Feeling Charitable Towards Folks Who Get "Creative" With Their Amp Solutions

In the US, for every hideously cheesey pointy guitar, there are 2000 zit faced 16 yr old metal dorks virgins that will buy it because it looks "cool".

lol So true.

I took a long break from guitar (much longer than now) in my thirties. I sold my Les Paul and a couple crap pieces and when I got back into it ten or more years later I picked up a used Ibanez "Superstrat"- type thing just to see if I still had it in me. Not a bad guitar actually - nice pickups and a fast neck - and not all that pointy. I had the whammy bridge nailed down and slowly got my chops back (such as they were) and then went out and bought a G&L and another Les Paul. Silly bitch - never should have sold the first one.

At any rate I still have that Ibanez. I could probably make money on the thing if I sold it but I'm thinking I might make a "Sky Blue Lou Signature Model" pointy beast with custom graphics and a Floyd Rose just for the fuck of it. It's only money - they're only guitars - YOLO.
 
My first venture into 'electric was dad bless his heart assisting me in building a big ported cab and he picked up a nice full range 15" EV for it. Neither of us at the time had any clue that an instrument speaker was a whole different animal, and as I recall the ting totally folded' with the clean transient from the Dynaco amp or whatever we were feeding it with.
Along about the same time (a little later) my friend's dad built us a big fat box with a 15 and a tweeter for our band's pa.
In neither case did any of us understand that 'job one was about getting the mids right -first.
Think I still have that EV out back.
 
You know, that stolen PA head looked a lot like that one, and it had a screw-on connector for the mic, which we replaced with a 1/4" TS jack. Probably the same one. Isn't that interesting?
 
You know, that stolen PA head looked a lot like that one, and it had a screw-on connector for the mic, which we replaced with a 1/4" TS jack. Probably the same one. Isn't that interesting?

That is funny. I remember it used 12AX7's for the pre stage. I don't know whatever happened to it.
 
In the US, for every hideously cheesey pointy guitar, there are 2000 zit faced 16 yr old metal dorks virgins that will buy it because it looks "cool".

And Cheap Trick fans ... Wife dragged me to a CT show last night. Rick Nielsen had quite a collection of ugly (and pointy) guitars. One Les Paul in the bunch - of course it sounded the best of all of them. Now don't get mne started on Robin Zander's lipsynching .... :facepalm:
 
A band I was in made some flash pots out of steel pipes wired to the light board. We tried them outside and they worked great. We experimented and found that you could put a bit of wax in the top and they would make a loud bang and flash too. We were using pyrodex(synthetic gunpowder).

The first gig we tried them on we had to use black powder...the gun shop was out of pyrodex. The lead singer told me " I loaded them hot man...it's gonna be awesome!"

Man, when our light man hit that switch it sounded like 2 double barreled 12 gauge shotguns went off. Chicks were screaming and crying. The flash was blinding...I was seeing yellow spots for 10 minutes afterwords. There was so much smoke the bar had to be evacuated.
Lol
I'm just amazed we didn't burn the place down.
Our ears were ringing and everyone was saying "huh?"...."what?" to each other like tommy Chong in that cheech and Chong movie.
 
A band I was in made some flash pots out of steel pipes wired to the light board. We tried them outside and they worked great. We experimented and found that you could put a bit of wax in the top and they would make a loud bang and flash too. We were using pyrodex(synthetic gunpowder).

The first gig we tried them on we had to use black powder...the gun shop was out of pyrodex. The lead singer told me " I loaded them hot man...it's gonna be awesome!"

Man, when our light man hit that switch it sounded like 2 double barreled 12 gauge shotguns went off. Chicks were screaming and crying. The flash was blinding...I was seeing yellow spots for 10 minutes afterwords. There was so much smoke the bar had to be evacuated.
Lol
I'm just amazed we didn't burn the place down.
Our ears were ringing and everyone was saying "huh?"...."what?" to each other like tommy Chong in that cheech and Chong movie.

dang, I'm laughing so hard. :laughings: But wasn't there a bar in NJ that burned down because that kind of hom eengineering??

The last three words before someone dies... "Hey, Watch this" :D
 
Jimi, how long ago was that?
Now a days that'd be like "HEY LAWYERS.. Over here!"
But really, 'tried it a few times, then like, 'change the mix'..? :rolleyes:
 
dang, I'm laughing so hard. :laughings: But wasn't there a bar in NJ that burned down because that kind of hom eengineering??

The last three words before someone dies... "Hey, Watch this" :D

I laugh everytime I think about it.
Hehehe
The whole crowd...including the bar tenders and owner, was out in the parking lot...white smoke rolling out the open doors.
The bar owner said: "you fuckers are good but GOD DAMN!!!!l"
"don't ever try that shit again!"
LMAO
 
My first venture into electric guitar was I think around 1964 or 65. My dad took an old cabinet radio, took out the innards, soldered a 1/4" female fitting and did some other stuff and I had my first amp. It wasn't in a cabinet, just the bare innards and the speaker sitting next to it. Still it worked, not very well but it worked.
 
Rick Nielsen had quite a collection of ugly (and pointy) guitars.
Long loved the "Dream Police" album. But even from 1980, I detested the shape of Rick Nielsen's guitars and his goofball image. I used to want to meet him and his guitars in some alley on a dark night down Streatham way before the girl gun gangs grew up......
They were once referred to in a game of rock band anagrams as Cheat Prick.
But I digress.
My first amp {for my bass} was my Hitachi cassette deck. It had 2 mic inputs and I found that if you put a tape in and set it record and pause and plugged the bass into one of the mic inputs, the sound would go through my Pioneer amp and out of my Goodmans speakers. Sounded good for the times. To this day I don't know what possessed me to try it but I didn't buy an actual bass amp until 9 years later !
 
An interesting point that one might draw from some of this is that it didn't actually sound all that bad plugging a passive guitar (or bass especially) into a low-Z "consumer line level" input and playing through even relatively flat "hifi" speakers. The tone suck that we generally struggle to avoid acts as a sort of cheap ass cab sim.
 
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