Adding Labels to the Line 6 Helix

I've been fumbling about wiring things up on my Helix as I usually play this on a dark stage. I usually need to lean over and peek at where I need to connect cables, and I've had enough of it! Fortunately, I have a label maker, and it doesn't look too bad from afar.

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The Clue-less Goat and Craftsmen Specialty Coffee (Novena, March 2019)

If you can spare to park at Goldhill Plaza, there are cafes in the vicinity of United Square that we found to be really good. First up, The Clue-less Goat:

Savory waffles with scrambled eggs and bacon.

Avocado toast with poached eggs and chorizo sausage

Brunch done right

I left my gear at home, so the phone will have to do. We have considered this the place with the 2nd best scrambled eggs, after Symmetry. Wife also really loved the avocado toast here. The only problem (as we found out the hard way) was that this place is not open for dinner!

Next up, Craftsmen Specialty Coffee. We hopped in here after discovering that Clue-less Goat doesn't open for dinner, and we were pleasantly surprised at the availability of brunch food for dinner.

Our evening caffeine: Jasmine green tea with rose for her and a cortado for me

Friday cortado

Avocado on toasted muffin with poached eggs with bratwurst

Savory waffles with scrambled eggs and bacon (view of eggs)

Aerial view of the waffles

Their savory waffles don't come with maple syrup, but instead, a heavy cream-based sauce which can be overpowering. We found that it masked the taste of  their scrambled eggs, which wasn't too bad. The point goes to Clue-less Goat for scrambled eggs.

However, their avocado muffin was really good, with the muffin toasted to perfection. Trust me, it's really hard to find a place that toasts muffins well!

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Going Amp-less: A Step-by-Step Process

If you're looking to have a convincing amp tone through the front-of-house without using a physical amp, a preamp pedal by itself isn't going to be sufficient. In this latest video, I outline the process of going ampless with the Joyo British Sound, augmented by an EP Booster and an EQ section with the Line 6 M5.

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Managing Wrist Injuries as a Guitarist

1. Get a wrist guard (1:41)
2. Play with less gear (4:19)
3. Modify your technique (5:33)
4. Play an ergonomic guitar (7:35)
5. Pray for healing! (9:05)

As some of you are aware, I have scapholunate dissociation in both my wrists. It's been a tumultuous journey, with its many days and nights of pain, with a constant cry to God for healing. There have been miracles and the tangible power of God in healing me. There have been moments where I believed God must not love me because of my constant pain.

But through it all, God is good. He has always been good. I may wear a guard now, but in time to come, I will not need it in the new heaven and new earth. But for now, for those fellow guitarists who suffer from wrist injuries, you are not alone, and your pain is not permanent! 

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Lunch at Omoté, Thomson Plaza

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Tone Pursuit: Analog vs. Digital

I did a series of two videos to present the pros and cons of the Line 6 Helix versus an analog pedalboard. I love all gear, and believe that there can be a time and place for their use. I hope these bless you!

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Jew Kit Hainanese Chicken Rice

Tucked in a corner of Bukit Timah Shopping Centre, this place serves really good chicken rice, priced beneath the benchmark Boon Tong Kee. All our chicken meat was juicy, and nothing was dry.

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Dinner at Saveur (Purvis Street)

These were taken with my new Canon EFS 10-18mm STM on my 600D. Apparently, ISO on a digital camera is not a "real thing", in that the brightness setting on a photo is post-processed. Taking a picture at ISO100 is apparently the same as taking it at ISO1000, just that at the higher ISO setting, the camera bumps up the brightness for you.

The limitation of shooting at a low ISO should be fairly obvious--your unprocessed images on the camera will be really dark, and you won't be able to tell very clearly if you botched the shot. But seeing as to how my lowly 600D has terrible ISO tolerance (anything higher than 800 and the grain is intolerable), I took a gamble. All these shots were taken at ISO800, 1/50s, and at f stops f/4.5 to 5.6, and on my camera, they were really dark.

All I did was raise the exposure of the photos in post, some with 0.5 stops of light, to 2 stops of light. Not too bad looking. But this still cannot beat my 5D Mark II.

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Shifting from Dayre...Again

Dayre announced that it was shutting down, which led me down a road of beefing up my Tumblr to get it looking the way it does now. Then Dayre didn’t get shut down, and I was in this weird limbo phase of managing yet another blog.

Then they announced a transition in management, and now Dayre is going to be marketed as a women’s lifestyle blogging platform.

Long story short, I’m back to being on Tumblr and Blogspot.

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Integrating the Line 6 M5 with the Mothership

The challenge was set before me. I knew that I wanted to replace my old combo Boss DD-7/PS-6 pedal for something a lot more versatile: the Line 6 M5, which is the swiss army knife of pedals, and has the potential for some amazing MIDI integration for preset switching with my Disaster Area DMC-8D, which can control up to four devices (currently at three because of the Strymon pedals).

However, as it is with all challenges, several circumstances were not ideal:

1. My pedalboard layout was fixed for the combo pedal, which was housed in an enclosure much smaller than the M5.
2. I will probably have to re-route some of the power and cabling to accommodate the top jacks of the M5. On my combo pedal, the in/out jacks were traditionally left/right.
3. I needed an extra MIDI cable to hook it all up, and it wasn't a long cable.

Aside from orientation and layout issues, I soon discovered that the biggest problem with the M5 is that the MIDI out is not a MIDI thru--it has to be the last device in a MIDI chain as it will only accept MIDI in commands!

At first, I tried to make do with the pedal in this weird orientation and the MIDI cable being quite haphazardly placed. It looked unprofessional, and it wasn't long before my disdain for disorder kicked in. I needed the cabling to look neat!

On the issue of orientation, if I flipped the M5 about, I had to extricate a power cable from the existing cable tie run. I found a set of black zip ties from my old Pedaltrain builds, cut the old cable ties off so I could re-run the power cable to the opposite side, and re-set the cable run with new zip ties. They're black in color, so at least the differences between Goodwood's cable tie runs and mine don't look too different.

With an improvised pedal riser, I managed to elevate the M5 so that the cable runs would be hidden by its imposing size.

I then had to reset the MIDI cable jack orientation. I have some experience in this as I got a MIDI cable from Disaster Area, who use BTPA cables. A flathead screwdriver and a good twist later, I managed to get both MIDI in and out cables from my Big Sky looking right.

Remember, the MIDI out on the M5 is not a MIDI thru!

Yes, this looks much better.

Check out my original rig-rundown post on my Goodwood Audio setup here.

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