Tyler Johnson - Actor, Artist, Musician

Fidelitas Guitar

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 23:13:10 +0000

This guitar has a unique story:

It’s an Asian strat knockoff that belonged once to my younger step-brother. He was very enamored with my first band, COR, and on my 21st birthday he asked me and all my band-mates to sign the guitar’s pickguard (which probably DECREASED its already low value). We happily obliged. Sadly, the guitar was stolen and disappeared forever…

Fast forward to a gig with Wreck of the Portland several years later, and some dear friends and fellow DeMolays arrive at the gig with a present for me. It was the same guitar. Somehow they saw this guitar and upon asking the then-owner where it came from, and if she knew COR, she mentioned that she had purchased the guitar from a friend who had stolen it from another friend…or something…and that, in-fact, she had no idea who COR was.

Well, my friends pooled their money together and purchased the guitar from her, and brought it back to me…with the signatures intact might I add…weird.

So as a tribute to my DeMolay Bro’s – I created this guitar, wrought with DeMolay symbolism – it looks totally bitchin and sounds even better!

Parts List

Hand-tooled, hardened, and shaped leather pickguard…made to resemble a Fender ’72 Tele Deluxe-style Pickguard
Leather Iron Cross “Inlay” on the arm rest. Carved out of the body so it’s flush.
Leather Headstock cover, Tremolo Back-plate, and Neck Plate
GFS Bigmouth Pickups with coil split on the volume knob and 3-Way Gibson style switch.
Schaller Locking tuners

Obama Bass!!

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 03:21:21 +0000

Here’s one of my favorite projects. For the U2 cover band I play in – Rattle and Hum – I made this bass perfectly befitting of a liberal, world-changing rock band and a world-changing President! My tribute to Our President, and to groovy Jazz Basses all over the world. It’s got undeniable mojo, and it’ll only get better after I replace the plywood body.

Parts List

Squier Affinity J-Bass – first bass guitar I bought.
Upgraded HiMass Bridge
Upgraded electronics and Pickups – Duncan Design JB101′s – I find these to be GREAT considering they are for higher end Squier Basses.
Headstock Logo.
Sharpies!
Lots’ O’ Sandpaper and time.

The Pickguard is completely hand-drawn by me with the use of several different colored Sharpies. I sanded and relic’d this body when I first bought it – before I realized that sparkly paint has a silver under-layer and it looks terrible when sanded down – plus it’s a disaster to clean!

Obviously this is not a finished product – but as soon as I get a decent solid body on this, and nitro paint it – It’ll be complete. It looks GREAT on stage though, and as I found with the strat relic – the new logo is hard to spot as a fake. It’s the first headstock I applied one of these logos to so there are uneven sanding spots – but they are barely noticeable. Enjoy! I’ll post sound clips and stuff soon.

Stratocaster Project

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 03:11:24 +0000

Hey all – Just wanted to share a now finished..(yeah right) guitar project. As my wife will certainly attest – I start a lot of projects and either don’t have time to finish them, get bored with them, or can’t afford the cost to finish them. Then there are even projects that get done, but are constantly tweaked over the years until I’m happy with it.

Here’s a Strat I put together, and made a convincing clone of a heavily relic’d Fender Stratocaster.

Parts List:

Fender Mexican body and hardware off eBay
Mighty Mite Neck
Dimarzio Red Velvet Pickups
Vintage-style tuners
WAY too much labor.
Spraypaint – yeah, I know…I’m impatient.

Process

This was the first guitar project that I put together from various parts…a “Frankencaster” as they are lovingly called. As such, it was a testing ground for some of my first mistakes – particularly the paint job:

The body was originally painted an AWFUL shade of sparkly metallic dark blue. I sanded the body down – First Mistake – until there was no trace of the poly coat. This is before sites like Ohio Valley Nitro existed (or were known to me) so I went to Home Depot to get the spray paint I needed. then I dove right in – painted the body and to my surprise…it was all pitted and wierd looking….DOH…My impatience made me forget to apply sanding sealer, and thus the paintjob is forever flawed – it kinda has that Gibson SG look to the paint…where the woodgrain soaks up the paint and it looks uneven…Oh well. Still looks pretty cool.

The neck is the REAL beauty – I FINALLY found a website that sells Fender Logos for repair or restoration – and they are printed with metallic ink…they look as close to the real deal as you can get. Unfortunately its a trade secret and the guy who runs this business specifically requests no links to his site. This neck had the decal applied and then clear coat sprayed over the top to blend it. It’s not perfect – but best to make mistakes on a project that isn’t expensive I guess. On the next project, I will use Nitro on the neck, and yellow the logo before I apply it.

Lastly all the hardware is lightly relic’d…to give it a convincing old guitar feel. It plays and sound like a dream. I’ll post clips soon.

“Hi I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC…”

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:29:31 +0000

Ahh…the long and arduous debate: Do I buy a Mac? Do I buy a PC? Am I a hip young college student, or a stuffy old businessman? I want to address a couple of myths, and some of the arguments that surround the Apple mythos.

Here’s my Bias

I once heard a quote from a junior-high science teacher of mine. “Apple is the most creative company in the world, but they are terrible businessmen, and Companies like Microsoft are bland and boring, but they are extremely business-savvy.” This is back in the mid 90′s, before the Intel-Mac explosion and even before the iPod…can we even imagine a world without an iPod anymore?

Thankfully, that comment no longer holds any water – with Apple holding 5th place on Computers sold in the U.S.; a little over 7% of the market share (Q1, 2010). I like Apple as a company. I like Mac’s as Personal Computers. What I don’t like are the lies and the “illusions” of superiority that Mac is gaining over PC. Maybe I just don’t like all the fighting. Let’s all play nicely in the sandbox kids!

Myth #1 – Apple has the Best Hardware, you get what you pay for!

Yeah Kinda – Here is the genius of the Apple business model, and why the appear to have the best machines: They design and have all their hardware built to exacting and discriminating specifications. When people say “Macs have better hardware – It’s so good that a mac runs windows better than a PC!” they’re partially right. Macs don’t have better hardware they just have consistent hardware.

In the PC universe anyone can vie for a chance to build a PC. You can have two different manufacturers make the same machine, but in 2 different price-points – Where do you think they cut costs? Why do you think certain manufacturers get a bad reputation for their machines? (Compaq, eMachines, etc.) Because they use consistent hardware as well – consistently BAD hardware. And sometimes the hardware is not even THAT bad, but is has terrible drivers written for it that cause the issues.

Apple has 72 components (I say this facetiously) that they put into their ENTIRE product line.. so they have 72 drivers or kernels that they need to have written and in perfect working order. That’s not exactly a difficult task. Consider that one Graphics card chipset for PC, say the GTX 260, can have 20 configurations and 40 different companies making it, which gives the consumer choices and price-points, but it also causes hell for Nvidia, to make sure that their drivers work for each Card configuration. So Nvidia has the individual company make sure to have drivers for their own hardware. But just one of those companies probably makes memory, motherboards, graphics cards, sound cards, optical drives, etc. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Apple does not have necessarily the best hardware. It has consistent hardware with top-notch drivers and kernels. (That’s why the hardware is so stable, and also why it can run Windows, in MOST cases, better than a PC.) So, yeah, you get what you pay for.

Myth #2 – Footloose and Virus Free. If you buy a PC your just a ticking time-bomb.

Not Exactly – Look, the reason people get viruses on PC Is because they are retarded about how they surf the net, and because more viruses are written for the PC. I was the assistant manager of the Geek Squad for a while, and I can’t tell you how many people brought their machines in for virus repair – usually husbands that said “my wifes PC got a virus, I think she did something stupid on the net.” Yeah – Right. I have never had a virus on my XP machine, my Vista Machine or my windows 7 machine, and I don’t us anti-virus software. How do I avoid the aforementioned inevitable catastrophic infection? I practice “Safe-Surfing”. I know the high-risk behaviors that give a PC a virus and I avoid them.

“OK Tyler, How do you explain the fact that Mac users don’t have to worry about risky behavior? Snow leopard will chase away all evils…so there!” No, it won’t. Mac’s are hardly immune to viruses. Even Apple itself doesn’t claim that. It’s only immune to PC viruses!! Unless you put Windows on a mac and get infected while your using Windows! Mac never says it won’t get a virus, they just point out that PC users get more viruses. What they don’t tell you is that’s because there are more PC’s and more viruses written FOR PC’s.

Mac didn’t have a huge market presence until recently, and therefore, nobody sat in there basement trying to concoct the most insidious virus known to Mac. “It will wipe out all 32 Apple users!” he said with such malicious fervor. There was no reason to write a virus for the Mac platform cause it wouldn’t do any damage..So Apple has a good reputation. But when you think about it, Apple is like a 40 year old Virgin.

Believe me, there are viruses out there for Mac, but because Apple had all this time not having to worry about viruses, they were able to play a simple marketing card and point out that PC’s get viruses. But, just because you point out that people who have a lot of sex could get Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Crabs, and Hepatitis, does not make you Immune to AIDs. Be careful Mac, you’re growing up, and one day when you least expect it some psycho with a Mac Vendetta is gonna come after you.

Myth #3 – Apple Has the best Operating System.

AGREED, to a point. Let me explain: I didn’t have serious problems with Windows (XP, Vista, 7.) They all did what I needed them to do, and they did it well. If I had problems they were fixed with updates, or by replacing cheap hardware.

But let’s get real here – Microsoft made a huge mistake releasing Vista before it was ready, and allowing it to be bundled on computers with sub-par specs. That mistake gave Apple a leg up on it’s competition. They swooped in with their funny ads, and appealed to the young, sexy, and spunky side of all of us. Most importantly – they really had a BETTER OS than Vista.

The back end of OSX is a downright thing of beauty. It made use of more RAM, the programs loaded faster and most of it was due to the 64bit nature of the OS. But Vista did the same thing, it’s just no one KNEW about it!! I have Vista Ultimate 64 – it has been awesome. Stable, Powerful, and Fast. So I had a Mac Mini with OSX Leopard, and a PC with Vista 64. On my Mac I could play Warcraft III, and sort Photos and listen to music. Also do some Recording, and Graphic Design. On my PC, I could do anything I wanted to.

So the Mac left me lacking. Not just because it was an inferior machine with regard to hardware, but because I couldn’t do much more than be a college student on it, and I couldn’t upgrade it if I wanted to. The OS was great, but how does that help when you can’t do anything with it?

However, and this is a biggie – Snow Leopard came out and pared their OS down to a small footprint on the Hard Drive, and used the Grand Central Dispatcher to delegate tasks…talk about a breakthrough! Again, let me explain:

I Worked for a 3D CAD Software company for a time, and they had a machine they were testing from HP – a 12-Core, 32GB RAM, FireGL Workstation GPU with 1.5GB GDDR5 on it. Based on the Specs, this thing should have been able to discover world peace if you simply breathed on it. In reality, my old Pentium 4 laptop was faster than it. LITERALLY. I did a side-by-side comparison of them running a few different normal programs. I suspected this would happen, but I was surprised to find out that I was right.

Here’s the Catch – Most people think that the more cores you have the better. This has never been true. Imagine you have 12 mechanics trying to inflate tires on a car. If the boss doesn’t understand how to delegate each mechanic to a specific task, everything bottlenecks. And things move at a normal pace. If the boss is really keen on how to change tires with 12 people, it can happen in seconds.

So until OSX Snow Leopard, no operating system REALLY delegated tasks efficiently to multiple cores. Sure, you had programs that could do it, but Mac really is the first Operating Sytem to make COMPLETE use of multiple cores at all times. Brilliant move.

So, let’s even the playing field…

We all know you can install Windows on Mac Hardware, but what about the elusive “Hackitosh”? Can it be done?? Yes, it can.

A while back I was confronted with a dilemma, do I buy a Macbook, or another PC laptop? I weighed my options and pricing heavily and when I found out that I could Spend $1,200.00 (after extra hardware) and have a laptop with a 15.6″ screen, 2 Physical Hard-drives (after the purchase of the 2nd one and mounting bracket.) 4GB Ram, and a GTX 260M with 1GB of dedicated video memory, When the closest Mackbook Pro by comparison was at LEAST $1000 more, and still to this day lacks the video power – I just couldn’t stomach it. So I went with the PC an Asus G51VX.

I decided that since this took the place of a Macbook Pro, I would see if I could install OSX on my computer’s 2nd HDD. It was successful and now I have a PC with a Windows 7 x64 and Mac OSX.

After running a few comparisons on 3 key levers – Boot time, loading Photoshop CS4, and loading iTunes, I noticed that there isn’t that big of a difference between the two Operating Systems. On average the OS’s boot at about 34 seconds, and Photoshop Loads Faster on the Windows side by about 4 seconds on average. and OSX loads iTunes at a blistering 1.8 seconds on average while the PC is closer to 3.5sec.

So, on the same hardware – the 2 OS’s perform similarly – the difference is, Microsoft allows Apple users to install Windows on their Macs, why not the other way?? C’mon Apple, play fair!! I DARE YOU make an OS that can be installed on any hardware, then we will see just how solid you really are. You see if you can hold up while your software has to support hundreds of thousands of different manufacturers and components.

Conclusion

Thanks to anyone who could stand my long-winded rambling.

For now, Apple took the smart path, by keeping everything simple, clean, and solid. Apple never puts out a product that hasn’t been thoroughly idiot-proofed, and they were smart to be hardware snobs, so that every product they make is of the highest quality.

To all PC users – Stop resenting Macs because they are prettier and more expensive than you are. You’ve still got what counts on the inside, and that’s all that matters.

To all Mac users – please stop spreading ridiculous rumors about PC’s, just because your computers are made idiot proof (which you paid a higher price for, may I remind you) doesn’t mean your perfect. We’re all part of the same family – Personal Computers.

Let’s all play together. For my part…I guess you could say I’m Bi-Computational. (ahhh…geek humor.)

POD Farm 2

admin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:27:53 +0000

Line 6 just released their newest Plugin – POD Farm 2. After messing with it for some time, this is my official review.

The NEW Features:

In this release of POD Farm, Line 6 has FINALLY allowed its users to arrange any of their effects in any order (up to 10 per-signal-chain)! We have been griping about this on Line6′s forums for as long as I have been a member, and they are listening…sort of.

They have re-vamped the GUI (Graphical User Interface) to give it an even cooler Bad-Ass-Lazy-Suzan vibe, and pretty pictures that make you feel like you’re interacting with the gear that’s being emulated.

COOL FEATURE – The Elements plugin. Good Idea guys, for sure! No longer do we need to run an instance of POD Farm and turn off everything but ONE effect if want to add a single effect to a channel. Now we can have what Line6 calls a “toolbox” full of tools: and only take out the one we need, when we need it. I’m really diggin’ this feature.

The ability to use the FBV Shortboard MKII, to assign MIDI CC’s to control your effects via USB – kinda neat as well

Was this plugin worth the $35 I paid to upgrade it from POD Farm? Absolutely! Nice work guys. Is it worth $50-250 for prospective new buyers. Yes it is. The tools and the sounds are unbeatable as recording plugins. Absolutely great.

I’m still just throwing this out there. Make a unit that has every sound and feature you guys make – with a COMPLETELY flexible FX chain. It’s gotta happen. This software is a step in the right direction for sure! But still – we’re missing some of the great effects like the “Octo-Verb” and “Slow-Filter” from your stompbox series.