Archive for the ‘Amps’ Category
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
The Black Keys are coming to San Francisco this weekend as part of the Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park. If you’re not in the know, the Outside Lands Festival is a 3-day affair headlined by Radiohead, Jack Johnson and Tom Petty with about 50 other artists playing, including our favorite - The Black Keys (iTunes link).
Little random fact: “Outside Lands” was an old name for the area that is now Golden Gate Park, before the park or any of the surrounding neighborhoods were built.
In honor of The Black Keys upcoming show in SF, we’d thought we give you a run down of some Dan Auerbach’s gear. This won’t be an exhaustive list, just some highlights.
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Monday, August 18th, 2008
Apparently £62,000 (about $115,600 USD) worth of Orange amplifiers have been stolen from Orange’s Borehamwood headquarters. The amplifers were in a container when they were stolen in a daring raid on August 16th where the robbers used torches to cut into a steel container.
The container had 141 Orange Tiny Terror Combos (£439/$818) amps that represented the first shipment in the UK of the new amplifier that was just launched this year.
Orange has announced there is a £3000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the thieves. They’ve also posted the serial numbers of the stolen amplifiers on their website, so you can trace that one you just bought off Craigslist for a steal.
Tags: orange amps, robbery
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Every year representatives of 100 music magazines from around the globe vote on and present awards at the Musikmesse International Press Awards (MIPA). These are big awards and would be even bigger if more people knew how to pronounce Musikmesse. The winners were recently announced in each key guitar category. Click on for the list of winners.
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Tags: Acoustic Guitar, d'addario guitar effects, electric guitar, guitar, marshall, seymour duncan, taylor guitar
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
Sometimes the scribblings on the back of napkins can really turn out to be worth something. In this case John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance”, written on a small piece of paper and given to a then-16-year-old Gail Renard, fetched a whooping $833,654 (USD) at a Christie’s auction in London.
Gail Renard received the lyrics directly from John Lennon, who asked Renard to re-copy the song in larger lettering so they could record a version during their 1969, 8-day “bed-in”, protesting the war in Vietnam.
But that’s not the whole story…a lot of rock-n-roll memorabilia was auctioned off that day at Christie’s in London.
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Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
In an earlier post I mentioned that I recently bought a Marshall Vintage Modern 2266C Combo amp. Ever since I acquired this amp and started producing some really vintage tones, I’ve been getting more and more into understanding how tube amplifiers work.
I bought a few books off Amazon to expand my understanding and I have to recommend “The Guitar Amp Handbook” by Dave Hunter. To help start you off on understanding how tube amps work, Dave Hunter does a great job of walking you through an early 1950s Fender Princeton amp circuitry and explains the various components contained in vacuum tube amplifiers.
Finally I understand what a “cap” does and why it’s important to your tone and how, if you’re not careful, you can electrocute yourself if you don’t properly discharge them. Tubes are obviously covered in great detail as well. Honestly, it’s become a bit addicting for me and I’m worried about getting a case of gear acquisition syndrome (aka GAS). I came very close to placing a bid for a 1958 Fender Princeton tweed on Ebay. It was all original!! There’s just something to be said for owning a piece of history as well as an amazing sounding amp.
The book also contains interviews with some famous amp makes and at the end has step-by-step instructions to build your own Fender Princeton-style amplifier.
Buy: The Guitar Handbook
After the jump, some great YouTube’s of the vintage Fender Princeton!
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Thursday, June 12th, 2008
I recently purchased the Marshall Vintage Modern 2266C after years of playing out of a Marshall JCM2000 DSL401. I wanted to upgrade for a couple of reasons - first I needed a little more volume when playing with my band and second, I wanted a more vintage Marshall tone than the DSL401. Overall I’m very satisfied with the amp and the tone, but there’s a couple things to be aware of when considering this amp.
The key feature that really drew me to the Vintage Modern amp was the ability to control a lot of your tone from your guitar’s volume and tone knobs. You can have your guitar volume on 7 and have a nice mellow, semi-overdriven and then roll your guitar volume to 10 and add a bit more crunch and a little more volume. That control at your fingertips is very alluring and is a throw back to how many players managed their tone before the advent of multichannel amps. It reminds me of a slide player’s ability to hit notes between the frets - your tone and volume knobs now offer you various degrees of sound. To me that is one of the best features of this amp.
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Tags: gibson les paul, guitar amplifier, marshall, Marshall Vintage Modern 2266C
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