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I got to play one of these on Saturday. All I have to say is WOW!!! OK. You know me better than that. I have LOTS more to say but that was pretty much it for the first few minutes while playing it.

50 watts of tube power! It is loud and punchy or growly as needed. The amp is plenty loud to use in a band setting unless you play with a caveman drummer. The tone is quintessential old school rock tone….think ‘Peg B15 with a slight update. Perfect for Americana, Alt-Country stuff as well as stuff you would expect like Motown and old R&B.

BTW, I was using a passive Lakland bass with it and…well, that worked great. I am not sure how it would fare with an active bass but….isn’t that a little wrong anyway?

Happy to report nothing but 15″ of goodness in the speaker cab. No tweeters allowed on tube heads!!! It should be a law. Maybe we can get congress to pass a comprehensive bass amp reform bill too.

Play one if you get a chance. Worth it!

Shout out to John Suhr and his team at Suhr Guitars. What a fine piece of custom building. Thanks to them and Mojo’s Music (in beautiful downtown Edwardsville, IL) for getting this guitar to me. It looks JUST like one I designed when I was about 18 years old.

I can remember a point in time when EVERY new piece of musical gear that came out caught my eye. I was interested in the neon green bass, the matching cable and an amp stack that looked like Stonehenge. I thought it was all cool.

Today, I got an email that included a picture of a set of EMG pickups in Camouflage….and my first thought was “HUH?”

Somewhere in all this, I have become a utilitarian player. It is all about the sound. I don’t care if it look silly but….OK, yeah, I can’t even go with it looking silly anymore. Even more…I see these and can only see fingerprints.

Here is a round of recent pics of our new church. Dan Thornton took all of them. He is an awesome photographer. I did the collage.

I recently sold a few guitars that were not getting any play time and bought this one. It is a Rickenbacker 660/12 string. I have never had much luck playing the 360/12 because of the narrow neck. This one has a little wider string spacing. Wish me luck. It should arrive in a week or so.

if you owned the maxworship.com (currently points back here) domain name? Should it be a blog, a resource site, or use it as one of the many domain names for your church? Shoot some ideas my way.

I recently bought a THD BiValve 30 amp. Besides being crazy cool looking (kinda Art Deco), it will take nearly every octal-based tube on the market. I frankly don’t have a clue how many tube combinations it will allow but I suspect I should have a nice ‘project’ amp for the winter months.

I don’t see it ever replacing my Orange Rockerverb 50 (unless it is for a grab and go….the Orange is not light) but it is a really fun toy.

OK, certainly not news to most of the civilized world but…holy cow. I just got on the bandwagon and I am ready to play. That is a killer piece of kit now that they are allowing third party apps. Bring on the Android.

We made it way past where we should have been. Someone forgot to tell the kids they can’t play that well. We can walk around with our heads held high. Viva La Cardinals!!!!

I have been quietly cheering on Jim Edmonds even though he has gone over to the dark side (aka the Cubs). Tonight, after hearing the following on the news…

When FSN’s Brent Stover and Claiborne (KTRS) approached Edmonds after the game for a quickie on-field interview that has become standard procedure for MLB rights holders, Edmonds blew them off and said:

“I’m (censored) done with St. Louis TV and radio and I’m (censored) done with the Cardinals.”

And then he walked into the Cubs dugout.

… I am done with the drama queen. Get over it Jim.