Message Board

I've missed the camaraderie of the TOMB - especially after the shellacking I've taken over on Gearslutz by the hate club over there. With the exception of one mis-spent evening, I've really tried limit my posting on the message boards - it?s a simple matter of time. My lead time on mods continues to...

Dents are not the problem. What caused the dents is the problem - the dropping or drum stick hits.

I never understood the hype / love.

The thing is noisy and only usable on guitar cabs, or loud vocals. I really did try to love it - new tubes, burn it in for two weeks etc.

But no way can it be used for acoustic guitar or quiet-to-mid level vocals without a hailstorm of noise.

Deej wrote:Does anyone here know how much different the 219 and 319 sound?

The 219 and 319 use the same capsule and circuit but have different headbasket designs. This gives the 219 a bit more lower midrange push while the 319 is a bit more open-sounding. Both are great mics, just slightly different.

I've spent a year with my Cascade Fathead Ribbon mic with Lundahl transformer and am overall disappointed with it. Is a ribbon mic supposed to have a 'knocking' tonal characteristic? Is it supposed to be almost unblendable with other mics around a source (like a drumkit)? Is it supposed to lack the...

Great guy. I've got his beautiful "Santa Cruz" tube reverb tank. Lovely woodwork on the case and great sound manipulation with tone, dwell and sustain controls. Looking forward to getting one of his amps - but finally took delivery of my Mahaffay Amps "Little Lanilei " so I'm exploring that one righ...

Anyone with an eight track should study Emitt Rhodes work. Dig deep - he was doing better work in his parents Southern California tool shed than McCartney was on his sheep farm and at Abbey Road back '69.

As Ubertar noted a ribbon mic transformer will work. With a transformer this pickup has a much better signal to noise ratio than your typical ribbon mic. Because, think about it - the aluminum ribbon is responding to air velocity changes while the coil in a string return pickup is actually getting w...

There was a guy by the name of Lane Poor, a Stars alumnus, who started a bass pickup company in Rhode Island. He was a school yard buddy of Jack Casady of the Airplane. I believe Lane was doing some string return bass retrofits around '79 through the early '80's. Interesting side bar - its rather fa...

Sure. This idea predates Google by quite a few years and I've never seen it documented in print. I believe it originated in the early '70s with Ron Rickersham, the Grateful Dead's chief scientist and Alembic founder. It was passed from him to Stars Guitars founder Ron Armstrong. The idea and impleme...

Man, does all that stuff bring back memories Jim - copper foil grounding strips in the PU and pot cavities painted over with graphite paint, humbucking pickup covers with the centers milled out, "brass mass" bridges, nuts, and stop tailpieces, "string return" acoustic guitar pickups (a single Alnico...

Another cheap trick is to mod humbuckers - install a coil tap switch or "roll in" pot to go from humbucking to single coil. When I worked at Stars Guitars in SF in the late 70s we had a six-way rotary switch mod for humbuckers that involved re-wiring both PU coils so you could get: 1. Front 2. Rear ...

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oh, no harshing heard!

Just wanted to explain my repair option and how its different than the mod.

I have one that just stopped working too. I think it's pretty common with these "legends" From the Oktavamod page... MK-012 Repair Option $69.00 To upgrade a non-working MK-012 you must purchase this Repair Option as well at the MK-012 PE upgrade. Non-working MK-012 mics require troubleshooting and...