The impetus for this article came about from a scrap piece of shag carpet that I'd collected and the happenstance of some pieces of plywood that were slightly bent but that were workable and that came my way in the past 30 days or so.

"Huh?", is what I hear you saying in your head right now.

Let's take a step back. In the process of building a business that mostly centers around renting out older tube amps, it follows that we also work on our own personal electric instruments. At the end of the day, we don't just love heavy music, we love playing it.

Hello everyone! This is a new sort of article for us here at Thermionic Studios. We've joined in collaboration with http://www.onlinebassguitar.com. We welcome them to Thermionic Studios and are excited to be able to provide a much longer, and we hope, a much more meaningful presentation of style, technique, and setup information.

Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars made a video back in 2012 - we just found it at Reverb.com.

If you have 15 minutes available, please take a look at the video made by Bob Taylor and listen about the use of ebony and the changes that humanity has made of the earth.

Here at Thermionic, we're not always open to new interpretations of heavy songs, however, the past two days have been interesting. Yesterday, driving back from Santa Monica I was listening to KCRW. DJ Raul Campos played a tastefully remixed version of Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan.

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.

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 there's a group of Fender Rhodes aficionados who post by the name of "Audiotech VR" on Youtube. The video that they've posted is well over an hour long. The video describes the Rhodes Electric Piano, its pieces and its function, and a bit of history as to when it first started being built. They describe the Rhodes in its heyday and put theirs through a number of different songs and artists. They then also go through and put the Rhodes through several effects for a really cool viewing experience.

You probably know the DeWalt company for cordless drills and stuff from Home Depot or Lowe's... (Do they even sell DeWalt at Lowe's?)

Not everyone who applies effort into learning a musical instrument does so with the intention to make heaps and heaps of money. Everyone says that they do it for "the love of the music". That "love of the music" can be a convenient cover for:

• Males who are looking for "enhanced opportunities" with females (see Lemmy Kilmister)
• The adulation of a crowd.
• A suitable outlet for expression that would otherwise be antisocial.
• Therapy.

And then there are some who actually do it for the love of the music...

Guitargeek.com is, as its name suggests, one of the geekier sites on the internet with respect to documenting rock artists and what they do to get their sound. The archive claims to go back to 1993, when the author and originator, Adam Cooper, began the project. Unfortunately, as I recall there used to be a lot more information up on Guitargeek.com. It appears that despite logging material since 1993, the site only goes back a little over a year, to December (a few times, I've seen a few August, but not reliably) 2013.