Solid pre-guitar shopping food.

Note Wiring is not really complete– I need some additional organization and cable lengths to make things clean and ideal, but I think this is the core layout.

Signal chain

Polytune 3 Mini -> Keeley OctaPsi -> BSRI Magawa -> (Amp) -> Walrus Julia -> Chase Bliss Billy Strings Wombtone -> Walrus ARP-87 -> Walrus Fundamental Ambient -> (Amp)

(Amp) is mostly the Dr. Z Maz 18 I have a UA Lion ‘68 (pictured) that I’m using sometimes for home recording and also intend to bring to gigs to enable an amp-less setup/backup if needed. I’m also not 100% sure I’ll always run the modulation/time stuff in the effects loop. In fact, I’ve mostly been running entirely into the front of the amp at rehearsals because it’s less hassle. But I think that I prefer this stuff in the loop, so I’m going to be less lazy about using a four cable method going forward.

The Dr. Z amp pedal is not a switcher– it’s a built in boost. To my ears, I don’t get much volume, likely because I have enough crunch set on the amp that I just get more compression, sustain, and gain when I slap that on.

The Walrus Canvas Power 15 is new, as is the pedalboard (Pedaltrain Classic 2, versus the original Pedaltrain I had– the tilt is really nice). Both are great so far.

Why are things arranged this way?

The spatial arrangement of the pedals is intended to make it easy to switch between the four-cable method, getting the dirt before the amp or the UA Lion, then getting the send from the effects loop into the Julia or going from the Lion to the Julia.

I put dirt on the bottom because that’s what I hit the most often. Magawa alone, amp boost alone, or both combined are my most common switches. That’s definitely followed by the octave on, which I use in a few songs to fatten a lead or a part heavy in diads. Typically, I am only using one modulation or time-based effect on at a time, so having them be a bit more distant is no problem. The Fundamental Ambient gets turned on the most, so it’s also in an easy spot at the edge.

What didn’t make the board

I continue to futz with the Slö and Fathom, the other two Walrus reverbs. I owned the Fundamental Ambient first and love everything about it. I’ve never been quite able to worm to the “big brothers” the Slö or Fathom. They may just not be for me. I honestly want to read more about both and look at other people’s settings and see if I can find a way to love them. If not, I’ll probably sell or trade them soon. I think I may want another reverb still– perhaps something more classic, perhaps something built into a delay like the Wampler Ethereal Delay and Reverb I traded (which I may get again, or perhaps try and EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master).

The Nano POG got pulled off when I got the OctaPsi, but it’s so damn good at what it does I don’t know if I’m willing to get rid of it yet.

Other uncertainties

I’m not so sure about the ARP-87. I think I liked the Wampler Ethereal Delay more, so like I said in Remainders about a reverb, I may be looking for a different delay, perhaps one with a reverb as well. I’m considering something like the JHS Flight Delay, too. I love the way the Julia sounds in general, but I’m still dialing it to find a setting that really fits with what I play and makes sense for a song. I suspect if I am ever going to get along with chorus, this will be the one, but I’m not quite there yet with it.

I got the Wombtone in my Mystery Box and immediately found a great setting for what I like a phaser to do and what I use it for in the band. Is it markedly better than the BSRI Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter– not for me, I use it in an almost identical fashion and don’t find it that much more meaningful. That said, it can do more and it’s a smaller enclosure, so when by chance I saw someone looking for the BSRI on Reddit I made the trade. I don’t need two phasers around, and BSRI will be at the Baltimore Pedal Show next month so I can always pick up another if I want and support a local builder.

Speaking of BSRI and reverbs, I’m pretty sure I want to look at the Soft Rains and the Smell of the Ground. I loved this pedal last year, and only didn’t get it because I was practically willing to buy everything BSRI had to show. Given my current reverb situation, I think it’s pretty likely I buy one of these next month.

What else am I considering? I think I want some more dirt options. The Magawa sounds and works great. The OctaPsi is untameable, like any Muff style pedal should be. But I still have interest in adding more textures and subtly. I think I’m most interested in a Browne Amplification Protein, the Boss OD-3, the Boss BD-2 or maybe instead a Boss Angry Driver JB-2, or possibly a Wampler Tumnus. The Benson Deep Sea Diver is also really interesting for another version of just “blow things up” in one pedal. I have tried hard not to gas over the Walrus Qi Etherealizer, because as much as I absolute adore Yvette Young, I can’t play even a little bit like her so I can’t “trust” the demos of what that pedal would do in my hands. But that being said, some of the sounds are absolutely crazy. I really like the idea of being able to create spacey pads of sound on guitar that are not just walls of fuzz. I also keep eyeing the EarthQuaker Devices Swiss Things. I do a fair amount of tap dancing sometimes to go from clean + Fundamental Ambient -> Magawa and amp boost on. It’d be kind of neat to have dirt in a loop so that I could set up any of my stacking how I need and one switch get to where I’m going. Plus, with the UA Lion, my Dr. Z amp, and the Valvetech amp, A/B/Y starts to get pretty interesting in terms of options.

Just hanging out, being destroyed by allergies.

Reddit recommended this post to me, with the following image:

As a reminder, this is what’s going on in my office, at the rehearsal studio, and who I am:

Ouch.

I only just barely had enough time to plug it all in and get it working, but I can tell you that my “record song ideas at home” setup just got a massive upgrade.

In fact, now it’s a “record solid takes at home silently” setup.

As I told Elsa, “I had to buy a new small box so that I could buy more small boxes.”

The Citadel. 📍

My youngest brother in law just graduated college! Elsa looks pretty good in his hat.

It turns out, one of the best burgers in Baltimore can be found at Camden Yards.

The AVAM in Baltimore is such a weird, precious treasure.

It is absolutely insane to me that there’s no way to click and add this to my calendar. Who makes apps like this? It’s been this way for years.

Pretty much where I spend my free days.

Alma always hits.

I’m pretty pleased with myself for thinking, “a free standing coat rack would be great for organizing cables at our practice space…”

I added photos to my list of posts “This Month” at the bottom of each page. I’ve really enjoyed my updated design and the emphasis on long posts. But pretty quickly I had the thought that photo posts deserve the same kind of emphasis. A nice consequence of using the same partial for my Archive page and the “This Month” section of the homepage is photos now show up in my archive list as well.

I took a screenshot of February, since as soon as I make this post the change will no longer be apparently, at least until I post a photo this month.

The final day of February is actually a great indication of how I want the site to work– it was a day of short posts, some of which make more sense read sequentially as I had those thoughts. The full day fits without scrolling and is clear. At the same time, you can see the “anchor” posts in February– those times I had more to say or posted some photos that may still be interesting a few days or weeks later.

I think this redesign has been a success.

Some additional technical notes about this change

I used an emoji to indicate that there’s a photo, but I may switch to using an SVG or similar in the future. We’ll see how it grows on me. I think the fact that emoji styles change on different platforms makes them a bad choice, and I’m not sure the look goes with the fixed-width font I use everywhere.

Photo posts have text along with them– but often not titles– so I chose to render:

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📸:  {{ .Summary | truncate 280 }}

The thought is I don’t want long content, so limit them to the canonical “tweet” length. I may adjust that over time.

I also have precedence– if the photo post has a title, it does not have the emoji right now and just the title shows up. I might change that, I’m not sure. It’d be fairly easy to show the title and photo, but I think this is kind of rare and this new design fits better the expectations of photo posts that are syndicated elsewhere– picture plus short comment, not title + photo + comment. Plus, posts that happen to have photos but are titled are more likely to be true “macro” posts anyway.

My category for pictures is photoblogging, and it’s set using a Micro.blog category filter for any post containing jpeg or jpg. So screenshots, like the png in this post, are not included.

This was meant to be a meal for 2. I think we’ll be eating it for three days.

The beast was sleeping soundly until I stood up. Then she rolled on her side, and began whipping her tail around expectantly.

Randomly remembering that I had a huge wall covered in wallpaper depicting Earthrise (kind of, it was actually a composite of Blue Marble and Earthrise) in my childhood bedroom and it was awesome.

She woke us up an hour before the alarm because she wanted scratches. Then she did this.

I can’t believe how far some of my friends came to watch our first show, which was meant to be a low stakes thing away from home. It was a blast to be on stage again after almost 20 years. I should have asked to have vocals and keys in the monitor up front, but oh well. Also, my old Dunlop pedal tuner is a piece of shit that was tracking terrible so I was not able to correct some tuning issues probably only I noticed.

Very successful first run out.

I have not sufficiently expressed my hatred for whoever did this.

This mess is what 573 books (plus 5 I couldn’t find and about 30 high quality magazines and 20 or so academic journals) look like. More to go.

This is what 61 cookbooks looks like (along with other things).

Stop taunting me, Reverb.

The main issue I’ve run into was the following:

.Site.Author was deprecated in Hugo v0.124.0 and will be removed in Hugo 0.141.0. Implement taxonomy 'author' or use .Site.Params.Author instead.

This is a relatively easy fix– include your .Site.author data in config.json under Params like so:

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{
  "params": {
      "author": {
      "name": "Jason Becker",
      "avatar": "https://micro.blog/jsonbecker/avatar.jpg",
      "username": "jsonbecker",
      "activitypub": {
        "username": "[ACTIVITYPUB_USERNAME]",
        "url": "[ACTIVITYPUB_ACTOR]"
      }
    }
  }
}

Unfortunately, lots of places across Micro.blog templates reference .Site.Author, most especially RSS and JSON feeds.

So in addition to changing references to .Site.author in your own theme (most likely in head.html partials), you’ll have to bring in custom versions of RSS, JSON, and podcast feeds to have a successful site build.

Micro.blog isn’t ready for Hugo 0.140.0 quite yet, but it’s possible to get up and running if you have a custom theme and know how to maintain it. Unfortunately, Hugo doesn’t use semver or anything like it. They also don’t offer stepwise upgrade guides so that you can say, select your current version and the version you want to upgrade to and easily get the steps necessary to keep things working.

There are some nice features that have been added since the last upgrade of Hugo on Micro.blog, but I have to say, the surface of breaking changes that Hugo makes and its impact on themes and plug-ins really feels like a liability. If Hugo followed semver, it’d be a lot easier to maintain versions of themes and plug-ins verified to work at certain markers and maintain older versions as well. As it stands, the upgrade path is kind of rough, and places a lot of burden on a small number of folks.

I’m thinking about if there’s a way that we can incorporate something like the exampleSite process for Hugo as well as some key steps in the Micro.blog process (namely the coalescing of templates and configuration) into a GitHub Actions build step. What I’m imagining is that each theme can have a GitHub Action that builds the exampleSite by coalescing the theme-blank templates and configuration, using reasonable environment variables for some default values that are set on Micro.blog, and then builds against multiple versions of Hugo, generating a check artifact for compatibility. It’s possible even to maintain a release branch for each version of Hugo that is supported by Micro.blog that tests against that version and ensures compatibility.

This way, themes can be updated one version of Hugo at a time, even when Micro.blog doesn’t necessarily support it. Community members can easily generate pull requests that update a theme to a working build on a new version, and maybe the burden can be spread a bit.

With a system like that setup, for example, I suspect it would take me under an hour to get most themes working. Occasionally there’d be a problem that needs a Manton-level fix, but that’d be easy to find. I suspect almost all problems could be solved without Micro.blog official participation provided that theme-blank is used for the coalesce and has a working release that matches the Hugo version. In other words, fixing theme-blank for a version and using that release branch should cover all or nearly all of the Micro.blog-system-level support necessary to fix the downstream themes.

For example, all of the RSS and JSON feed fixes are not needed if theme-blank is updated to use .Site.params.author – except doing so now would break every theme on older versions of Hugo.

I am a Burrata Babe