My step kids are discovering vinyl records in a big way.  My step son and I are going to be home alone tomorrow and are thinking of stuff to do.  I am wondering to myself it if might be time to start figuring out which used record stores in Boston and Cambridge that I used to shop at back in the 90’s are still open.

Nuggets near Kenmore Square is still there.  Planet Records near Harvard Square is still there.  At least according to Google.

Looney Tunes is around but it moved.  I don’t think Mystery Train is around anymore either.  Second Coming near Harvard Square was bootleg paradise back in the day, but I’m 99.999% sure that one is gone.

Research continues……..

I took these on Wednesday when Waze told me that my morning commute needed to go through the center of town.

In the second picture you can see the Guitar Garage sign, but you can’t see Music DNA which is further up Hampshire Street. You also can’t see Bada Bing, which sells chicken wings and has nothing to do with the place Tony Soprano used to frequent.

Letters to Cleo tickets went on sale today and we nearly missed out due to ticketmaster being a lump of cow shit.

We needed three tickets.  Larry, Mike, and me.  Mike and I both had meetings at 10:00, when the tickets went on sale, so Larry volunteered to pick them up.

He tried to at least.  He got placed into the queue and sat there forever.  He opened multiple windows and never got through.  He eventually started getting error messages.  My 10:30 meeting was pushed to Monday so I was back at my desk earlier than expected.  I took a shot.  I failed on the first try.  I didn’t even get to the queue.  Error messages and good bye.  I tried again.  This time I got into the queue but then got an error that the transaction failed.  I use Google Chrome at work.  When I use my personal gmail account I log in through Incognito mode.  That way I don’t have two Google accounts signed in at once and have to go through that annoying selection every time I log into something.  I hate that.  I was in Incognito mode for my ticketmaster sessions as well.  Huh.  I went over to a normal Chrome window and tried again.  It worked.  Huh.

The three tickets are on their way but damn that was a ton more difficult than it should have been.  Ticketmaster is a monopoly so I don’t expect any site issues to be fixed any time soon.  That’s what happens when you don’t have a competitor pushing you to be better.

What a mess.

Still though… we’re on for this year’s Letters to Cleo Homecoming.

Ignore the rubber duck if you can, and dig that crazy cracked windshield. This seems to have popped up yesterday. It will be fixed tomorrow. No one knows how it got there.

We are running out of dinner and a movie on the patio nights.

I finally got around to test driving the couple of pieces of guitar gear that I bought over the last few weeks.

First was the new Fulltone OCD GE.  I played my SG through both my Fender Deluxe Reverb and my Fender Bassbreaker 15 at the same time.  It sounds great.  It feels a little mellower than the standard OCD (I think mine is version 1.4, but don’t quote me on that) but in a good way.  It’s smoother, I guess.  It sounds great, as I just said a second ago.  Let me reiterate, it sounds freaking great.

Now that I’ve said that, let me TOTALLY overshadow it.

I bought an 8 ohm attenuator and I was honestly afraid of it.  I got it on reverb.com from a builder in Tyngsboro, MA.  It’s called Carls Custom Guitars Speaker Soak.  I turned everything off and then plugged it into the Deluxe Reverb.  It goes between the amp and the speaker and just the idea of messing with the speaker connection scares the shit out of me.  I have had this thing for weeks and was just afraid to plug it in.  Yeah, I’m a wuss.

I plugged it in, turned off all of my pedals, and turned the volume on the Speaker Soak all the way up so that it wasn’t attenuating at all.  I kept my amp channel volume on about two.  It sounded normal.  I then turned the Speaker Soak volume all the way down so that it was attenuating as much as it could… and there was no volume.  So that works, I guess.  I turned it up about half way and I could definitely hear a difference in volume.

I then turned the volume on the amp up to four and turned the Speaker Soak all the way down.  Again, no sound.  I bumped it up a tiny bit and there was a very low volume.  Okay, it’s definitely doing what it’s supposed to do.

Next I turned the volume up to about seven.  The amp is compressing at that point.  We are now at the start of real overdrive.  Things are breaking up.  With the Speaker Soak turned super low, how did it sound?  It sounded quiet.  A nice reasonable volume.  When I dug in with the pick it was definitely starting to overdrive.  Things are starting to get really cool now.

The time has arrived… I cranked the volume.  10.  If this were Spinal Tap I would have been on 11.  How was the volume level?  It was a touch louder than what you’d want for goofing around in your bedroom.  It was very listenable.  My step son was sitting next to me and he was afraid of the potential volume at first.  I told him without the attenuator we’d be at the threshold of pain.  Did it hurt?  Nope.  It was a little louder than you’d want your television while watching a TV show, maybe a little quieter than you’d want it when watching an Avengers flick.

And the tone quality?  I had to fiddle with the EQ a bit.  I lowered the bass (which I usually keep close to cranked) and raised the treble (which I usually keep around 6-7).  And the overdrive?  It wasn’t metal by any means, but it was definitely rock and roll.

I recorded a minute or so with my phone.  The mic sounds like crap and eventually I’ll record this for real with a real mic into GarageBand.  This will do for now though.

I’m so stoked right now.  I want to use this thing at a gig and go 100% pedal free.  Cranked tube amps, brothers and sisters!  Cranked tube amps without bleeding ear drums!  Can I Get a Hallelujah, people?!

I like tumblr.  Ever since it launched I liked it.  I never really stuck with it though.  I had a blog where I posted photos.  I had another blog that I started when the band that would eventually become Lizardfish first formed in my basement.  After I left the band a few months later I turned it into a recording project tracking thing.  I still use it during RPMs in February, and I started using it for this year’s 50/90, even though that challenge is pretty much dead in the water (I haven’t officially given up yet, but it’s been a month since I’ve done anything).

When tumblr was sold to Yahoo I assumed the worst, just like everyone else.  They said they weren’t going to change anything, but I am a Flickr user so I know how bad Yahoo can screw things up.  I don’t know if the numbers bear it out, but it felt like the entire universe lost interest.  I let my photo site lapse to the point that tumblr actually recycled the name and URL.  I don’t remember what either of them were so I can’t look to see if anyone claimed them.  I also stopped looking for other RPM/FAWM/NASOALMO/50-90 users.  The whole platform seemed like a ghost town.  There were a few times when I thought about changing platforms and tumblr was an option, but I never went with it.

Yahoo bought tumblr for 1.1 Billion dollars in 2013.  When Yahoo was sold to Verizon, tumblr was part of the package.  Verizon did not do the site any favors and it just continued to slowly die.

This week Automattic, the company that owns wordpress.com (the blog hosting site you are reading right now), bought tumblr for, reportedly, less than three million dollars.

Let’s do the math on this.  Let’s take the money Yahoo paid and the money Automattic paid and see how big the difference is…

1,100,000,000 – 3,000,000 = an absolute shit ton of difference.

The price Automattic paid is about 0.27% of the price Yahoo paid.

Wow.

If I could have gotten a decent bank loan for myself I bet even I could have bought tumblr.

I hope Automattic can bring it back to life.  I would guess they could market it as a sort of wordpress.com lite.  WordPress.com is already kind of full WordPress lite as it is, so maybe that would work for them?  Add some of the things we like about wordpress.com to tumblr, and some of the things we like about tumblr to wordpress.com, and still try and keep them unique from each other.  I think it could work.  I don’t know if I’d want to merge them.  tumblr is more of a social media thing where wordpress.com is more of a commercial thing, at least from what I can tell (even though it’s sort of a social media thing for me.  Oh well).  They have already announced they are going to keep the adult content ban that Verizon put in place.  That’s good.  I like being able to update my little music page at work without having to worry about some one dumping porn into my dashboard, thank you very much.

Good luck to you, tumblr.  Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to dig the coins out of my couch cushions and make a serious offer to purchase you.

Well now there are three concerts I want to go to this fall.  My last post is a Facebook post from earlier today from Letters to Cleo.  Two shows in November.  I am pretty sure they are the week before the next Lizardfish thing.  I want to go.  Larry wants to go.  Mike wants to go.  Will we go?  I don’t know.  Tickets go on sale Friday morning and I am in meetings.  I won’t be able to buy tickets.  Someone else will have to do it.

Steve Hackett and King Crimson are still up in the air.  I’m 50/50 on both.  I want to go, but if I do I’m going alone and I don’t know if I want to go alone.  I was listening to Hackett’s most recent record over our Sonos network this morning as I was getting ready for work.  I had the house to myself which means the volume was loud.  The album is so freakin’ good.  Why couldn’t he have released a turd this year and made my decision for me?  Stupid ex-Genesis guy making life difficult.

Maybe I go to see Hackett and skip King Crimson.  Hackett has been on my see-them-before-they-retire/die list since I was still in high school.  Still… King Crimson.  Robert Fripp.  Tony Levin.  Yeah, I’ve seen Tony Levin live once before, but this is King effin’ Crimson!  Maybe I go to King Crimson and skip Hackett, but it’s Steve effin’ Hackett!  It’s the guy who played that perfect, amazing, epic, incredible solo on Firth of Fifth.  It’s the guy who, when you listen to Supper’s Ready, reaches across the decades, through your speakers, and literally lights your brain on fire!  (figuratively speaking, of course)

Mr Indecisive here has to make up his musical mind.

And Letters to Cleo needs to start putting their tickets on sale on Saturdays instead of weekdays.  Us old farts need to work.