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Braved it through Nemo’s snow to the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, there to see John Mayall and his band. Any hairy moments on the road were well worth it as John and the band put on an outstanding show of classic blues and rock.

Despite being 79 years old, Mayall is still playing some solid keys and nice rhythm guitar and delivering great vocals and brilliant harmonica. Rocky Athos on guitar , Greg Rzab on bass and Jay Davenport on Drum seemed to be having a great time and all had their spotlight moments. Just a really great unit with all the chops and a deep feel for the music.

The set was varied and included a bunch of old classics, including Room To Move, Nature’s Disappearing and Hideaway as encore. The Colonial is a cool intimate environment with an appreciative blues crowd and the band seemed to relish it. Awesome show, I hope John Mayall can keep it going at this level for many years to come.

So back in my native UK, gas pumps typically dispense fuel at around 60 liters per minute. Here in the US the maximum rate is limited by law to 37.8 liters per minute.

So next time you are freezing your socks off filling the car you can blame congress for one more thing. Thanks guys.

Ugh – tax time looms and I just spent 15 minutes grappling with H&R Blocks on-line purchasing system….so why is it that web sites these days don’t bother to put little boxes and labels on fields ?

So you have to scrabble about looking for invisible fields without even knowing what information they want. And what dimwit still thinks it is a good idea to make you enter your email address twice ! Seriously ? We have been using this stuff for quite a while now.

C’mon web site designers and H&R Block in particular, get over the fashion statement and think about the customer !

Sad to see one of my Guitar Herores move on, even at the age of 87. Mickey Baker, whose ‘Guitar Method’ has been my friend for many years. Here is a link to his big hit back in 1957 – really cool guitar solo.

Link to Mickey and Sylvia Love Is Strange

I ran the ATlantic City Half Marathon at the weekend…nuff said about that, but I was very pleased to catch a good deal of Robert Ross’s one man blues set at the Atlantic Casino Club, including a fantastic Ghost Riders in the Sky and soulful Sitting on Top of the World. Very elegant blues player and a fine entertainer…thanks !

Robert Ross Home Page

Caught the Pork Roll Projects set at the Paoli Blues Fest on Saturday.

Fine set with nice playing from the whole band, really super solid bass and great harp were standouts.  Lot of variety in the set with some funky , some straight ahead and some nice leads from Pork Roll himself.  Great to see local bands pulling in a good audience and everyone having a good time.

Pork Roll Project

Upgraded my system with a new M-Audio 192 Sound Card – I love this card !  It installed easily, it has regular 1/4 inch mono jack inputs and outputs, it has a nice software control panel to tune the performance and above all is primarily a music makers tool.   The latency with Adobe Audition is miniscule right out of the box and the recording performance is exceptionally clear.  Guitar recording sounds great but bass recording is really exceptional  If anyone is wondering about the benefit of shelling out for a better sound card I would say consider M-Audio 192. I’m thrilled !

Very sorry to see the passing of Jon Lord.  I’ve been a Purple fan since ’69 and his incredible organ sound was always such an essential part of their music.  An absolute pioneer and creative master.

Quick shout out for Zydeco-A-Go-Go caught at the Delaware County Summer Concert Series at Rose Tree Park.

Great band – tight , funky, danceable, fun. Hard to beat !

One of the interesting properties of homebrew amplifier projects is that they are never really fnished…..somehow as each problem is resolved, the builders ear homes in on another annoying sonic issue and the soldering iron comes out again.

The main issue I have been wrestling with is what I believe to be crossover distortion at middling amplifier volumes, particularly at certain notes, around A on the 6′th string.  Here’s what the amplifier ordinarily sounds like…..Push-Pull-Demo…..I’d like to say a good blues-rock sound.  However the distortion creeps in on some notes and it sounds like this…..CrossOver Distortion.

Now in a Push-Pull amp at low volumes, both output tubes are amplifying the full wave, so they add together in the output transformer to form a nice symmetrical wave.   But as you crank the volume, differences in the two tubes as they go into cutoff can cause this nasty distortion when the 2 halves of the wave don’t quite line up.  As you crank the amp again and both tubes are in full cutoff  these differences will be minimized and again the amp sounds good.

Lacking an oscilloscope, I made a special MP3 of pure sine waves to use as input to the amp.  Then I recorded the output in Adobe Audition and looked at the resulting waveform.  Here is the sine wave file….A440-220-110-55    As the name suggests its A440 and then successively down 3 octaves from there.

The waveform above from Adobe Audition shows me that the amp at moderate volumes is amplifying the sine wave with very little distortion.

And this wave form shows what the unwanted distortion looks like.   So I think I can say that my ‘method’ to obtain a visual representation of the problem seems to work.  Unfortunately it doesn’t tell me how to resolve the underlying issue !  But I suspect it’s connected with the paraphase splitter maybe being a little bit unbalanced, so I think I’m going to try a little experiment with a trimming pot to try and get a perfect splitter before I finally close up the amp.