I don't know where curiosity comes from. For me it was always there. By the time I was 4 I was explaining the 4-cycle gas engine to our neighbors in the elevator on East 85th street. My mom took me to the museum of natural history so many times it felt like home. I grew up in a world of James Bond, Johnny Quest (really his father) and Speed Racer (also a lot of his dad). All guys who had knack for tech on their side and for the latter two, they were involved in world changing inventions with their fathers. I dreamed of the government giving me a volcanic island somewhere to do pure research, and maybe a secret jet. I wanted to build race cars with my father. I wanted to land jets on aircraft carriers on the open ocean. Walk on the moon. Solve meaningful problems.
I settled for dragging home broken televisions, power tools and the like and pulling them apart. We moved out to the suburbs when i was 5 and soon I discovered the magic of 'big garbage' day. Like my hero I had not yet discovered (Les Paul), I couldn't help myself. These were the days when older cathode ray TV's were still partly point to point wired and you could go test the tubes at your local Radio Shack. Which is what I did. My first B&W TVs, and our family's first Color TV all came into the house this way. I brought home console stereos. Also our first powered lawn mower. (fixed that too) I did get a pretty bad shock from a TV once, probably nearly died, hard to say. I woke up at the other end of the garage in a ball and couldn't breath; every muscle had contracted. The worst part was being suddenly awake and not being to do anything about air. Suffocating with air all around me. Obviously it worked out, but I got religion about safety. And I read lots of stuff about electronics to make sure I knew enough to prevent that from happening again.
Lots of people helped me learn along the way. My friend Richard who had a much better grasp of both math and electronics; his father brought home old lab gear from work and we'd tear into it. My middle school science teacher sent me home with a bunch of old tube gear one year, I got some of it working, and the rest I parted out. Mr Defonce, who was an older gentleman on a paper route I sometimes did. One summer I painted his garage, and he gave me old radio magazines and tubes as payment, including a 1947 Motorola B&W TV that used a 7" round CRT. My "Mr Miyagi", and just as inspirational. And finally, and critically, my neighbor Sabrina introduced me to the Beatles. What were those instruments? What made a sound like that? The 12 string Rickbacker getting volume swells (from John, while George played the parts) in "I need you" I remember very clearly. How does one even imagine that? It really planted the seed of sound as a tool, as a concept, as its own thing that was variable. They did so much, and in fact the electric guitar is only half an instrument (which is generous. It might be less). What you do to that signal is as important in some ways as what you play in the first place.
In the end though, I wasn't very good at engineering by my own standards and so I drifted off to other hobbies. I didn't have the patience for piano lessons from my mother. The things I tried to build were too complex for my experience level and often didn't work. So instead I listened to a lot of music on the radio, and tried to learn to hear what was doing what. My neighbor Robert would come over and we'd listen to the Beatles, learning who was singing, and what all the parts were. I never imagined I could ever make those noises or play those parts. It would be years later, senior year of HS when I would finally pick up a guitar.
Years later when I was living in my first apartment with my then girlfriend, I had re-discovered vacuum tubes as part of my guitar playing journey. My little transistor amp sounded not a bit like the records I loved. Why? I bought a copy of "The Tube Amp Book, Volume II", by Aspen Pittman at Sam Ash in White Plains, NY. I read it cover to cover, especially the "Trainwreck Pages" written by a famous tech named Ken Fischer who lived in New Jersey. How exotic! The back half of the book was dedicated to schematics, basically dozens of recipes for famous and expensive guitar amps, perhaps ones like my heroes played. With Ken's "advice" and the inspiration of the schematics and very little money (buying the real things was out of the question) I went about finding the parts and building one.
In my railroad apartment.
In the kitchen.
I still hear about the spray adhesive I got on the toaster oven when I applied the Tolex.
I had to order the transformer set from Fender directly. Other parts came from Radio Shack. I had to improvise. But where to find a 4 ohm speaker? I was working as an office manager in mid-town Manhattan, and getting more and more interested in music and music gear. Soon I discovered west 48th street, with its rows of famous music stores like Manny's that had sold gear to the Beatles and Hendrix and so many others. The famous block was between 6th and Broadway. Sadly, it's all gone now. A few blocks farther west on 48th, in a nondescript neighborhood, was a repair shop called Andre Audiotronics. Gene Andre was the owner and what I didn't know was his father, Gene Sr. had been a fixture at Ampeg back in their heyday. Gene Jr knew an awful lot about stuff, and the shop had the air of a NYC fixture that had been there for decades. He was busy re-coning speakers and fixing guitar amps; the kind of guy I wanted to meet! He made me a custom 4-ohm 10" speaker to use in my apartment amp. He had speaker frames hanging on the wall, including the fabled AlNiCo magnet ones! (a magnetic alloy featuring Aluminum, Nickel and Cobalt and of course, Iron) That's what's left, below. To always remind me of my 'humble beginnings':
So that's what we used. I had chosen the simplest circuit in the book, an 1950's Fender Champ; maybe 3 watts of pure attitude. Just one knob. Amazingly enough, it worked the first time and sounded pretty good, like something the Stones might have used while recording Sticky Fingers. It buried my little transistor amp; it was big and round and warm sounding. I was hooked. I wanted to learn everything about Why it sounded different.
What had we forgotten?
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