power bank, aka portable battery. Although it's difficult to see, there are two usb cables connected to this. The black cable connects to a usb charger - obviously when I want to charge the battery. The white one connects to the thin box on the right of the battery; this is the power distributor. A few black cables can be seen emerging from this box; they go to the power sockets on the cables. The new pedal came with its own power cable; one end has a standard plug for powering a pedal whereas the other end was a usb plug. The 'documentation' that came with the pedal was extremely uninformative and seems to be suitable for several pedals. As this cable seems to hint that the pedal needs more power than other pedals, I used the supplied cable to power it. The distributor has a usb socket on the far right end, so I plugged this cable in there.

I don't really need an overdrive pedal; in fact, I was sure that I had ordered a compressor, so I was somewhat surprised when I opened the box containing the pedal. As far as I can see, this is a rebranding (or a non-branding) of the Joyo overdrive pedal that itself is a version of other overdrive pedals. The control layout is slightly different on my pedal and fortunately it is matte black as opposed to the somewhat garish Joyo pedal. It cost me all of 80 NIS; the fruugo site is selling it for a mere 189 NIS + 9 NIS shipping, only almost two and a half times the price that I paid.

I found an interesting site with a review of the pedal. I don't imagine that I'll be using the pedal when I'm playing chords, which is most of the time, but I'll try and find a setting that gives me a little amount of 'dirt' or 'grit' as I would prefer to call it.

I've been watching several YouTube videos about pedals recently. I've noticed that in most of these, the guitar is far louder than the accompanying drums and bass, and especially with chorus, phaser or flanger pedals, the music played is very 'airy' that allows the effect to be heard clearly. I haven't seen many videos of someone demonstrating a pedal whilst playing rhythm guitar in a loud band, which is not exactly an occasion for subtlety in the sound.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
501	08/08/2012	Back to normal (well, almost normal)	Health
749	08/08/2014	Twenty five years ago	Personal
1249	08/08/2019	Night walking	Walking
1330	08/08/2020	Masked songs	Kibbutz

Pedalboard power supply problems

Way back in February/March, I discussed putting together a board for the various guitar pedals that I have purchased since the beginning of the year. The board consists of two logical parts: the pedals and the power system. The latter is composed of a chargeable battery and a power distributor. The last few band practices have been marred by problems with this system; even though I charged the battery for at least an hour in advance, I couldn't get any power into the distributor and from there to the pedals.

Last Saturday I devoted some time to establish where the problems were. The first seemed to be that the battery wouldn't work if its feeding cable was connected (even though the other end was not connected to anything), so of course I disconnected this cable. Then I had problems connecting the power distributor to the battery: on one end of the cable was a normal USB male plug that connects to the female socket on the battery. But the other end of the cable seemed to be a female C-type socket that would sit on the male C-type plug on the power distributor. I had trouble making this connection work but eventually it did. As a result, I obtained a nice (to my ears) swirling sound via a combination of the multifunction box and the tremolo pedal.

I resolved to do something about this situation; today I made my monthly order from Temu that included a different power distributor. This one has the feeder cable directly connected to the box so there should be no similar problems in the future. Of course, I was shown a picture of the distributor that I already have and something tickled my brain. 

This distributor had a C-type female socket for power entry, exactly the same as my telephone. So why did my distributor have a C-type male plug? It occurred to me that maybe the plug had detached itself from the cable and was stuck in the socket. So I got a pair of long-nosed pliers, put them around the plug and pulled gently; the plug came away revealing the C-type socket that had been there all along.

So I cancelled my order for a new distributor and threw away the ruined cable. Now I seem to be one cable short, but in fact there is a cable that will serve double duty. In advance, this cable will be connected on one end to power and the other end to the chargeable battery; this will charge the battery. When I am playing, the same cable will be reversed, so that the USB end connects to the battery and the C-type plug connects to the power distributor*. Problem solved!

As it happens ... a few weeks ago, my wife bought an external battery to help charge her phone, costing her 129 NIS plus another 15 NIS for delivery. This is a very simple device with a built-in male C-type plug for connecting to the phone and a built-in cable with a USB plug to connect to the charger. A few weeks later, I was offered the same device (from the same people) for only 99 NIS, so I decided to buy one for myself.

Over the last week, I wondered how I could use this battery with my pedal board, but as I was living under the misconception that the power distributor had a C-type plug and not a socket, there seemed to be no simple way of connecting the battery to the distributor. But now that the C-type socket has been revealed, this small device can be connected directly to the distributor, eliminating the need for the chargeable battery that is stuck on the pedal board.

I think that I'll leave the pedal board as it is, with the chargeable battery on-board, but that I'll take the little battery along with me in case of emergencies.

*Post-script from a few days later: I should have checked that the cable can do double duty before band practice. It turns out that the plug does not fit the power distributor socket so I had another evening without pedals. I do have a spare cable that does connect on both ends, so this is going into the gig bag. 

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
183	11/07/2009	Treeview program manager	Programming, Delphi
262	11/07/2010	Poland and the Holocaust	David Lodge, Holocaust, Poland
381	11/07/2011	Bern, baby, Bern	Holiday, John Le Carre
877	11/07/2015	Highlighting cells in Excel based on their absolute value via Delphi	Programming, Delphi, Excel, Office automation, Statistics
1239	11/07/2019	The difficult negotiator returns	Personal, Negotiation

Italian language lessons

My wife and I both love Italy and have visited there several times; at the moment we are preparing for another trip to take place in a few months' time. This fascination with Italy has prompted my wife to take an Open University course to learn spoken Italian: she travels once a week to Tel Aviv and learns a bit. At the beginning she mentioned that she doesn't always manage to write down everything the teacher puts up on the white board; remembering my MBA days, I recalled that there were students who never wrote anything but photographed the white board, and so I suggested that she do this. No one else in the class (about ten people where the youngest is maybe 55 years old) had even thought of this. Below is a cleaned-up example.

This picture, and all the others like it, remind me of when I was a schoolboy learning Latin: our homework one night was to write out the conjugations of a few verbs, and that exercise stuck with me for years. The same thing happened when I learned Hebrew; whilst the present tense in Hebrew only has four forms (masculine/single, masculine/plural, feminine/singular, feminine/plural), the past tense has eight forms, two of which aren't used in spoken Hebrew. It's the same in Italian: the picture shows the various forms of the verb 'Essere' - to be. This was an unfortunate choice to start off with; although Hebrew has an infinitive for 'to be' as well as past and future forms, it doesn't have a present tense, so it was very difficult for me to explain what 'Io sono' (I am) would be in Hebrew. Fortunately we've got past that stage.

I sort of understand written Italian, but can't really understand spoken Italian as it's always spoken too fast. So I was pleased that during my YouTube searches for material on Italy, I came across a series called 'Easy Italian', in which two or more people (one of whom turns out to be British) speak in slow Italian, or as one might say, Italiano lento. These videos are both fun to watch and very educational. Whilst it is good that there are Italian subtitles, having English subtitles as well is slightly problematic. On the one hand, I don't want to see the English so that I can understand the Italian as Italian, whereas on the other hand, having the English helps me with understanding the words that I don't know. My wife can't read the English fast enough.... But will these videos help me to speak Italian? I can say a few phrases, but recently whenever I try to say something in Italian, it comes out in French.

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Obligatory guitar effects pedal paragraph: last night we had band practice and I took along my new pedalboard. Some of the effects were ok, but I will have to dial down the number of echoes in the presets of the multi-effects pedal. The octave pedal was also interesting: I might use it more in the 'down one octave' setting in order to add depth. Today arrived the tremolo pedal that I ordered a few weeks ago; it's a shame that it didn't arrive yesterday. Apart from the slightly annoying fact that the power socket is on one of the sides and not on the top, the pedal came with two pieces of sticky tape/velcro that will enable me to attach the pedal to the pedalboard easily. Yesterday the two mini-pedals fell off the pedalboard, as the velcro that was attached to the pedal came loose. The sticky side took with it something from the bottom of the pedal casing, leaving the pedals unattached. I put new sticky tape/velcro patches on the pedals that seem to have improved the situation.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
238	14/03/2010	Toyota	Organisation behaviour
558	14/03/2013	Minimising the overhead	Programming, ERP
687	14/03/2014	Research questionnaire / 2	DBA

The Dublin murder squad

I don't want to give the impression that my life outside of work is solely concerned with guitar effects pedals, so I thought that I would write a little about the books that I am currently reading. Over on the Reddit Cormoran Strike channel, some people have recommended the Dublin Murder Squad series of books, by Tana French, so I thought that I would try them.

I am currently about half way through the fifth book (out of six) so at least I know what I am writing about. As one might imagine, the books are concerned with murders committed in the Dublin area and the attempts of the police to solve them. As opposed to most detective series, there is no titular policeman. Instead, protagonist #2 from the first book becomes protagonist #1 of the second book; protagonist #2 of the second book becomes protagonist #1 of the third book; a character from the third book becomes the protagonist of the fourth book, and another, more minor, character from the third book becomes one of the protagonists of the fifth book. All of the books are written with a first person narrative, that is slightly off-putting at first until one discovers who the narrator is.

Titular detective series devote as much time to the detectives' private lives as they do to the murder mystery. In this series, it seems like even more time is devoted to the detectives' private lives, but as each book has a different detective, all this information is not carried over from previous books but instead has to be read (and written) and absorbed each time anew. Whilst this gives author Tana French bonus points, in my opinion it is somewhat overdone.

The first book was very good (if slightly long); the second book was very long and not very interesting - in fact, I'm not sure that I even finished it. The third book was so-so (the background material was more interesting than the murder story); the fourth was more about detecting, but again over-long. The fifth, so far, seems to have struck a good balance; in fact, there's much less background material.

Somewhat off-putting is the language; apart from a small amount of Dublin slang, there is also a tremendous amount of swearing. Judging by 'The Commitments', the swearing content was about right, but it's annoying to a polite person like myself.

Reading these books is fairly hard work and it's not particularly rewarding (at least I can read them, as opposed to some detective novels that I found unpalatable and not worth reading). I hope that rereading these will be more rewarding.

I mentioned fictional detective Cormoran Strike in the opening paragraph; I discovered yesterday that two of the televised books ('Lethal white' and 'Troubled blood') are to be broadcast again on tv here in the next few days. Apparently work has started on filming the next book in the series, 'The Ink Black Heart', a book that is generally considered to be inferior to 'Troubled blood'. This no doubt will present a huge technical challenge as a fair amount of the book is composed of discussion group chats, often three at a time. These chats make reading the book (especially on a Kindle) very hard. 

And talking of Kindles, I managed to lose the cover bag for mine a few weeks ago; this was made by a seamstress on the kibbutz who took some material, folded it over, sewed it up and used some velcro to close the bag. Not to worry: I ordered a kindle cover from Temu. This is like a mobile phone cover, where the device sits snugly in the back cover and a front cover protects it. Unfortunately, my kindle is relatively old and is slightly smaller than the cover that I ordered (which was the smallest on offer); a few pieces of double-sided adhesive tape solved that problem.

Writing about velcro and double-sided adhesive tape makes a fine introduction to my guitar pedalboard that arrived yesterday. There are plenty of videos on YouTube about putting together a pedalboard, but 99% of these are concerned with the pedals and only a few discuss how to attach the pedals to the pedalboard. Fortunately I found one of these and had an aha! moment, after which I succeeded in attaching the various devices that I already have to the board. Yesterday I ordered a tuner pedal, and finally a tremolo pedal, so I'll attach these when they come. I also redefined the presets on the multi-effects pedal to be more useful with approximately matched volumes.

The board comes in its own gig bag with a voluminous extra pocket. I was able to distribute all the bits and pieces that I carry around with me (manuscript paper, strings, cables, capos, laundry clips [for the paper], pens, etc) between pockets on the guitar gig bag and the pedalboard gig bag, so I don't need to carry around yet another bag.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
337	27/02/2011	Michael Palin	TV series, Prague, Poland, Michael Palin
456	27/02/2012	More spooks	TV series, MI5
928	27/02/2016	Chicken breasts in tomato sauce	Cooking
1013	27/02/2017	What are the benefits of ERP enhancement?	ERP, DBA
1203	27/02/2019	Pneumonia again	Health
1476	27/02/2022	More musicians	Obituary, King Crimson
1587	27/02/2023	Bone conduction headphones/mp3 player	MP3, Headphones

Jasmine Myra

Yesterday I was sent an email by Gondwana Records, the label formed by trumpeter Matthew Halsall to shine a light on the talent Matthew heard in the local clubs. The subject was saxophonist/flautist Jasmine Myra, announcing the imminent release of her second album, 'Rising' that will be released at the beginning of May 2024 (why the wait if the music is ready?). The email contained a link to the title track, at Bandcamp, but the track can also be heard at YouTube.

Along with the saxophone of band-leader Myra, the recordings feature flute, harp, piano, guitar, bass and drums, producing a sound slightly reminiscent of Halsall's earlier albums, with the sax replacing the trumpet, although here there is prominence given also to the guitar (played by Ben Haskins), an element that is not to be found in Halsall's recordings. A definite yes to this sound!

Once I heard 'Rising', I had to see what else was available from Myra: her debut album, 'Horizons', can be found in its entirety on YouTube, along with a few live performances. On one of these (at the Art School live festival, 2022), she dedicates a tune to the Canadian musician, Kenny Wheeler, who played on Bill Bruford's debut solo album, "Feels good to me", so this is for me a point of reference. At the moment I have yet to ascertain any structure to the pieces (presumably written by Myra), but that will no doubt come in time. 

I'll order 'Rising' in due course.

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In the mean time, I made a 'proof of concept' setup of all the equipment that has been arriving over the past few weeks. The equipment in the picture is not arranged in any sensible order, so I'll explain it logically: the blue box on the right is my practice amplifier. Next to it are two pieces of equipment: at the bottom, looking like a mobile phone in a closed case is a 'solar power bank' - this is like a battery that can be charged either via the electricity mains or by an inbuilt solar panel. The output of this goes into the little box with lights on it - this is the power distributor - and the output of this goes into the red box with the light on - this is the octave pedal. In terms of guitar signal, the guitar is connected via the lead that plugs into the right hand side of the octave pedal (black cable); the output of this pedal (white patch cord) goes into the multi-effects box (on the left) and the output of this (black cable) goes into the amplifier. Nothing is connected to the mains power supply.

It all works together. The octave pedal sounded much better today than it did in its initial trial although it was slightly noisy; this presumably is a side-effect of the power distributor. Not all the outputs of this box are equal - half have low output and half have high output, so next time I'll try powering the octave pedal with a high output to see if this makes any difference. Otherwise I may have to buy a noise gate pedal. I made a new preset for the multi-effects box that has a slight amount of phasing and nothing else; this is intended to be the default preset for the box.

There are two more items that have to arrive that will complete the set-up: a pedalboard, on which everything will be mounted (this should arrive in the next few days) and a tuner pedal. The order of effects will be mixer (in case I use two guitars in a performance; this won't be wired up at first), tuner (ordered yesterday), octave, chorus, multi-effects. This is, to say the least, slightly unconventional, but I'm relying on the multi-effects box to produce overdrive, and anyway I'm a rhythm guitarist, not a lead guitarist.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
65	24/02/2007	Post Mortem	Programming, Cooking, Migraine
680	24/02/2014	Somebody's been lying	Psychology

More guitar effects

As the late Jerry Pournelle would have written: Donny, the Donner octave pedal that I ordered via Amazon, arrived at Chaos Manor yesterday. The delivery was relatively quick and hassle-free - it's a shame that more deliveries aren't like this. On the other hand (sorry: as Pournelle would write, on the gripping hand), I did pay $15 for delivery ... or did I? The invoice included in the package states that there was use of a promotional certificate for $15, so the delivery was actually free. But first a report about the multi-effect pedal being used at band rehearsal.

During the exchange of messages enquiring as to whether we could have a session on Saturday night (at the moment we're playing once every two weeks and last Saturday was supposed to have been an 'off' night), I mentioned that I had a new toy to display. So everyone asked about the little pedal and were either impressed or amused by all the lights on it. Most of the time I was using one of the presets with chorus, although for a short solo I used another preset with a great deal of echo. This was fairly successful although sometimes I managed to get the pedal out of preset mode, so I had to turn it off and on again. The chorus sound is very trebly (as usual) so I turned down the tone knob on the guitar. I shall try to do more with the tone settings on the pedal and the amp.

And now to the harmonic square aka octave pedal. I should point out that the same pedal is available under the Mooer label; had I bought it in Israel, it would have cost about 300 NIS (including delivery) so I definitely saved money by buying from Amazon. Testing the pedal allowed me also to test the pedal power distributor: I had one cable from AC mains to the distributor, one cable from the distributor to the pedal, one cable from the guitar to the pedal and another cable from the pedal to the amplifier. Spaghetti time. I am pleased to say that the electricity side of the equation worked perfectly fine.

In advance I had already worked out four different modes of use for this pedal:

1. Setting the wet and dry to 50%, the switch at the top to 'sharp' and the interval to one octave basically makes the guitar sound like a 12-string guitar, where every note played on the guitar is doubled an octave higher.
2. As above, but setting the interval to 7 semitones (a perfect fith) is supposed to cause an E note to be doubled as a B. If I play an E chord, then the pedal will 'play' a B chord; the result should be an E Major 9th chord, namely E G# B D# F#. 
3. Moving the switch at the top to its middle setting, detune, creates a chorus effect whose depth is dependent of the setting of the big knob.
4. Setting the wet knob to 100% and the dry knob to 0% causes the pedal to act as a capo: if I move the middle knob to the '3 semitones' position, the top switch to sharp and play shapes in Am, it's as if I'm playing in Cm (this will be useful at Passover). Similarly, after moving the top switch to flat and the middle knob to '2 semitones', playing shapes in G will sound as if I am playing in F.

As with the multi-effects pedal, I'm not sure that my practice amp was the best option to test the capabilities of the pedal. For setting 1, I actually had both wet and dry signals to 100% and this seemed to overload the amp when playing chords; single notes were ok. Setting 2 didn't seem to work as I expected, although again this could be because of the level of the wet and dry settings combined with the amp. Option 3 worked fine as expected and so did option 4, although this was somewhat disconcerting as I could hear the acoustic sound of the guitar playing (for example) an Am chord whereas the amplifier was sounding a Cm chord. In a band setting this problem won't exist, but it might appear when playing at Passover.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the pedal although it apparently wasn't as good as I expected (especially for settings 1 and 2 when playing chords). The power supply problem is also slightly annoying, although this is expected to improve when the pedalboard that I ordered will arrive. Then I can set everything up properly. At some time in the future I will also order a tuner pedal that will sit neatly on the pedalboard.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1376	20/02/2021	Cormoran Strike (3)	Cormoran Strike
1377	20/02/2021	Winter comfort food	Cooking

The good, the bad and the self-delusion

After my previous blog about guitar effects pedals, I decided to look for the chorus and phaser pedals; as I suspected, they were under the bed. I first looked at the phaser pedal: initially I saw no way of opening the sturdy metal box, but eventually I saw that in each corner of the box was a screw so I unscrewed them and opened the box. The electronics had been wrapped in a foam-like materal that had seriously deteriorated in the forty years of the pedal’s existence. Not only the foam: the pedal had been stored with a 9v battery still attached; although I was able to partially detach the battery, one pole of the pedal’s plug seemed fused to the battery, and in trying to free it, I merely tore the battery pole. Into the bin the pedal goes without further thought.

Then I had a look at the DOD FX65B chorus pedal: this is sturdily built and fortunately there was no need to open it up as there is a battery compartment at the top of the pedal. I connected a new battery to the pedal but there was no sign of life. Then I read the manual that was stored in the pedal’s cardboard box: a line that caught my attention said “if you’re not going to use the pedal, unplug the input jack so as not to waste the battery”. Could it be, I asked myself, that I’ve always been checking the pedal with no cable attached? I found a guitar cable, plugged it in – and the little red light on the pedal came on when I depressed the pedal. In other words, this pedal works fine! 

I saw a mention of the possibility of using an external power source instead of a battery so I thought that this would be a good opportunity to try out the pedal power box that I bought from Temu. At first I plugged the USB cable that comes with the box into the USB power out then wondered what I could do with the C connector end; then the penny dropped and I plugged the C connector into the unit and the big USB socket into a telephone charger. Blue lights came on. At this stage I realised that I had been deluding myself: I thought that this unit would store electricity that could then be sent to any connected pedals, but it appears that this distribution unit itself has to be plugged into the electricity when being used. At least it saves on a multitude of external adaptors, aka wall warts. 

I then discovered that the chorus pedal can use an AC adapter that of course I don’t have – well, this pedal is from the 1990s. At least I can use the chorus pedal with a battery. The multi-effects unit (which has been released from Israeli customs but has yet to arrive here) is promised to contain its own USB charged battery. I think I confused this with the power distributor. 

I took the pedal with me to band rehearsal last night. It drew a few comments, so I explained the history of the pedal (my brother in law reckons that he gave it to me in 1988, but that's wrong as he would have been too young then). I used it sparingly in the songs, primarily in the new one that was introduced a month ago. As I had the chorus effect on the pedal, I set my amp to use a small amount of phaser. We recorded that new song, so it will be interesting to hear what my guitar sounds like.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
24	11/02/2006	One small step	Programming, Psychology, Kaizen, The brain
451	11/02/2012	A change is gonna come	Films
1580	11/02/2023	This week's rant	Israel
1581	11/02/2023	Hot filling soup	Cooking, Weather

TEMU is the new Ali Express

A few weeks ago, I mentioned in passing the TEMU site. Little was I to know that a few days later I would actually order something from TEMU. I must have been temporarily insane because the items that I ordered weren't exactly necessary. One of them, a guitar t-shirt, is made out of 100% polyester and so it is dubious as to whether I will ever wear it. Oh well, that's only 28 NIS down the drain, so not exactly a great loss. 

Along with the t-shirt, I ordered something more useful: a portable pedal power supply with 8 channels. I have noticed that many guitar pedals these days are very small, and that the reduction in size precludes them from having their own battery. So in order to supply these (as yet non-existing) pedals with power, the portable power supply was born that gets charged in advance before a gig. At this stage, I was informed that the mininum order is 120 NIS, so I added a guitar string winder that cost all of 8 NIS. This apparently is a useful accessory when changing strings.

This order was very much a test, to see how fast TEMU supplies their goods, so it's just as well that there was nothing essential in this order. To my surprise, the tracking information showed a few days ago that the package was already in Israel and on Friday I saw that the package had been delivered. I assumed that it was delivered to the kibbutz 'post office', although by the time I saw the notification, the office was already closed. But the package was there on Sunday morning.

From ordering to arrival took only three weeks and this is because the package was sent by air, instead of by sea. Thus when my wife said the other day that she was having no luck in finding curtains for our granddaughters' rooms, I could recommend the ridiculously low priced curtains of TEMU. Of course, the end result probably won't look as good as in the picture, but for the price that they are charging (33 NIS for a pair), the result should be well worth it.

At the same time, I took the opportunity to order what I should have ordered before: the portable multifunctional guitar effects pedal. This little unit has received several positive reviews on YouTube, and again for its ridiculously low price (183 NIS), it seems worthwhile to buy and try. This unit has its own internal battery so there's no need for the external power supply.

I've been watching a series of YouTube about playing ambient guitar; this is of course device heavy, and one of the pedals used is an octave shifter. Shifting the sound up one octave will make for a very interesting sound. TEMU has a suitable pedal (the Rowin Harmoniser with no inbuilt power supply) for a very reasonable 215 NIS (and I've seen how I can get a 30% discount), but the reviews of this pedal were very bad (bad latency and inacurracy), so I am no longer tempted to buy and try this pedal. A much better pedal is the Electronic Sub 'n' up mini octaver pedal, but this is also more twice the price, at 528 NIS here in Israel (so add some more for delivery). Now I have to consider whether this is such a good idea. Another pedal that will be much cheaper is a compressor, but again, I have to consider whether this is necessary.

On the other hand, I have discovered the Donner Octave Guitar Pedal that in terms of functionality seems to be as good as the Electronic Sub but only costing $56 via Amazon, including shipping. I am still waiting for the wireless connection to arrive, so I don't know when to expect this guitar pedal (for financial reasons I'm not going to order it for another two weeks). There are many demonstrations on YouTube and all the reviews are positive.

There are many pedal reviews on YouTube but these are almost all with guitars playing lead lines, not chords, and certainly not in a band setting, making it very hard for me to justify purchasing any. I'll see what I can get out of the multifunctional pedal before I make any further decision.

We were discussing TEMU during the visit of my son/daughter-in-law/granddaughter, when the DIL said that "TEMU is the new Ali Express". Sending by air is definitely an improvement, although this might explain why items cost more than they do at AE.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
157	29/01/2009	The Goodbye Girl	Films
446	29/01/2012	Disappointment - Finance exam results	MBA, Finance
447	29/01/2012	Watching the weight / 4	Food science, Diet
1108	29/01/2018	Noise cancelling headphones (2)	MP3, Headphones
1288	29/01/2020	XML files in Priority	Priority tips