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Reverb prices are mostly ridiculous... as a friend of mine said, "the problem with creating an eBay especially for musicians is that you end up with an eBay where mostly musicians are selling things for what they think they're worth."

Britney is not writing her own material... it is well-written... (watch this gem... and how it reveals at the end that it's a chord sequence based on ancient madrigals)

I work at the state PBS network here... that special is a couple of years old (I just had to dig through backup stuff to find the graphics I'd done to promote it before) but I'm surprised it's new to a lot of people, which is good for us... he's one of our constant "moneymakers" as far as membership pledges - since he usually has a tour coming through and we do ticket packages - snd he does a new concert for DVD which he also lets us air probably every year. I thank him for that, he's doing a lot of good in supporting PBS.

With my standard Teles or Strats or Jazzmaster or my Variax I do use the volume knob, as it is very conveniently placed and there's only one for all the pickups... but I do play a lot of Gibson and Gibson-style guitars these days... I had considered doing the Jon Herrington (current Steely Dan lead guitarist) mod and have a master volume put closest to the bridge (even if means moving the pickup selector switch on an SG), keep the volume pots for both but switch to a master tone pot... I love my new 3-P90 Firebird with all of the tone options from the 3 volume knobs which pull for coil tapping, but I do wish I could un-intrusively add a master volume, and I guess that's part of what I'm trying to put on the floor.

I'm a devotee of my Lizard Leg Flying Dragon clean boost pedals (made by a guy in my area, who's stopped making them... but since they aren't super well-known I bought tons of them for under $100 for a while whenever they'd pop up used)... I even bought a Draconis, which was his "double" version made by request, since some people liked having one Flying Dragon at unity just because of the magic it works on your tone and then another as a boost at the end of the chain... it has a loop so you can place the two units in different spots... and one of my JangleBox compressors is the Nano version, which by request of people like Elliot Easton has boost separate from compression... then I have a Komet Mirasol, which is a clean boost + Rangemaster-style treble boost circuit... and I have a SoloDallas X Boost, which is modeled on the limiter in Angus Young's wireless transmitter that made his guitar sound so magical on the "Back In Black" record... Look Larryz, I know I have a problem... I keep expecting to come home one day and walking into an intervention my wife has put together...

E Ball sells little kids to replace the string and spring for $10-20, I think (probably 4x what it costs to just find the same spring and string) and I bought a few of them years ago and had a friend swap them out on my pedals... stiull have a couple left somewhere... but yes, kind of a daft design...

Thanks Caeven... this actually is great info as I'm seeing other optical volume pedals to investigate.

I have a couple of Ernie Ball VP whatevers I've had forever... I probably need to change the string and spring in them again and de-oxit the pots and maybe change a jack or two... but what other choices are there these days? These are solid chunks of metal and kind of indestructable... but also heavy and big... do any of you use a volume pedal you like a lot with a nice taper? I do faux pedal steel stuff with them, and use them with an eBow to kind of control the unpredictable nature of that device interacting with pickups... also like having them for if the level of a certain pedal or other is a big unexpected volume jump onstage so I can pull it back without stopping playing and do the bend over fiddle with knobs thing...

I just watched this a couple of days ago... I have an English bandmate who plays harmonica, too, and he'd never heard of Magic Dick, so I sent him Whammer Jammer and these old shows to check out

and while we're at musical previous lives... Bon Scott as a 1960s bubblegum pop idol in Australia's version of the Bay City Rollers (backup vocals) and a few years later on a different trip...

forgot this one, which is a remarkable vocal

Dio's replacement in Rainbow, Graham Bonnet, had been a soul pop singer and a protegé of Barry Gibb and The Bee Gees... one day his manager called and said "The guitarist Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple wants to work with you in his band Rainbow..." and Bonnet said "ME!?! But I'm not a hard rock singer..." "He says you're his favorite vocalist and he'd like to meet you and discuss working together!" I think he quickly got kicked out of the band for refusing to grow his hair long and dress "cool" or something... though ironically fashion swung more in his direction post-punk new wave soon after. But as Tony Iommi and Ritchie Blackmore have both said in interviews, they and their contemporaries did not grow up listening to heavy metal or even hard rock because it didn't exist... they stumbled into creating it out of bits of the stuff they grew up on, and they don't listen to it now because it's weird hearing your own work parroted back at you... At this point we get musicians who have only ever liked or listened to one narrow sub-genre of music, which us very weird to me. I don't like much metal, but around age 12 I delved into it very hard, along with punk and new wave and disco and funk and rockabilly and ska and old country and country rock the jazz and blues records around the house... I played in a friend's hardcore punk/metal thrash band for a bit because he was a cool guy and fun to play with and be around. I still check out anything that pops up, and of course I respect talent.

Have you ever heard this stuff? It amazes me how much things changed between 1961 and 1971, and 1981... especially now that it generally does not seem like much has really changed musically since 1991, and certainly not since 2001... I annoy some younger friends/collaborators by pulling out records from over the past 40 years that sound like whatever new thing they're hyped up on... (which I will address in my new post, regarding something I am listening to a lot at the moment)

Most metal rhythmically has more in common with Marches than blues-derived swing... I used to joke that I didn't like much metal because I have no German heritage. I got corrected by someone just yesterday for casually referring to AC/DC and Van Halen as "metal bands I liked," with "neither of those bands are metal, dude... they're like hard rock, maybe... or pop rock." AC/DC is The Stones and Free on overdrive, so I kind of see distinguishing them from "metal," but I'd think Van Halen (DLR-era) certainly qualified... but I think they were too happy and popular with mainstream top 40 people to be cool to a certain younger group of metalheads... someone posted a video of Van Halen opening for Black Sabbath at the L.A. Forum just as their first record was released... a notorious show/tour because it led to BS firing Ozzy and rethinking their sound at the time... a young David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen were mind-blowing in their energy and stage presence, Eddie of course was mind-blowing in his playing... and looking at a bit of footage of BS from the same show after that... it was like a bit of a dated lumbering dinosaur with an out of it singer who just kind of stood there and I'm sure the band was a bit shellshocked at what they had to follow. But the comments to that post were strangely heavy on "Van Halen sucks... they play disco... they're spandex weenies... Sabbath is legend!!!" I don't get that, but I don't share the frame/worldview of those commenters, I guess... and BS (with Ozzy) is a very loud blues band at its core.

Oh yeah... actually, I'm always a bit embarrassed by my dislike of most actual Opera... then again, my mother doesn't like most of it, either, and she had to teach it at points... and I was dragged along to see tons of Operas as a kid, then worked on the stage crew for a lot of productions. I file most of it in the "appreciate... but honestly don't 'like' it" camp. But yes, a trained Opera singer can make for a bad and annoying pop singer and a horrific blues singer... and I've had some terrible experiences with trained choral singers in rock band contexts, just the wrong feel and accents AND the refusal to listen to us neanderthals who are beneath them and dare try to clarify things. One funny exception is a Smiths tribute band I'm in that had an Opera-trained singer (who also has a punk and rock background) who was a truly perfect fit for Morrissey's vocals, which most people would probably think of as being "amateurish" or even "not good" but perhaps were just misunderstood in the context, and are certainly hard to pull off.

Same guy in classical music mode

I just watched a vid that Rick Beato posted about this act, who he found on MySpace back in the "Stone Ages" and produced, and how it is unjustly ignored and obscure... a classical guitarist making pop music... and I'll be damned if I can't stop listening to it...

That is in general how autographs work, though... and go look at Reverb and eBay and count the number of signed instruments listed for 2 or 3 times their actual value. There was a music store across the street from the House of Blues in the French Quarter in New Orleans, I was there one afternoon when a guy in a House of Blues shirt walked in and bought the cheapest Squier Strat and Epiphone Les Paul they had then walked across the street, and the guy I knew who worked there said "he does this almost every day... he has the acts playing over there sign then them auctions them on eBay..." When I order vinyl records from acts I can pay $5 more (or sometimes nothing more) and have them sign the record, and I see a lot of those listed for way more than they cost everywhere... same with records or cds signed by acts at shows, books signed by authors at readings, autographed pictures... half of the charity auction things, like autographed guitars, raffled off get listed to be resold automatically by the winners... it made no sense to me because I know people who've had much bigger household names sign their guitars, and those signatures are much more valuable as far as selling them.

He also has a charity here where he gives guitars to underprivileged school kids to put them on a creative path and ward off trouble.

From my state!!! I got to shake his hand once a few years ago when he came into the TV studio where I work to be interviewed for an annual thing that honors State "Legends"... a guy I work with said "you brought your Tele today, right? NO?!? Go get it... I have mine, we'll get him to sign them!" So I ran home (I live .8 miles away from the studio) and grabbed one of mine and went back... but while he was doing the interview his wife walked by and said "I'm sorry... I hope you're not going to ask him to sign your guitars because I have to be the bad cop... our lawyer says not to do it because people try to sell them... and he would not be able to tell you no, so I have to..." which made no sense but we weren't going to argue with her... I will say this, he seems to be the happiest guy on earth and his default facial expression is a big smile. I was going to ask him to show me some of his licks on The Monkees' "Papa Gene's Blues" that I can't quite make out... He did the interview with his Tele in his lap.

One big thing, since Reverb was mentioned here... Etsy bought Reverb, and then had to figure out how to make it actually be profitable (like most apps/websites, it operated in the Red for years just to attract and build up users and make itself attractive to a bigger firm looking to buy it out, then that firm has to figure out HOW to make money with it) so they had to raise the fees for selling... and that gets built into prices. But also, the price of everything else drives everything up... actual brick and mortar retail shops are paying more for rent and electricity and the inevitable shift to online shopping habits means they aren't selling the little "counter candy (ricks, strings, tuners, pick holders, even soft drinks... whatever else that is a mindless grab for physical customers that represents steady profit for them based on what they pay for it)" and that increasing lack of income gets folded into the price of what they are managing to sell... also, a recent change in law makes any seller have to declare and pay taxes on items sold online for above $600, I think, so that factors into pricing structure from people just selling their own gear. I've picked up a couple of guitars and other bits of gear over the past 2 years for cheaper than they should've been, because of the shutdown... because that's the only way I really bother to buy any gear. Otherwise, I don't really need that 23rd guitar or 11th amp or 187th effects pedal... I don't buy "brand new" music gear anything unless its on sale for a good discount, otherwise I let someone else take the depreciation that happens instantly. So yeah, guitars have gotten more expensive. But do any of us really NEED more of them at the moment? The guys I know who trade in that vintage guitar market paying tens of thousands of dollars for golden age instruments are actually finding "deals" now, they say, because they're finding very motivated sellers who need to move stuff to offset loses in other areas.

yeah, the Mel9 does do that...

I use some Tc Electronics vocal harmony pedals to do the same thing as that vid in gigs... in fact, I ran my guitar in the TC vocal harmonizer set on the choral effect and then into an EHX Key9 for Rhodes piano+chorus to back up a female singer on a version of 10CC's "I'm Not In Love" for a gig that freaked people out. I need to get her to do.a live vid of it with me.

Yes, I used it this way for years as a clean boost for solos onstage. I also has a trip of masking tape with different color markings so I could quickly change it for certain songs. All Boss pedals were $10-40 used in pawnshops and classified ads back in the day, here, so a guy I knew saw my trick and just used 3 of them set different ways,

Not new, but new to me... and inexpensive... I'll let you know if it works worth a damn when I get it in...