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Well it is VFEFRIDAY and today I want to showcase my most recent Merman build. A friend had asked if I would sell mine to him and I couldn't part with it so I offered to build one for him. Here it is on a lovemyswitches 1590b, airbrushed gold leaf and hand painted with a graphic homage to the original. Next week I am going to show my personal merman and the accompanying video that I made for it.

I have been editing my balls off and noticed this little gem in the background. I can't seem to find where it went on the website but this thing gave me hell. thesameage had a post about desoldering blues and this thing put me down for about 3 days!

I foolishly did not get long pin pots and soldered in the board the wrong way. It was a demon of a bad idea on my part. So here it is warts and all, jumpers to get it to work and just a fly in the ointment.

It does sound really great though and I love the copper airbrush front with little monkey.

I know what your thinking, "hasn't this dude run out of VFE pedals yet?" No, I have not and I will make more, damn it!

This is my choral reef and this is a video that almost broke my patience. I filmed it and edited it and tried to get the video to a shorter length (thinking that is what people want) and sent it off to my brother for some notes. He said it sucked and was missing what he liked in my videos, me dicking around acting like myself (an idiot). So it was scrapped and completely redone. I love my brother and he helped me remember why I am doing this, to have fun and get people into building pedals. I am not a youtuber just a diy nutjob who likes to have fun, I am going to try and still edit them to a reasonable length but keep the fun parts about them. I will also never ever say please like and subscribe and dont forget to hit that bell icon, just not happening guys. I may sell myself on the street but not on the internet.

Now for this video I did not tell the whole story of this build. This build is an homage to my father, my dad is absolutely the funniest guy I know and without a doubt will have me laughing every time we talk. He once told me this story about when he was a kid he would always get my grandma Lillian fired up and he would get stuck doing chores. Back in roughly 1966, he was 10 and got in some real hot water and had to do dishes for a month. Half way through this long stretch he couldn't take it and decided to have some company join him in his efforts.

Looking at Grandmas fish bowl, he grabbed a goldfish and threw him in the sink.........

My dad thought it was hilarious, a little fish swimming around in the sink while he did dishes. His idea was, he would get a laugh and then toss him back in the fish bowl except he forgot about one little thing, dish soap.

When he told me this story I couldn't help but feel sad for this fish but then feel even worse for the 10 year old boy who was just trying to have fun. I think there is probably a lesson in there somewhere but for me I just think back to that story and think about my Dad and that goldfishes last thoughts. I am guessing they were like this....

Here is dem sweet gutz.


Here is the demo and this will be the last video until the 11th. Next week I want to show off my Merman build I did for a friend and I have to get caught up on some video stuff.

It is Friday and here is yet another week of VFE Madness, here is my Mini Mu! This guy is drunk as duck and ready to quack yer ass off. I love this pedal envelope filters/auto wahs are my jam and I have a lot of fun with this one. Challenging build like most VFE builds but totally worth the effort and I actually found this easier then the MBP Naughty fish. Now that I say that I wish I would have put them together for some really quacking madness....

Missed opportunity, anyways here is the video and here are the pics.

[youtube width=640]SSgl19Yp4wQ[/youtube]




Here are some other goodies that went out last week or the week before, I cannot remember.

A PedalPCB.com Abyss, a clone of the EQD Univibe, it has a painting of the Loch Ness Monster taking a bubble bath.



Here is a PedalPCB.com Seabed Delay, a clone of the Mad Professor Deep Blue delay with an evil AF Panda



And lastly a AionFX Procyon, a clone of the BJFe Honey Bee. It has a little Luma on it with star bits from Mario Galaxy.

This is a bad ass little box! It does everything I love about good drive pedals, clean boost, overdrive and some distortion. I put it in a cream box, really bad decision, I just kind of dislike it and really had a hard time coming up with something good. Slapped on some orange knobs and painted this weird monkey cult thing. Not my best work but easily not the worst.

This is built fairly stock, I think I subbed in some fancy mislabeled diodes instead of 1n914.

I think next week will be the Mini Mu.

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This bad MF was used in my Tweed videos and finally got painted and put in a video. This video was quite a lesson learned, I forgot to turn on the vocal mic for the first attempt, half a day wasted. Then for the second attempt I did not realize the mics were moved and the end result was a very weird out of phase sound. I then switched amps and changed mics to film a video how I normally would and then decided to change it up completely....

All of this is to say I think this is the best way to show off a pedal like this, multiple guitars, multiple pedals and an amp that can do everything. I also edited the hell out of this to make it shorter and more concise without all of the wasted time. Let me know what you all think!

And yes the PTP Dan Boost makes an appearance.

Here is the Madbean Hipster Fuzz I used, my son thinks it may be bubbles from Angry Birds on there.




Here is a PedalPCB.com General Tso Compressor I made, I am calling this finish burnt sparkle orange with the general painted on it.

Here is a pedal that really shows what happens when I run out of fun ideas to paint on pedals...........

I really dropped the ball on the creativity with this one but I honestly kept coming up short handed. Maybe its because it is lime green..

Either way to get back on track for #VFEFRIDAY here is a lime green Focus.

Here is a little video I shot putting the Dragon hound through its paces! Next weeks video is going to actually be on Friday and coincide with #VFEFriday, mind blowing shit right there.

Here is the demo for the incredibly fun woodchipper. Lets see a MBP board of this guy.

What more needs to be said, it is a freaking Klein Bottle and it is mind blowing and crazy over the top. It was a challenging build in terms of the shear amount of parts but really came together quickly and of course sounds great. Now I just need to figure out what the hell to do with it......

Also next week may not have a hand painted VFE but after that the #VFEFriday will have the demo videos released with them.

Here is the demo video I finished for this build and I think this is my favorite video I have mad so far. This pedal is so much fun and I hope everyone enjoys this video and builds this thing.

[youtube width=640]gWV6YSIheaI[/youtube]

Here is the last of my Koopa style builds, this is Bowser Jr in a Fuzz Duo. This has a couple of ac127s and 2n1308s in it and has a wild range of tones in it. I highly recommend building it and using sockets because not every transistor combo sounded that great together.

I normally do not do builds for others and very rarely ever paint for anyone else but I gotta fund this habit somehow...

Anyways this deal involved vintage tubes and all he said was "just paint whatever, I trust you". This is really freeing because I dont have to worry about trying to create his vision just do what I want to do and here it is, his Timmy Version 3 I believe.

Does anyone have any stories like this? I am new to selling the stuff I build and so far have had some good experiences.

To continue my completely backwards way of showing off builds then releasing a demo weeks later, I give you the Pale Horse!

https://youtu.be/5Qu9qAs8bQI

Here is VFEs take on the BB Preamp, this board came from the VFE files. I made this in a florescent orange 1590B from tayda and it is crazy bright, like too bright and I didnt really like it. Once I painted the Morton Koopa face on there I decided to keep going to cover up some of the bright orange.

The pedal sounds really cool, it has a switch to go between 9v and 18v which is nice for this kind of Tube screamer type thing. This is the last Koopaling series, next week will be Bowser Junior and then we are onto some good stuff.

Here is the first in a long list of VFE pedals I demoed from #VFEFRIDAY, so many cool sounds in this pedal. This will be every Wednesday for quite sometime so if there are any requests please let me know.

Here is the deliciously fun distortion/overdrive/Rat/TS combo thing. So many cool sounds to mess around and the fat control and filter control allow it to have pretty versatile eq options. I didn't feel like using any of the coveted LM308 chips so I used the OP07 and enjoy the sound it gives. I painted Wendy Koopa on here and she is the second to last Koopaling I have painted. Anyone keeping tabs know who is left?

Here is my Blue Shoe Gai Pan AKA the JHS Paul Gilbert Signature pedal AKA a booster into a supro emulation pedal. It is a pretty good sounding little thing and has a lot of features packed into, I actually sold this pedal off to fund the Tweed Amp Build and filmed this right before it went out the door. I airbrushed on the sparkle blue color and then hand painted the rest, this is one of the last enclosures I airbrush the sides of because there ended up being a big thumbprint on the the bottom side of it.

This video was super fun to make, I knew I wanted to cover a RATM song at some point and thought this one worked well. I found the midi for the drums and used ezdrummer to dial in the drum sound and then used my P bass DIY monster for the bass tones and got all of the sounds fairly quickly. I used a Multiplex jr for the little delay part and in editing I realized how blatantly I am reading the tab from the monitor because I kept forgetting stuff. I have been watching a ton of youtube videos on using Resolve and this was my first foray into trying to really up my editing game. Still a long way to go but I think it turned out great and I hope you guys like it.



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Here is another VFE Friday and here is an odd one, the wooly bear. This is Peter Rutters take on the Foxx Tone Machine and is sounds as insane as the original. The blend control is really neat and is fun to bring back some of your signal and layer the octave with it. Instead of just an on/off switch for the octave it has the drive control which sets the level of the octave for even more tone shaping. Here is another Koopaling, Larry Koopa and a very fun painting.

It wouldn't be a glorious Friday without another VFE pedal build. This board came courtesy of swirl effects, the re-creator of the mega pedal. I haven't seen him around these parts in a while but he had a bunch extra boards a while back that I grabbed up, the woodchipper was one of them.

This is VFEs take on the Meastro Brassmaster and is one helluva ugly octave fuzz pedal. I will be making a demo for this one when I get sometime because there are all kinds of interesting sounds in it. Maybe it is the 18 dollar transformer in it.....

Also continuing in the Mario Koopalings theme here is my significant others favorite Koopa, Lemmy.