Greetings, Fretters....

[duhvoodooman***]

Howdy do, everybody. To quote Mr. Jagger, "Please allow me to introduce myself...."

I'm a picker with more enthusiasm than talent or experience, but I enjoy banging away, so what the heck! I play strictly for my own enjoyment and relaxation, in the confines of my own home. After a period of many years without an electric guitar, I bought a used 1990 MIA Fender Strat Plus in '97. Nice instrument, and I like the Gold Lace Sensor pups. Also had a real piece of crap small Fender SS amp that the music store guy threw into the deal for nothing. Worth every penny! But I lived with it until this past December.

At that time, I finally bought a Les Paul, a guitar I had lusted after since the days of my youth. Being (1) just a casual musician, and (2) cheap by nature, I wasn't about to drop a couple of grand on a Gibson, so I got an Epi Elitist LP Standard. Fantastic instrument--just love it. Posted at length about it HERE.

With two nice guitars to play, the crappy little Fender amp just wouldn't cut it anymore, so after some intensive research, I got myself a VOX Valvetronix AD30VT modeling amp, which offers about as much fun as a man can have with his clothes on. Just love fooling around with the various amp models and effects, though when I settle in to play it's usually with one of the classic amp models (Fender, VOX, early Marshall) and just a bit of reverb or compression. I did pick up a few used pedals on eBay, though, including a Dunlop Cry Baby, a Digitech Tone Driver for light distortion and a Hot Rod for a bit heavier dose, and just won an auction for a Digitech DigiDelay pedal last week, but it hasn't arrived yet. I also bought a cheap ($20) little Behringer 7-band EQ pedal for some tone-shaping capability, but it's also good for a volume boost on the clean amp models.

You can see the two guitars and the VOX amp (before I changed the cheese grater for VOX cloth) at THIS LINK.

As far as musical preferences go, I lean strongly toward classic rock and blues. Being a child of the late 60's/early 70's, my personal guitar heroes include Clapton, Hendrix, Beck, Page, Townshend, Duane Allman, and a bit later on, Steve Morse and my #1 all-time favorite, SRV. Attempting to sound like these guys is pretty much an exercise in futility for me, but it's still fun, especially when I accidentally get a note or two right.

Just a couple of quick comments on the "duhvoodooman" handle--this has nothing to do with Hendrix, SRV or anything musical. I'm also quite interested in computers, especially the hardware end of them, and several years ago became something of a resident expert on 3dfx "Voodoo" video cards in a couple of user forums I frequented. Some of the other forum regulars started calling me "the Voodoo man" and the nickname kind of stuck. Eventually, I used it for my personal website, so please stop by Duhvoodooman.com and check it out. Mostly computer stuff, but I have several pages relating to the VOX Valvetronix amps posted there now, too.

Some quick personal info: Just turned 55 years old, live in the Albany NY area, happily married with two teenage kids (hence the need for hammering on the ol' gitfiddle as a means of non-violent stress relief! ). A pleasure to meet you all, and look forward to talking guitars, amps & relata with all of you!