I saw Jason Ricci at Mexicali Blues on 8/29/2008. Between sets I jumped on stage and took a picture of his Harp Gear Amp knob settings.

Treble and Middle off and Bass and Volume on 7. I should have taken a pic of his effects box. He used some wild chorus on one number.

I am uploading a couple of videos to Vimeo. When they are finished I’ll put them on JT30.com.

Snake, James Cotton’s harp wrangler and chief cook and bottle washer, showed me Cotton’s amp at the Weehawken concert this evening. He said he’d replaced the first pre-amp tubes with a 12AU7 and another with a 12AT7 in order to cut back on the gain and improve the amp’s tone and resistance to feedback. (click image to see the knobs better)

$200,000 anyone?

Somebody had a serious case of Hoard and Clutter syndrome, Packrat Syndrome, or Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome. Even I don’t have this many amps. (but only because I have no more room to put amps).

There are many nice amps in this auction, but very few real finds. Any of these amps could be had on eBay. Some are more valuable than others. I counted (quickly) 664 pictures, but many are front and back pictures so figure 400 amps. Most are valued between $300 and $500. Many are less and there are a few notables valued at more.

There has to be $200,000 worth of amps retail. The eBay price would be about $100k to $150K. I am guessing that the purchase price will be less than $100,000 for the bunch. Possibly well under 75K because there aren’t many people who can come up with the cash and have the patience to off that many dogs on eBay.

You could bid $75k or so and then spend the next year posting them on eBay at the rate 10 or 20 a week. You could make a nice living for a year. You’d make about $75k total on the project and only have to work 15 to 20 hours a week listing amps and packing them up for shipment.

Sonic Circus Guitar Amplifier Sale of the Century

I discovered that the problems that I had with HarpAmps redirecting users to new pages was due to Chitika.com, and advertising group. I used to have a little graphic section where you could buy harmonicas and amps from various stores. I put this way down at the bottom of the page so it wouldn’t bother anyone. These ads started going nuts over the weekend.

I turned off most of my Chitika ads today. Their new premium ads were the cause of the browser hijacks. Chitika started their premium program because, they claim, the older per-per-click ads weren’t working. They never did more than a dollar a day for me on about 8,000 exposures, but I considered this to be a problem with the fact that I placed them below the fold, near the bottom of a long pages.

Premium is a misnomer for their new product. What they did was resell their ad space to doubleclick and other advertisers. Along the way they were not very careful about who they were selling to, because the ads resulted in the execution of javascript that produced popups and in some cases page redirection to other websites.

Popups suck and I never want them on my page. Browser redirects are unacceptable. I opted out big time. I am now going through and removing Chitika code from websites. I don’t need users calling me up about problems for a lousy dollar a day.

We had some weird things going on here for a while. It appears that some piece of code managed to send a redirect to a malicious site. I think it might have been the Webring code. It appears that it has stopped so I have returned the site back to its original state.

I was taking out a bunch of the scripts that run (google analytics, etc.) trying to figure out where the bad guys were getting in. The website should run a little fast, now, anyway.

If you have a problem, please notify me. Use my other site www.jt30.com to get in touch with me, or check my non-harp blog at www.cthreepo.com/blog.

I am sorry if you had a problem with the site this morning.

Keith

I came across this tube amp tutorial. I like the absolute thoroughness of the tutorial, Everything is covered from soup to nuts. The schematic is customized, which may be a good or a bad thing. It uses relatively low voltage power tubes, which means it might be good for harp. Lower power means sweeter tone and less feed back.

The article offers a great many good ideas about where to get parts, how to salvage stuff to save money, even how to build a neat cabinet.

Even if you are not going to build this particular amp, it is worth while checking out the process. It may be just as easy to build a deluxe or bassman clone (I suggest looking at a tweed Fender Super Amp).

This looks very interesting. I combines a PC keyboard and a MIDI keyboard. I want it, but I can’t figure a good justification for buying one.

It’s only $19.99 with free shipping. It seems sort of dumb not to buy it. It comes with a cover for the music keyboard so you can actually type. I don’t suppose that it would go over big here at work, though.

It would be the perfect present for the musician in your life.

The thing hooks to USB. This would work better with a full function sound card, but a standard sound card will have the regular MIDI instruments and the ability to edit and add instruments. Since sound is Creative.com’s forte, I am assuming it comes with some nice music composing software.

Prodikeys PC-MIDI – The Ultimate Keyboard for Work and Play

I found this site. The prices are pretty good. I am ordering a 5F4 Super chassis. THe Fend 5F4 is one of my favorite harp amps. It has separate tubes for each of the preamp channels so you can put a 12AU7 in one and a 12AX7 in the other and have hot and cool channels to plug into.

CeriaTone.Com – DIY Guitar Tube Amp

I’ve been fooling around with creating web pages on Squidoo. This one is called How to Become a Harmonica Super Star. It is a list of the steps that you need to follow to really learn how to play harp.

10 Steps to Becoming a Harmonica Super Star on Squidoo

Squidoo allows you to make a nice web page that’s good for a short lesson or an interesting article. It is good for a band to make a nice profile page and any number of things. The advantage is that Squidoo pays you to create a page by giving you a good chunk of the advertising revenue. It does not have the kiddie type features of MySpace or other social networking sites. It is more business oriented, concentrating on pages the are useful. If you interested in trying this yourself, click on the link above, and sign up.