Nic Clark playing a Bantam amp

Nic Clark with Another Kind of Magick. Nic is playing through his vintage Fender Bantam amp, using a Front & Center crystal mic.

The Bantam is a cool bass amp, with a wild speaker: Yamaha, asymetrical trapezoid shaped w/ white styrofoam cone.


Note: Everybody in this band is under 17 years old.

Shrimp Daddy

Mike Reid is playing an Astatic JT-30 mic with 151 crystal element through a Harpking 6x10 100-watt amp. Great tone!

The Blues Allstars - Live at Ziggies

I'm playing through the Mission Chicago 32-20 amp here. Steve Mignano on guitar, Mahlon Hawk on bass, and Bruce Collins sitting in on drums.

Blues News

I've been elected to the Board of Directors of the Colorado Blues Society.

Champ at Work

Our gig at Jazz @ Jacks in downtown Denver last night had one of those load-ins you dread: Up on the 3rd floor and with long carries. So, I decided to take my lightest amp, the 1971 Fender Champ. I played it at band practice the other day and was impressed by it's nice tone.

Holy crap! When I got it in the big room and cranked it up the little Champ came alive. It was very crunchy and compressed, like you'd expect out of a Champ, but more so. Like a Champ on steroids. It was filthy. And I mean that in a very good way.

This ain't yer daddy's Champ.... It's been modded for harp and has a 10-inch Weber speaker. Bruce Collins at Mission Amps in Denver put in Paper in Oil caps and tweaked the tone stack. He installed beefier transformers and even added a choke. It is twice as powerful as a normal silverface Champ, and way way nastier. It is the junkyard dog of Champ amps.

The gig went well; lots of comments on the harp tone; lots of hyperbole about the band. Our next show is this Saturday at Dazzle Nightclub in Denver, but I plan to play my regular gig rig, the Mission Chicago 32-20 amp. More color and not quite so much grit. But the Champ was a stone blast for one night, and it made the load-in and -out a breeze.