AFI at Brixton

Finally found some time to describe AFI at the Brixton Academy last month. After stocking up on some tasty Nando's free chicken and watching all the über-keen teens queuing far too early we headed in to what ended up as quite a packed gig. The support were The Dear And Departed followed by Sick Of It All, the former were quite fun and, having listened to some of their songs afterwards, seem not too shabby. The latter were completely insane and slightly on the heavy side for my taste but they did a pretty good job of getting the crowd bouncing. And watching the guitarist run from one mic to the other every 5 seconds was hilarious.

AFI themselves put on their usual energetic and extremely well performed set. I can't decide if it was better than their December Underground tour, maybe not, but they still know how to do a good live show compared to many bands. They also managed to please both old and new fans with a good mix of songs. There were in fact fewer Crash Love songs than I expected (5 out of a set of 18 and all in the first half) but it worked. Opening with 'Medicate', 'Girl's Not Grey', 'The Leaving Song Part II' and 'I Am Trying Very Hard To Be Here' was was a good way to rock out. They threw in 'File 13' and 'Love Is A Many Splendored Thing' for a bit of old-school punk-based fun and ended with 'Miss Murder' before the encore of 'Days Of The Phoenix', 'Love Like Winter' and 'Silver And Cold'. For some reason the sound seemed a little bit off on some songs but that could have been due to standing too far back and didn't diminish what was an awesome gig.

(Thanks to Terri for these photos!)

More geeky effects pedal shizzle

Having popped into the lab yesterday I decided to attach the Crunchie Boost to a signal generator and see what sort of waveform it produces. I used a 200 mV peak-to-peak sine wave input with frequencies of 800 Hz and 8 kHz, kept the volume potentiometer at max and the tone at its mid position. The results are fairly interesting and seem to be the sort of thing one requires of a tube overdrive/boost...

800 Hz:

8 kHz:

From left the right the graphs are Low Crunch, Mid Crunch and High Crunch. Red curve is the input, green is Low Boost, blue is Mid Boost and pink is High Boost.

So there is not quite the separation of Boost and Crunch effect that would be ideal since obviously the Boost also overdrives the tube stage leading to some clipping. However, the two controls do seem to be able to produce a wide range of sounds from warm tube boost through to nice overdrive. At low Crunch there seems to be clipping of the negative part of the cycle which is slightly annoying. Also there is still more noise than I would like but once it is in a box the latter may improve. I'm not to sure about the tone control either - there is quite a lot of low frequency attenuation and some distinct shifting of the phase evident at 800 Hz. Otherwise it's looking cool. Finally out of interest the complete circuit draws around 0.318 A.

Overall it is pretty pleasing and fairly incredible that it worked at all first time!