the flanjo project

The journey of conceiving, building, playing the flanjo and then finally loaning it to Tim from my favorite band Shred Kelly and they used it in a gig!

Piecing it all together has been fun in itself - took place over a long time and had some interesting intertwine of separate threads.

story more or less starts October 2014…

We (Peter R, wife Karen and me) had discovered Shred Kelly at folk fest Ottawa 2013

we had already and seen them once since then

Tim on banjo totally impressed me (this is how I would play if I was better)

and the band in general seemed great and great people

Fusion of folk and punk - that's my thing! (clash, gang of four, talking heads, dropkick murphys)

Great stuff - Shred Kelly

http://shredkelly.com/

I started conceiving the idea for the flanjo right around october-ish

"Flanjo" came from a mashup of "flanger" and "banjo"

electric guitar players know what a flanger is - a pedal effect that has a frequency shifting thing going on - not 100% different from how a traditional banjo with a drum skin top works

Flanging /ˈflændʒɪŋ/ is an audio effect produced by mixing two identical signals together, one signal delayed by a small and gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds. This produces a swept comb filter effect: peaks and notches are produced in the resulting frequency spectrum, related to each other in a linear harmonic series. Varying the time delay causes these to sweep up and down the frequency spectrum. A flanger is an effects unit that creates this effect. In some cases the two signals will become so close that it almost fades away to oblivion called "sucking air." It has also been called the "Darth Vader effect."

At that time, scott is a guitar player - learned to play and wrote a bunch of songs in my 20's all with a folk/country influence

my musical tast is punk

and i jam with a bunch of guys who are little bit older than me and firmly rooted in classic rock! (men with day jobs - no website... coming to a mall near you!)

I am relegated to 3rd string rythm guitar on a good day - lead singer if I can grab the mic

I switched to banjo about 5 years ago - found that i could plunk away to the classic rock without even being amplified - and every song turns out to be a great banjo song! (see the cognitive dissonace tab on this website)

The boys were very tolerant of me and my banjo (only a few mean jokes - 8 or 9 per hour)

I started to improve a little and was making some progress in putting punk and folk into the overall repetoir

at some point, i realized... I NEEDED MORE VOLUME!

October 2014 was Queen's U homecoming and by sheer coincidence, shred was playing at a kingston bar that weekend

so we all went and had a total blast

Our thoughts that the kids in the band were great people were re-inforced as they stayed and chatted with the crowd before and after the gig.

That was the first time I described the idea to Tim (note his reference to "scott being just some crazy drunk guy" in the video).

As I described it more and more you could see on his face that he was starting to get the picture and agreed that if it could be pulled off it would probably be pretty cool.

note the background of the picture above - dining room table... poor karen - this was the tip of the iceberg. there was (and still is) flanjo shit ALL over our house.

nice to have that kind of support (tolerance)

Got a new idea - round piece of wood as the backing plate, block of wood on the backing plate for attaching the neck.

Once I got past this, the pace started to pick up.

The top would be mounted off the bottom by bolts going into coupling nuts.

I spent about 2 hours at Ottawa Fastener with this old guy in the back at end of nut aisle (and "the guy" he was - not a fella for sure he knew his nuts!)

body starting to take shape. Structure of a stringed instrument is tricky. Lots of tension from the string make it want to collapse on itself.

So now the sides are a nicely bent piece of maple that I made using my table saw and drum sander.

No structural element to the side, just closing in the body.

Meanwhile - late january 2015 and Shred is coming to play Mavericks downtown

I have the neck on and the start of the first (proto) soundboard - or top

We get there a bit early... In comes the band... we had met them for a bit in kingston and few months earlier - no expectation of being remembered... but for sure - look of recognition, all of them came over one by one or stopped as they walked by, said hi and gave a handshake - cool!

When Tim stopped he said" I met you before, right? your that guy making the weird instrument thing..."? I said "flanjo" - he said "ya"!

Always packing my andoid, i had been posting progress shots on facebook... Liam took this photo of Tim checking progress....

Another great Shred show. (note - warmup act was Ottawa's Loon Choir - worth checking out).

Winter going on, making steady progress.

At that time - unrelated - my friend Tony has been battling cancer all year and is coming up on end of treatment with a really positive outcome.

This thread intertwines the story a bit later.

I finally get the thing figured out, built and it can be played. The soundboard (the front) is made of plywood - got hacked up a bit in cutting and the sound quality is compromised because it is not what a proper instrument is made of (should be solid cedar, special kind, hard to find).

Super excited that it worked pretty well the first day, I shot some selfie videos and posted them up on youtube.

Note that the flanjo is pretty cool - BUT - the soundboard is a bit hacked up

It is plywood and when i cut the holes a lot of chipping occurred. also, was experimenting with how to get all the electronics mounted

was meant to be a prototype from the get go, refined and replaced in some future phase of the project

We have an old high school friend who has a chalet at Fernie (small ski town in southern alberta rockies and original home of Shred Kelly), he had told Tony that we would do a ski trip when he got cured of cancer - time to cash in on the promise - ROAD TRIP!

note: location of Mike's lodge and Tony's cancer are completely independent of Shred or Flanjo - all coincidences

SO - April 2015 - ski trip to rockies (my first ever - but that is a different story) gonna travel Wednesday, ski Thursday Friday Saturday, travel home Sunday

Wonder what else is going on in Fernie - especially Saturday night - would be fun to hit a local bar, maybe take in a band... see where this is going??

no shit - Shred Kelly is playing the huge Fernie end of year bash in their home town!!!!

so - gotta get some tix... could not quite figure out how to get them online, so I emailed info@shredkelly.com (or something), expecting to get a manger or subcontracted email machine. instead i get back "hi Scott, it is Sage (female lead singer) - cool that you are coming, click on blah blah to get tickets (youngster shows old man how to use interweb - typical).

After i figure it out how to get tickets, i decide to send another email to Sage:

1 - thanks

2- see you at the show, tony and the gang will be in the "fuck cancer t-shirts" and

3 - get Tim to watch my video (folsom prison video above)

5 minutes later I get a really nice email back from Tim... he loves it! I was pretty happy! (understatement?)

Side note - wow - skiing in rockies - holy shit - fun - scary - lived through it! great time

and I LOVE fernie - wonderful town

Turns out we ended up being 5 instead of 4 on saturday (mikes older brother Jim who was the actual owner of the chalet joined us)

so we went into town on the saturday (it was raining on mountain, so no ski)

swung by venue for that nights gig - met the band who were there doing sound check

also note - it is march-ish - Sens are still WAY out of a playoff spot - but - got the hat - represent!

Tim asks - "did you bring the flanjo????"

I said that it was a combination of two things; 1) would have been hard to bring it on road trip, plane tec and 2) felt kinda wierd to show up at a band's gig with an instrument and ask the player to try it

Tim graciously agreed and we decided that eventually they would be in Ottawa and we would hook up then

show that night was SICK - super fun. end of year bash so all the waiters and waitresses, ski lift people, ski rental folks - everyone we had met so far - whole town was going and super excited for the year end (end of ski season)

on the way driving there, we passed a bunch of guys who had apparently stolen a giant moose head - turns out they had taken it from a bar with some sketchy story about the level of permission... whaaat?

who should show up at show... bulwinkle...

note the celebrity in this shot... thanks again jim for hosptitality! dear reader; ask me about side stories of getting out of traffic tickets and haiku.

so that was last April 2015.

flanjo is in pretty good shape (plywood top needs upgrade) and I am playing it a lot now.

keeping an eye on the Shred Kelly website - looking for announcements of an east coast tour swing

Meanwhile, my nephew Jeff (who was also the donator of the original strat that I gutted for the flanjo electronics) had told me about a cool exotic wood shop in Burlington Ontario and that they had a special humidor section for luthiers (fancy name for guitar builders)

as it happened I had a business trip there in June, so I swung by. it was awesome and they had exactly what I needed to upgrade the sound board.

AAA Adirondack Cedar. nice...

had to plane it, join two pieces to make 1 and then cut it in a circle.

I ended up cleaning up my whole shop, buying new blades and setting up all my saws to do a better job of cutting this super nice piece of wood. was pretty nervous - not really a "finish" carpenter - more of a framer...

after I cut it into the circle, i rimmed the edges with a thin piece of maple.

ended up so nice, that i just left it for several weeks, i could not bring myself to cut it! plus i was kind of reluctant to disassemble the flanjo - i was using it regular now and doing weekly gigs. the disk occupied various prominent locations in the house - Karen moved it around a lot... I put it up on fireplace mantle and such.

there is even a ribbon of maple around the outside edge to give it a nice smooth edge.

getting into July - Shred website starts to show some ontario dates

now I have seen a proper sound board, I am thinking there is just no way I can show this to Tim with that hacked up plywood sound board.

I finally got enough courage up to drill the bolt holes around the outside - pretty safe...

after I did that, I decided to go ahead and re-assemble the flanjo without installing any electronics or doing any more cuts in the beautiful new sound board.

as much as to not make an error on the new wood as to delay the disassembly of the old one. nervous.

what a nice surprise. new soundboard sound wonderful acoustically! gave the whole thing a kind of deeper mellow tone. even further away from banjo, but just so nice I had to follow it to its logical conclusion.

note in background of shot - "Andre the Acoustic Bass" - last years project... good sound.. not so pretty, and friggin HUGE!

wow - new plan. gonna re-engineer the whole thing to make the least amount of cutting on the new soundboard - I don't want to interfere with the physics of the sound in any way! (bessel equations)

Chatted with a few folks - fittsy and jipper most notably - and came up with:

- mount single pickup with body, have it extrude upwards through as small a hole in soundbaord as possible

- move volume, switch and input jack to sides, no other interference with sound board

went to Long and Mcquaid kanata - those folks had been really helpful through the whole project - still need to go by there with finished product and thank them

With Shred Kelly ontario tour dates rounding out, getting closer to Ottawa feeling like I can get this done and have it nice in time to really show it to Tim

One marathon all nighter, popped it all together (Karen goes to cottage mid-week a lot in summer, you should have seen the house that night. Dining Room, living room and shop too cluttered - now moved into kitchen). Thanks to Toe LeMather for hanging out with me for a chunk of that night.

First time I tried it out I had some really serious grounding issues - huge humming and buzzing

Encouraging that under all that bad sound was this insane beautiful mellow kind of jazz tone - cedar sound board plus the seymor duncan humbucker pickup

JP (johnny vegas) was a huge help here as we talked it through. basically just had to ground everything to everything with lots of wire... the way it is built is pretty cool in the respect that the soundboard is completely removable leaving all the electronics in the body and easy to work on.

this is us doing a Burban Guerrillas gig at andrew hayden park bandshell with the proto version of the soundboard

last piece of the puzzle was to take it apart one last time to stain and clear coat

went to randalls in bells corners - girl there was a huge help - like the ottawa fastener guy - she got guy status for sure - no fellas!

)side note - i scott language "a guy" is a person who you ask for help and you get "a solution", "a fella" is a person you ask for help, he tells you lots of stuff, sells you some things, but in the end - the thing you are trying to get done is not done "no solution". watch for it mext time you go to a hardware store, plumbing store, hockey equipment store... music store.

meanwuke, back to randall's paint in bells' corners...

I told her what I was up to . said I wanted it to look like a plain white disk from far, but as you get closer you start to see some grain and it is a beautiful piece of wood. she smiles and says follow me... sells me 2 small cans for not a small amount of money! plus explicit instructions on what to do...

White gel style stain applied with a rag (6 coats - 1 per hour staying up all night) and a super flat gel based clear coat applied with a foam brush (another 6 coats, 1 per hour - that was a really long night - finished at sunup. karen was at cottage again that day, hungry and dirty, but lots of spare time to do flanjo work all night!)

Shed tour had booked both burnstown and ottawa by then, finished with about a week to spare

mmm... looks, plays and sounds like butter. smooth.... had some fun doing that photo too (self proclaimed guitar portrait expert, happy to do one if you want)

so - all that is left is to email Tim, figure out logistics and let him have a rip.

I was of the mind that he would give it a hack during sound check. I could only hope that he would choose to use it for a song - figured probably not.

Discussing with Peter R (Shred's second biggest fan??!?! and coiner of phrase "shred head") - he says - just email them already - we already had our tickets to Raw Sugar show. just as we are about to do it he says "hey - why not see if they wan to come to dinner too"! what the heck...

On Aug 24, 2015, at 9:50 AM, Scott Bulbrook

Hey Sage

I have a ton of friends all lined up for the gig Wednesday at raw sugar including the lads that came to Fernie with me - should be a blast!

2 things:

- I live pretty close to raw sugar, so I was thinking of taking the day off and coming by sound check so that Tim could give my flanjo a try

what time do you think sound check will be?

p.s. check the attached photo - I finished the final details last week

- second thing… raw sugar is in the middle of Chinatown Ottawa. we are booked to have dinner at a Chinese joint on the block.

when I was telling my friends that I was planning to swing by sound check, one of them suggested that we offer to buy the whole band dinner

not sure how the timing works for you (or if it is too weird) - anyways - we will be about 16 people heading to a place called jadeland

if you guys wanted to come along we would be more than happy to have you join us

From: Shred Kelly
Sent: August 24, 2015 11:08 AM
To: Scott Bulbrook
Subject: Re: Wednesday at raw sugar - flanjo!

Hey Scott!

Man that Flanjo looks awesome! I'd love to give her a whirl at sound check if you bring it by. And yeah we are definitely keen to grab a meal at Jadeland. We're not exactly sure what time load-in and sound check is yet because the venue hasn't got back to us yet, but i will let you know as soon as we know.

Can't wait to give the Flanjo a go!

Cheers!

Tim

Sent from my iPhone