This whole thing is based around explaining what the basic types of switches do and how it impacts guitar effects.

I’m no guru, but I’ve learnt enough to share a bit. Take note this doesn’t talk about momentary, rotary or center pole off switches. I also take the liberty of bending a few things in order to get the idea right (specifically what a pole is) but anywhoo, here we go.

In the meantime, here’s the skinny on how these switches work, and this will hopefully explain what I was up to.

First, when we have a switch we normally think of it going from on to off. That kind of switch is called a single pole single throw or SPST. That SPST rubbish means that there there is only one lug or “pole” to flick or “throw” it on. It’s either making or breaking the connection on one side. The pole thing is easier to think off as being a row of lugs of a switch.

It looks a bit like this on the bottom:

[] <–power goes in
[] <–powergoes out

You can see that with the switch on the power goes through like the switch doesn’t exist. With the switch in the off position, the circuit is broken and no power can pass through.
I know that’s straight forward, but bear with me.

The next idea a designer had is “But wait! Instead of just turning a light off or on, what if I had two lights and I wanted to turn one light off but simultaneously turn the other off?”
So they came up with the SPDT or single pole double throw. This means there is still one row of lugs on the switch but now there are two ways to throw or flick the switch.

Looks a bit like this:

[ ] <–circuit goes in
[ ] <–circuit goes out
[ ] <–circuit goes in

The middle lug is the
Hopefully I explain this right!
So, let’s say that we currently have a light switched on in the bedroom, and a light switched off in the bathroom:

[|] <- This lug is making a connection with the middle lug so it’s providing power to the bedroom light
[|]
[x] <- This lug is NOT making a connection to the middle lug so the circuit is broken and the bathroom light is off

When we flick the switch, the bedroom light turns off, and the bathroom light goes on.

[x] <- This lug is NOT making a connection to the middle lug so the circuit is broken and now the bedroom light is off
[|]
[|] <- This lug i  making a connection with the middle lug so it’s providing power to the bathroom light

So what it’s doing is breaking the connection on one at the same time as it makes the connection to the other, and changes it each time you hit the switch.

It gets easier from here.

The designer then has another idea: “What if I want TWO sets of lights to turn on and TWO sets of lights to turn off simultaneously?” So they came up with the double pole double throw. Remember how I said to think of a pole as a row of lugs on a switch? Now all we’ve done is add an extra row to the right.

The Rat pedal you have uses a DPDT as you know. It looks like this on the bottom:
[ ] [ ]
[ ] [ ]
[ ] [ ]

Just think of the previous example I used but double it up eg

[|][|] <- These lugs are making a connection with the middle lugs so they’re providing power to the bedroom lights
[|][|]
[x][x] <- These lugs are NOT making a connection to the middle lugs so the circuit is broken and the bathroom lights are off

[x][x] <- These lugs are NOT making a connection to the middle lugs so the circuit is broken and the bedroom lights are off
[|][|]
[|][|] <- These lugs are making a connection with the middle lugs so they’re providing power to the bathroom lights

I think you get the picture. Guess what happens when it becomes a triple pole double throw (3pdt) switch?
Yep, we add yet another row of lugs to the right, looking like this

[ ][ ][ ]
[ ][ ][ ]
[ ][ ][ ]

So our designer is now mad with power, wanting to turn three lights on in the bedroom whilst simultaneously turning three off in the bathroom. I’m sure you get the point but let’s illustrate it on last time.

[|][|][|] <- These lugs are making a connection with the middle lugs so they’re providing power to the bedroom lights
[|][|][|]
[x][x][x] <- These lugs are NOT making a connection to the middle lugs so the circuit is broken and the bathroom lights are off

[x][x][x] <- These lugs are NOT making a connection to the middle lugs so the circuit is broken and the bedroom lights are of[f
[|][|][|]
[|][|][|] <- These lugs are making a connection with the middle lugs so they’re providing power to the bathroom lights

It’s like having 3 seperate switches in one box.

So how does this relate to what’s happening with your rat?

Right now with your DPDT it’s switching between the effect being switched into the signal and the signal just passing straight through.

Looks like this (approximately):

[|][|] < circuit switching in effect
[|][|] < ground
[x][x] < bypassing the effect

The effectboard output will soldered to the top left lug, the effectboard input to the top right. The lugs in the middle will most likely have the jack output on the left lug, input on the right, and the bottom lugs will be connected together somehow.
With the 3pdt, all you’re wanting to do is add another pole or row of lugs so you can switch your led on or off. You’re not wanting to switch another led on instead, so you’ll be leaving one of the lugs alone.

Practically, you could solder everything on the dpdt on to the first two rows of the 3pdt switch and then attack your led to the last row of lugs. I’ll do exactly this later on when I get home and post up a picture so you can see what I did.

My first foray into Biffy-dom was Infinity Land, an album as filled with jarring stabs as it was with glorious crescendo and melody. Each song tended to take you on a quick-stop journey through frontman Simon Neill’s mind, which seemed rather chaotic to say the least. You come away from the album feeling as though there were nuggets of blinding brilliance wedged between slabs of strangeness; it comes so close to being brilliant that it frustrates the listener that it’s not quite.

Following that was the three-piece’s more accessible Puzzle, which did away with quite a lot of the chaotic elements, pumped up the hooks and really beefed up the heaviness. This album got far closer to where they should be; plenty of great hooks with jarring quirks scattered throughout. This was a much more complete sounding Biffy, and was far more accessible.

Finally, their latest release got even hookier and heavier. Only Revolutions is the sound of a band on the very tip of exploding into widespread release. The riffs are crushing, huge, frenetic and beautiful. The drums and bass are woven tightly together, the guitar going wherever the hell it wants to. This album is the most accessible by far, being produced by GGGarth of RATM and Shihad fame (as was Puzzle). The only thing that can let Biffy Clyro down at times are the lyrics. At one moment they’ll be poiniant and bare-all, the next they are trying hard to be abstract and failing miserably. The lyrics connect when they’re earnest, when they’re not they miss the mark completely. Of particular note is Biffy Clyro’s knack of doing really good covers. They retain their Biffy-ness whilst doing a very interesting cover of the original.

Songs you should check out in particular are

• Get F**ked Stud
• As Dust Dances
• Saturday Superhouse
• Bubbles
• Many of Horror
• Cloud of Stink

Have fun, these guys are brilliant.

The root of the word ‘religion’ is bondage; don’t get caught trying to please God by your works. You only need to accept that Jesus fulfilled the requirements on your behalf.

I had forgotten what was so amazing about Grace.

There were about 5 guys that I kicked around with and to be honest, I haven’t seen them in years. Maybe a “so…how’s your ENTIRE LIFE” in passing, but very little real connection. These are friends that were with me through some of my darkest times, but now they seem so distant.

I used to beat myself up about how useless a friend I was, how little I kept in contact, but I have come realise that the lack of effort was on both sides; they didn’t see me as worth maintaining a friendship with. I am quite fine with that, even relieved to be free of ownership of the lack of friendship.

It’s interesting when you spot the real differences between you and your old highschool friends. All of my old mates were brilliant at sport, most achieving regional representation. I have always enjoyed sport but I’ve enjoyed music and God stuff a lot more. I found that I generally felt inferior to them, even though their jokes and jests were never particularly intellectual. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older and more dad-like, but puns and witticisms are far more my kind of humour than situational gags. At the end of the day, I never quite connected with them as well as I thought I did; I always felt a bit of an outsider and that has been amplified by my Christian world-view. Getting tiddly on cody’s holds so little attraction to me now.

The great thing is that as things have evolved, I really have been able to begin to choose my friends. The people I have around me seem to be of a different quality, be they church going types or musicians. I seem to have a deeper emotional and intellectual connection with the people around me now than I had with the others. Sure, some would say I’m not perceived as being as “cool” as I used to be, but honestly I’d rather have good company as opposed to feeling I have to laugh along or look like a tool.

This isn’t a dig at my high school mates, just an admission that we’re traveling along very different paths now, maybe never to intersect again, and I’m fine with that. So here’s to you, my now long-term acquaintances.

I must admit, it’s very strange to see how much I’ve changed, and the people that have decided to hang around. Those guys are pretty cool indeed.

My wife is freaking cool, talks about cool stuff and has an awesome sense of humour, taste in music, and is ridiculously creative.

I’m extremely lucky to have had such a cool woman saunter into my life and be my best friend.

That’s all I’d like to say.

Click through to see the photo essay, otherwise just take my word that it sounds great.

Alright, so you’re a big geek.

So I decided to get a RAT off HCFX, and the seller said it had a LM308 chip. The LM308 chip is the goodin’ and they cost a crapload but they’re worth it.

I popped the hood and guess what?! It didn’t have one! Awesome!

I gave it a thumbs down for having a crappy chip.

So I put in a a socket and a LM308N chip. Sounds great now. It’s that upside down small black thing (for those geeky yet untechy types)

I had a few problems at the start with the chip not being seated properly but a little extra pressure sorted that out.

Next, I decided to install a trimpot for the Ruetz Mod, which gives less gain and more bass. With a trimpot, it means I can dial in the reduction in gain. Apparently. I think I arsed it up, and all it gives me is squeals at either extreme. I’ll leave it for now, because I didn’t want a switch. Here’s the trimpot:

Here’s the resistor you need to remove:

Yeah, I love blurry photos. And here’s the trimpot installed:

Increasing in difficulty/fiddiliness , I decided to put a led on the box to indicate whther the effect was on or off, and a switch to go between Mosfet (big, juicy, crunch), leds (open, uncompressed, loud) and silicon diodes (the stock rat sound). To do this I needed to drill the case, which I actually bothered to measure a bit, which is a first. To drill cases and such, first you drill a small pilot hole, then this is your best friend:

The unibit! Also known as a step drill bit. Seriously, if you ever are going to mod or make pedals, get one of these. It means you can use a hand drill, get great smooth results and a uniform sized hole. If there was ever a statement to be taken out of context and giggled at, that was it. Anyway, here’s the drilled case

So pretty.

The unfortunate thing is that I found the clipping switch to be quite taxing and so I didn’t take any photos of it. Following this ( amz rat clipping) for how to work it, and this (mighter mouse mods) for the mosfet clipping  I put 2 3mm red leds in the place of the clipping diodes (the two to the right of/above the LM308 chip), connected the stock diodes directly to the left of a dpdt (3 position on/off/on) switch, and did connected the mosfets to the right of the switch. What it means is that in the left position, mosfets clip the signal, in the off position the leds do the work, and the right position has your stock rat sound. It’s a bit like this expect the leds are mounted on the board, and the leds in the picture is the mosfet/germanium combo.

(From Kyle Tompkins blog) Hope that makes some sense to you. Oh, and with the mosfets, ignore beavis’ pictures of the mosfet and attach them with the GDS. Moving along, with that *all working perfectly* … mosfets gave me trouble until I put them round the right way…it was on to the 3pdt and led.

The Rat has true bypass with a DPDT switch (the big black one).

However, with this vintage rat the easiest thing to do to get a LED on their is to slam a big 3pdt in there and go.

As you can see, what I’ve done is move the top wires of the black dpdt on to the top row of the blue dpdt. Likewise, I’ve move the wires on the bottom 3 lugs of the black dpdt onto the bottom row of lugs on the blue 3pdt. This leaves three lugs in the middle of the blue 3dpt unused, and that’s where we are going to put our led wiring.

I wired a 1.8k resistor onto the 9v+ power lug. You see that red wire next to the blue 3pdt switch that says “red”? Follow that all the up to the power socket and that’s the lug you want to wire the resistor to. From there it goes to the positive leg of the 5mm led (the longer of the two legs) then to the left-most unused lug. The middle unused lug is going to be your ground. The way I grounded mine is I soldered a snipped resistor leg from the centre lug to the top hand right lug with the green wire coming off it. The last lug in that middle row is meant to be unused. If it’s not working, try putting the wire from the led on the right lug instead. I go into detail here because when I searched all I saw were people saying it was easy, (which it is) but no one said how to do it. I’m sure someone with more technical knowledge may have a better way of doing it, but this worked for me.

In that last picture, you can also see the switch assembly  up at the top right, with those big mosfets hanging off it. I later taped the mosfets up into a small square.

Finally, we are finished, and back to square one.

I’m very happy with how this one has gone; it sounds great and I didn’t tear my hair out at all.

I’ve got a new Chinese small box rat 2 on the way that I am keen to do similar mods on, plus trying to mod it to vintage specs. We’ll see how close I can get them.

For more rat history go to the excellent http://webpages.charter.net/daosmun/ and  http://www.happybob.com/rstrand/rat/rat_versions.htm

I learnt so much from these guys, and in particular stagecraft. I learnt to go at 100% activity, swing my bass around manically and till stay tight. I also fell over a lot, but that was cool. It instilled in me an insatiable urge to do something the crowd isn’t expecting, and I learnt that when you go crazy, you enable the crowd to loosen up. I loved their faith (I was barely christian at the time) and their adherence to their core ideals. I was the crazy drunken munter that smoked too much, whilst they went crazier, harder, and never seemed too cool for me. I always respected that no matter how worldly I got, they just walked beside me. I owe a lot to those guys, and the crew of ever faithful supporters, Brehaut, Jim, and Fraser, who were there for every gig we rocked and every gig we sucked. It was refreshing to get off stage and have three guys go “yeah, that sucked.” Why? Truth is good. And when they came up and said “that was amazing!”, you felt 10 feet tall because you know you had done your job right. At the time, we were picking up support gigs everywhere, and it really helped us get super tight. Then, as he does, the lead singer faded out again, this time for good, to Canada. That was that.

I want to better that now. I want to get a good bunch of fans, do tours, write cool collaborative music that rocks, and go mental on stage once again. There is nothing  as cool as the night where everything clicks together; the crowd on your wavelength, you’re playing out of your skin, the atmosphere is electric,. You can just FEEL a memory being made. It’s exciting stuff indeed, and rather addictive.

But as people go more acoustic and mellow, I feel my chances are dropping. Maybe I won’t get to where I want. Maybe that was the high point? It could well be that I need to find a whole different bunch of musicians.

Nah, I’ll be back again. I can’t help but pine for it.

I used to say exactly what I thought, and always had a sense that I was entitled to provide it, but now I’m not so sure. It seems that the older I become, the more specific I become in my views, just as others also become just as specific. For instance, I have friends that have become increasing left-wing both in politics and in Christianity. Left wing or right wing, in politics it really doesn’t faze me as I tend to get splinters where they shouldn’t be from sitting on the fence so much. However, liberal Christianity is something I just can’t embrace. I’ve seen too many people of Christian influence in my life take up a post-modern, liberal stance and have watched their faith, morals and worldview erode into a morass of second-guessing and conversations ending with “well, what is truth anyway?”

“What is truth, anyway?” Why can’t we answer the question anymore without receiving a chuckle or a look with one perniciously raised eyebrow? This post-modern approach sounds great, even charming, but it’s eating away at society’s moral backbone, or resolve, and most importantly, the foundations of the Church are being rusted by this tepid philosophy. Frustration is forever building in me when I see seeker-friendly churches become so much like the world in their bid to attract those turned off by traditional church. They end up dancing with the world so often that they forget what their mission is! Coupled with this wooing the world on the world’s terms is their embracing of post-modern ideals. The image is laughable; a church behind the times not quite cool enough to attract the world whilst holding the bible in disdain saying “this old thing? We don’t really take this seriously! We want to help you!” They rely on tradition rather than doctrine, never quite sure of what’s correct but i it feels good, it must be alright…right?

To be fair, the cobwebs need to be blown out of traditional church. Stodgy old worship and pink rinses aren’t going to get many fired up, even if the teaching is sound. They’re too complacent, too much of an anachronism, too much like a concrete bunker instead of a medic tent. But they do have this; solid doctrine, a healthy respect for the word, reverence and faith, and a desire to feed the people, not just find them. We need to make a hybrid of these two; an accessible church that makes sense, is honest in its doctrine, stands strong for what it believes, and makes disciples of Christ as opposed to attenders of a church. Once we relinquish the idea that church is in a building, let go of the pride and the lack of honesty that’s all pervasive, and get the word explained clearly and with scholarship to us, we will become a dynamic church. (Oh the evil that is ‘niceness’. We just don’t tell each other the truth! Another rant there, for another time.)

There are few of these churches that are accessible AND doctrinally sound but most of this emergent church movement has failed to provide something of substance. Sure, it looks pretty but most of the time there’s not a lot going on in the knowledge/common sense department; this annoys me so much because they could be so impacting! If only they would make sense and have solid grounding in the scripture, instead of dropping the ball in this area. The problem is a lot of Christians now shun fancy looking websites, well-rehearsed worship teams, good presentation, even just general competence because they associate being effective with media as being aligned to the world. This attitude is really brought on by a whole pile of emergent churches emphasising media and presentation and lacking a solid biblical backbone.

These opinions are unpopular, and I find that the people I can talk with about religion and how liberal, emergent, seeker-friendly church is broken aren’t christian. Maybe I’m secure in my opinion; it might just be that others aren’t as secure in theirs, and that upsets them.

I’m not particularly political so no fun to be had from that angle really.

I like bacon and eggs too.

The title is because my name is Tony, I identify with big Maori monsters (due to our mutual love of a good glass of pinot noir) and I like the punnery of keeping a monster entertained whilst a fellow named Tony craps on about *very important things*.

It’s not very clever, but it’s the best I could be bothered doing.