Sound Garage Tales

Did your speaker develop a nasty buzz lately? Chances are that the voice coil became off-centered and it touches the magnet. Here’s how to check your speaker for voice coil scratching against the magnet. It happens even on new speakers — the magnet becomes off centered and the coil starts rubbing against it inducing some pretty nasty buzz.
The cheapest Celestion AlNiCo Blue on Planet Earth is here.

I am asked many times about the programs I’m using to design my amp layouts. So I thought of putting together a three part video tutorial about using Inkscape, a free vector based drawing program (for Win or Mac). I also made available the actual Inkscape amp layout drawing presented in these tutorials so you can use it as a blueprint starter template for your drawings. Please share your drawings! They are art!

Because the EF86 pentode is such a finicky tube but sounds so wicked (once you find the right one), I thought it might be worth showing the pain I’m going through (besides replacing Fallon with Leno), to keep things quiet:

This week’s video tip is about soldering the leads to the turret board to have a strong connection. The wire I am using is PVC insulated topcoat stranded wire (20 AWG).

Some of you might know that the whole Gabriel Sound Garage venture was spun into space by a little college physics project by my brother in law Tim, called The Champ.

This small little beast intrigued me enough with its splendid sound despite the 8 inch speaker to pursue building my First Born 10 years ago and from there as they say it’s history:

Finally I got a Solder Fume Extractor after years of soldering. It’s about time. The fumes can be nasty for your health:

I thought this particular build (a Gabriel Stinger 7w Head with an Celestion AlNiCo Blue open back bottom) was worth of recording a video demo to keep for the records. I was pleasantly surprised to hear the way the Blue interacted with the Stinger. It is as if they were from the same movie.  The 100 dbs sensibility of the Blue helps making this Stinger rig pretty loud for it’s humble 7w power rating. Obviously what you hear is NOT what it sounds in reality since you really need to be in the room to get the full emotional vibe of the tone but you can get an idea. Sit back and enjoy! And of course please leave a comment!!

Softbox Spiderlight

Many of you are now familiar with my photography and video fixation lately. If not, watch my latest YouTube videos and you’ll understand (while there, hit Subscribe, I’ll love you for that!) After many make shift lighting improvisations including very hot 500 watt shop lights, clamp lights and what not, I came to the conclusion that it would be really nice to have a softbox which will project a really nice soft light with no harsh shadows on the subject. So I found Alex Campagna’s home made softbox blog post and I used it as an inspiration to build mine with a couple twists.

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Videosongs Blog

By now you must be familiar with my latest fixation about videosongs. You must, if you follow my secondary YouTube channel and read/watched my Mission Impossible post about the videosong I made that got 3rd place at the Movie Show 1 Minute Videosong Competition. I thought it was time to reveal my primary source of inspiration, support and tutorials in creating a videosong from A to Z. Ladies and gentleman, please welcome (visit and subscribe to) the Videosongs Blog, maintained by a good friend from Paris France — Arno Ceres! Read the rest of this entry »