Alright, now that the Grammy Awards have all been passed out, let’s have a little reprieve, shall we? Each of the 15 albums in this list made a deep impression on me this year. Why 15? Because there were 15 of them. Here they are in alphabetical order.
My buddy Ivan uses this combo-ified 1963 Band-Master as his backup. It suffered from a phantom crackle that would only appear after being warmed up for an hour or two. It had been in and out of another shop for over a year, and the problem was never successfully addressed.
This data is taken from my last.fm account, and mostly reflects my private listening at work. This may more accurately reflect my personal preferences, though, as it is what I chose to listen to without being influenced by other people. My taste in metal seems to be getting more extreme.
Somewhere around a decade ago, the Bottom Dwellers’ PA head took a flaming shit. It started smoking. It was out of warranty, and rather than deal with repairs and not having a PA for a while, we replaced it with a Mackie PPM1008. Ever since then, the Carvin PA has functioned as my amp stand.
There is a small chain of music venues in Sacramento I frequent that has implemented ID scanning kiosks at their front doors. At first, I was a bit put off by this, but after doing a bit of research into the platform, I think I might be okay with it. You might not be, though. Here is what you should know.
I’ve seen a lot of live music this year, and I have had the chance to check out a lot of different venues in a lot of different towns. Some do it quite a bit better than others. Here are some easy ways music promoters can provide a much better experience for their patrons.
The illusive phantom crackle that plagued this early 60s Fender Bandmaster for years has finally been purged.
The Sacramento Valley is going through a bit of a live music boom as of late. This is a good thing. A healthy music scene has a lot of diversity and a lot of live music to choose from. The downside is that many venues are booked through the end of the year, and many of the gigs that do come up don’t pay very well. What is a fair price to pay for live music, anyway? Allow me to offer a musician’s perspective.
Well, I recently got myself joined up with another bluegrass band. I’m not really one to go joining bands all willy nilly. I have a good track record of sticking around in bands for a long time, so it’s important to me that everyone is easy-going, but takes professionalism as seriously as I do. And of course they need to be, you know, good. The folks in Red Dog Ash check those boxes for me.
About three or four years ago, I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of tube amp repair videos. It started innocently enough with the humble idea of building a custom foot-switchable preamp/mixer for my double bass. That lead to me building a few guitar stomp boxes. Before I knew it, I was watching hours and hours of tube amp repair videos every week.