tgoss

If you don't have bad ones you don't know what good is.

Hmmm, Willie Nile Garland Jefferies Crack The Sky Carolyn Mas ...others I'm sure...that was early 80's for those of you young enough. +1 on Jason & The Scorchers

It's called "paying your dues". That's what Buddy Guy told me in an email I have to assume was from him after I spent hours waiting to get up and play at his Chicago club. Never got the chance.

Greg, I get this feeling you love your job.

DavidE..Could I get a copy of that chord chart for Crazy?

You've got to remember that up to a certain point in amplifier history, engineers were trying to make it cleaner, louder and more effecient. Distortion was not their aim back then. Tweed and blackface circuits differ tremendously. I doubt if it would possible to sum up all the differences here. Some of them are that the tweeds had a different tone circuit which was usuall one knob. Blackfaces had 2, usually 3 and was considerably cleaner because you're actually losing signal in a blackface tone circuit. The single knob tone has more midrange 'cause all you're doing is rolling off highs or lows. More feedback was used in BF circuits too, which returns a portion of the speaker output to the (usually) phase inverter which helped smooth out an amp. Amps with little or no feedback sound "wide open". BF's sound, well, smoother. Many other changes were made as well. What I've pointed out is very generalized. There were variations in the tone circuits along the way too. The best thing to do is find somebody who's got these amps and listen. Maybe you know someone who works on tube amps who would let you hang out and hear these things for yourself. The technical aspects could take up pages.

Cathode biased amps have a bit more compression than fixed bias amps because of the way the cathode resistor affects tube current. Another reason is that the tubes see only the difference between the cathode and plate voltages. You get slightly less power and a "warmer" sound due to the lower voltages. Just because you can switch tubes like light bulbs in the Allen amps does not mean you can do this in any cathode bias amps. Other things need to be taken into consideration. My homebrew Pro is cathode biased and the sustain and compression is truly unique.

You won't believe how many people come into my store complaining about the very same thing HolLoWskull. This does seem to be an on going problem..anyone out there from Elixir listening?

I think as long as it's a 10 gauge just about anything will do. Boomers, DR, Ernie Ball, etc. I'm kinda liking the Gibson Les Paul's cause they have a groovy red wrap at the ball end. I think it was supposed to stop the string from ringing in the stop tail piece but I've never had that problem with any other string.

You're right about that MTM105. I'll never forget the day Duane died, my dad handed me a newspaper clipping and said "do you know this guy?"

So do you really need that Peavey Deuce? Don't forget, you can do things like take the output from a smaller amp and hook it up to the Peavey's speakers for a better sound.

All those distortions do add up the noise factor. It sounds like what you really need a smaller amp. I think there were some posts about them not too long ago. Things like the Roland MicroCube and a couple of others. You'd be able to have all the distortion you want and still be able to hear your wife when she asks you to take out the garbarge.

And The Allman Brothers are chopped liver?

Well hey, whatever's local for you.

Boo..hissss...support your local music store!