Exhumed Muerte En Vivo 1

Last month, I headed out with Exhumed for a tour of Latin America. I’ve already played Mexico a bunch, but this would be the first tour for me, and Exhumed, to head even further South… right down to where the toilet water spins the other direction (lies… it doesn’t). We had just finished recording a new album, literally hours before we got on a plane at LAX to our first stop in Monterrey.

This was the first time I had a dude with a sign waiting to pick me (and the boys) up. It was momentous. It would get tiresome. So… many… flights. We also had some tigers show up to take photos of us. How did they know what flight we were on? Even the promoters couldn’t explain. This would become a frequent occurrence throughout Latin America.

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Bicolor LED switch on SIB! Varidrive

The Varidrive by SIB! is a gnarly fully AC powered vacuum tube overdrive. It’s got a real analog growl, pushing that tube to the limits for real distortion.

For such a nicely engineered pedal, they forgot one thing: there’s zero indication when you’ve engaged the effect… I mean, other than screaming overdrive in your ears. But visually, ya got nothing, and during a hard core punk rock gig, it can sometimes be hard to tell. Luckily, SIB! already put an LED on their pedal to indicate it’s getting power. It’s not so hard to change that out for a bicolor LED to indicate power AND when the effect is engaged.

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One Thing’s for Shure

I bought a used Shure Beta 58 off of craigslist some time ago. The damn thing just stopped working one day. I tried to see about fixing it, but it was a ding dong mystery and the insides of that thing do not reveal secrets easily. Plus, a bunch of it is just glued in. I finally read about sending it in to Shure for “repair,” where they charge you half the cost of a new mic and you get… a new mic, in the box. No warranty or receipt required.

I can reveal, friends, it is true. Shure has a great product replacement system and sent me a brand new Beta 58A in the box with all the peripherals. All I had to do was fill out a form and provide CC payment info. I also sent in a GLXD1 wireless transmitter that’d gone wonky which they fixed for free! Again, no warranty! They just did it!

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Plug and Play Jack Plate Replacement

Maybe you have a guitar cab with just a single input, but you want to be able to switch to 4Ω instead of just the 16Ω it’s wired to. Maybe you want to run your speakers in stereo. Maybe you just hate those stupid fucking bullshit plastic Marshall switchable stereo jack plates that constantly break. If any of this applies to you, please consider the Plug and Play jack plate as a replacement.

Full disclosure: I have nothing to disclose. This was bought and I installed it. As far as I can tell, it’s made by Amplified Parts, a webstore I use frequently to purchase tubes and parts. This is an all purpose jack plate made of durable metal with no stupid switches that break. Installing one is easy.

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Modify Apple’s MagSafe 2 into MagSafe 1

Apple Computer is such an annoying corporation. They make these tiny changes to their stupid cords because they expect all of us to be rich tech bros upgrading our shit constantly. Well, I’m a cheap skate and I’m still rocking a seven-year-old laptop. But I did lose my charger. It was a MagSafe 1 charger. You know what’s incredibly hard to find now? MagSafe 1 chargers. Well, it turns out MagSafe 2 is the same fucking thing, just slightly different in size.

I picked up this old charger off craigslist for $20. It was late, we met in front of a grocery store, and I didn’t realize it had the wrong end until I got home. Dammit. Do I call the guy back? Do I try and sell this one myself? Or do I fuck it all up on my own DIY like I always do? You can guess the answer.

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Vacation

Checkout in the shop will be closed for a few weeks as I’m going on vacation. It will be open again November 28-29, then closed again for a couple more weeks while I go on tour. It will open again December 16.

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you want some art for holiday gifts, browse away for now and mark the dates. Keep in mind the time for shipping! Cheers.

Aesthetics of Sickness Book

G.O.R.E. Corps, ten hut! Check out this excellent new book coming out featuring tons of gory metal artwork, including moi, with great features on the artists and a foreword by legend Jeff Walker. Pre-order now and get 15% off with the code IWANTGORE15‬

https://heavymusicartwork.bigcartel.com/product/aesthetics-of-sickness-the-gore-archetypes

DIY Spew Tanks

So you want to spew like the pros. Or, at the very least, the idiots in our band. Before our last tour with GWAR, we rejiggered our entire system of blood delivery. Based on a system devised by Sean, I made a revised version of a self contained blood tank that could send pressurized spew to the wanting masses.

The excitement is palpable.

Sean first got the idea to use plastic pipes for self-contained blood spewing some years back. It involved sealing and pressurizing plastic tubes with common Schraeder bike pump valves. Everything was customized for each individual costume, though, and require fragile gravity feeds. Years later, I came up with this diagram after thinking about how a spray bottle worked:

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