Forty-five years ago today, Black Sabbath released their first album to the world. The band was even so generous as to upload a video of their performance live at L'Olympia Bruno Coquatrix in Paris performing songs from the first album and Paranoid on 20 December 1970:

We've all watched this a few times at various places on YouTube. It's awesome to see a Black Sabbath-sanctioned version!

Garnet Amplification is a company that we doubt most people have heard of, but Garnet amps have DEFINITELY made music that most people (at least in our western culture) have heard. Fender and Marshall are the big names in electric amplification. Of course, there are other names you're probably familiar with: Ampeg, Peavey, Line 6, Randall, Crate, Ampeg, Roland, etc... The reasons you haven't heard of Garnet Amps are numerous:

Proto-metal aficionados rejoice! (Long post follows)

So I went looking for some deep tracks - the kind that you rarely ever hear of. THEY ARE OUT THERE. In fact, it's amazing just how much material is available now through YouTube and other places that simply was never available on a mass-market basis before. The real challenge is cataloging it and separating the wheat from the chaff. I believe we have just such a find today.

Found a great article, linked just below. It's geared for guitarists, but just about anyone who is looking to become a professional musician can learn from the advice posted. The article is titled "25 things every guitarist should know". If you're an aspiring musician, there's some really solid advice about getting your act together to become a working musician. Like all articles, this does not encompass everything that you ought to know and put into practice (that would require a book), but it's a very reasonable place to start.

I'd mentioned the Prog Rock Palace in an earlier post HERE. It occured to me that in that posting, I never included the link to the actual webpage. I will point out that here at Thermionic Studios, we're not particularly fervent followers of Progressive Rock. That said, I do like to take occasion to listen to different rock genres because of the occasional spillage of one genre into another. There are oftentimes a lot of "operatic" or "orchestral" (or "bombastic") influences from Metal into Prog Rock, and conversely from Prog Rock into Metal.

So we've loved Orange Goblin for years here at Thermionic. It occured to us to share Orange Goblin here because, while we like to find and share new (and old) obscure stuff that we search out, sometimes we're so deep in it, we don't realize that what's "well known". Orange Goblin is one of those bands that clearly creates and performs great music. They really haven't broken through. There's no radio airplay. There's no mention of them in the media. Of course, that could be said of just about every "heavy" band today.

I don't really know how I came upon it, but I found a rather interesting article about practice and rehearsal habits that may offer some help with respect to getting better quicker, especially when it comes to practicing repetitive exercises.

Here's the website and the article: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/why-the-progress-in-the-practice-room-seems-to-disappear-overnight/

So the latest effort into wah-wah pedals (and we've found some pretty awesome stuff to share!) revealed some other interesting tangents that we thought we'd share first. Yes, yes, we're going to do more wah-wah pedal stuff, but we think it's better to break up the content with other interesting information that has more to do with great heavy music, the development of great heavy music, and the presentation of great heavy music.

So I actually saw this a few years ago, and it just occured to me that this would be a great post here - not because it's "new" (it was released in 2011 at www.crybabydoc.com), but because crybabydoc.com now forwards to jimdunlop.com instead of showing the movie, we thought it would be important to make sure that the links are still available. I have been, since its release, looking for a DVD of the crybaby movie to purchase, but none has been forthcoming.

The Snorkler is an amp that people talk about in hushed tones - as if it were a holy relic. It's almost mythical in the lore that surrounds it and the way in which people speak about the guitar tones that issue forth from it. It is a one-of-a-kind butchered Marshall JCM800 combo amp that, at the request of the owner, was turned upside down and converted into a custom head amp, by Reinhold Bogner. The speaker / combo amp shell was done away with and the owner (Ronnie Champagne, as referenced below) had another tech shop build him a headshell for it.