Dead air.  Not good!   As I was nearing completion of my epically long video for part 2 in my guitar pedal building series, one of the big items left on my to-do list was to find some appropriate thematic music for the section interludes.  Each of the 5 tutorial sections has a table of contents image that sits on the screen for about 16 seconds.   At that point in the project, each of these brief interludes was dead-silent. 

I had this vague idea that I would compose some short piece of music, and then make five increasingly complex variations to play for each of the five increasingly advanced sections of the tutorial.   16 seconds is not very long- not long enough for a big composition, but maybe long enough for a short melody.  This idea lurked in the back of my mind for a few weeks.   A couple of aborted attempts just didn’t seem to fit the tone of the video- too perky, too funky, etc.

Inspiration arrived, as it sometimes does, with a new piece of gear.  So with brand new Les Paul in hand, and Jamman Delay looper and Vox Ice 9 under foot, I recorded the following series of melodies.  Each loop starts with a copy of a previous variation, and adds a little something.

I’m particularly fond of that last clip, even though it ended up on the cutting room floor.  It’s got this crazy riff in it – which may be just a little too complex.

This is part 2 of my new series on building guitar effects pedals. 

This part of the project ended up being far more grandiose than I originally intended.  I started out planning to just show how to model this diecast aluminum 125B guitar pedal enclosure, to make sure my PCB and components would fit properly inside.   But by the time I was done with it, it was essentially a complete beginner’s how-to course for Google Sketchup.  (Note, Sketchup is now part of Trimble instead of Google).

To give you an idea of how long this took for me to complete, I started filming the intro and the Sketchup tutorial videos in June of 2011.  Over the last year, in the time-spaces between the rest of life, I’ve been gradually editing, revising, extending, and composing music for the project. 

In this tutorial, I start out with the absolute basics, and gradually pick up the pace, progressing to more and more advanced topics.  I divided the video up into 5 sections, but kept them all together in one 55-minute video.  In my previous multi-part videos, I had to split them into multiple YouTube clips, due to the YouTube length restrictions, but now that they’ve relaxed those for my account- I hope it’ll be better having it all in one video.

Here is the Sketchup file that I used in the tutorial if you’re interested: Download sketchup file.

Each section assumes a familiarity with the previous section topics.  Here’s the table of contents:

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