Fans of old Orange and Matamp amplifiers rejoice!

Planet of the Amps has lots of old amps for you to drool over. Planet of the Amps was put up by Joel Wheeler, who owns Electric Amp Company, USA.

It just so happens that a lot of downtuned Fuzz/Doom bands (starting most famously, with Sleep and their crusade to get as many old Oranges as they could to revive them...) LOVE the sound of the amps that Planet of the Amps features.

Whether on purpose, or just by dint of fate and coincidence, you've probably heard of the Donovan song "Hurdy Gurdy Man", but you probably never learned what a Hurdy Gurdy is.

Check out this Turkish electric Hurdy Gurdy awesomeness:

If this isn't one of the coolest things you've seen in a while, please feel free to use the contact form to complain to me. :)

(Another long post...) So this is an amp we received at Thermionic Studios a few months back. We've finally had an opportunity to take a look at it. It was a "steal" off eBay at $150 + $30 shipping. It stank of stale cigarettes. The headshell was dinged quite badly. The tolex, while a cool pattern, was brittle, ratty, and tearing off in multiple spots. This amp had clearly been abused. Even the original Randall nameplate was trashed and had to be repainted.

I had a great time sitting in with Tim at The COAR Radio show, on Thursday Feb 19th. I was invited to come back on the 20th, but was unable to do so. I came to San Jose to help my mom with an eye surgery. She had to be seen for her post-operation check exactly the same time that I would have gone in on Friday, the 20th. So unfortunately I wasn't able to join him again. Fortunately, and more importantly, my Mom's eye surgery procedure was successful...

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:

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.

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.