Home, 2:34pm

Just braved the snow (HA! flurries w/sunshine) to pick up a pair of replacement Eden speakers for my Isovent cab. Just got them installed and fired the rig up. Sounds great! Farty rattle sound is GONE. Had to throw them on my credit card, has a zero balance and I consider this an emergency business expense (need them to record TONIGHT and Austin Speaker was only place in town that had 10's).

Yesterday went to Austin Vintage Guitars cause they had some 10's but they were wrong ohmage. Crap! When I called asked if Jesse from Shurman was working, he wasn't. But while I was there he stopped by, saw me and said "Hey man I got your amp!" Sweet! I dropped off my stricken SVT-II to him a few weeks back as he wanted to take a stab at fixing it (making occasional weird staticky/crackly sound like a dirty pot, Dug Pinnick has same amp and stopped using it for same reason). Will try it tonight at Friends and see how it goes. Then we head to the studio to finish the 'Green Diamond' album tonight: bass tracks for as many songs as I can do, saxophone overdubs, and all lead/backing vocals. Going to be a very long night...

Last night at Antone's was great! Good crowd for once despite the nip in the air. We played good even tho Richard was getting a little carried away drumfill-wise at times, heh. Overall a great set and fun show, and profitable as well. Tessmer said a review from the Austinist (online music mag) reviewed our last Antone's show and said this night's show would be the best $8 spent on live music all week. Nice!

Will lay low the rest of the day to save energy for tonight. Load in at Friends around 5:30/6pm.


3:51pm

Just fired up the SVT-II and tuned it a little, swapping around some tubes to get the sound I want. Stock it comes with all 12ax7's for pre-amp tubes, which sounds great for snarly bass tone but makes it almost unuseable past 3 on the volume. Tried a mix of lower gain tubes and found a good mix of clean head room when playing lightly and more grit when I dig into the strings. We'll see how it sounds tonight. Must go sleep for an hour before load in.