UtilityBeltFX
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The first concert I ever went to was blink-182 and Green Day on the Pop Disaster tour, 2002. I saw three boobs that night!
(me circa 2002)
I've gotten some attention recently for building a blink-182-in-a-box pedal (more on that another time) and because of that, Mark Hoppus's bass tech started following me on instagram. I knew I had a special opportunity to shoot my shot, so I went for it! I sent him a message thanking him for the follow, and asked if I could build a custom bass fuzz to send to Mark. His response was "yeah, that'd be rad!" It happened to be on my birthday I asked, and was such a treat to get that response. blink is currently on tour in Europe, so he detailed that they would have some crew members back in the states soon, and I could ship it to them to bring back to Europe. (I ended up shipping it to Tom DeLonge's guitar tech, which was extra crazy for 12 year old me).
I decided to go with my tried and true EHX Big Muff, built to Sovtek Green Russian specs. It just rules on bass, plain and simple.
But I knew I wanted to design something really special for the enclosure that hopefully Mark would love. Additionally I only had about 2-3 weeks to have it printed by Tayda, and fully assembled to get to the crew members in time to make it back to Europe.
Mark owns a company called Hi My Name Is Mark, that sell shirts, hats, and even his custom Fender Jaguar bass, which is only available through his online store. I stole his logo which is a cool octopus graphic, and used that for the main image. Hi My Name is Muff was an obvious and fun pun to go with, so I got the Big Muff font and tweaked it a bit.
The color is important though.
This is Mark's bass Skully that he received from the Fender custom shop around 2001. He used it on the tour I first saw him back in 2002 and then retired it in 2006. After surviving Cancer last year, he brought it out of retirement for their tours this year, so I knew I had to make the font Skully pink.
For the blend, I once again used the Buff n Blend circuit from GuitarPCB. Works great, sounds great! Because its going to a bit of a famous rockstar I went ahead and opted for the nice Lumberg jacks, and heat-shrinked the connections.
I also left a clearcoat-only hidden message that says "Octopuses Exist" as a little jab toward his alien-obsessed bandmate Tom.
Tried to keep it nice and tidy in there in case anyone peeks inside
All in all this was a very special and surreal project for me. blink-182 was a huge gateway into playing guitar for me, and to send them a pedal I built only a year into my pedal building career was an experience I'll always remember!
I'll update this thread when they receive the pedal and if they give me any feedback
UPDATE:
Mark received the pedal and immediately posted it on his Instagram story!
Thanks for reading!
Ross
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