So I've spent a little bit of time trying to find this episode of Undercover Boss for you to see. CBS makes you sign up for some membership. But then so does Hulu. Hulu seems to be the least objectionable from what I found. The best solution is if you have Tivo, or a DVR from your Internet/Cable/whatever company and can manage to record it on re-run.

So there's a really interesting thread that was started on The Gear Page that we happened upon a few days ago and it really got us thinking - not just about guitarists, but about bass players, keyboardists, and singers too. Yes, yes, we know that drummers get no love - but drummers don't seem to use, or even need a lot of effects in their repertoire and so, perhaps, this isn't as germane.

So you may remember that we had taken in a 1980s Randall "RG100 Classic". While we didn't take any pictures of the amplifier when it first arrived here at Thermionic Studios, we did take some after we'd broken it down a bit for repair. We also took pictures of some of the repair work, including using Bondo where necessary.

Well, here's the finished product.
(More pictures and many more notes inside...)

Steve Albini was recorded giving his thoughts on what one has to do in order to record drums well. This video was taken around 2005 at a convention called "Tape Op Con".

There's quite a wealth of information here in the video considering it's only about 30 minutes. Steve talks about such things as dealing with phase cancellation, using compressors as noise limiters, using a de-esser instead of a noise gate...

(Phase Cancellation explained briefly inside!)

Goddamnit does Bondo stink. It's really bad.

It smells so bad, that it reminds me of an incident when I was in college, when my friend and I got drunk on potato vodka and rode our bicycles to the local mall. At the mall, we wandered into a Kay-Bee toy store. While we were in there, goofing around, my friend, Anton, cracked open a liquid glitterglobe that was on the end of a pencil. He proceeded to flick the glitterglobe juice on me. The juice had an odor that hit me almost immediately, and as a result, I laughed so hard I peed my pants...

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".