Hello Team.

Once again, I made the trek to Santa Monica - and this time the $30 Dunlop GCB-95 I bought arrived. Unlike the last time I made the trek to Santa Monica, I wasn't listening to any KCRW or being thrown into horrendous confusion with southbound 405 traffic to Long Beach backing up for miles. No, today was different; and the traffic was surprisingly easy.

But, it did give me a chance to muse on some pedal things...

One of the great things about buying an album used to be the collateral that came with the album. It wasn't just the music. It was the other things that came with the music in the physical album. There was always a sleeve that came with the physical media (the vinyl record, the cassette, or the CD) that you purchased the music on. The least imaginative record labels used the sleeve to hawk their other bands.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/nsa-phone-data-collection-illegal-court-ruling-117725.html?hp=t3_r

We always do everything we can to post about interesting, accurate, and timely music creation and music creation-related items.

This is too important to not repost.

Sorry we haven't been on the usual posting schedule.

There was a nasty bout of Strep Throat that went through my household these past couple of weeks. Everyone is on the mend, so Thermionic Studios will be back to a regular posting schedule soon.

Around the office, we have attempted to sort out our thoughts regarding the differences between club owners and musicians, and we WILL post something on it shortly.

Thanks for your support!

In our continuing saga of Musicians vs Club Owners, there's yet another entry from the Houston Press. How the Houston Press would have come across the posting, especially given its apparently short life on the Tampa Craigslist site is all the more amazing. Clearly when that club owner posted his missive, it struck a chord.

We need to offer some background on this letter first:
1.) It would appear that Chris LeDrew originally found this posting at the beginning of 2013.
2.) It appears to have been reposted by Chris, or someone known to Chris who gave him credits at On Stage Magazine.
3.) Presuming the chain of custody and the chain of information is correct, this Craiglist posting was listed briefly in the Tampa site...

So we ended up finding out this interesting juxtaposition between a working musician, Bill Lonero, and a club owner. Bill, the musician, laid out his position in a 15 point manifesto. It was a pretty good manifesto. It was reasoned well. It was articulated well. I found it to be a little snarky with respect to the club owner's perspective (by writing "maybe you shouldn't be hosting live music?"), but at the same time I can totally understand where he's coming from.

*Not an April Fools' story:

Throbak Electronics is a company that we've been following for a while. We were going to post something else, but we thought this story was too cool and felt we had to post it as soon as we could. In the wake of the Les Paul Estate Sale, Throbak has recently posted that they obtained yet another vintage Gibson pickup winder. This is *THE* pickup winder that Les Paul took from the Gibson factory when Gibson left Kalamazoo and relocated to Nashville.

We've been pretty clear, at least in an earlier article, about our feelings about Metallica, so we won't belabor them here. However, in order to be consistent with and to those feelings, it seems only fair to give credit where credit is due. Metallica is launching a reissue project where they're taking their cassette release from 1982, "No Life Till Leather", and remastering it and apparently a bunch of other material, and releasing it.

Most of the metal that's up on Bandcamp is screetching banshee or growling cookie monster nonsense. My own belief, is that bands put out music like this because they can't get vocalists who are any good and end up doing the banshee/cookie monster stuff to cover up that fact. How these bands ever get listeners is beyond me. However, we've found a few gems to share with you and they will hopefully tide you over for the next few days...