Tech Tips: Vacuum Tube Crisis
This month's Tech Tips will tell you how to make the vacuum tubes in your tube amplifiers last longer, given the current geopolitical situation in Ukraine that has led to sanctions being placed on the import of new tubes.
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Cottonwood Correspondents: Philippe Herndon of Caroline Guitar Company
For the month of August, we have a Q&A with Philippe Herndon, the founder and owner of Caroline Guitar Company, which makes handwired boutique guitar pedals and just launched a new fuzz pedal called the CROM.
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Tech Tips: Excessive Dryness And Fluctuating Humidity Levels Can Ruin Your Guitar
This month’s Tech Tips concerns how environmental factors such as dryness and humidity can impact the health of your guitars, as well as how to solve for this problem.
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Tech Tips: Tube Amplifier Maintenance
Tube amps aren’t without fault, and like many refined instruments and machines, need periodic maintenance to perform at their best and prevent failures - just like changing your car’s oil and giving it a tune-up. With our cars, we understand that changing the oil every 3-4k miles is recommended to keep the car running as it should. However, with tube amps, we don’t have regular maintenance intervals. Despite this, it’s important to understand that maintenance still needs to be performed eventually in order to keep them running smoothly. A lot of questions arise about maintaining tube amps, since we have all been told of the danger caused by their lethally high voltages. With this in mind, here are a few points to keep in mind about tube amp ownership and maintenance.
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Cottonwood Correspondents: Ryan Guzman of Gear Fever
Ryan Guzman runs Gear Fever, a wonderful YouTube channel that offers demos of a wide array of gear in order to make it easier for guitarists to choose products that will help them get closer to their personal signature sound. We asked him a few questions to get a sense of what inspires and influences his content creation process.