Blastronaut

As an ebay seller I hate and actively avoid selling auctions. As a buyer I Iike them, especially stuff that ends early on a Monday or Tuesday morning.

Nice one, thanks. Seven Stories looks a great shout. Mostly thinking of stuff for my 5 yo, the older kids are also on the spectrum but generally cope a lot better when out and about.

Anyone able to advise on places in near the city center in Newcastle are tailored towards (or at least cater for) autistic kids? Also, less important but a heads up on the best local indy music stores would also be appreciated.

Must be massive ballache being a lefty guitar player. Cool that you're still always able to find guitars that float your boat though, despite the premium. I'm a bit of a metal-head but don't really keep up with most of the new scenes and I'm more inclined toward stuff that sounds like Motorhead having an amphetamine and alcohol fuelled scrap with Sabbath over a lot of the more modern, technical and perfectly polished stuff. I'm heavily obsessed with Carcass and High on Fire, still not over Des leaving HoF. Big soft spots for bands like BoltThrower. Loved the short lived de Grasso/Pitrelli era Megadeth (album was a bit limp but live there was a dynamic there that really floated my boat). Saw Hellripper recently too and was massively impressed, seriously good old-school thrash band that are making a few waves locally.

Not to mention Gibson have dropped the ball with their quality control in recent years. That said, I'd still probably trade ALL of my gear for a Zoot Suit SG.

Oh cool, these look great. If the price is right I might even look into getting on myself. Weird seeing ThorpyFx pedals in regular looking enclosures though. That's all I've got for now. I'll probably have more to say when I shake this hangover Edit: Holy fuck they're expensive. I'd hope at that price they had subminiature valves but looking over their website I'd doubt it. Also a little surprised to see they run on 9V (I'm guessing they have a chargepump in there to internally double the voltage) which probably means there's no tubes in there and they've went the old-school way and just used silicon transistors in a arrangement like the Fetzer Valve circuit. I'm a bit skeptical now. No doubt they'll sound good, wouldn't expect Victory or Thorpy to put their name to junk, but I can't see how they'll be anything more than just a solid-state approximation of the amps they're being marketed as. Also would be liked to have seen the Anderson's guys show them being pushed by a boost or a Tubescreamer to see if they respond more like a tube pre-amp amp or just another distortion pedal (maybe they did, I didn't watch the whole thing). I'd give it a month and these will be traced and cloned all over the place.

am I right in thinking that the HXfx has options for both buffered and true bypass modes? It could be that the Stomps front end just doesn't like the buffer. I'm not hugely familiar with either pedal but that's an interesting conundrum.

Betamax Boy could've been a halfway decent stage name that would've changed the course of your life (for better or worse) if you'd got into gabber in the 90s.

My oldest hit me with this same Jupiter stat after school today and was out in the garden excitedly looking at stars at the back of ten asking me which one was Jupiter. Bit shite having to break to her that even if we had a telescope and some coordinates, dad actually isn't that all that smart, but we had a cool 15 minutes gazing at stars and chatting about just how small our town is compared to the vastness of space. Bit of a reality check for me tbh and feeling like a shite dad for having nothing else to offer bar "aye, we're pretty insignificant in the grand scheme".

My other half keeps a close eye on the local scene up here, and most of the time I can't be arsed but the big stand out this year has been Dead Pony's War Tribes EP. Nowt new or overly original but they've got perfect pop choruses and earworm riffs for days and might be worth keeping an eye on. If Ginger Wildheart is on the ball he's already poaching their singer for the 3rd Hey! Hello album.

Long story short, they ripped off half a dozen Wire songs. When challenged Justine claimed she had never heard of Wire and was countered with "you personally named them as your biggest influence on the liner notes of your album". Stranglers (and others) also went after them over the waking up riff being lifted from No More Heroes. I do have a little sympathy for Justine, there's only 12 notes in the scale and smack probably blues the lines a bit.

Ha. Jesus, that's almost on par with Elastica debacle.

I've only seen Dando perform live once (about 10 years ago, Belladrum) and he was fucking brilliant but the polar opposite of what I was expecting. I went in expecting something verging on Elliott Smith and was met by some bizarre, short but high-energy full-on rock set where he came across as more Scott Weiland strutting about the stage with an SS hat. Not sure if I caught him on a good or a bad day but it quite the performance. Weird guy.

Conned is a strong word like. But artificial scarcity from the off that creates a 5 year waiting list, then fobbing off most of the responsibility to a company that can mass-produce something that was supposedly impossible without long-discontinued and hard to find parts is, eh..... leading folk down the garden path at the least. Theres fuck all special about that diode at all and Analogman knows that. It's just a run of the mill modern silicon switching diode. To be fair though I doubt he's planned this from the off, mxr have just given him an outball. For clipping diodes in pedals the only thing that really matters is the forward voltage and curve of the knee. This obsolete 856 diode is damn near identical to the widely available 914/4148 in that respect. The most ironic thing is that the KoT has made the 856 so desirable that there's now a market for fakes that look the same but have a wildly different knee and fV from both the original 856 or the obvious widely available 4148 replacement.

Aye. Fair play to him. Potentially fulfilling a lot of those orders and creating even more hype about the originals without even having to actually make any more himself. I just can't forgive him for having the audacity to charge an extra $25 if you want a different colour LED.

Ah the name change might suggest they've just slapped in 4148's, which most folk who build pedals will tell you are near indentical (as clipping diodes) to the "magic" 589's. You'd need superhuman hearing to notice any difference. Any audible change between the units could be explained away by the tolerance of the capacitors. If anyone's interested I could go further into it and draw up graphs and stuff but I'm sleep deprived and on the sauce so it would probably just turn into another tirade about analogman's shithousery. He's played a blinder here though.

That's interesting. Guessing either MXR have been sitting on a fuckton of those obsolete "mojo" diodes, or someone is finally going to have to admit there was never anything special about them and no real reason for a waiting list.

The guy that's meant to be sending me the gutshots isn't mad on his either. Sure he said it sounded a bit sterile, can't remember his exact words though. Turns out the PG14 has already been traced and cloned. It's definitely not a Tubescreamer for a change. Here's the schematic http://pedalpcb.com/docs/BlueShoeGaiPan.pdf Doesn't look much like any of the usual candidates. Lots of op amp stages for gain and the tone sections and the fet stage is similar to the old Fetzer Valve which will be where the whole "valve amp in a pedal" spiel comes from. Charge pump taking it up to 18v for more headroom too. Cool stuff.

Fine, I'll say the line. It's literally just another ts808! Another shout for the Bonsai from me. It's a really cool idea to have all models in one box. Slightly off topic, I'm actually waiting on a guy sending me gut shots of the JHS Muffuletta (multi Big Muff), I'd bet my right bollock only one or two of the models on that are exact copies of the originals, must be some trade offs with some of the models on that thing. There's less differences between the Tubescreamer models than the muffs, so it's way more likely all the different TS models on the Bonsai are true to the originals.

Fair play to Shaun, him reaching 60 must have fucked over a of folk in celebrity death pools. As a coincidental aside, Spotify randomly threw up Kelly's Heroes on a drive on Saturday and my other half let slip she had never heard of Black Grape. The return leg she and all four of the kids had to suffer "it's great when you're straight" in its entirety. Its somehow even more hit and miss and disjointed as an album than I remember being but it weirdly it hit just right for that shit drive home.

https://juststream.live/HeartburnTableauxRedefiner Mad that nobody else was in for this guy and he ended up going from eredivise top-scorer to coming off the bench to score overhead nutmegs on plastic pitches in Scotland.

Fucking hell, first I'd heard. Hope he pulls through. Guessing the obvious question will be whether a Muslim or Christian extremist is responsible (gambler in me would assume the former) but regardless we need less religious extremism and more voices like Rushdie's.

Ha. You've got me wondering what that combo into something like a Bit Commander might result in. I put a killswitch in an old beater LP a while back. Dunno what I was expecting tbh, played with it for all of 5 minutes and then just went back to rocking the toggle switch for the basically the same effect. Makes a lot more sense putting one in alongside a strat pickup switch than an LP I guess.

Easy up man. I wasn't jumping to any conclusions or directly accusing you of being a bigot, just pointing out that one specific slur is still routinely used as a sectarian dog whistle up here. It will always raise eyebrows when used in the context of a Glasgow, Edinburgh or Dundee derby.

I'd take that olive branch tbf. Purple is much cooler than maroon.