Tonefiend’s Half-Assed NAMM Report!

I just drove back to San Francisco from Southern California, where I got to hang out with family and spend a long, full day at NAMM. And while even the longest and fullest of days isn’t enough to see half the stuff at the show, I’ve put together a little slideshow covering some highlights […]

A Very Quiet Guitar

After last week’s loudness experiments, and with the sonic carnage of NAMM just days away, I figured it was a good opportunity to dial down the decibels and share an interesting guitar/string combination I’ve been enjoying for a few months.

Last spring I wrote about several oddball acoustic strings I was trying out. […]

Attenuation Nation:
Loud Sounds at Low Volume?

I just tried an interesting tone comparison, one I’ve never seen attempted. It concerns the search for loud amp sounds at low volumes.

Have any of you ever experimented with speaker attenuators — the passive load boxes that reside between your amp output and speaker input, which let you crank the amp while maintaining […]

Jimmy Page at 13

Aha! Now we know why no one has developed a cancer cure! It’s because young James Page took that skiffle thing a little too seriously. Yep — it’s Jimmy Page at 13 in 1957. (He turned 70 this week.) Imagine how different the world would be had he followed his stated goal of becoming a […]