Battery for the Ranger

January 25, 2011

Yesterday my truck wouldn’t start.  Now, to it’s credit it has been fine all winter even down to -5F and it was all the way down to -18F yesterday morning when the battery failed to turn the engine over.  Also, it is the original 11 year old Motorcraft battery.  I was thinking of replacing it this year, but now I’m thinking about waiting till next fall.  The reason being that we probably won’t see -18F again this year and it started fine this morning at -1F.  When I do replace it I think I will go with another Motorcraft…can’t really argue 11 years on a battery here in Maine!

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I like my amp and guitar too much

January 21, 2011

I got so excited last night that I had an hour or so to jam on my new amp that I did just that.  Now I have a couple blisters.  Guess I got a little too excited.  That said, it was a blast.  My Harmony sounds very sweet through the Vox and it’s really the tone I’ve been looking for.  So far for clean I really like the “Boutique Clean” setting and for overdrive the “US High Gain”.  Effects wise most of them are relatively cheesy sounding to me, but most effects are.  Flanger for instance.  Another is the Phaser setting.  I like a good phaser sound, but really so far the MXR Phase 45 is the only one that does it for me.  The Vox’s phaser sounds more like a Phase 90 or 100.  The Reverb is excellent and the Auto-Wah is actually more useful than anticipated.  I also like the noise reduction feature of the amp, now I don’t have to worry about doing a bunch of shielding on the Harmony and making it “less original”.

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Advertising on SSG?

January 20, 2011

I’m thinking about putting up some advertising on SSGuitar.com to help it be more economically sustainable.  Right now I’m figuring a Google Ads banner across the very bottom and a small 125 x 125 rotating add on the right underneath the user stats/new posts sections.  To start with the rotating ads section would only have a Musician’s Friend affiliate ad.  Eventually I could get some small companies to pay for ads – either with a monthly fee or a pay per click setup.

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Rockin’ a new amp!

January 17, 2011

I picked up a Vox AD50VT for cheap in the Uncle Henry’s.  It just needed a little soldering to get it up and running.  It sounds great.  50w, 12″ speaker, 11 amp models, 11 effects, 2 programmable channels and it uses a 12AX7 tube to help “smooth” and “warm” the sound – and it works.

Vox AD50VT and 1966 Harmony Bobkat H15V

Vox AD50VT and 1966 Harmony Bobkat H15V

What a pair 🙂

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SSGuitar.com doing well!

January 13, 2011

All my work seems to be paying off over at ssguitar.com.  We are having more legitimate posts and at the same time virtually no spam postings!  Now I need to start looking at publicizing the site more as well as thinking about putting in some advertising space so I can make the site profitable in time.  I’m thinking of using Google Adwords on the bottom in a banner, some other ad campaign situation on the side in a small box and then leaving the top free until I can find a few companies that want to pay me direct for advertising and I can make a rotating banner for the top.  Last time I did advertising I only did the latter and it worked relatively well.  However, I made the mistake of not making a tracking page for the links so I had no idea how many people were being sent to their sites and consequently they never renewed their contracts with me.

You live and learn.

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