Playing with a band for the first time in  years really got my adrenaline pumping.  My schedule makes doing that regularly still a bit difficult, but working with those guys did open to me the possibilities. It also lit a fuse. Or more correctly FUSE. As in Fender FUSE -- a software system that allows for total connectivity not only between a computer and a guitar amp, but more important, between a musician and the sound he or she hears in his or her head.



I'd turned on to the…

Getting together with a group of very capable musicians for the first time in 40+ years was a joy. Getting to experience the way at least some bands rehearse these days was a shock.



Amps? "We don't need no stinking' amps!"



Well no one actually said that, but they do live it.



Instead of amplifiers each instrument - yes, even the "drums" - plug into an electronic gizmo that sends the sound to earphones worn by each musician. With the phones on one hears the…

As most all of that play electric guitar know, that while there are dozens and dozens of worthy and desirable guitars 'out there' (both past and present), they almost all fall into one of two sound categories: Fender and Gibson; single coil of humbucker.



I started out as a Gibson man - something that is rather funny considering that my first love as a guitarist was surf music. But my first Gibson was equipped with P90s - a single coil PU that could pretty well emulate the Fender…

A buddy had come by yesterday asking me to spend an evening jamming with his band. Very tempting!  But I've been playing solely acoustic of late and the necessary change over to electric will take a little time.



What the hell! Why not give it a try?  So I grabbed an electric out of the music room and the little battery-powered Pignose amp and took 'em into the library and wailed. What fun!…

Got home yesterday and what was in the mailbox but the Spring edition of Ugly Things. Lots of good stuff throughout but I have to admit that I turned immediately to "Echoes of the Vault" hoping to see it and there it was ... right there under the section title ...  UG's review of The Abstracts' "Hey, Let's Go Now!" Woohoo! And penned by the main man himself: Mike Stax. 

A couple of nicely captioned pix were included including one of The Abs' lead singer, Al Karp, and…

"I was sleeping. Now I am awake."  No, I'm not quoting the bible's Lazurus there, but myself. For in a sense I was dead. Dead to something that had once been absolutely central to my life but that is no longer. Let me explain...

Like many kids growing up in the fifties and early sixties I felt like a stranger in a strange world.  I was the kid that didn't fit in. I was the kid who had no interest in sports. I was the kid who stood with his eyes closed and his lips sealed while…

Every lover of `60s music that I know is blown away when they first experience a Break-A-Way Records LP. I know I was. Who is this little label hidden away in some city I'd never heard of in Germany?  Should I really expect an unknown company like that to be releasing something special? I didn't make sense. 

I personally first learned about Break-A-Way Records from Mike Dugo -- the editor of 60sGarageBands.com and 60s music expert par excellance. He had just heard mp3s of The…

This s cool! The Abstracts "Hey, Let's Go Now!" has been chosen as a recommended selection of the month by Britain's Record Collector magazine. I'll post the clipping someone sent me of the mag page in my pix area. :)

Don't know how many here are on Facebook, but for those that are and have the interest, here is The Abstracts Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/147162632022407/  There is recorded in real time the almost (to the band members) impossible thing that has happened to our long thought forgotten music.  Enjoy!