Naked and Dimed: My Lifelong Quest for Awesome Tone

How do vintage Fender amps sound clean, at the point of break up, and fully dimed? What’s better: the juicy, well-rounded, smooth, rich distortion from a pair of 6V6s, or the bold, firm, low end and prominent highs that come from a pair of 6L6s? What’s so magical about Allen Bradley carbon comp resistors, cardboard-covered Astron Minimites, molded Mallory blue coupling caps, and Sprague Atoms electrolytic caps? Are NOS 6V6GT, 6L6GC, 12AX7, 12AY7, 7025 and 12AT7 tubes really worth the extra bucks? What difference do 5Y3, GZ34, and solid-state rectifiers make? How do paraphrase inverters, cathodyne inverters, and long-tailed inverters sonically compare? Is negative feedback a good or bad thing? How about those tweed, brown, and black-face tone stacks—what makes some more touch sensitive than others? Is there more magic in a big iron interleaved Schumacher or a wispy thin-wound Triad output transformer? Is it better to push air with 1x10, 1x12, 1x15, 2x10, 2x12, 3x10, or 4x10 speaker combos? Do Jensen P12Rs sound better than the Oxford 12K5-6s? How about professional grade brown tremolo compared to the bias affected smaller combo tremolos of the same era? What sounds better, black-face reverb or a splashy brown Reverb Unit? These questions (and many more) were answered when I entered the studio with The Psychedelic Mooj to record Naked and Dimed, our 5th album.