Commercial success rarely goes to good engineers or inventors - historically, they usually lived and died in poverty. I read a lot of books about dozens of incredibly innovative great inventors when I was young, and most of them got very little, if any, reward from their brilliant creations. Often they ended up in debtor's prison while someone else got rich off their inventions.
On the other hand, the people who becomet rich, successful in business, and/or famous, are usually a very different personality type - not inventors, but rather narcissistic, power-hungry, lacking in ethics, willing to "do whatever it takes" even if it means being dishonest, unfair, cruel, and selfish, taking advantage of other's work and passing it off as their own, and so on.
Just about everyone knows Lord Acton's famous line "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". But it is Lord Acton's next sentence in the same letter that is the real take-away: "Great men are almost always bad men."
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are typical examples, Wozniak the gentle and brilliant inventor who built a world-changing computer in his garage with his bare hands, Jobs the arrogant narcissist who tried to cheat his friend Wozniak out of his share of the money, and then went on to become famous though he never created anything himself, but only peddled other brilliant engineer's work.
-Gnobuddy
It's the least I can do. Maybe the next guy with one of these will find it helpful. It's not a simple "just move a couple of resistors" mod - it's basically a nearly-complete rebuild - but who knows?
Yeah, that's a remnant of the James EQ, which would have put DC on the Bass pot without it. If I someday have an emergency shortage of 47nF caps, I'll dig it out then. But for now, it's buttoned up and I don't intend to open it again unless something breaks.
It was. Like I said early on, our relationship was complicated; to further muddy the waters, he was a traditional jazz guy (played in big bands and Dixieland combos, and played mostly stride when he was solo), while I was caught between hard rock, acoustic folk, and classical choral music. We didn't actually play together until I was in my 30s, when we did a recording session at the little studio I ran as a side hustle. But music was important to him, and during that session I got a glimpse of just what a genius he was - how smoothly everything just flowed through his soul and out his fingers.
My brother is a jazz guy too - clarinet, trumpet, alto sax. But that didn't get him any closer to dad. We talked about it many years ago, and I found out that he had never actually played with him either. He was a complicated man.
Nothing wrong with that! I didn't start playing electric until I was 22, and I actually had to UNlearn a lot before I felt like I was any good. Not that I'm all that great; I bill myself as the "the world's mediocrest guitar player".
Thanks! As for sounding good, well, that's a matter of taste, innit? I'll post some clips when I get a chance. Probably this weekend.
I've been planning on learning all about this stuff pretty much forever, but there was always something else in the way, or so I told myself. But I've got a lot of extra time at home now, like a lot of people, so I figured what the hell, just go for it. Now my wife is getting annoyed at how much time I'm spending on this and not home improvement!
I definitely could use some work on the systems design bit. That's the next project, which is already kind of underway. I've got the chassis and transformers, and am backing my way into a design by starting with the tube complement. Yeah, I know, not a super great idea, but I don't have a lot of interest in treading over the same old 5AR4/12AX7/6L6 ground. And it should give me interesting problems to solve - lots of degrees of freedom still left.
I'm glad that you were able to convert all the strangeness of our present time into something of personal significance to you!
IMO, this forum has been pretty moribund for the last year. After the lock-downs and general isolation began a few months ago, I expected to see a lot of "pandemic projects" show up. I thought I would be part of that surge of new projects. And I hoped that would breathe new life into the forum. But, for the most part, that hasn't happened.
Perhaps people are finding that with all the additional stress and challenges they're now dealing with, there isn't much satisfaction in taking on still more (non-essential) challenges?
I've been fortunate to be able to keep on working through the entire pandemic, so I haven't had significantly more free time than usual, other than that freed up by a weekly music jam I would otherwise attend. But I also notice less of a desire to take on big challenges. Instead, whatever extra energy I have, has gone into cooking most of our meals at home, and a few less intellectual and more hands-on projects like the wooden bench I recently built for our tiny patio.
When the local Home Depot stores re-opened recently, I went to one to buy some 2x2 lumber and a circular-saw blade, and was floored to find a long line of people waiting outside in the hot sun to get in. Apparently everybody and his uncle has decided to start re-doing their bathroom, or their kitchen. I found that a bit strange in a time when most of us are facing an uncertain financial future. I would have thought we would be squirreling away any spare pennies we had, rather than spending them on something nice, but unnecessary.
I started building with tubes shortly after moving to Canada six years ago, leaving behind the relative financial security I had had in the USA. As a result, buying expensive tubes was out of the question, and my shopping list was limited to the dollar-list at ESRC vacuum tubes.
That made for a lot of interesting challenges, and forced me to fight for almost every inch of design ground I gained, because there were no previous examples to follow. On the good side, I got better at looking at tube data sheets and figuring out how to use them. On the bad side, all that experimenting and tinkering slowly eroded my will-power over time, and I eventually got to the point where I thought I should just follow an existing schematic next time!
-Gnobuddy
Been meaning to respond to this. That's a really clever solution! What I'm now doing for this is feeding a powered wedge from a Behringer G-100 (Red Box clone) that sits between the amp and the dummy load. It's not like I need the wedge these days, since I switched over to in-ears about five years back. And ain't nobody gigging right now anyway ...
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