I’m rediscovering a band I used to listen to nearly 20 years ago, Moderat.
This music came at such a strange time in my life. I struggled with allowing myself to listen to anything other than Christian or worship music. It’s sad because Christian music fails to produce anything making you feel anything of substance; the dichotomy of “I’m a sinner heal me,” “I’m in love with you,” and “I’m going to heaven and everything is great,” with very little in between. Or worse, “the world is bad” or “let’s pray for the sinners.” Musically, Christian music is, at most, a surface level copy of non-Christian music, but in major chords and rebranded content about the (self-imposed) struggle of a Christian’s life in a broken, fallen, world.
I accidentally ran into this while slicing out clips from a different tape to run through the processing chain.
Not sure who it’s by; it’s an unlabeled tape I’ve been randomly recording over. This happened to be after the section I recorded, but kept extracting from the tape onto my laptop. Normally I just delete this kind of thing but it grabbed me something specific today.
Last week I was feeling super fucking maxed out. Work has been tiring on a number of fronts. Then working on the house in the evenings compounded it.
So I logged out for lunch, put my phone on silent, and made some music.
This was recorded over a single take in 30ish minutes. I recorded some mini synth sounds onto a tape loop, then my guitar onto another tape loop, then fed those each into a channel on my mixer. Then guitar through some pedals and into another channel. Then some random creek sounds from the BBC sound archive.
I bought an Epiphone LP Jr. earlier this year from my favorite guitar shop. It needed a little work so I got a great deal on it. I removed everything, started to strip the nitro, but parked it to work on my Fender Strat build. I started working on it again this weekend and I’m stupid excited about it.
There wasn’t a lot asthetically I wanted to change with the Fender, but this guitar was different. I didn’t want an all black guitar and didn’t want a relic’d black guitar either.
After putting down the shielding the next step was routing the grounding wires. I installed the wiring, soldered the ground to the tremelo and jack pin. Everything tested correctly with the multimeter.
Next the pickups. I went with a set of hand wound, aged, Alnico 5/2, with flat poles. According to the description, the combination of Alnico 5 rods for the low strings, and Alnico 2 rods for the high strings, “creates a smooth, well balanced output… punchy attack with well defined bass response on the lower register and warm swelling vintage tones on the upper register.”
This part of the project was a lot of fun. I spent a fair amount of time researching materials and proper shielding techniques. There are many differing opinions about the effectiveness of shielding and when it actually matters. In the end, the copper tape was cheap, and it was fun applying it.
I covered each cavity with the copper tape then ran a small copper wire between the jack cavity and the main body. Using the multimeter, each cavity and wall tests conductive to every other cavity and wall.
The other day my friend Clay from Franklin Music messaged me asking if I wanted to take on a new project guitar. I’ve jokingly become his salvage guy. Clay had purchased the guitar just for the pickups (and apparently the tuning machines) but didn’t want to invest the time or money to build it back up. Perhaps it was too beat up for the average customer at his shop, or perhaps he wouldn’t get out of it what he would have to put into it. Lucky for him that’s what I like, that’s what I like.
April 28, 2026
