Thermionic Studios

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.

I hope I perform as strongly in my next job interview.

For a few years now, I've been scouring the Internet, looking for snippets, and bits and pieces of information - and putting them together in order to try and build a reasonable educational curriculum on how to master the building of, and the repair of, tube amplifiers. I've wanted to do it whether the amps built are for Guitar, Bass, Vocals, or public address (PA). I've bought Merlin Blencowe's books on building tube amps. I even have his out-of-print "Designing Power Supplies for Tube Amplifiers".

So about ten years ago I was working at a place where software was being written to support MP3 players and gather different forms of content into a new and daily upload for your MP3 player. There were a number of problems, not the least of which was the fact that you couldn't really control the daily feed that was put together. In addition, you couldn't advance through the songs something like more than 3 or so times an hour. The MP3 players were, for the most part, built by iRiver, which as I recall was a Korean company. I think at the time, their largest player was 4 megabytes.