bluesblast.com

Bought some tickets for the Yes tour stop at the Tower Theater in July and I’m really going to look forward to this…..I’ve been recently listening to Tales from Topographic Oceans on vinyl and I find the musicianship and creativity is still outstanding. Great music for an old ADD type to work by as there is always something different happening.

Amp Schematic -> amp_schematic_1
Sound Clip -> hi_a_ppd

So I’ve been working on a homebrew tube amp for a while and this track is representative of the state of play, with both guitars and the bass recorded through the amp. I started out with a Phonola 2262 Tube Amp from a primitive stereo system and built it into a push-pull amp modeled on the Supro 6420. The amp uses 2 6AQ5A output tubes and now has 2 12AX7 pre-amp tubes and a 5Y3GT rectifier.

Changes required included….
- changing parallel ‘Class A’ amps into a push-pull topology with paraphase splitter.
- adding additional 12AX7 pre-amp tube to get required gain
- replacing 2 output transformers with a single new one
- complete set of new capacitors
- proper grounding and a 3 pin socket
- a heck of a lot of tweaking and bug fixing (especially grid stoppers )

I’m totally in awe of the result. It has nice clean tones and flat out it absolutely roars. Right now I’m going to box it up and use it over the summer…..maybe next winter I’ll start something new, but I’m done with this one for now.

Update – Friday evening. Spent some time playing hard with the amp sitting on top of the speaker and its crackling when certain notes are played, put it on the floor next to the speaker, and there’s no crackle. Must be something mechanical resonating inside….damn.

Don’t forget – tube amps can be dangerous – don’t start a project like this unless you know what you are doing and understand how to work safely.

Took advantage of the beautiful evening of Friday 13′th to spend an hour dry fly fishing on Ridley Creek in south-east PA. This is the largest of the 3 that I caught. BluesBlast is strictly catch and release so this handsome fella was soon back in the creek hopefully wiser for the experience.

Thomas Hardy's Ale - Vintage 1975

I bought a couple of bottles of Thomas Hardy’s ale in my college days at Bath in 1975 (yes I’m that old) and somehow they have remained intact during my travels around the world. Finally yesterday curiosity got the better of me and I decided to open the raggedier of the two bottles and share the experience with a beer connoisseur friend, Bob and my son Richard.

First of all I had to ensure that the bottle was upright for several days to allow any sediment to settle…and of course you don’t serve beer like this cold !

Finally I popped the crown cork and gave it a sniff…a rich complex aroma, with hints of ale but also a complex sherry or port tang. I carefully poured three tiny glasses and the colour was a great surprise to me, a very dark amber but still clear. The taste was strong and complex and the sensation changed as each drop went down the the throat, still recognizably an ale, but with fantastic character derived from oak barrels and age.
Bob declared the ale to be in perfect condition and exactly as he had hoped for in a beer of such age….and he knows his beer.

Curiosity assuaged, the second bottle will sit now and maybe mature for another 36 years, who knows.

I was shocked to read that the LA Times applauded Viagra for the use of Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lightning in their ad.Here’s a link through

While I’m all in favour of the blues featuring in commercials and hopefully the musicians getting some cash, i was just appalled by the mashup of the tune they actually used, which disregards the 4-bar riff structure and creates some horrible lopsided phrasing. Am I alone on this one ?

This year I fell for the Japanese Tenkara method of fly-fishing, hook line and sinker one might say and I’m trying an experiment to make a couple of bamboo tenkara rods using the bamboo that thrives in my backyard.

The steps are pretty simple…..
(1) Select and cut two eleven foot pretty straight bamboo sections….completed
(2) Dry these for several months, tied to a straight rod to make sure they don’t curl….completed
(3) Cut into 2 sections and attach ferrules (I made sure to cut at same thickness so that the sections are interchangeable)….completed
(4) Using a blowtorch heat and straighten the rod at each bamboo joint. Actually very easy…..completed
(5) Sand down each of the joints….completed
(6) make a cork handle for one rod. The other has a nice bamboo root rhizome that will do as a handle,,,,to do.
(7) Attach the little tip core to which the tenkara line is knotted…..to do
(8) Put on a little decorative whipping…..to do
(9) Varnish the rodes with tung oil……to do

The bamboo must have a lot of natural sugars in it. When you heat for bending it forms a wonderful caramel colored glossy finish which you can see in the photo.

I feel good about this. By next spring I should have 2 nice bamboo tenkara rods and I can’t wait

4/14 update…..tried out one of the rods on the FFO section of Ridly Creek….no trout but eventually got a purple dace on a dry fly…cool.

If you trawl through the bluesblast archive you’ll find many up-tempo jazz blues tracks. It’s just a thing of mine, I’ve always loved that bop blues sound and keep trying to improve my improvisation in that vein. One challenge is to avoid sounding kind of rinky dink ragtime-y over circle of fifth changes which are the main feature that distinguishes jazz blues.

I found this great tip to help with that on Dr. Bops site – it’s quite counter-intuitive , essentially using the chord majot scale over chords that don’t resolve via the circle of fifths and using the core key blues scale over the chords that resolve.

Link to Dr. Bop’s soling tip Here’s a link to the original tip – great stuff.

Now the tech stuff – so I made a jazz type blues track to try this out. It’s in E which is not really a great jazz key, but what the heck….try it.
Jazz Jam in E here’s the track.

This track is quite fast at 170 BPM and I really noticed my bass track getting out of synch due to sound card latency…..I did some tests and figured out that the latency was around 20 milli-seconds, whish is quite significant as a single beat at 170 bpm is 350 milli-seconds. My soundcard is not an ASIO card and I’m using Adobe Audition 1.5 which is not ASIO compatible. So I just edited 20 milli-seconds out of the tracks and it synced up pretty well…..but I need to think about an ASIO upgrade…..and will that in turn mean a new computer as i’m sure a new Audition will need more system….hmmm

Here’s what I guess you can call an up-tempo blues-rock in E — just wail away stuff.

E jam

MSNBC – Can Windows 8 Save the PC ? I was reading this article about declining estimates for future PC demand which will inevitably increase PC prices.

Those of us into home recording have really been getting a ‘free ride’ for years, building studio PCs around low-cost powerful machines designed primarily for other purposes. As the consumer switches to other platforms for photo/video/gaming I wonder if we will be left keeping our old XP/Windows 7 machines alive to protect our investment in software and cards as the cost of replacements becomes prohibitive ?