The Blog

The webmaster community has been in a froth over the past few days in anticipation of Google’s latest update of every website’s PageRank, which is a number between 1 and 10 displayed on the Google toolbar. It’s a gross rating of how popular your site is, based on the number of links to your site from other sites, the quality of those links, and the alignment of Neptune with the Earth and Sun, it sometimes seems.

Anyway, it looks like the update may have commenced. I’m curious to see how the dice tumbles for me and my webmaster friends. Even if PR is the equivalent of an SAT score (in terms of accuracy), it’s still nice to come out on top….

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: Well, it looks like instead of updating, Google is waffling back and forth between current PageRankings and former ones. Who knows why? A couple very well-paid geeks in California, and few else, I guess.

I look at the fluctuations the way volcano scientists look at eruption predictions: When there’s rumbling, she might be about to blow.

Can you tell I’m obsessed?

I was eight years old when, 25 years ago, John Lennon was killed. I don’t remember hearing about it, and I don’t think I would have known his name if I did. My mind was on treehouses, rope swings, and what the next few hours had in store.

I never saw Lennon perform, and I haven’t even seen him on TV or in a movie. It’s still startling to hear recordings of him speak, because for most of my life—every since 7th grade when I got my first Beatles mix tape from my sister’s boyfriend—all I’ve known was his music.

But the Beatles had such an impact on me. When I felt lonely as a kid, I’d lie in bed with the lights out, listening to “Nowhere Man” and “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I felt like I was connecting with something incredibly powerful and beautiful. It was during those dark nights, staring at the face of my illuminated alarm clock, that I fell in love with music.

And on September 11, I sat on the front lawn with some neighbors and sang “Imagine,” gazing over downtown Seattle and the empty sky. Despite all the sorrow and fear I felt that day, I was comforted that such a powerful statement for peace existed. It felt strong enough to keep my heart steady, even if the buildings fell around me.

A few days ago I came across lovely fingerstyle lesson for Lennon’s “Imagine”. I’m going to remember him today by learning it.

It’s snowing in the city! Snow always makes this place feel magical. In addition to checking the window every thirty seconds, the weather has inspired me to post Ordeal by Eggnog again. It’s the story of my buddy Chris and I circumnavigating Seattle on cross-country skis in January of 2004.

No guitars were involved in execution or documentation of this harrowing undertaking, but I thought you might enjoy it anyway.

. . . the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. —Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

I think I’ve figured out the appeal of this whole build-your-own-amp craze. It dawned on me during my soldering lesson with Al a couple weeks ago. I’d just made my first few attempts at soldering two wires together, and had discovered that when you hunch directly over the thing you’re soldering, the smoke goes up your nose. I asked Al about the safety of breathing smoke from something that’s 40% lead. Last time I checked, lead was not one of the items on the Percent Daily Values chart on the side of my Cheerios box. Al shrugged and gave me a sideways glance. “I kind of like the smell of it.”

You know what I smell, folks? An ADDICT.

Fact! 60/40 electronics solder isn’t really 60% tin and 40% lead. It also has what’s called a “rosin” core. The “rosin” is supposed to be a “flux,” which helps the solder to flow better. It doesn’t take Jeff Spicoli to figure out that “flux” isn’t just making the solder flow better. Your whole day’s gonna flow like lava in a lamp after a morning spent over your soldering iron.

Fact! 18watt.com, a website supposedly dedicated to discussion about replicating an obscure, long-forgotten amplifier, has over two thousand members. At this moment, at nearly 1am on a work night, fourteen guests and nine members are visiting the site. What could possibly inspire such interest in electronics, particularly in guitarists—a group not necessarily known for having populated the front row, or any row, of AP Physics classes?

Fact! Melting solder smells kinda like doobage.

I rest my case.

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It’s been 23 days since I started my amp-building project, and in that time, in addition to replaying the Bob Marley box set about thirty times, I’ve screwed all the parts to the amp chassis and completed about half the wiring. It’s been so much fun, I’ve put off updating my blog—whenever I have the opportunity to write, I go downstairs and grab my soldering iron. There’s something meditative about soldering wires. Through a thicket of mysterious electronic components, I’m following a path, one step at a time. As long as I stay on the trail, I’ll find my way to my destination.

And on the way, I am learning a bit about electronics. I only have the most superficial understanding of how the components of my amp work—power transformers change voltage, capacitors store electricity, tubes make your guitar scream—but the logic in the tangle of wires is slowly becoming apparent. Instead of seeing a plate of spaghetti when I peer into the chassis, I am beginning to see meaningful electrical paths, as if I were looking at a roadmap of my hometown.

I’m gonna build an amp.

Not content to leave my fate up to highway traffic, rockfall, or old age, I’ve decided to go where no spacey musician belongs—into a box of wires, jacks, knobs, caps, tubes, pots, screws, nuts, transistors, transmogrifiers, thermal detinators, and crystal gravfield trap receptors; from which, if all goes as planned, I will emerge with a replica of the legendary Marshall 18-watt guitar amplifier.

If all does not go as planned, I’ll know by the 290 volts coursing through my vitals—double the amount I’d get were I to, say, stick a paper clip in a power outlet.

Why risk electrocution? Marshall built the 18-watt combo amp for just three years, from 1965 to 1967, and they only made a couple hundred before replacing them with the cheaper, inferior 20-watt series. Back then, guitar amp manufacturers were trying to make their amps as clean (distortion-free) as possible, and the 18-watt was advertised as having a “distortion-free volume level.” Ironically, it’s the distortion you get—when you crank the volume—that tone snobs love. Michael Doyle, the author of The History of Marshall says they have “one of the greatest Marshall distortion tones [he’s] ever heard.”

I’m building this amp partly on that promise, and partly on the recommendation of the thousands of gentlemen feeding their midlife-crisis-induced gear lust in the 18 Watt online forum (“An 18 Watt in every home” is their motto), and partly on the promise of life insurance money and/or litigation claims should I daydream about wailing guitar solos while I solder.

Which brings me to Al Scott. Al’s one of my guitar students, and we’re swapping guitar lessons for amp-building guidance. He’s also a writer for the Seattle Times, an ex-speaker-repairman, an amateur amp builder, an excellent teacher, a really nice human being, and my scapegoat if I fry.

Today we set up shop in the basement of my house, on a long, empty workbench that’s just been begging for a project since I moved in this past summer. We took the kit out of the box, fresh off a cargo ship from Malaysia (several companies sell 18-watt kits, but the Malaysian company Ceriatone is the cheapest reputable one I’ve found). We organized the parts on my workbench, and spent most of the hour talking about tools I’d need and deciphering the wiring layout.

A layout’s like a schematic, in the same way that The Moby Dick Coloring Book by Sally Daisyfield is like Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Even so, it took us a few minutes for us to realize that we were looking at the wrong layout—one for the 18-watt TMB, an updated, higher-gain version of the original 18-watt. Once we downloaded the correct layout, things started making more sense, and Al left with me feeling confident that I could color between the lines for the first few hours of work.

The first thing I need to do is screw all the parts onto the chassis, which is a metal plate that holds everything in place. Once I get that done, I’ll post some photos and tell you how it’s going.

If you don’t hear from me, please contact Ken Silverton at New York Life Insurance. His phone number is 206-324-2960. Tell him my policy information is under the stack of Guitar World magazines in my office bookcase, and that it was Al’s fault.

Last night I had an epiphany.

I was at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play their gorgeous mournful music. It was an incredible show. I knew Gillian Welch was a great singer and songwriter, but it was Rawlings’ virtuosity on the guitar that blew me away.

Anyway, my epiphany started around the second song. Gillian was moaning one of her dark parables, keening her way through a heart-wrenching chorus, when she slipped into another verse and, ever-so-slightly slowed down.

I snapped out of my reverie for a moment, and thought, “Oops, did they just pull the reins in on a racing tempo?” Keeping a consistent tempo is one of the most difficult skills to learn as a musician, and it sounded like Gillian and David might have let their intensity get the best of them. Yet they had made the tempo shift completely in-sync, their harmonizing voices and interwoven guitar parts locked in tandem. The effect was as if someone had touched a finger to a record and slowed the music down a hair.

Then it happened again, at the start of the next verse. Again, their voices and guitars were synchronized, conducted by a baton only they could see.

The ebb and flow of tempo continued through several other songs during the performance. Once I realized they weren’t mistakes, my heart tugged when the songs would slow–the effect gave the music an added weight, like a moment of silence in a speech before a profound statement is made.

I’ve chisled “Thou Shalt Keep a Consistent Tempo” into my students’ songbooks ever since I started teaching guitar. “This isn’t classical music,” I’ve told them. “Rock and folk music sounds sloppy if you speed up and slow down. Even if you’re doing it on purpose, it ends up sounding melodramatic, like an opera.”

Well, since last night, I’ve decided to bust out my chisel and amend my commandment: “Thou Shalt Keep a Consistent Tempo Unless You Really Freaking Know What You’re Doing.”

Let’s be frank. How many of us, given the choice, would really want to be rock stars? Sure, having people hock your nosehair on Ebay at $200 a strand might be fun for a while, but let Keith Richards’ face tell you what it’s like to rock long and hard.

But to be a rock star for a day? Who wouldn’t want that? On October 30th, about 25 of my students are going to perform in downtown Seattle for what I call the Coffee Shop Jam. They work hard on a song–really polish it–and then perform it for a great crowd. For many of my students, it’s the only time they’ve performed music outside their house.

When I started hosting Coffee Shop Jams two years ago, I knew they would motivate my students, but I had no idea they would be so popular. “You’ve got something magical going,” one of my students told me at a recent lesson. She’s also said that performing her song was the hardest thing she’s ever done.

Nor did I expect the audience’s reactions. The Jam is open to everyone, but most people who come are friends and family members of the performers. You can imagine what it might be like if you were invited to your friend’s performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind”–patiently waiting until your friend takes the stage, enduring all the untrained voices and fumbled chord changes. It sounds like a good Saturday Night Live skit.

It’s true that Atlantic Records has never sent a scout to a Coffee Shop Jam, and it’s unlikely they ever will; yet many audience members have told me that they’ve been touched by the beauty of the songs, and the passion and courage of my students.

For example, my girlfriend Christine invited one of her friends, Libby, to come to the last Coffee Shop Jam. They were sitting together when Gary took the stage to sing “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor. Libby spent a good part of her college years in nightclubs–I don’t think she’s a big James Taylor fan. And yet, as Gary invited the audience to sing the final chorus, Christine turned to speak to her friend and saw a tear on her face.

When I created the Coffee Shop Jam, it was just a tool to motivate my students. It’s become so much more than that–a chance for my students not just to show off, but also to really inspire people through music.

And if rock stardom happens to occur, I just hope they remember to moisturize their face.

You can see videos from the first Coffee Shop Jam here, and photos from the last one here.