Categories
Effects

Torn Asunder

Sorry for even more solipsistic stompbox stuff, but I couldn’t resist. David Torn, one of the players I admire most on earth, just posted an unsolicited demo of my Filth Fuzz on Soundcloud. I love his post-apocalyptic soundscape.

For the uninitiated, David is one of those rare players who deploys staggering technical skill in a bold, unique style utterly unpolluted by cheesy guitar heroics. He’s recorded with Bowie, Tori Amos, John Legend, Madonna, and k.d. lang and created many brilliant solo albums. Last year’s Only Sky is particularly magnificent. It makes a great introduction to this singular guitarist/composer.

Thanks, David!

Categories
Effects

Cult Is Coming!

Cult_crop

Of the four pedals new I announced at NAMM, Cult is probably closest to my heart— it’s my favorite overdrive circuit. If you’ve watched many of my videos, you’ve heard it. I even built it into a few guitars, including this one, this one, this one, and this one. And now Cult is coming in pedal form.

It’s no secret that 90% of today’s overdrive circuits are derived from the Ibanez Tube Screamer. Screamers are great if you want to compress your signal for consistent and predicable results. But Cult provides the opposite effect, expanding your guitar’s dynamic range rather than compressing it. It’s great for players who vary their touch and guitar-knob settings for maximum tonal variation.

Cult is sort of the mutant grandchild of the single-transistor boosters of the 1960s, including the Dallas Rangemaster. It’s no Rangemaster clone, though — the parts, values, controls, and tones have little to do with that classic treble booster. But Cult has the crackling presence and extreme dynamic response you only get from such minimal germanium-transistor circuits. (Guitar Player magazine went so far as to call it “the most dynamic overdrive we’ve heard.”) The pedal heard in this video is a final factory prototype, and the units now in production look and sound identical.

Have a listen:

As the video demonstrates, Cult lets you veer from crispy-clean to spatter distortion just by adjusting your guitar’s volume control. But my favorite way to use it is to set the gain so that you can go from sparkle to splat just by altering your touch, as heard in this video:

Cult with be available from Vintage King in the next month or two. There’s more info on the Joe Gore Pedals product page.

Categories
Effects

Filth Fuzz is (Almost) Here …

Filth

My Filth Fuzz pedal is finally in production and will be shipping within a few weeks. It’s one of three new pedals I’ll be showing at this week’s NAMM show in Anaheim, California. I just finished the demo video, and I’m stoked about how it’s sounding.

I’ll also be debuting three other new pedals: Gross Distortion, Cult Germanium Overdrive, and Boring Boost & Buff. Filth, Gross, Cult, and are finalized and in production, and should be available from my partner, Vintage King, sometime in February. (Vintage King is also currently the sole vendor of my Duh Remedial Fuzz, released last year.) We’re still working out a minor bug in Boring, but it should arrive soon after.

Now, it’s not like I can afford a proper booth or anything, so when I say “I’ll be showing these at NAMM,” I mean I’ll be walking around with a bag of merchandise. I’ll have a pedalboard with all my products on display at the Vintage King booth in Hall A, but sadly, it won’t be set up for demoing — there just isn’t enough space. However, my super-cool friends at Voodoo Labs will have a Filth Fuzz on their demo pedalboard, so you can take it for a spin in their booth while checking out the new stuff from that ever-innovative company. (I have no business connection to Voodoo Labs — they’re just helping me out because they’re nice.)

If you’re going to the show and would like to meet up, contact me and we’ll work something out. 🙂

Here’s what I wrote about Filth on its product page. (If you’re allergic to marketing copy, skip ahead, where I share some interesting backstory on how we arrived at the interface design.)

Man, I love those mad scientist fuzzes with too many knobs! I’ve collected them for decades and used them on a zillion sessions. It got to the point were people were hiring me specifically to make those sort of farting, fried-circuit tones.

But the downside of those complex fuzzes is that they’re a little too wide-ranging, with many settings you’ll probably never use. It’s easy to spend 20 minutes dicking around with the dials without nailing the perfect tone. I’ve always wished for a wild, highly variable fuzz that was a bit more “curated,” with easier access to the tones you’re likeliest to use.

That’s what inspired the Filth Fuzz. It’s only got four controls, but it’s a cornucopia of cool, quirky, and usable fuzz flavors.

The drive and level controls do what you’d expect. But unlike many fuzz drive controls, this one sounds great throughout its range. Extreme settings are molten-lava thick. Lower settings are like…slightly cooled lava, maybe?

But the real action is in the two sliders. They’re tone controls of a sort, but not in the usual way. Most fuzz tone controls are tone-sucking passive circuits situated downstream from the fuzz effect. But here, the sliders alter the voltages at the transistors, radically changing not only the tone, but also the timbre, response, attack, sustain, and compression. In other words, the sliders radically alter the fuzz’s core character, as opposed to simply EQing a single core tone.

TO USE: Set desired gain and output levels. Move the sliders till it sounds awesome.

CAUTIONS: Filth sounds best before any buffered effects. It usually works best at or near the front of your effect chain.

Filth Fuzz was created in San Francisco and is built in Michigan by skilled craftspeople earning a fair wage.

Filth’s sound hasn’t changed since I concocted the circuit on breadboard a few years ago. but the interface has gone through many iterations. It kept changing even after I sent schematics and prototypes to Tony Lott at Cusack Music (my manufacturer). Here’s a pic of three production prototypes:

Filth Fuzz
Three incarnations of Filth Fuzz (in order of appearance).

To dial in tones on Filth, you adjust two highly interactive pots (let’s call them x and y), which tweak the voltages going in and out of the transistors, providing many tone variations. The original version used two standard pots for these x/y controls. It worked okay, but the ergonomics weren’t ideal. I’ve found that the fastest way to refine sounds is to move both pots at once over a sustained note or chord, and it was just a bit awkward having to take both hands off the guitar to turn the controls simultaneously.

So I decided to employ a joystick, which lets you adjust x and y with one hand (and it looks pretty bitchin’). The ergonomics were great, and I thought we’d finalized the format.

But then I showed a joystick prototype at the L.A. Amp Show in October, and for the first time I had a chance to sit back and watch other guitarists interact with the device. Players seemed to have a blast with it, but I kept noticing how often a heavy stompbox foot would land perilously close to the joystick’s none-too-sturdy shaft.

Meanwhile, we discovered that the the only compatible joystick option cost about $25 per unit — enough to jack the retail cost way up. Also, it was tricky to replicate exact setting via the joystick, which would suck if, say, you were trying to get identical tones night after night on tour. (I knew that when I first opted for the joystick, but I’d figured the fun factor would more than compensate.)

Then Miko Mader, a clever guitarist who works for my distributor, M1, came up with the perfect solution: Why not use two sliders instead of pots? Tony at Cusack sourced the perfect part, and we prototyped a third version.

Bingo!The ergonomics were great (check out the demo video to see how quickly you can change sounds with one hand). You can mark exact settings with tape if you need to, easily repeating specific sounds. The two sliders are a fraction of the cost of a single joystick, so we can sell the pedal for far less. (We’re still nailing down the retail price as I write.) There’s no fragile shaft to break. And while I miss the goofy fun of the joystick, the sliders are still pretty darn entertaining. (So thanks, Miko, for your brilliant idea.)

I’m really stoked about this pedal. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Categories
Effects

Heaviest. Stompbox. Ever.

I’ve been breathlessly awaiting one of these since I saw this. It’s Korg’s Miku Stomp, a spinoff from the company’s Vocaloid voice synthesizer. It tracks your pitch as you play and responds with a synthetic voice that forms various syllables and phrases.

There’s some cheating here: The effect’s latency is quite severe, so I had to slide the Miku track back in time while mixing. Its triggering is also inconsistent, so I replaced a few notes. Miku tracks best when playing melodies on a single string, hence my awkward, position-jumping fingering. (Actually, it tracks pretty well when you play slow melodies full of sustained notes. But steady eighth-notes at 155 BPM as heard here is a major challenge.)

One of the pedal’s most interesting aspects is the way it interprets slurs. When there’s no break between notes, Miku sings a sort of pseudo diphthong. Detached notes get a syllable with a clear transient.

IMHO, the inescapable facts that Miku is silly and doesn’t work terribly well doesn’t diminish her total awesomeness. No doubt about it: heaviest stompbox ever.

The tune, of course, is “Georgy Girl,” which I’ve loved since forever. It was a blast recording the backing tracks with classical guitar, ukulele, ukulele bass, 12-string, toy piano, M-Tron Pro, and a mix of live and sampled percussion. And of course, gobs of my favorite reverb effect: Universal Audio’s EMT140 plate simulation. Yum.

Categories
DIY Effects guitar Pickups

Ultimate Lipstick-Tube Guitar (with experimental tone control & onboard overdrive)

Okay, it’s not the ultimate lipstick-tube guitar for everybody, but it probably is for me. It’s my third lipstick-tube pickup experiment — and definitely my favorite.

You may have heard some of these parts before: I used the neck for all my Mongrel Strat projects, and the Strat-sized Seymour Duncan pickups appeared in my previous lipstick-tube experiments. (I love Duncan’s lipstick-tubes. To my ear, they sound way better than the ones in new-school Danelectros.) The new body is Warmoth’s Hybrid Tele model, in purple with butterfly stickers. It’s très macho. (Better not use if for gigs in Indiana and Arkansas.)

My previous lipstick tube experiments used a MIM Strat body, but I wanted something a little more distinctive, and with a built-in battery compartment (because nothing is a bigger pain than changing batteries in a traditional Strat control cavity). Also, I like how the design evokes both Strat and Tele, since the guitar has three-Strat sized pickups and a whammy, but is wired more like a Tele.

About that wiring: The 3-way pickup selector chooses neck, bridge or both pickups, like on a Tele. Meanwhile, a SPDT switch toggles the middle pickup on and off regardless of the pickup selector, so you get six settings: neck, bridge, neck + bridge, neck + middle, bridge + middle, and all at once. It’s a pragmatic variation on “Nashville Tele” wiring with a switch rather than a pot. That means you can’t dial in varying amounts of middle pickup—it’s all or nothing. But on the plus side, I can jump instantly to an out-of-phase sound from any pickup-selector setting, and it freed up space for the other weird crap I put in this guitar. (Yo, electrical engineers: Don’t bother telling me that combined-pickup settings aren’t really out-of-phase True, they’re not out-of-phase electronically, but they are acoustically, and the distinctive “hollow” sound of combined settings is precisely the result of phase cancellation from two pickups at different positions.)

The weirdest detail is what I call a “cap-fade” tone control. It’s an idea I speculated about back in January, and to which many of you contributed cool perspectives. I pretty much followed the scheme in the original diagram:

cap-fade tone control

The idea again: Instead of sending varying amounts of signal to ground via a tone cap, the pot here fades between a small-value cap (which defines the minimum cut when the control is engaged) and a larger one (defining the frequency of the maximum cut). In other words, instead of sending varying amounts of signal to ground, this circuit always sends everything above the cutoff frequency to ground, with the pot determining the frequency.

Categories
Effects

Lookit — My New Pedals!

Awesome! I just received production prototypes for my next three stompbox releases, in the wake of last month’s launch of my Duh Remedial Fuzz. I’m still making minor tweaks, but these should be available in just a few weeks. Whee!

New-Pedals_skunk
Filth is a freaky joystick fuzz. Cult is my oddball take on Rangemaster-style single-transistor overdrive. It’s my absolute favorite distortion device, and the same one heard in many of my videos and gear reviews. The Cult Germanium Channel supplements this simple but deadly circuit with extra controls and an active EQ stage.
(Baby skunk sold separately.)

 

Filth. I love whack-job fuzz boxes like the Z. Vex Fuzz Factory and the countless “sick fuzz” pedals it’s inspired over the last two decades. But here my goal was to create one with a higher percentage of “likely to use” settings — I wanted to make it easier to find the good stuff. Topologically, the circuit’s nothing tricky — basically a Fuzz Face descendent coupled with an extra JFET boost stage (though it doesn’t sound remotely like any Fuzz Face you’ve ever heard). The main innovation is the x/y control, which jiggers the transistor biasing, producing a broad array of timbres. It’s not a conventional tone control, though it’s arranged so that it’s easy to summon smooth, chubby tones or angry, brittle ones.

There was a lot of interest in this a couple of years ago when Fuzz Box Girl posted a demo (apparently no longer online) of one of my handmade ones. She focused on the pedal’s maximum-gain, My Bloody Valentine side, which was fine — Filth can definitely make your amp melt like a Salvador Dali timepiece. But now it’s easier to dial in crisp, lower-gain tones.

I’m making two Filth versions: the joystick model [pictured], and one with three conventional knobs. They sound identical — only the interfaces differ. The three-knob is good if you want to mark an exact setting for use onstage, while the joystick is more fun when concocting new sounds. (I don’t know the exact pricing yet, but the joystick model will cost more, because that’s an expensive part!)

I’m far from the first builder to create a joystick stompbox, but you usually encounter them on crazy noisemaker effects, or deployed as conventional EQ controls. I’m not aware of another pedal where it regulates the fuzz’s fundamental timbre this way. But then, I don’t get out as much as I should.

Cult. If you’ve seen my videos or heard my audio demos, you’ve probably heard Cult. I’ve built it into several guitars (while others have a built-in Duh fuzz). It’s a one-germanium-transisor boost descended from the Dallas Rangemaster of the 1960s, though the apple has rolled far from the tree: All part values differ, the EQ profile is modernized, and the gain control works in an unconventional way. But like a Rangemaster, it boasts spectacular dynamic response and electrifying tones that crackle with presence.

To my (admittedly odd) ear, no other distortion sounds as bitchin’ as a single-transistor boost between a good guitar and a great amp. The weird thing is, while most players know the countless ’60s rock tracks produced with such primitive boosters, many  have never tried this sort of circuit. I love faithful Rangemaster clones, and I love many of the variations I’ve explored over the last five years. But Cult is my very favorite recipe.

Cult Germanium Channel. This one pairs the Cult circuit with relatively modern active EQ/boost stage, with proper tone controls that don’t suck tone. The added circuitry sacrifices a touch of Cult’s explosive presence, but it provides a greater range of tones. There’s also more gain on tap, so it’s better for those high-testosterone rawk tones that I’m far too much of an prissy, effete San Franciscan to use myself.

Thanks a Lott. As mentioned, these are manufactured by Cusack Music in Michigan, under the expert eye of engineer Tony Lott. Cusack builds pedals for numerous  boutique brands you know, many of whom prefer to keep the fact a secret. But I’m proud of the relationship, because Tony and his team improve everything I submit. (More about the collaborative process below. It’s fascinating stuff, assuming you’re a geek — which I do assume, since you’re here.)

Categories
Effects

Duh for Days

Duh Pedals

Wow — I can’t believe my eyes! After years of planning, scheming, and screwing around, my very first batch of production fuzz pedals has arrived at my distributor, ready for sale. Will they gather dust or sell like hotcakes? That depends on you, dear reader!

You can read about the Duh Remedial Fuzz, hear a demo, and place orders from the product page at Vintage King. (For now, Vintage King is my sole distributor.) If you’ve been following my videos, you’ve heard Duh already — I’ve got the circuit mounted inside some of my favorite guitars, including the Hello Kitty! and lipstick-tube Strats.

Excuse me for quoting again from the great review I got in Guitar Player — I’m just a proud pedal papa! Have a cigar.

“Remarkable … responsive dynamics and simultaneously fierce and expressive tone. This is a pedal that doesn’t give up even one less-than-spectacular sound. It reminds me of ’60s records where the fuzz sound jumped right out of the grooves and changed my world.” [Editor’s Pick Award recipient.] — Guitar Player magazine, 2014

Categories
DIY Effects guitar

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 much rarer — or uglier.
They don’t get much rarer — or uglier. (This is a cosmetically faithful reproduction from Theremaniacs.)

I’ve been wanting to write about these for years, but was hindered by the fact that I don’t have access to one. No one does! Well, except the pedal’s best-known user, producer/guitarist Steve Albini. (Steve has posted several popular YouTube videos in which he sings the praises of the original and evaluates it against modern clones.)

But I revisited the idea recently when Christian Magee, who runs Tube Depot, sent me a couple of old 2N404A transistors from a stash he recently acquired. This rare PNP germanium transistor appeared in the original, along with an NPN 2N3565 (also rare, but not as ridiculously rare as the 2N404A). Yes—this pedal uses both a positive-ground germanium transistor and a negative-ground silicon transistor in the same circuit. (Another Fuzz Face/Tone Bender clone, this ain’t!)

I whipped up several variants:

    • a clone using the original parts

 

    • a near-clone using more readily available alternatives

 

    • a Harmonic Jerkulator, an all-silicon/no-diodes variation created by DIY stompbox titan Tim Escobedo

 

    • an experimental version with extra controls

Survey the wreckage:

Post-mortem after the jump.

Categories
DIY Effects guitar

The One-Knob Manifesto

Duh Pedal
Can you help me figure this thing out?

It’s almost always a bad idea to label something a manifesto. It’s pretentious, and it makes you sound like a crank, especially if you were born between 1890 and 1990. But it is dramatic. And would anyone pay attention if I gave this post a more accurate title, like “Please Participate in My Stompbox User Interface Focus Group?”

Anyway, I’ve been having this recurring workbench experience. (No, not the solder burns.) Every time I breadboard a stompbox project, I poke through the circuit, looking for places where I might add a switch or knob to unlock cool sounds. I usually find nice variations and build accordingly. But as soon as I plug in the pedal, I always seem to like one setting a lot more the others. Then I rebuild, hard-wiring the preferred value and ditching the switch or pot. Eventually almost  everything I build winds up with only one or two knobs. (Unless I’m making it for personal use, in which case it often has no knobs.) It’s not a love of minimalism, and it’s certainly not an assumption that users are too stupid for anything more complex. It’s just that time and again, the simplest solutions sound best to me.

Meanwhile, I just had an interesting experience reviewing a (gulp) $5,000 amp for Premier Guitar, which crystallized some of my thoughts. The amp in question is a Little Walter 50/22 (which is actually two independent amps in a single housing), and I’ll link to the review when it goes live in a few days. But suffice it to say that Little Walter amps draw their inspiration from the earliest Fender tweeds, and have minimal controls to match: one volume knob and one tone knob. Furthermore, builder Phil Bradbury all but advises against using the tone control, pointing out that vintage-stye tube amp tone controls are strictly subtractive, and that you get maximum impact and richness with the tone circuit wide-open. And Bradbury is right. As on many great vintage amps, the Little Walter controls are practically superfluous. If you locate the right sweet spot, you can park the controls there and make any needed gain or tone adjustments the old-fashioned way: by playing them. Dig in harder for more distortion. Back of the volume to clean up. Use your angle of attack as a tone control. Like that.

But you don’t encounter many new-production amps that adhere to the philosophy. I get the sense that a lot of designers would like to create minimalist amps such as these, but they fear that the public wouldn’t get it. How could the one-knob amp possibly sound as good as the one with 11 knobs? But I suspect that the more experience you have with amps, the likelier you are to believe that simple sounds better. Now I want to build a great-sounding tube amp with only an on/off switch.

Three knobs?! What, do I look like Einstein to you?
Three knobs?!
What, do I look like Einstein to you?

I’m finding the same to be true with distortion/fuzz/overdrive stompboxes. For many players, the minimum complement of controls is gain, tone, and master volume. But almost every circuit I’ve explored sounds better without a tone control, and it’s hard to make a gain control sound great throughout its entire range. So more and more I find myself fine-tuning circuits to what I feel are the best gain and tone settings, hard-wiring them there, and then just slapping on a master volume for level-matching. (And if the pedal doesn’t add a great deal of volume, I often skip the master as well.) If you “tune” the distortion, you can control the gain perfectly well via your hands and guitar.

“But,” I hear the inquiring player ask, “don’t you need a tone control so you can use the same pedal with different guitars?” (Sadly, I sometimes believe I’m hearing the voices of inquiring players when I’ve neglected my meds.) Increasingly, I think not. In almost all cases, there’s a sweet spot where a circuit sounds good on everything from a bright Tele bridge pickup to a tubby neck humbucker. Those extremes don’t sound the same, of course. But if you’re playing distorted on a Tele, can’t we assume that you want a bright edge? (And vice-versa with the neck humbucker.) And if you do want to modify the tone, isn’t doing so with via fingers, amp, or mixing board a better solution than using a tone-sucking stompbox tone circuit?

Another example: I spent countless hours pursuing a stompbox vibrato circuit. (I mean true pitch-shift vibrato, not tremolo.) I’d obtained great tones, but I couldn’t get the effect to sound good at all rates and depths, because the perceived depth changes along with the rate. Finally, it occurred to me to go the one-knob route, using only a rate control, and letting that determine the depth. That may sound like a half-assed non-solution, but I’ll be danged if I didn’t suddenly have the most gratifying vibrato pedal I’ve ever played. Like the minimal controls on ’50s amps, the arrangement just worked.

Other factors influence my one-knob attitude: Since I’ve spent much of the last few years in the digital guitar realm, analog guitar has become a refuge from that sometimes math-based approach. When I switch on the analog rig, my goal isn’t maximum user options, but a primal experience. Also, there’s probably an element of advanced-player snob appeal. I don’t know much about cars, bicycles, motorcycles, or sporting goods, but there’s probably a parallel between minimalist musical tools that demand a fair amount of technical  finesse, and vehicles and sports gear with stripped-down, featherweight, only-for-pros features. Not every bicycle needs a kick-stand, and not every fuzz pedal needs a gain control. (Or something like that.) Additionally, I hope to bring my pedal designs to market, and what a crowded market it is! Sure, it’s mainly crowded by clones, but many brilliant builders are creating complex mad scientist boxes. Maybe there’s a niche for one-knob mad-scientist boxes…

I’m not sure it’s kosher to conclude a manifesto with questionnaire. But I’m eager to hear your replies to these queries—or anything else you feel inspired to add. Thanks!

  1. Do you tend to change tone settings on amps and pedals when you switch guitars?
  2. How often do you fiddle with stompbox knobs mid-performance?
  3. Do you use your guitars’ tone knobs much? If so, how and why?
  4. Does anyone out there actually use their guitar volume knobs to veer from clean to dirty sounds? Or is just the wishful thinking of pompous guitar “journalists?”
  5. Would you consider using a no-knob stompbox that pretty much requires you to use your guitar’s knobs?
  6. What’s your favorite Nickelback song?
Categories
DIY Effects guitar Pickups

Blood on the Workbench

Small puncture, big pain.
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 the tool properly! I was trying to pick loose a knot of wire with the iron’s tip rather than the recommended wire-picker-thingy.)

So no guitar recordings for me this week while my poor l’il finger recuperates. But I’ll try to compensate for this dog-ate-my-homework post by sharing three works in progress. If they turn out well (and they might!), audio and video will follow.

1. Lipstick Tubes Revisited. For more than a year, the generic Mexican Strat I fitted with lipstick tube pickups has lived, disassembled, in a filthy cardboard box next to my workbench, guilt-tripping me every time I fired up the soldering iron. There were a number of experiments I’d been meaning to perform on it, and in a spectacularly bad example of scientific methodology, I incorporated them all at once, making it pretty much impossible to discern what’s doing what. But I hear some things I like. Here’s what’s new (beside the blood spatters):

lipstick_labeled

Not everything is working as desired yet — but there are some promising directions here, and it’s so nice to have a lipstick tube instrument again. :pacman:

Joystick fuzz: like giving a loaded gun to a monkey.
Joystick fuzz: like giving a loaded gun to a monkey.

2. The Joy of Stick. Anyone tried a joystick effect, like Devi Ever’s Drone Fuck Drone? I bought a few joysticks from 4Site and have been having a blast. I thought they’d be difficult to wrangle, but it’s really just two pots, each with the standard three-lug connection, deployed in X/Y configuration. Two things to bear in mind, though: They’re generally available only with identical resistance values for each pot, and more important, you need two controls that have meaningful values throughout their ranges. Fortunately, I had just the circuit for it: my Filth Fuzz (which Fuzzbox Girl was kind enough to demo and review in 2011). I’d even labeled the controls X and Y! (I’m not selling these, but I do hope to bring it to market before long. Honest.)

photo

3. A Reanimated Amp.  This one’s personal: I’m finally refurbishing the 1951 “TV front” Fender Deluxe amp that I received for as a bar mitzvah present in the ’70s. (I was mature enough not to express my disappointment over getting some crummy old tweed. But how I longed for that shiny post-CBS crap!) My mom procured it from the son of one of her fellow elementary school teachers, who worked at Fender in nearby Fullerton. (Sadly, I’ve forgotten his name.) I also got to pick from three early-’70s Fender guitars: a sunburst Strat, a paisley Tele, and a black Jazzmaster. I, of course, chose the Jazzmaster — at the exact moment when no one on earth gave a crap about that model.  And naturally, I sold it just when new wave arrived and Jazzmasters became cool again. See? I established my pattern of buying and selling the wrong things at the wrong times while still in my teens!

I didn’t wreck the amp by myself — the process started with the black paint job it acquired long before I entered the picture. Over the years it received a preamp mod from Paul Rivera, and later got totally ruined by an overambitious repairman who added mods I never requested, and who probably stole most of the original electronic parts. But the cab, chassis, speaker, and output transformer are original, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t sound bitchin’ after I restore it to its original 5A3 circuit. I’m getting expert help from Tube Depot’s Rob Hull, who helped me source parts and make a grommet board to house the components.

So my apologies for all talk, no audio. My boo-boo is healing, and I should be back able to, like, actually play some of this stuff soon!