{"id":127,"date":"2025-02-12T19:27:23","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T19:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/?page_id=127"},"modified":"2025-07-16T00:01:56","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T00:01:56","slug":"chapter-6-hell-on-the-way","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/table-of-contents\/chapter-6-hell-on-the-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 6 – Hell On The Way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Crickets, crickets, crickets. Mostly all I heard for the next few months. Still no bass, The electronics were delivered in March and now it’s getting into late July. I would get calls from Mr. X asking me to help Mr. Y. put things together. I was in California and my wife was 7 months pregnant. Mr. Y was in Dallas, and it was still lingering Covid. I wasn’t gonna go anywhere and they were not willing to ship a bass and the pickups to me to assemble. Oh, and that’s not my job either. Im not sure what my hourly rate would be for that work. However, I did continue to take there calls and try to explain how to wire this stuff together. I had even sent them documents, but Im not too sure they were understanding them or if they were even reading them. Quite honestly, I was a setback by the lack of knowledge regarding electronics that Mr. Y had to be building and selling such pricey, high end instruments. The Jerry guitars are pretty complicated as well. My buddy Fred and I had built one with a MicroTron and a rechargeable LiPO battery back installed on top of the normal OBEL system a couple years prior. I was very familiar with how this needed to work. Eventually I would see how these guys pretty much condemn his work. Punch down to elevate thyself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Since I was bored, I went ahead and designed the LED board circuit. I messed with a few micro-controllers and found the one that would work. It needed a quick boot time and wouldn’t take to much power. I ended up with a what’s called a feather. I could drive up to 1000 LEDS on a single chain and each one was individually addressable. The technology is called NeoPixels and techs were making LED clothing using these. I found the ones that would mount nicely inside the bass. I could then build the button array and map them to the LEDS sort of like a piano. I could make the LEDs Red, Green, Off. Done! I could also make them Blue or 64 million other colors. The microprocessor had a built in microphone, which allowed me to analyze frequency or amplitude and put on a light show, or I could program preset lighting moods that were actuated by the buttons. Anyway, it was easy for me as I had a background in Computer Science. Coding, I could do I my sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted the led board to fit flush in the contour of the upper half of the bass. I called them up and said “surprise, I finished the LED board it can do this and that….” And as per usual in the Mr. X. tone “I don’t care how it works, just get it in there. All I want is red, green, off. ” Ok that’s fine send me a bass so I can these boards cut right. I needed exact measurements. I still had not been allowed to measure the original bass which was 30 miles from me. And they had no bass to send me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, pretty much all the hard parts were done. I knew the current draw of the entire system. And it was all working off the power supply as planned. The only unknown remaining would be the analog LEDs in the fretboard and neck. I was able to get them to send me some of those and I was able to confirm that the current would not overload the power supply. I was pretty stoked. You could run the whole thing off a single 9 volt battery or one of my rechargeable LIPO packs. You could even ditch the break out box and just use a stereo guitar cable. They weren’t hip to these ideas either. My argument was, who’s gonna play thru a wall of sound? Just let the guy roll up with stereo amp setup. Or go sitting in on a gig with just the bass and no breakout box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point I had spent 100s of hours on this, holding hands, taking calls, explaining impedance, explaining current. I wanted to see it succeed, but that ball was in their court and I was ready to move on. If I could could only just get the pickups and the bass and put the whole thing together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What I did not know, is that there was a parallel effort underway. I think people got greedy when they realized I was going to have the Super-Freq II pedal for sale. I also think Alembic realized that they should have probably jumped on this to get some of the action. They were still in the rack mount game and selling the Super Filter rack mount in their store for $3800!!!!!!!!!! I really wanted a unit to AB to the Super-Freq II. They couldn’t get me that either, so I found one used on eBay for $1800. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My pedal was gonna cost $500. It would not only do the static Alembic thing, It also do wah-wah and envelope filter. The routing was more advanced on our version as well allowing for series or parallel configuration just like our BiPhase. So cool, I preserved the roots, added a some Mu-Tron features, and innovated something that never existed before. Still no mention of any collaboration on this project. But at this point, Im not really caring. I’ve done everything I said I would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t get a bass to measure, I was sent some files that were supposed to be CAD drawings of the cavity so I went by those. I left all the traces within good margins in the case they would need to saw away the edges to make it fit. I sent Mr. Y the board and as far as I was concerned they had all the parts for the first prototype\/production unit. Mr. Y finally sent me an analog(MDF board) template of where the LEDs and Buttons go and now I can know that they will line up with the holes in the wood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Template<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Better get to work on my graphics and finish the version 3 Super-Freq II in time for NAMM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Crickets, crickets, crickets. Mostly all I heard for the next few months. Still no bass, The electronics were delivered in March and now it’s getting into late July. I would get calls from Mr. X asking me to help Mr. Y. put things together. I was in California and my wife was 7 months pregnant. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":110,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-127","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/127\/revisions\/150"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakedeadhead.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}