Holiday Fun with some of the toyz...

Yay! What a fun day! It began with the phone and internet being down; now that I actually have a cell-phone, I was able to call tech-support and verify that my diagnostics were correct, and the problem was up the pipeline and outside of the walls. Thank goodness I'm an early-riser, I'm sure that's the reason I got a technician on-site in about an hour. And, indeed, the problem was up the pipe. Poor guy, service was back by the time he knocked on my door, but it was nice to verify everything was good inside the walls, and we got to chat enough so that he said, "you're pretty savvy-if you get a problem like this again, here's my cell number. Call me and I should be able to tell you if there's a service issue in the area and save you all that checking." Pretty cool.

Then, I ended up going onto e-Bay to look at a guitar pedal I was following. The short story is this-notice the beige pedal in the pic above-that's a Danelectro Daddy-O Overdrive pedal I bought about two weeks ago for $38 off e-Bay. My friend John and I had been looking at these with an eye to doing some modifications and seeing if it wouldn't be a good mate for the pedal next to it, my vintage Electro-Harmonix Big Muff. That Daddy-O just happened to have the exact mods John and I were planning on doing, and the seller offered it for $38 delivered. I bought it, got it, and have totally fallen in love with it! I was talking with John the other night, and mentioned I liked it so much, I thought it would be cool to get another one, while they're still available (it's been discontinued); John said he'd seen some on e-Bay, and a little research showed there were several and they weren't getting much action. I bid on one this morning, and won the auction for $12.50! Hoo-ha! Modding it to match the first will be good fun in a week or so!

The ensemble pictured above actually represents a concept I and another friend, Don, kicked around a couple of years ago-we called it "the C-note Rig". The notion is, a guy can put together a pretty fun guitar rig if he discounts label-conscious snobbery and buys some inexpensive, but good, stuff. And here it all is: beneath that black-face Vibro-Champ (vintage, and stupidly costly these days!) is a very cool Epiphone Valve Jr. tube amplifier that I bought for $90, delivered, about two years ago. The telecaster guitar is a chinese knock-off I bought for about $95, delivered, about the same time. Beneath the pedals is a floor-monitor I built decades ago, the materials for which cost less than $25; it has a nice Celestion guitar speaker in it that I paid about $50 buck for, again bought online. The finally piece to the puzzle is a tasty little stomp-box of some ilk, depends on what you want, that, as I've shown, can be had for considerably less than $100. Our vision was, $100 for guitar, $100 for amp, $100 for speaker cabinet, and $100 for stomp-box. Again, I've shown you can considerably beat those prices with judicious shopping and a little ingenuity.

Now, I'm just gonna fire up the grill and do some chicken, drink a cold brew and play with my toyz. Y'all have a great holiday weekend!