Prairie Sun Manufacturer Profile: Dunlop Manufacturing; K & M Analog Designs

While I am sure we will to return to introducing our staff and extended producing/engineering family in future issues of the newsletter, I also would like to use this space on occasion to introduce some of the manufacturers with whom we work directly in order to bring our clients the gear, instruments, and accessories that make Prairie Sun an exciting place to make a record. So for this issue I'll tell you about two such companies located right in our neck of the woods.

In recent years I've had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Jim Dunlop, and through him starting a relationship with his company Dunlop Manufacturing. If you're a guitarist, you've probably seen or used their products before! Jim is a friend and an avid reader of the Prairie Sun Newsletter, and thanks to him we not only have a number of Dunlop effects pedals on hand, but also had the privilege of trying out his electric and acoustic guitar strings as he moved into the string manufacturing business, and we now use them extensively on our rather large instrument collection. In fact, some of my engineers became such fans of his electric guitar strings that at first I had trouble keeping a supply on hand!

I've known Bill Krinard of K & M Analog Designs for a number of years now, but it has only been relatively recently that I first got to use one of his Two-Rock guitar amplifiers, and let me tell you, that was a revelatory experience! As mentioned in our Dec `06 newsletter, we are proud to own a Two-Rock Custom Reverb Signature Version 2, hand-built for us by Bill, but that doesn't begin to cover everything that Bill does for us and our clients. Bill of course is an excellent amp tech, and has taken a number of my vintage amp finds and brought out their best, and he has supplied us with NOS vintage tubes not only for guitar amplifiers but for our tube mics as well. On top of all that, as mentioned in the Dec `06 issue, we and our clients also have the privilege of beta-testing various Two-Rock amplifiers, as was the case on both of this year's Chris Duarte sessions. As Chris (pictured) laid down his guitar overdubs Bill brought by various amps that he felt would suit Chris's sound and style, including amps that were on their way to Bill's well-known endorsers like John Mayer.

Mooka's Notes:

As usual, I have made a couple of gear purchases recently that I'm just dying to talk about. One was an item I had been waiting patiently on for quite a while: a vintage Vox AC-30 with Top Boost. This amp was just shown the love from top to bottom and brought up to spec, and because of the legendary Vox volatility is available by special request only. The other item was purchased as part of my dangerous tendency [dangerous only in the way that desserts are dangerous;-)] to go after the Belle of the AES convention: the Bricasti M7 digital reverb. In an era where software plugins and convolution reverbs seem to have long since stolen the algorithm-based hardware reverb's thunder, this little single-rackspace unit has been making a lot of noise (only figuratively, of course!) with it's decidedly "non-digital reverb" sound, and is now doing so in Prairie Sun's Studio A. Last but not least, I have made yet another step towards guitar nirvana by rounding out my vintage Gibson acoustic collection with a `60's J-200, which joins our Dove, J-50, and 1936 Jumbo. The J-200 is currently in the hands of master luthier Tom Cerletti.

I'd like to wish you all a happy holiday season, and I leave you with some words of wisdom from the late Joe Strummer, which I discovered in the documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. In the middle of an extended rant, Strummer cautions us on getting lost in the trees when obsessing over our records, when things get so crazy "you overdub the sound of ants biting through a wooden beam." ;-)