MI Gear

Ted Weber RIP

Professor Thump — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:59:31 GMT

Ted Weber (Weber Speakers in Kokomo) passed away last Friday. From his website....

To do list:

- Build speakers for Jimi
- Lunch with Leo and Les
- Fix Lennon's amp
- Dinner with Miles and Bird
- Make Heaven Louder...

https://taweber.powweb.com/weber/

Bonamassa - Tone Quest

Professor Thump — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:15:17 GMT

Eminence a well respected OEM driver company whom we have used puts out a compelling news letter called Tone Quest. I keep forgetting to go back here regularly but this is a great place to go for articles on guitarist and their gear. I don't know who writes this but I would suspect it is Anthony "Big Tony" Lucas who is a Senior Lab Tech who works for Tom James and Rob Gault.

http://www.10e20webdesign.net/joe_bonamassa/quest_tour_article.pdf

Here is an article on Joe Bonamassa...

Les Paul: The Guitar, the Logo, the Legend

Professor Thump — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:11:26 GMT

BY KEN CARBONE23 minutes ago

Yesterday, a deafening cry of disbelief was heard from every electric guitarist on the planet.Les Paul had died. He was 94. We all knew the day would come but the shock was seismic.

Guitarist, entertainer, pioneer, inventor, audio engineer, hit maker, Grammy winner, "Architect of Rock & Roll": Les Paul earned all of these titles. He's best known for creating the first functioning solid body guitar back in 1941. Other inventions include multi-track recording and special effects that changed the course of 20th-century music. If you could imagine a Mount Rushmore of innovation featuring Thomas Edison, Edwin Land, and Tim Berners-Lee, Les Paul would be in their company.

What was truly remarkable about "the legend" was how accessible Les Paul was. He chose to appear weekly at a small club in New York City because he just liked to play. His devoted following included special guests like Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney, and Eric Clapton, who would stop by to pay tribute.

I purchased a vintage Les Paul guitar in 1968, while in high school. The $250 price was a fortune for me at the time. It was 1952 Gold Top, the first Les Paul model introduced by theGibson Guitar Company. Today, as a collector's item it could command tens of thousands of dollars. A 1958 Les Paul Standard, the Stradivarius of electric guitars, with its cherry sunburst finish, is priced even higher.

The Les Paul is a beautifully-designed instrument with a luscious, warm tone, and sculpted body. The script logo that's stamped on every guitar is not a typographic masterpiece. It's a simple signature and feels a bit like a naïve attempt at elegance. However, its global recognition and the product's high quality reputation, imbues this logo with a magnetism that has attracted a fanatically loyal customer for over fifty years. This logo is a classic and represents what every great brand aspires to be.

If you're not a guitarist, the name Les Paul might look like a French bistro. If you are a guitarist, I feel your loss. If you just love music, think about it this way: His life is the recorded history of music. Everything on your iPod can be traced back to him.

8/13/09 Les Paul passes

colterphoto1 — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:48:35 GMT

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/08/13/guitar_legend_inventor_les_paul_dies_at_age_94_boston_globe/

Long Live Rock and Roll! Thanks for the guitars Mr. Paul!

Michael

Les Paul left mark in Kalamazoo

Professor Thump — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:25:49 GMT

by Aaron Aupperlee & John Liberty | Kalamazoo Gazette
Friday August 14, 2009, 8:22 AM

Mark Bugnaski | Kalamazoo GazetteMarvin Lamb, Co-founder of Heritage Guitar in Kalamazoo, holds the last Gibson Les Paul solid body guitar made at old Gibson factory at 225 Parsons Street. Lamb, who started working for Gibson in 1956, worked on Les Paul models in the late 1950's. He order the gold-top standard 30th anniversary model Les Paul before they closed the factory September 14, 1984. The Les Paul was also the very last guitar ever made in Gibson factory, and the last serial number stamped. 1814002, meaning, 1984, 181 day of the year, and the second of the two guitars made that day.

KALAMAZOO
When Gibson Guitar's Parsons Street factory cranked out its last Les Paul guitar, Marvin Lamb had to have it.

Lamb started working for Gibson in 1956, at age 16.

He hand-drilled holes in the tops of early Les Pauls to screw in the stop tailpiece. He installed the first tune-o-matic bridges on the single-cutaway, solid-body guitars.

He sweated at 225 Parsons St., on Kalamazoo's north side, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Gibson employees made 200 to 300 Les Pauls a day.

Mark Bugnaski | Kalamazoo GazetteMarvin Lamb, Co-founder of Heritage Guitar in Kalamazoo, also has a 25 year anniversary model of the Gibson Les Paul, 50th year anniversary of Les Paul's music career.

He was there Sept. 14, 1984, the day the factory closed.

Les Paul, the man who pioneered the solid-body electric guitar wielded by a legion of rock 'n' roll greats, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94.

Paul died at White Plains Hospital in New York with his family members and friends by his side, according to Gibson, headquartered in Nashville, Tenn.

Lamb remembers meeting Paul. He remembers sitting in development meetings with the legend and a funny story that Paul told during dinner one evening at the Kalamazoo Country Club about Rusty, his son, who, despite the fortune his father had made from the guitar, decided to play the drums.

AP Photo/Richard Drew, FileMusic legends Les Paul, left, and B.B. King, who both play Gibson guitars, put their heads together during a jam session at the third anniversary celebration of the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in New York's Times Square, in this June 17, 2003 file photo. Paul holds King's signature "Lucille" Gibson guitar, which he played.

On Thursday, Lamb, who helped found Heritage Guitar Co. and still builds guitars inside the Parsons Street factory, admired the craftsmanship of his 1984 Les Paul Goldtop, with serial No. 81814002 -- the last guitar to come out of the Kalamazoo factory -- and remembered the legacy and icon behind its name.

"He didn't seem to put himself above anyone else," Lamb said of Paul. "He was down-to-earth."

A tinkerer and musician since childhood, Paul experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called "The Log," a 4-by-4 piece of wood strung with steel strings.

For a decade, Gibson, then based in Kalamazoo, pooh-poohed Paul's electronic "broomstick." But competition from Paul's pal, the legendary Leo Fender, finally made Gibson change its tune. The company began marketing the "Les Paul" in 1952, with its creator advising.

Leo Happy Birthday

Professor Thump — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:44:10 GMT

Aug. 10, 1909: Leo Fender and the Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll
By Michael Calore
August 10, 2009

1909: Clarence “Leo” Fender is born.
The designer, engineer and inventor would found the Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, the banner under which he created and produced the first wave of commercially successful electric guitars, basses and amplifiers. Fender’s panache for instrument design reached its pinnacle with his work on the Telecaster guitar, the Fender Precision bass and, most famously, the Stratocaster, the musical instrument that was the central force in defining rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and ’60s, and whose influence continues to dominate every genre of popular music.
Leo Fender didn’t invent the electric guitar. Six-string slingers had been experimenting with rudimentary amplification systems since the early decades of the 20th century. Always itching for more volume, guitarists were eager to be heard above the drums and other loud instruments in the dance bands of the time.
The first real innovations toward electric axes, however, came with the awarding of two patents for magnetic pickups. The first went to Gibson’s Guy Hart for his company’s Hawaiian guitar design on July 13, 1937, and the second went to Rickenbacker’s George Beauchamp for his horseshoe magnet pickup design featured on his company’s lap steel “frying pan” guitars, on August 10, 1937 — coincidentally, Fender’s 28th birthday.
The earliest electric guitars were either of the lap steel or hollow body archtop varieties. It wasn’t until guitarist Les Paul constructed his own prototype solid body electric, nicknamed “The Log,” in 1946 that the stage would be set for the revolution that would define popular music in the second half of the century.
And that’s where Leo Fender comes in.
Fender was working alongside the earliest electric guitar designers throughout the 1930s and 1940s, even applying for his own patent on his 1944 Hawaiian guitar design. Fender’s earliest commercial successes were in amplifiers, but his first hit was the Fender Precision Bass. The “P-Bass,” introduced in 1951, was meant for players in jazz and dance bands who needed more volume than they could get out of their acoustic upright models. Fender’s bass was a huge success, and its design became his signature. Its visual cues were ones he would return to as he moved on to creating electric guitars.
The Broadcaster and the Telecaster, designed with his business partner George Fullerton, came first, in 1951. The Telecaster, a light-weight solid body with an adjustable neck that was easy to play, is still in production today. But nothing endured, influenced or captured the imagination like Fender’s next major design.
The Fender Stratocaster is more than just an electric guitar. It is one of the great hallmarks of modern art. As an object, it has made a profound impact, becoming synonymous with the men and women who play it and the art it has been used to create.
Put on a Jimi Hendrix song, shut your eyes and let your mind draw you a picture. There’s the head tipped back, the messy afro half-tamed by a headband, the face a mask of lidded-eyed sexual ecstasy, mouth agape. In his flailing hands is a white Fender Stratocaster. And what’s most the most enduring visual image of Hendrix? His stunt at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival when he lit his Strat on fire and knelt behind it, coaxing the flames to grow higher like a possessed Voodoo priest.
It’s the same with Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Dick Dale — every popular musician who has chosen a Fender as his primary axe has assumed the guitar’s iconic curves as part of their own image. Only Stravinsky’s piano approaches such visual power.
Fender’s crowning achievement is indeed a tremendously influential piece of industrial design, and one of the most evocative relics of America’s post-war culture. The Stratocaster’s slopes and swooshes perfectly connect the empty spaces between the dawning space age, the sleek Modernism of Calder’s floating sculptures, the flamboyance and heat of a California hot rod, the raw lust of the sexual revolution and the angry rebellion of youth.
Most of the guitars on the market in the late 1950s had their share of feminine curves, but the Strat was the wood and metal equivalent of a pin-up model. It came in colors like orange sunburst, pearl white and the ever-popular candy apple red. It begged to be touched, and it practically screamed “trouble.”
It was, as the songwriter Jonathan Richman put it in “Fender Stratocaster,” his 1989 ode to the Strat, “everything your parents hated about rock ‘n roll.”
But in the end, it’s a guitar, and it’s not all about the looks.
All of Fender’s guitars were noted for their clean, bright sound. The Telecaster featured two pickups, one at the bridge and one closer to the neck that produced a thin, trebly twang. Strats were configured with a third pickup in between the neck and the bridge, supplying a wider range of tones. Since the solid wood design didn’t resonate as much as hollow body guitars, you could crank one up nice and loud without it feeding back. Just ask Bob Dylan, who plugged in a Strat at Newport in 1965 and turned American pop music upside-down.
Leo Fender’s guitars weren’t just versatile, they were also durable. The carved slabs of wood with bolt-on necks were made to be abused. The neck was detachable (making it easier to service) and adjustable, so the player could set the distance between the strings and fretboard to his or her liking. The Strat’s spring-loaded tremolo system, which could alter the pitch of all six strings at once, may have caused the to guitar to go out of tune a little, but you rarely saw one break.
All of Fender’s guitar designs have endured, and they are prized by both players and collectors. The visual boldness draws you in, but it’s the playability, the way the guitar feels balanced on your shoulders, the curvature of the neck and the way its carved body hugs your own that hooks you.
Fender didn’t stop after the Strat. He also designed the Jazzmaster, the Jaguar, the Duo-Sonic and the Mustang. He followed up the massively popular P-Bass with its slimmer and lighter cousin, the Jazz Bass. He also had a hand in designing the company’s famous amplifiers like the Twin, the Champ and the Bassman.
Leo Fender sold the company that bore his name to CBS in 1965. He founded two more companies, Music Man and G&L Guitars, that sold his newer instrument and amp designs.
He suffered from strokes and Parkinson’s disease late in life, and died in 1991. He never learned how to play the guitar.
Source: Various
Top photo: Matt York/AP
Middle photo: Corbis

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leo Fender’s birth (August 10, 1909 - March 21, 1991), Fender is proud to share the story of the man behind the most creative surge in the history of electrical instrument manufacturing.

Remembering Leo Fender

By Tom Wheeler

There is a good chance that his office would have disappointed the lowest federal bureaucrat in Washington. It was a small room, sparsely furnished—no carpet, functional lighting, with a drafting table piled high with blueprints; the monotonic paint was vaguely institutional. A metal bookcase was crammed with speaker parts and catalogs from electronics suppliers. On the modest, metal-topped desk sat a Styrofoam coffee cup that, while disposable, was nevertheless being saved; it was labeled with a name carefully printed on masking tape in ballpoint pen: Leo. A side door opened into a large, concrete-floored room full of industrial drills and punch presses. There were no clues to the fact that the occupant of the office was a millionaire executive and a leader of his industry, though the absence of frills and the palpable air of utility and frugality befit the man who designed it, Clarence Leo Fender.

If historians can’t pinpoint the first solidbody electric Spanish guitar, it’s partly because of a lack of agreement on criteria that would define it. Was it a Hawaiian lap steel modified by some obscure soul who hammered frets into his guitar, tuned it to standard pitch and flipped it on its side? Was it Lloyd Loar’s short-lived, seldom seen Vivi-Tone of 1933, with its impractical pickup and oddball construction (sort of a full-length neck assembly with a guitar top attached to it)? Was it Rickenbacker’s Model B Spanish guitar of 1935, with an inconveniently small, chambered body of Bakelite, a short scale, and its frets and neck molded into a single unit? Or Slingerland’s late-’30s Songster Style 401, called by some the first "modern" solidbody with its full 25" scale, real frets, and wooden body?

Some point to Les Paul’s "Log," a makeshift contraption consisting of a neck, hardware and strings attached to a 4x4" pine board with body "wings" stuck on the sides. There were more than a few drops of bad blood among various parties concerning a guitar designed by Merle Travis and built in 1948 by Paul Bigsby; my own contender for the "first modern solidbody" title, it had neck-through construction, a headstock profile that foreshadowed the Stratocaster, and a somewhat Les Paul-like body silhouette.

The Vivi-Tone, Rickenbacker, and Slingerland were innovative, to be sure, but aside from suggesting to anyone who was aware of them that the solidbody concept might be worth pursuing, it would be hard to document their influence on the pioneers who designed practical solidbody guitars. Although the ingenious Paul Bigsby almost certainly influenced Leo Fender to some degree, he never wanted to be a major manufacturer, and according to former Gibson president Ted McCarty, the time-honored Les Paul of 1952 was not so much a fulfillment of Les Paul’s request for a solidbody but rather a response to the Telecaster. As much as we might revel in the romance of a tidy, straight-line evolution traceable to some hallowed First Guitar, the story of the solidbody’s development is rather a tale of sometimes simultaneous efforts by independent builders, each with his own influences and insights. A few of their ideas are still with us every time we play or hear an electric guitar, but most are long forgotten. As with many species, the solidbody’s story is marked with more than a few evolutionary dead ends.

Debates about who influenced whom, however fascinating, sometimes obscure an essential fact: it was Leo Fender who put the solidbody on the map. He possessed something beyond a knack for mechanics, or foresight, or a belief in a dream—he could make it happen, and therein lay the singular genius of Fender. He designed an electric Spanish guitar with no discernible connection to the Vivi-Tone or the Slingerland, one that looked nothing like the little Rickenbackers or Les Paul’s ungainly "Log," one that even Merle Travis admitted was superior to his own Bigsby, one that would later prove its practicality with continuous production over half a century (and counting). Mr. Fender’s next move was just as important but often overlooked. He developed a process by which the new instrument and its more glamorous sibling, the Stratocaster, could be profitably manufactured on a large scale. By any meaningful criteria, it was Clarence Leo Fender who was the father of the solidbody guitar.

But suppose he had never developed the Telecaster, the industry’s first commercially viable solidbody and also its longest running success story. What if he had never designed the Stratocaster, the world’s most exciting, popular, and influential electric guitar? Suppose he’d never invented the electric bass, which, as Quincy Jones said, "came along and gave music its real sound." Take away the Tele, take away the Strat, take away the Precision and Jazz Basses. Without these monumental achievements, what can we say then of the legacy of Leo Fender? In his own way, the farm-born, self-taught genius from Orange County would remain the preeminent figure in the history of electric instruments because of the amplifiers that sprang from his restless mind and from his first and perhaps deepest love, electronics. More than any other person, it was Leo Fender who gave electric guitarists our electricity.

"Leo was a deep, relentless thinker," his friend and colleague Bill Carson recalled, "and when you got an idea across to him he could put it into being. He could figure the size of the screws, the amount of threads per inch—in his mind—and write it down on an envelope and then go out there and make it. In my estimation, the working musician never had as good a friend as Leo Fender." If there was one other quality aside from mechanical genius that Leo Fender’s friends remembered him for, it was his legendary thrift. He was once asked by a co-worker why he ate canned spaghetti instead of buying a hot sandwich from the lunch truck like the rest of the factory crew. He replied, "Because for the difference in price between the spaghetti and the sandwich I can buy a handful of resistors."

Fender’s radical guitars and their profound, even subversive effects seem all the more impressive given Mr. Fender’s low-key personality and the distinctly conservative tenor of the Orange County, California, surroundings where he grew up. But his calm demeanor diminished neither his passion for things mechanical nor his relentless inquisitiveness. He routinely annoyed representatives who sold him parts and supplies by grilling them about their own products and then explaining the answers in detail. He was ever curious, known to suddenly slide under a parked car to check out its undercarriage. According to the late Don Randall, "Leo liked machinery. He had very expensive and high-powered machinery that probably didn’t run more than five days a month, but he liked it, the big presses and everything. Leo designed all the equipment, which was unique, and he was a genius for figuring out the manufacturing process. A very clever man." By his own estimate, Leo Fender owned up to 75 patents. Clever, indeed.

It’s difficult to overstate Mr. Fender’s impact on his industry. Almost like a glitzy trend-setter, he helped to alter the look, the sound, and the personality of American music, and yet it would be hard to imagine a man of plainer appearance or fewer affectations. The late Freddie Tavares said, "He never wore any kind of clothes that you’d expect a person in his position to wear. People didn’t have the slightest idea he was any kind of a wheel. I would have to point him out to someone who didn’t know him. ‘See that man over there? He owns everything.’ Leo never flew off the handle, never raised his voice. One time someone made a costly mistake, and Leo just said, ‘I wish they knew how often I made a mistake.’ With all of his stresses and strains, he still tried to keep everyone’s spirits up."

A similar account, told by the late Forrest White, concerned a new employee who, not recognizing Mr. Fender, responded to some casual advice from Leo by saying, "Look buddy, you take care of your job, and I’ll take care of mine." "Leo just sort of grinned and didn’t say anything," Forrest recalled with obvious affection. "But that gives you an idea of what kind of man he was. He was easy to get along with because he didn’t have to impress anyone. He was a living example of what a successful man should be."

Although Mr. Fender was not an outgoing individual, his offbeat sense of humor often entertained employees. One of his favorite techniques was the play on words; an example: "You know, everybody thinks we make custom instruments, but that’s because we make them so good that our competitors have always cussed ’em." He liked a good car, meaning one that was mechanically sound, but he shunned most trappings of the successful executive. He rarely wore a suit, and was almost never without his leather holster full of screwdrivers. In his shirt, he kept a plastic pocket protector stuffed with pens, pencils, and a little metal ruler.

When someone did a job for Leo Fender, no matter how good it was, it rarely met his standards. He split hairs, he looked over shoulders, and he could be meddlesome (he offered employees much advice, solicited or otherwise, on subjects such as which new car they should buy). Yet his employees liked him; some practically worshipped him. Forrest White’s opinion—"I wouldn’t trade the years I spent with Leo for anything."—was not uncommon.

Leo Fender neither drank nor smoked and had few close friends. He had no children. "His guitars and amps," one associate said, "those were his kids." He was described by more than one associate as something of a recluse. While he dabbled in photography, liked to play pinochle on a Saturday night, and owned an expensive boat, his only true hobby, perhaps his obsession, was his work. He was a man of few words. He did not play guitar.

Excerpted from The Stratocaster Chronicles and The Soul of Tone by Tom Wheeler (Hal Leonard Publishing)

Devon Almond show

Trey Cannon — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:49:49 GMT

Steve P and I went to the Devon Almond show at the Rathskller last night. Colter and Carl were running sound. It sounded good.

KT-66 Mullards...Thanks for the tubes Clint

Professor Thump — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:18:14 GMT

I got two packages today at the office. I opened them up and what do I see? Tubes and Transformers...Nice!

Fender's Right Hand Man Dies

Professor Thump — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:09:58 GMT

http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=6994394&msgid=243591&act=DYZK&c=194644&admin=0&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.premierguitar.com%2FMagazine%2FIssue%2FDaily%2FNews%2FGeorge_Fullerton_Dies.aspx

Here is another news thread...

George Fullerton dies at 86; musician helped Leo Fender create his unique guitars

Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times

George Fullerton, left, and Leo Fender examine a guitar at their Fullerton manufacturing plant.

Fullerton was charged with making the Telecaster and Stratocaster electric guitars practical for mass production.

By Randy Lewis
July 8, 2009

George Fullerton, a longtime associate of Leo Fender who played a crucial role in the electric-guitar innovator's extraordinary success through his broad-based skills as a musician, artist and technician, has died. He was 86.

Fullerton died Saturday of congestive heart failure at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, said his son Geoff.While Fender tinkered away, coming up with improvements in guitar design that led to the creation of his revolutionary Telecaster and Stratocaster electric guitars, Fullerton was charged with making those innovations practical for mass production in their Orange County factory that opened in the late 1940s. Nearly 1,000 people were working there when Fender sold it to CBS in 1965.

FOR THE RECORD:
George Fullerton obituary: In the obituary in Wednesday's Section A of longtime Leo Fender associate George Fullerton, Leo Fender Gallery curator Richard Smith was quoted as saying that Fullerton made "the machine that threaded the guitar necks." What he actually said was "the machine that fretted the guitar necks." —

"Leo's domain was the lab: innovation, getting ideas together on the conceptual level. George's domain was the shop," said Richard Smith, curator of the Leo Fender Gallery at the Fullerton Museum Center and author of "Fender: The Sound Heard Round the World." Fullerton "made the machine that threaded the guitar necks. He came up with the neck shaper and all these unique tools they used. If Leo had problems, [Fullerton] needed to solve them."

Fullerton's lifelong interest in art allowed him to create sketches of new designs based on his conversations with Fender, whose background was in accounting and electrical engineering.

George William Fullerton was born March 7, 1923, in Hindsville, Ark. He was one of six children in a family in which "everyone was musical," Geoff Fullerton said. "There was definitely a music gene going on there."

Fullerton moved to Southern California shortly before World War II. He picked up technical skills working in an aircraft manufacturing plant during the war, after which he periodically ran into Fender, who ran a radio repair service and retail store.

Fender had begun making guitars -- originally focusing on steel guitars -- and amplifiers with Doc Kaufman (under the K&F brand), but their partnership ended quickly because of differing ideas about how to run the business.

Going it alone, Fender offered Fullerton a job helping with radio repair, but he soon shifted over to provide warranty service on Fender's steel guitars and amplifiers. Fender was as impressed by Fullerton's musical credentials -- he was playing in two bands at night after work -- as by his technical know-how. Fender was confident in his own technical expertise but often hired employees who also were musicians because he could barely play a note, much less a song.

In the late 1940s, various guitar makers were experimenting with ways to amplify the sound of a guitar to allow it to be heard in larger dance halls and ballrooms that featured live music. Fender wasn't the first to come up with a solid-body electric, which could handle a much greater degree of amplification without the sound feeding back, but his innovations in design allowed the instruments to be mass produced affordably -- something no one else had then figured out how to do.

They started working out of Fender's small shop in Fullerton, then expanded to two buildings. The early Fender team also included Don Randall, originally a salesman who became Fender's chief sales and marketing executive. At its height before the sale to CBS, Fender was turning out a guitar a minute from its 27 buildings in Fullerton and Anaheim.

Fender said he never regretted the sale, but he did have reservations about leaving many of his associates behind. Fullerton stayed on for about five years, but was disheartened by what he considered the new owners' bottom-line mentality.

"Quality issues were always at the forefront of his mind," Geoff Fullerton said. "The people at CBS would tell him 'We can save a nickel by doing this,' and his response would be 'Yes, but you'll screw the guy who's playing it.' So immediately there was a conflict there."

He teamed again with Fender at the Music Man amplifier company, creating a new line of guitars, then they created G&L Guitars around 1980.

In recent years, Fullerton had served as a consultant to the Fender Custom Shop in Corona, the company's high-end division that crafts upscale custom guitars for superstar clients as well as meticulous recreations of celebrity guitarists' favorite instruments. "George was very passionate about music, as a lot of the people who worked at Fender were," Smith said. "They thought they were doing something great for musicians, and they were. That whole spirit originated with Leo, that spirit of building better instruments to help musicians."

Besides his son, Fullerton is survived by a daughter, Diane, and two grandchildren. A memorial has been scheduled for 10 a.m. July 25 at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. Instead of flowers, the family has asked that donations be sent to the St. Jude Memorial Foundation.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Weber Speakers - Kokomo Indiana

blsamuel — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:51:57 GMT

Hanging out with the good Professor Thump during IndyFest09 it ocurred to me that he and others might be interested in Weber Speakers.

I only heard about them from a friend at table tennis who said a guy in his church builds speakers here in Kokomo Indiana. It looks like they build quite a bit of different musical instrument speakers and also amplifiers enclousures and complete kits though for people experienced in building from a schematic (not me). May be a source for the 10" guitar speaker used for a small horn loaded speaker project by Bruce Edgar in a 1980ish Speaker Builder issue that was supposed to be great for vocals that I always thought would be fun to build....

I'll have to call some time and see if they give tours.

Here's the link to the website if anyone is interested. http://www.tedweber.com/

Welcome to MI Gear

Professor Thump — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:42:48 GMT

Welcome to our new MI Gear Forum where musicians and music lovers can get their groove on! Whether it is Keyboards, 6 String or Bass Guitars, Drums or Stage Gear let's discuss it in this new play area. As opposed to vintage gear, this is the area for MODERN MI GEAR. Bring your mojo here!

This particular picture has a funny story behind it. Brad Geswein and I were at the 2006 NAMM show in L.A. I always love going to this show but there never seems to be enough time to see all the candy on display. I was in the off shore and secondary brand area of the show when I came accross this amplifier stack for sale. Normally stuff doesn't sell untill the last day but this owner was nervous trying to sell this stack because he didn't want to ship it back to China. I started negotiating for the head and top box but he wanted to sell it all. So I low balled him to what I thought was below his bill of material. I ended up buying it for $330 I believe but was planning on putting on a credit card. Unfortunately he couldn't accept a CC so I thought the deal was bust. Luckily I remebered that I had a fair amount of Chinese Yen on me because I had my travel bag with my international wallet in it. I rummaged up enough yen and US to purchase this stack. So that explains the happy face for the picture.

I called Brad on the cell to see if he could help me wheel it out of here and back to the hotel. When he found me he asked what I bought. He pointed to the head... No.... He pointed to the two cabs... No... He said "you bought ALL of it?" Yep...He asked how are you going to get it home. I said "heck I don't even know how I am going to get it to the hotel."

Eventually, after wheeling it out about a 1/4 of a mile we found a taxi that was a van. I then had a very good friend of mine pack it and ship it to my home.