Recent content by JohnnyB

Ernie Ford on lead vocals with Grandpa, Stringbean, and Roy on banjo:  

Reminds me of the joke: Q: What's the definition of perfect pitch? A: When the banjo lands in the dumpster without hitting any of the four sides.

My first Hamer-USA was a vintage orange Eclipse-12 I bought used at a vintage guitar store in Seattle. It was pretty easy to play and produce convincing jangle. It required patience, but I found it surprisingly easy to restring. I liked it but  sold it in late 1999 to get a freshly minted Hamer...

Knock yourself out.  

I forgot to add: I  didn't even see any consignment money from Seattle's now-defunct "Guitarville" for these gorgeous and gorgeous-sounding basses. It turned out that the owner had moved his shop and hired some contractors to modify the interior to add teaching studios. The contractors...

Then you'd love this one:

I'm sitting at the computer reading some news, checking email and Facebook, and figured I could use some music to comb the kinks and gnarlies out of my brain waves. Fortunately, I chose this LP wisely: This is Metheny in pure acoustic solo mode with a range of guitar-based string...

Meridian Audio of England introduced a decoding scheme in 2015 called MQA (Master Quality Authenticated). It introduces mirror-image frequency curves to compensate for the very steep filter slopes during digital recordings (which screws up the phase relations between various voices and...

Yesterday I listened to Lou Rawls' first album, Stormy Monday, recorded and released in 1962 backed by the jazz pianist Les McCann and his trio. Lou and Les became acquainted with each other when they were both performing in the jazz club scene in Hollywood in the late '50s. They finally...

I had a used ASAT Special for awhile. It was Lake Placid blue with MOTO pickguard, stock SC soapbar MFDs, and user-added copper foil lining in the control cavity. I had a Gibson ES-335 Studio at home, but once I got the ASAT home, it was all that I played until I got rid of the ES-335 studio...

Since this would be a video selfie, wouldn't portrait orientation be more appropriate? Unless, of course, you want to see the backdrop of his seedy room, which may reveal why he's weeping.

Friday I'd been a bit sluggish and needed to straighten up the kitchen so I put on an album that featured a single I used to listen to on my AM clock radio when I was 12--"Got My Mojo Workin'" by Hammond organ jazz/R&B master Jimmy Smith: This was 1965, when The Beatles' "Help" and...

I'm 66 now and had a tough 2019 in and out of the hospital plus a stroke that seems to have turned me into a "sentimental old fool." When I dropped digital for vinyl, it amped up the tear factory. I find the analog signal chain and my refining tweaks to have an emotional impact I seldom had in...

One of the stories I heard was--that for radio play--when listeners turned the tuner dial--the louder songs are what they stopped and listened to, which also translated to more record sales. Compression made it easier to set playback to higher average volume. This never quite made sense to me...

I did find some wide variety of cassette quality, even on copies to the decks with reputations. The store I worked in carried Nakamichi 700 and Nak 1000. Compared to my Tandberg open reel transfers, the Nakamichis sounded "meh." On the other hand, we also had some Advent factory-recorded CrO2...