Louder = Better

Spent the weekend doing important stuff, like, umm, restringing the Babe (pictured, in the chair - it's a Gibson Les Paul Classic). I need to restring Sara too (that's the acoustic), but I wanted to play instead of bumble with the strings so I put that off until later this week.

Stuffed animal (pictured) is a chew toy that baby girl left to keep me company. 

I needed my roommate to experience the full awesome of The Babe played through my Fender DeVille 4x10 amp. The amp is appropriate for 'small to medium sized gigs', and totally inappropriate for a 10x10 room with hardly any furniture and hardwood floors. It's also perfect when your roommate is suffering on the couch with a hangover. Sorry bro. Kind of.

Total number of seconds I played before a screw from the vent rattled out of the ceiling and fell to the floor: ~6. (Some of the falling fasteners are also attributable to the stereo. We do a brisk business in loud music here at Chez Spencer.)

Took me a while to get the tone I was hoping for. One of the (dis)advantages of a tube amp is that they don't start to sound good unless you turn them up. The volume increase is nonlinear, so it goes from inaudible (setting 1, seriously, it doesn't even make noise until you get to 2), to 'kind of loud' (2-5)  to 'deafening' (5-12; hells yeah it goes to 11). You can keep turning the volume on the amp up but you only get a minor increase in volume up above about 8; instead the tone changes as you push more power through the tubes. Further complicating matters are volume and tone controls on the guitar. So many variables! So much power!

Invited the roommate to plug in the acoustic (she's an acoustic-electric) and jam but he said he 'doesn't know how to play'. I pointed out that didn't stop me, but he demurred. I'm optimistic he might get involved next time. Next step: learn a song for the electric. Or two. Maybe two.

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Brief technical description for Music Whiz Scotty B, who has a similar guitar and same amp, and will want to know what settings I used. Skip this part if you aren't into minutiae.
Tone pickup on LP (front?), guitar pickup volume at 5, pickup tone maxed, amp volume to 4, amp treble at 6, regular drive, and I forget the other settings. no reverb.