The more they say they are great, the less they are. I have never met a good player who said anything other than "Yeah, I mess around with it." or just simply "I play a little guitar.". Every blowhard I ever met turned out to be 'okay' at best.

long ago as a young hotshot lead player. (or so I thought)

A band I was in was playing a gig at a local club one night. We all thought we were hot shit since we had recently won a local Battle of The Bands. It was a slow night, not a whole lot of people out that night. A gentleman came in and sat and watched for a bit. It was obvious he was from the nearby Air Force Base because of his regulation haircut and the way he carried himself. During the break he came up and chatted with us and asked if we would mind if he sat in. He said he had his guitar in his car. We said sure no problem, its slow, perfect night for it. He headed out to retrieve his guitar. Being the young smart asses we were we thought this would be good for a laugh, some straight amateur GI guitar player might liven up the night. We saw him coming in through the door carrying one of the cheapo Japanese guitars common at the time ( early 70's) by the neck. We started elbowing each other and laughing. I volunteered to sit down and let him use my amp. The guys got up and decided on a slow blues tune for him to Jam on.
You probably saw this coming........the guy smoked us. He made that cheapo Japanese guitar sound like Hendrix playing a Fender Strat. Way better player than I and the other guitar player in our band. All the while he stayed very humble and nice to us. Snotty kids lesson learned. Don't be judgemental about your fellow players. Everyone is on the road from the time you start playing until you can't no more. Just enjoy the differences and lend a hand when you can.

Every really good player, on any instrument, knew how good they were & never tried to do a false humility thing.
I agree that many mediocre players overrate their abilities, but I've never known a killer player that wasn't completely aware they were one of the best around.
We've hosted many jam nights. We could tell by the way a person talked if they were a hack, a poser, just a guy, or a killer.
The killer players know they're killers. They go to jams to cut heads. It's why we went to them when not hosting.

But Howard is now Alexander Dumble. Also just my two cents, but you can buy a BLUDOTONE that while pricey, is not $100K like Dumble's. I've used a slightly modded Traynor YGA-1 for over 50 years, these days also have a small Peavey 40 watt VYPYR, for friends & when playing out. The Traynor has all the bark, knarl, bite , growl & grit one could hope for, also it depends on the P/Us...I've had many, many pedals over the years, these days I'm down to a Johnson J Station, set up for my likes, I'm used to it...had a Boss GT3.

The fun we had in the 1960s, 70s, playing with pots, P/Us, amp circuity...kids have to too easy these days, just buy an effect pedal, cause so & so uses it. No fun at all....

Learning how to solder, PROPERLY, may have spent more money on blown old type screw-in fuses, how to refret, also PROPERLY, there was no youtube, just really helpful guitar techs & sales staff. Staff that would sell & finance equipment with no credit checks, if you missed a payment, a big deal for struggling musicians, no big deal for vendor. Using a banjo string for an E,

Glad to see the younger set taking a real interest in experimenting, makes my heart warm.

The days of rigging several tape recorders to 'track' for us the trying to edit them together manually. (All but impossible.) Using recorders that only had mic inputs by creating a 'step-down' circuit to allow the non-voltage input to handle some voltage.

Yes, budding musicians today will never know the thrill of using a bunch of rigged shit and having it actually work, if even for a short time.

(Just me and my 1977 Tele these days. Got some small, no name, 20-watter with a mic input to use. I sold my nice pedal, as I never really used it much anyway. I am a rhythm player, not a soloist.)

I'm the loudest kid on my block.



I used to have my own private security guard too.

My bud has one

Those are neat little amps.

Although I don’t understand all your technical amp stuff, my son was the drummer in a hard rock band that practiced in our basement for years. So….I have a little understanding of amps. Now his son practices in his basement. On and on it goes and I love every minute of it.

Thanks yet again for another delightful family tale. Keep writing, keep posting.

Cornerstone makes a great pedal called the Gladio SC which is able to get the low-gain compression sound nicely. For the higher gain/crunchier sound, there's several options like the Demon Kondo-Shifuku and the Mojo Hand FX Extra Special. Honestly, there's a ton of options out there just not many that can capture both tones needed to mimic the Dumble sound.

Love hearing about your boys and their guitar adventures. Thanks for sharing bud!

Last edited Sun Dec 3, 2023, 04:05 PM - Edit history (1)

My other one dropped out college he’s pre occupied at Paris island at moment.

I agree there is so many options like with my slight return pedal it matches with single coils to give you what you want

So I found these Nux pedals and son has one nux steel singer and it is decent and Firestorm maybe $50 brand new. So when I wanted new boost I went with nux boost to stack behind the slight return and ultra phonix and it’s quality

did as parents was giving it to our two sons desire to start a band. One was a drummer, and we held out for a while getting a 'real' drum set, but it turned out to be great. Because it was too much hassle to take it to other kid's homes, that meant the band always practiced at our place. It was often loud and kinda painfully amateur. Their band played a few neighborhood events, but ultimately diminished as kids moved away, college, etc. Now, looking back, those were some of the best days of our (parenting) life!

Rock On!

My best friend/guitarist uses these. Fantastic tone!

https://www.tophatamps.com/

If I remember right, you can get one that sounds like a ‘68 Vox or a Febder blackface, etc, etc,

for tone is the old Carvin X60A tube amps. I have 3 of these. They all sound great. 60 watt tube amp, small size with plenty of punch. I use Electro Voice 12 inch 200 watt Black Shadow speakers in them. I rarely have had to go over 1 1/5 on volume. I love the tone of them. After I came across my first one I liked them so much I started leaving my Mesa Boogie in the garage in favor of them. You can still find these reasonably priced, especially for a tube amp. Usually $300 to $600 depending upon condition.

You can't see it in the video below but here is what they look like.
https://rvb-img.reverb.com/image/upload/s--W8m4YZri--/f_auto,t_large/v1575300488/dbttisoqhjwdbjovigly.jpg

A video from a Jam I used to host when I used the amp.