My dad’s gonna build a guitar amp

This is pretty cool. I’ve been playing guitars few a while now and have gotten pretty familiar with the ins ‘n outs of guitars; I have no problem taking ‘em apart, modifying them, putting them back together… and, I’ve even built a couple. However, through all these years I’ve remained blissfully ignorant to amplifier technology; I have no idea how they work, what the internal components do or anything like that… that’s my dad’s world.

My dad’s taken a petty decent interest in my gear. Whenever I get new stuff he’s always checking it out, has done dozens of electronics (pickups etc) mods for me & has taught me how to solder and do some of this stuff myself.

A couple weeks ago I was playing a bit and wasn’t too happy with any of my amps (I have 4 at home). They all left something to be desired. I figured I’d look for something new and started doing some research, checked out prices and read a ton of reviews. After a while I was pretty frustrated, pinged my dad and said “hey, dude, you wanna build me an amp?”. He lit up.

As far as I’m concerned my dad’s an electronics genius. He’s worked on all sorts of electronics for 40+ years & I’ve never heard of him not being able to mod or fix something that has wires. So, I’m pretty stoked.

Right after bringing up the idea my dad started flipping through schematics for various Marshall amps. A few days later he declared he needed a physical amp too. Due to their popularity we decided that we’d use a JCM800 as a reference. But, after reading up on some forums I decided to go with a late 70′s JMP 2204 w/ master volume instead. A couple hours of hunting later I found a sweet ’78 in pretty awesome condition & bought it.

Here’s dad w/ his new toy:

Oh, the irony: I just bought my dad a Marshall for him to take apart and dissect… 15 years ago when I asked for 1/2 stack his reaction was “um, no!”. LoL

This should be pretty sweet. Dad’s been going off and telling me all sorts of stuff he’s learned about Marshalls, expressed some discontent with some of their designs & is flat out stoked to take on this challenge. He’s already been sketching out some ideas & had the JMP opened up minutes after it arrived. LoL.

I’m sure we’ll have a working amp pretty soon. I’ve got a pretty good idea for where I want this project to go & am positive dad can make it happen. It’s gonna be pretty rad.

Rock ‘n Roll

So, I’ve had my current A3 for about 2 years now and I love it but…

There’s a lot to like about the car but I settled when I bought. I had an A4 Wagon before that and dug it but never really made peace with the fact that I was driving around in a station wagon. So, one day, I randomly popped into the dealership and traded it in for the A3.

I was looking for something smaller and a bit less expensive so I didn’t pop for some features. One feature I was stoked on was the iPod integration & did get that… unfortunately I didn’t bother trying it before I signed all the paperwork and it turns out it sucked.

Anyways – over the last couple years I’ve been mostly happy with the A3 but really wished I had the nav (better iPod integration), bigger wheels, Quatro & a few other niceties that, at the time, I was convinced I didn’t want/need.

Well, I’m pretty close to deciding that I kinda want it all at this point. I don’t want a different car – just a “better” version of the one I already have. So, today I almost got the car above; things didn’t work at (dealer was a dick) so I didn’t get it. I’m glad I didn’t though… for now. That one had everything I wanted except the nav/ipod kit. Turns out there’s none in America w/ the config I want and ordering’s my only option.

I’m gonna think on this for a bit and see what happens. If you know me (even remotely) then you know the odds are pretty high that I’ll be placing an order pretty soon .

Why do site’s make it hard for me to give them my money? I’m “here”, I’ve got my credit card in hand, I’ve got stuff in my cart but then you go fuck it all up with a horrible checkout process.

Ten minutes ago GuitarCenter.com lost an easy $250 sale: My iPod broke today, they sell iPods, I have a $200 gift card, know they carried ‘em, put one in my cart but right when the sale should have been a slam dunk they shat all over themslevs.

So, what happened? Well, the iPod is $250 and my gift card is for $200. I get to the payment screen, select “gift card” and see the following sentence:

To use your gift card with another form of payment, please call 1-866-498-7882.

So, now I have to get up off my ass, get my phone, call some number, go through some shitty “press 1 for deez nuts” type menu process… eh, fine. So I call, dance through their stupid menus and, finally, Hector picks up. Midway through explaining why I’m calling I started thinking:

Fuck, now I have to spell my name for him 5 times ’cause the odds of him getting “Sarkissian” right the first time are slim to none… then I gotta rattle off the the gift card number followed by the pin. Next I’m going to have to read of my CC# & its expiration date for the balance. After that we’ll go through the whole “can you say that again” business with my billing address and shipping address. Fuck this… I could’ve order it on Amazon already.

So, I hung up. It’s stupid. Giving you money shouldn’t be a pain in my ass.

Ya, I’m lazy – that’s why I’m shopping from my couch instead of going to the actual store. Calling people to order stuff? Really? This isn’t 1993 is it? The web is so much more convenient: I don’t have to spell shit over the phone & pray to God that the underpaid, “i hate this fucking job” saying CSR actually types my shipping address in correctly.

So, anyways… I hung up on poor Hector, cruised over to Amazon.com/ipod (a url I flat out guessed), clicked “add to cart”, picked 1 day shipping (Amazon Prime is the shit), they have my CC on file so there was none of that bullshit to deal with and, honestly, 45 seconds later my order was placed and I had an email confirmation in my mailbox.

Now I don’t expect every eCommerce site to have stuff setup 100% as awesomely as Amazon does but c’mon… that doesn’t mean your site has to suck ass. Amazon and others have done the hard work & spent all the R&D money figuring out the user flows that maximize the “add to cart” to checkout ratio. Just fucking copy them.

Anyways – that’s my rant. If you’re getting into the eCommerce business please get it right; please make it easy for me to give you money!

Ladies & gentlemen… I present Peanut in her interweb debut.

Today was the day I was going to start taking guitar lessons. I’ve been playing for about 14 years (shit! It’s really been that long?) and I figured it’s about time I get some proper training: learn scales, modes and theory and all that. Sure, I can play – but I really wanna learn some of that stuff to expand upon what I’ve taught myself in order to have a pretty good foundation to help with writing & improvising solos etc.

I ended up in a pretty shitty part of town… “The hood” if you will. The second I got there I thought “oh, Jesus!”. Last time I was driving by I literally saw some dude smoking crack on the corner. No joke…

I got there a bit early and parked right across the street. I had to stand around and kill about 1/2 an hour. I was giving some serious consideration to taking my car to a parking lot. But, opted not to. Instead I left it under the watchful eye of these guys:

You gotta love Street View on Google Maps.

Funny thing is I really did meet that dude from the picture above with the bubble over his head. He asked me for a cigarette and started talking & talking ‘n talking. And, yes, he went on ‘n on about being a drummer and how he used to play for Natalie Cole. He even started doing some off-beat drumming on his legs to show me how legit he is.

Eh, so after the chat I had about 15 minutes left to wait and thought I’d go chill by the door: “Hopefully someone will come by and let me in.”

That’s the door. This serious fucking steel door with a shit ton of locks & a sliding steel panel; kinda like the panel they use in prison to give shit to the guys locked up in solitary. It reminded me of “The Carter” from New Jack City.

I was expecting Nino Brown, Gee Money and Pookie to show up any minute with some crack.

Good times for sure! Man this place sucked balls.

So the dude show up for the lessons & he’s fucking strung out on something or another. Either that or he was just a fucking tweaky kinda guy to begin with. Eh…

The lesson starts & I play some stuff so he can gauge where we should start. He’s actually a pretty decent teacher. He picked up on my weak points pretty quick and he laid our of bunch of stuff we should go over. He even made a bunch of suggestions regarding ergonomics etc that were right on the money.

The problem is that he’s a fucking weirdo & I swear he spent half the time noodling & tweaking instead of teaching me stuff. He’d go off on random riffs and licks etc which is fine but he’d fudge shit up here ‘n there. And, not to be all “I’m rad” about it, but there’s some techniques etc where I’m just better than him. He went into some tweak inspired riffarry and was flat out sloppy. At a certain point Hendrix’s Little Wing came up & he started playing it wrong (even though he said Jimmy is his hero). When he got to the solo he stopped so I picked it up and started playing the solo . I guess I was showing off a bit but shouldn’t my teacher be able to school me?

A bit later Metallica’s One came up in conversation & I just started playing the heavy part in the middle and went into Kirk’s tapping solo. He just sat there tweaking and saying shit like “Woah dude!!!” LOL

So, the guy’s a decent teacher & I could learn a bunch from him but he’s not a “shit ton” better than me. If I knew the theory stuff he knows I’d probably school him. Tack on the fact that the neighborhood scares me & the that he’s tweaky as hell and it’s pretty clear that I shouldn’t go back.

I gotta find me some old dude with a beard who’s some blues or jazz master to take lessons from: Let’s go from one extreme to another & see how that turns out.

Rock ‘n roll.