Effects Bay

For my 200th post of EffectsBay.com, I’d like to make a cool announcement. Two site sponsors (Cheese Block Effects and Gear Alley) have partnered up where Gear Alley will be the exclusive Canadian dealer of Cheese Block Effects!

Matt at Cheese Blocks has been a great supporter offering some sweet guest posts in the past, so if you’re in Canada contact Gear Alley and ask about the sCream Cheese overdrive. On that note, we’ll be reviewing that pedal soon, so keep a look out for that!

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As some of you know that Harmony Central has been down for several days now. Initially, they directed traffic to their Twitter account (@harmonycentral) which was keeping people informed of the status. They would reference the outage to ‘maintenance’ which I thought was a bit weird, but today they issued a letter explaining the situation, and it looks pretty ugly:

Here is the relevant chunk of the letter. Please read the full letter here.

What Happened.

Someone without authorization temporarily gained access to the Harmony Central site.  That person or persons also gained access to our stored member information, which includes e-mail addresses.  If you have provided us with other information, like your date of birth, we have also stored that information.  Our stored information also includes member passwords, which are protected by multiple levels of encryption.

Our Response.

Our team stopped this intrusion.  We are working hard to further improve the security of the Harmony Central site.  We regret that this incident has caused the site to go offline temporarily.  We also regret any concern that this incident may cause you.

Since user accounts and personal information may have been exposed, they are recommending that all users update their passwords as soon as the site is back up. The passwords were stored encrypted, but to be safe we should ALL update our information.

As of today, the site is still down

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Wow, 2 days in a row where I’m re-posting news from MMR (Musican Merchandise Review)! The NashvillePost.com reported that Federal agents and local police seizedwood, guitars, etc from Gibson Guitar’s Massman Road facility in Nashville.

Here is a chunk of relevant info:

Sources say the guitar manufacturer is being investigated for violating the Lacey Act, a key piece of environmental law, for importing endangered species of rosewood from Madagascar.

Rosewood is widely used in the construction of guitars and sells for $5,000 per cubic meter, more than double the price of mahogany. The island nation off Africa’s east coast is a key producer of the hardwood, the export of which has links to international criminal activity.

You can read the entire story at Musical Merchandise Review.

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I was just sent this interesting news link stating that Musician’s Friend is cutting 75 jobs from their northland distribution center (Missouri). It’s sad to see jobs disappearing, but it’s quite puzzling it’s not due to the bad economy?

An exact number of layoffs remain uncertain, said Galen Erickson, vice president of fulfillment at Musician’s Friend in Kansas City. Some of the affected workers could find jobs within the warehousing unit or other affiliated retail stores.

Musician’s Friend is closing a call center and a retail clearance store at the distribution center. Both business decisions are strategic rather than because of the economic downturn, Erickson said.

You can read the full article at Musical Merchandise Review.

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So, we’ve been having some major issues with our host the last few weeks, and in a fit of rage this morning, I decided to move the site to another host. This is good AND bad. If you’re reading this message today.. this is good, since you’re hitting the correct server. Alot of people will still be hitting the old (crappy) host though until the DNS change takes affect for everyone.

The others will constantly be seeing old error messages or ‘denied’ errors until their DNS updates. I apologize for that. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to let everyone know via Twitter and Facebook about the situation. I’m sure there will be a few issues regarding this transition, but hopefully they’ll all be resolve quickly.

Oh, speaking of Facebook.. there is a EffectBay page there now, so it’s time to fan up!

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I was very bummed today to discover the Les Paul passed away. He died from complications related to pneumonia. He was 94 years old.

Les Paul was a amazing human being. Unique in the respect of his level of guitar play along with a very technical mind. He was inducted in the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. He created multi-track recording, the modern pickup, solid body guitar, etc, etc. On top of his great inventor’s mind, he could absolutely slay on the guitar.

Les Paul Trio / Les Paul & Mary Ford.. you should youtube some of this stuff up. It’s fantastic.

Here is a link to a web site discussing his passing:

http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=425984&GT1=28102

If you have an opportunity, you should watch “Les Paul – Chasing Sound”. This is a fantastic documentary about the man. Here is a small clip:

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