Teflon Bullet

A couple of days ago, I wrote about my new Diddly Jo with Bass...

Well here's a new recording with it: Teflon Bullet (96 kps stereo mp3)

This is a song I wrote back when four NY cops brutally murdered Amidou Diallo in the lobby of his apartment building.

At about the same time, some Texas rednecks proved that Texas needs the death penalty by dragging James Byrd to death behind their pickup truck. The song originally had a verse about that incident too, but I felt it detracted too much from the focus of the song, so I took that verse out.

Except for the backing vocals, this recording is a live, single take, single microphone recording of voice, diddley jo, and foot-operated mini-lagerphone. I'm not entirely happy with the mix (voice is too quiet), but with this kind of recording, there's no way to fix it.

Still, it shows where I'm going with the live show these days.

New Diddley Jo with Bass

I've been playing one of my diddley jos a lot recently... Wait a second! What's a diddley jo? Well, it's sort of a cross between a diddley bow (one string blues instrument) and a banjo - that is, it has one string for melodies plus a half-length string played with the thumb as a high drone. Recently, I've been playing it a lot... and finding that I can play pretty much any of my repertoire on it. But I'd like to get more bass in the mix. Well, I could form a band... but what hassle! So instead, I added a bass string. It's a piece of 3/16" silicone cord stock. I also hand wound a couple of pickups. One is mounted conventionally under the diddley jo strings (which are two electric guitar strings). The second one is mounted inside the Sucrets box which carries the saddle for the bass string - it senses the vibrations of the metal top of the Sucrets box. Here's a sample tune: Got to Get a Girl (64kps mono mp3)

Here's a close up of the pickup setup. The intent of my design was to allow separate outputs for the bass and diddley jo strings. See the two jacks at the lower right. But it's also designed to output a mix of the two if only the lower jack has a plug in it. The two volume controls were intended to control the bass and diddley jo respectively, whether mixed out separate output. Unfortunately, I'm not so good with electronics... and neither the volume contols nor the separate output works right, lol. The good news is that the combined output is very clean and the mix is just about right - purely by accident.

Here's a shot of the inside of the Sucrets box showing the pickup. The two pickup are identical (as much as anything hand made can be) - craft sticks were glued on top and bottom of a magnet from Radio Shack. Then pickup wire was wrapped 100 turns by hand. The whole thing was dipped in molten beeswax to pot the pickup. (My wife uses beeswax in her art so we have a crockpot permanently filled with it in the house.) How does work?... Well, the sound is great but not very loud. If I do this again, I'll make the bobbin bigger so I can use more turns of wire.

One issue with the silicone cord bass string is how make them work with tuners - the string is so thick that you can't get more than one wrap around a typical tuner and so stretchy that it needs a lot of wraps to get it to pitch. Originally, I just hand stretched the string and tied it on - then adjusted the pitch by moving the bridge. That worked but was not completely satisfactory. In the final version, shown here, a harp pin is mounted in the box. The cord is tied to the pin (but allows the pin to turn freely), goes over the bridge to the other end of the box. Then around to the bottom of the box where it's tied to a piece of weed whacker line (WWL). The WWL continues to the harp pin and through the hole so that turning the pin tightens the WWL and pulls the silicone cord tighter. BTW, I originally tried a sheet bend to tie the silicone and WWL together but the big difference in diameters defeated that knot. I finally settled on a fisherman's knot which works fine. I use the harp pin to get into the right range and fine tune by moving the Sucrets box.