Death by Doubling

This photo was originally a line of 137 amps, but I had to crop it to fit this small space.

Premier Guitar has just posted a new installment in my Recording Guitarist column. The topic: doubling riffs for fatter sounds. Using a single guitar part (and a great drum performance swiped from Dawn […]

Museum of Lost Effects:
Interfax Harmonic Percolator

Few guitar pedals can rival the cult cachet of the Harmonic Percolator, a singularly ugly distortion stompbox produced in minuscule numbers in the early ’70s by Interfax, a small company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And guess what? They sound ugly too, though they’re ugly in a cool and useful way.

They don’t get […]

Drum Roll, Please …
The Comedy Competition Winners

The Cro-Mag Comedy Competition polls have closed. We have a winner and two runners-up tied for second.

The gold medalist is wrangle, for his touching coming-of-age tale about the day he learned there’s a reason musicians say “One two three four” before they start playing. Tied for second: Mark Spangler’s harrowing near-death experience […]

The Call of the Cave

Part of my recent trip to Europe was a scholar-led tour of Late Paleolithic cave art, starting in the Vézère river valley of France’s Dordogne and working west to northern Spain’s Cantabria region. I’m no expert on the era — just an armchair history geek with a lifelong early art fascination. I could bore you […]