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Instagramarama!

Name That Gear!
Name That Gear!

I just started a Tonefiend Instagram feed, ’cause I know there’s not enough junk in your inbox. If you’re an Instagram user, feel free to follow. (Or just friend me on Facebook, where all the Instagram images also appear. I’m not picky—I’ll friend anyone, at least till they start posting links to $19 Prada handbag knockoffs.)

Often I don’t post here at tonefiend.com till I’ve cobbled together a relatively substantial item, which means the site can fester for weeks without an update. But for better or worse, I plan to post a steady stream of square cell phone pics compelling images and trivial pithy thoughts on Instagram/FB/Twitter.

On Instagram, I’m starting out with two weekly posts. Both are pretty silly, but each has inspired some surprisingly cool conversations. The first series is “Name That Gear,” which is simply a close-up shot of some music gizmo, but with some telling detail that reveals its identity. Not much too it, but it can be fun.

Page vs. Wagner: Who'd Win in a Fight?
Page vs. Wagner: Who’d Win in a Fight?

The other recurring item is “Who’d Win in a Fight?” These are deliberately absurdist:  The first post matched Jimmy “Hammer of the Gods” Page against Richard “Twilight of the Gods” Wagner. But amazingly, it inspired a long, fascinating, and drop-dead funny Facebook conversation. (Thanks for my wife for suggesting both ideas.)

Naturally, I’ll also be using those feeds to shamelessly flog my music and gear. I’m going to be showing the first five Joe Gore Pedals stompboxes at the LA Amp Show in Van Nuys, California on October 3rd and 4th—just a couple of weeks from now! The product announcements aren’t quite ready yet, but trust me—I bombarding you with them very soon. 🙂

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Croque-Monsieur

IMG_3125

So much for demoing my new-fangled guitar and its new-fangled tone circuit this week.

Pro tip: Just because your cheese grater looks like a Flying V and is called “The Shredder” doesn’t make it any less dangerous! However, the croque-monsieur was delicious (once I’d scraped away the blood and bits of flesh).

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Not About Music: Marvin Gore [1923-2015]

Marvin Gore, 1940
Marvin Gore, 1940

If my blog and video posts have seemed fewer and less fun in recent months, it’s not your imagination. I’ve been shuttling between San Francisco and my childhood home in the LA suburbs, spending as much time as possible with my dad in the wake of a back-to-back broken hip and terminal cancer diagnosis. He passed away on January 28th — my late mother’s birthday.

Dad was many things: an engineer, a thinker, a WWII vet, a rocket scientist, a college dean, a loving husband and father, a passionate progressive, a sci-fi/horror geek, and a world traveler who visited all seven continents.

But there’s one thing he definitely was not: a musician.

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Frets in Flight, 2015

Here are the new U.S. Department of Transportation rules on flying with musical instruments. Sounds like carriers are required to check instruments.

The key passage, per the DOT site:

The rule requires that each U.S. carrier subject to this regulation allow a passenger to carry into the cabin and stow a small musical instrument, such as a violin or a guitar, in a suitable baggage compartment, such as the overhead bin or a closet, or under the seats, in accordance with FAA safety regulations and the carrier’s FAA-approved carry-on baggage program.

Carriers must allow passengers to stow their small musical instruments in an approved stowage area in the cabin if at the time the passenger boards the aircraft such stowage space is available. Under the rule, musical instruments as carry-on items are treated no differently from other carry-on items and the stowage space should be made available for all carry-on items on a “first come, first served” basis. Carriers are not required to give musical instruments priority over other carry-on baggage, therefore passengers traveling with musical instruments may want to buy the pre-boarding option offered by many carriers to ensure that space will be available for them to safely stow their instruments in the cabin.

Maybe we should do like my pal Shelley Doty recommends and carry a copy of this every time we check in for a flight.

kitty_plane

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Happy Holidays, Dear Readers!

Lookit what Elvis got for Chanukah!
Lookit what Elvis got for Chanukah!

I hope everyone’s holidays are splendid. And remember — even if you don’t have one of those families that you need to take a break from every 15 minutes, you can still slip into the other room, fire up Photoshop (and other stuff, if need be), and make funny pictures.

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DIY guitar Uncategorized

Capacitor Smackdown! Does Cap Type Matter?

Cap Pot

Oh man, I’ve been wanting to do this test for ages! A direct comparison between capacitor types in a standard guitar tone circuit.

So who’s right? The Tone Illuminati who discern dramatic tone improvements after installing vintage/audiophile caps? Or skeptics who say those perceptions are delusional? Does cap type matter at all?

You tell me.

Anyone hear anything I don’t?

UPDATE:

magic-caps-sm
[Image from BBC innit.]

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Best. Stompbox. Ever.

… at least if, like me, you have the soul of a 12-year-old Japanese girl.

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Amps Uncategorized

The 18-Watt, Bletchley-Style

How come my DIY amps never look this pretty inside?
How come my DIY amps never look this pretty inside?

A couple of weeks ago I posted here about a Premier Guitar project in which I built two Marshall 18-watt clone kits. Meanwhile, the magazine received a review model of Marshall’s latest iteration of the 18-watt, a high-end, hand-wired version that sells for $2,700. My new review is online at PG, if you’re curious to hear a proper Marshall as well as the clones.

My take: It’s a beautifully built, hand-wired amp that sounds as least as good as either clone. Unlike the kits with their single 12″ speakers, the Marshall has a pair of 10s, which I think I prefer in this circuit. At $2,700, though, it’s pretty darn expensive, even for a beautiful, hand-made instrument. But I’ll be sad when I send the review model back to Bletchley.

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Drum Roll, Please …
The Comedy Competition Winners

Screen Shot 2014-05-07 at 8.58.10 AM

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 as Jeff Beck’s hand-picked opening act, and Roel Torres’s terrifying tale of being hoisted skyward by stage machinery. (Think twice before wearing a hoodie onstage, kids!) Both are worthy of reenactment on one of my fave guilty-pleasure TV shows, I Shouldn’t Be Alive.

Winners, send me your snail mail addresses, and I’ll send you something noisy.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a story, voted in the poll, or just read the stories and spewed coffee on their computers. Thanks for holding court while I was traveling, and for giving me plenty of good laughs on the road. In the meantime, I’ve pretty much gotten over jetlag, flu, and a mountain of postponed paying work, and I’ve got some cool and intriguing posts planned for the coming days!

You can read all the entires here. Or just the finalists here. Or just the winners after the jump.

Continue reading “Drum Roll, Please …
The Comedy Competition Winners”
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The Call of the Cave

This sculpture of an early hominid has nothing to do with the fully modern homo sapiens who decorated the caves. Furthermore, some scholars question the historical accuracy for her guitar.

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 to tears with my holiday pics, but since this is theoretically a guitar/music blog, I’ll keep things brief and music-focused.

This sculpture of an early hominid from the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, has nothing to do with the fully modern homo sapiens who decorated the caves. Furthermore, recent research calls into question the historical accuracy for her guitar. Some scholars even suspect that it may have been Photoshopped into this photo.
This sculpture of an early hominid from the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, has nothing to do with the fully modern homo sapiens who decorated the caves. Furthermore, recent research calls into question the historical accuracy for her guitar. Some scholars even suspect that it may have been Photoshopped into this photo.

Basically, I got to visit many of the best cave art sites not closed to the public, as both Lascaux and Altimira have been for many years. By sheer coincidence, one fellow geek was Hollywood composer Craig Safan, perhaps best known as the composer for Cheers. In addition to  being a cool, smart, and fun guy, Craig has been obsessed with these caves since he visited them decades ago as a young man, and is planning a major composition inspired by them. Unlike me, he was up to date on all the latest research about music and musical instruments of the era, mostly based on fragments of simple flutes, bull roarers, and such.

Craig was traveling with a tiny Zoom recorder, a little ocarina, and a pair of small resonant stones. As we’d tour various cave sites as Font de Gaume, Pech Merle, El Castillo, and Isturitz, he discretely record little clacks, whistles, and tongue clicks, cave ambience and all.

Now, the last thing I’d planned for this vacation was an impulse response reverb experiment, especially after having recently written about the technology in this blog and for Premier Guitar. But it occurred to me that we might be able to capture the ambience as impulse responses in order to reproduce it later in the studio. I didn’t have a proper device for playing back a test tone, though I might have tried it on a phone or iPad. But Craig’s clacks and clicks seemed like they might work. He sent me a few audio files after we both got back to California. With a little editing and EQing, they worked pretty well — have a listen below, and help yourself to a couple of reverb files if you like. Some of the nicest are from the deepest gallery of Pech Merle.

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