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Howdy gang, so last week we talked about the dismal state of live music through 2020, and our hopes for a brighter future.  However, there is an enormous silver lining to have came out of the dark cloud of 2020.  Fender announced that they sold more new guitars in 2020 than in any year in history ... ever!  Wow. Read the whole uber-cool story at Guitar World HERE.  Seriously, it's worth the read.  Just as good is this article in the New York Times entitled "Guitars are Back, Baby!".  Folks,...

Hey again fellow guitar lovers!  Last week I discussed how playing bass has made me a better, more well-rounded guitar player and musician, let's build on that! So again, if we travel back through time, we will see that only a few years after getting my first guitar, I acquired my first drum set; I believe I was about 16 and I used the set to track my own demos in the little studio I had built.The kit was awesome, an old Ludwig kit from the 1960's, and that kit would come with me to Nashville and become the...

Holy Cow, gang ... did 2020 take a hard left turn into the dumpster or what?  I mean, seriously? Who the heck would have thought that isolating yourself from other humans would EVER become a SUGGESTED practice, right?  Psychology has been telling us for a century or so how dangerous isolation is to our mental well-being, and that's for "normal" people.  But we musicians are far from normal.  We need, DESPERATELY NEED, each other.  A one-man jam session, well ... isn't!  So to get started...

Okay gang, last week we talked about the best speaker upgrade for the super versatile Blackstar HT Club-40, this week, let's talk about it's splendid little sibling, the HT5R.  In case you missed the memo, 5-watt tube amps are all the rage these days.  Almost all of em are single-ended amps with a single 6V6 or EL84, and Personally, I find most to just plain be too mushy in the bottom end; but this lil gal is different!  The HT5R (and the verb-less HT5) actually come about their 5-watts(ish) via a unique...