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Small puncture, big pain. I was trying to decide which self-indulgent experiment fascinating project to demo this week when my hand slipped, driving a sharp soldering iron tip into the meat of my fretting-hand index finger. It didn’t hurt all that much—until I tried to play. Ye-OWCH! (No, of course I wasn’t using […] Part acoustic, part electric—but 100% bitchin’. This post is inspired by in interview I just did with Mississippi Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson, a cool dude and a deep player. I’m digging the band’s new album, World Boogie is Coming. (And for better or worse, that praise comes from someone who hates almost all […] Oh, my. But for better or worse, I like being reminded that superhuman geniuses weren’t necessarily super in every regard. Maybe because it gives the rest of us hope or reassurance? Plus, it’s too easy to typecast artists into archetypes, like so: Paragon: Bach, Verdi, Palestrina, Beethoven Punk: Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Boulez Batshit: Schumann, […] You can TELL it’s Photoshopped! There’s no TBX! Thanks again to everyone who chimed in on the “What your favorite mod?” discussion. I got tons of great ideas from your comments. Like this one, which I’ve been meaning to explore for ages: the Fender TBX tone control circuit, which appears in several Custom […] Seriously, dude — where’s my band? Anyone have much experience playing solo instrumental guitar gigs? Even though I’ve been playing since the Pleistocene, I’ve only performed solo once since I was a teenaged classical guitarist. But I’ll be making the stumble leap this Wednesday, Sept. 11th, when I perform north of San Francisco […] How am me make guitar thing better? What’s your favorite guitar mod? The kind that changes how you play. One you’ve become so accustomed to that you wince when you pick up an axe that lacks it? I’ll choose pickup wiring mods as a starting point: During the year that Seymour Duncan sponsored […] 
NOTE:Nothing controversial about this post — it only involves race, gender, and religion! A few decades ago, the standard history of rock and roll went something like this: In the mid 1950s. black R&B and white country music collided. White kids went apeshit. Rock happened. That may hold a bit of water as sociological history, […]
UPDATE: My Premier Guitar Heptode Virtuoso review is live. Read and listen here. I’ve got phase shifters on the brain, especially after encountering a couple of truly stunning ones. I just wrote a review for Premier Guitar of Heptode’s Virtuoso phaser, a superb clone of the old Maestro PS-1A. (I’ll link to the […] I just bought 500 germanium transistors.(Yes, as a matter of fact, I am insane. Why do you ask?) UPDATE: My Dunlop Fuzz Face Mini review is live at Premier Guitar. Audio clips included! How and when did it get so frickin’ easy to procure great-sounding germanium transistors? I’ve been building stompboxes for four […] Any talk box fans out there? Whew. Didn’t think so. I mean, doesn’t everybody hate those godforsaken things? Wasn’t it all downhill after “Tell Me Something Good?” But did you know that the “talking guitar” has a rather exalted history four decades pre-Frampton Comes Alive? Check out this performance by Alvino Rey, the steel guitar […] |
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