The Steel Guitar Forum

Years ago I had my steel set up in a tiny bedroom in a mobile home we were living in. I was playing one night and my wife came in and decided she would give me a little smooch. She was barefoot and standing on an A/C vent in the floor which was evidently grounded opposite from my amp. Talk about an electrifying kiss, thats one we both still remember about 26 years later.

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Darvin Willhoite
Riva Ridge Recording

"HOT LIPS"!.....or WHAT?

My lil dog came padding across the living room carpet and then tried to lick my nose for a big doggy kiss. The "crack" of electricity was a shock but the expression on her lil nose was something I'll never forget.

Wish I could make as much money playing steel as I do producing Electricity! Rem. the price of electricity has only doubled ONE TIME in the past 40 years. Little known fact of little interest, but the name of the subject here was "Has Electricity been good to you". In my case, yes.

Electricity has never been good for me.

Working in electronics, I've been zapped probably one too many times..

Skip,

Your post reminded me of one of the first jokes I ever remember hearing. Some guy was telling it to my old man not all that long after the big one. Itwas about three buddies talking about cars that they were going to buy for thier girlfriends. 1st one says, I am going to get a Kaiser and surprise her, 2nd says, I think I'll get a Frazer and amaze her. 3rd one says, I have decided on the Tucker.

John Drury
NTSGA #0003

Sooooooo, finally someone that can remember far and beyond yesterday. A "Tucker"? I remember that promotional con-game. Does anyone else? You have to be elderly in order to have experienced it.

Ray Montee, You, my friend, ought to have an immunity to electricity by now!, if not, maybe an honorary excemption from Thor!!!!

This is so dumb, I didn't want to post it. My wife got me a new pager and I had it on vibrate so as not to disturb any one at work. I was working on a radar set and was just about to ground out the maggie circuit with a probe. Just as I was about to touch the power supply, that pager went off and I threw things all over the shop trying to get away from it. The rest of the shop thought it was kinda funny but I didn't the next day when I was so stiff I couldn't even move some muscles. Like Jack, I've been hit so many times there doesn't even have to be any current there to make me do some violent moves !!

Regards, Paul

I shouldn't add this to the thread but it's funny and Paul and his pager reminded me of it.

I had a female Novell CNE working for me at our Help Desk. The Help Desk area was in a computer room with raised floor tiles. She came in one morning and as usual put her purse on the floor under her desk. About an hour after she got there she made a comment about feeling the floor vibrating. No one else felt anything and they didn't do anything. About 30 minutes later she said she felt the floor vibrating again so the guys started looking for the cause, removing floor tiles and checking the plenum underneath, etc and couldn't find anything. She got the vibrations about an hour after that and finally realized her pager was set to the vibrator mode and being in her purse that was on the floor that was what she was feeling. She caught hell about her "vibrator" the rest of the time she worked there (about 6 months and then transferred to headquarters in Baltimore).

Jack: Thanks for the laugh. I needed that !!

Regards, Paul

Within only a few months of my getting zapped at the Kaiser/Frazer Dealership Open House extravaganza....my little wrist watch seized to function. The clocksmith said it was completely magnetized! In High School, at the annual tech-show, they'd always place a young man ( a senior, don't you know )atop a large metal plate. He'd sit on a metal covered bar stool and while wearing metal guitar finger picks, they'd hit him with the electricity as they'd also dim the room lites. There was electrical fire squirting out from his finger picks and just about everywhere else....some a foot or more in length......blue and white fingers of electrical energy and all.
That is just about how I looked in the various TRUE EVENT scenarios that I have shared in this thread.
Just couldn't believe I was the only one that was so susceptible to electricty.
THanx guys for all of the personals.....
And Paul, I can surely relate to the episode about the vibrator..... WHEW!!!

It's rather amazing how new occurances, experienced by other folks, will jog the memory of we old timers......to days of yester-year and the like.
I just remembered a situation that happened some years back. As fate would have it, I was playing "a freebie" for a friend that couldn't make the retirement party for this elderly lady. I hauled my equipment some 50 miles for this festive occasion, up in the back woods in a large, old fashioned grange hall.
We'd played the first two sets and were on our break. Some kids had gotten up on the stage and were jumping around and while doing so, they seriously irritated my REVERB in my Session 400 amp. The more noise it made, the more they repeated their jumping technic in order to repeat the loud irritating electronic noises. YES! Quite an accomplishment, wouldn't you have to agree?
One of the kids finally hollared down to me that "gee's, it's smoking!"
I hollared back, "get off the stage and leave it alone and it will likely quit smoking!"
Moments later, I observed a grayish mist hovering over the top of my Session. I also noticed the two VERY BRIGHT flickering lights about two inches apart, right in the center of my speaker cabinet......it could be seen right through the speaker mesh-matting or whatever you real musicians call it. As I viewed this in astonishment, I said to myself: "SELF, there aren't supposed to be any little flickering RED LIGHTS inside that speaker cabinet".
Obviously, I denoted, the sucker was on fire! I ran up to the stage and some guy was standing there with a fire extinguisher in his hands and as I unplugged it and started to carry it in his direction in an effort to get it out doors, I told him to shoot it with the fire retardant.
His response: "It'll likely ruin it!"
I told this idiot to shoot it, otherwise I'd likely end up with nothing more than a leather handle to carry it with.
The reason for sharing this thing with you is this: For a number of weeks before, I had been getting very light tingling sensations in my hands while playing my Emmons. My bar hand would tend to be sticky and would not slide as freely as I'd imagined it normally did.
I'd always check around me to see if the floor was wet or concrete was entirely covered as insulation for me.
Whenever I'd mash a pedal to make some pretty music, I'd get this electrical "Popping" sound. I then noticed that there were large nicks "burned out" of my pedal bar across the front of the guitar in the vicinity of my Emmons volume pedal.
Matching "nicks" were found in the pedal as well. These were like the electrical burns you'd see in a scale model railroad locomotives' wheels from DC arching from the rails, and all.
The final analysis,was the Session 400 had developed a short, just PAST the FUSE...
and in that area where AC current is changed into DC current or whatever(?). This overloaded my speaker cone causing the FIRE and thus....is the end of my story about electricity.
If you hear electrical popping sounds while playing your pedal steel, take a moment and examine the seperate parts that ultimately touch one another during the course of your playing. You could be experiencing an electrical failure that's about to occur in your system.
HOLY SMOKE!

Skip, you mention DC power which the some of the young bucks may really not know much about except in car batteries. 150 years ago, (or so it seems), I was booked with this country band to play a gig in a remote country community hall way out in the boondocks. I set up ok, then turned the amp on. WOW! The damned thing went up in smoke! It was completely ruined in a matter of seconds! Someone in their mighty wisdom had installed regular wall plugs, but unknown to any of us, those plugs contained DC current pumped in from a diesel generator out back of the hall. I was later told they were preparing for a regular AC line which was the reason they installed those normal wall plugs. It was a tube amp. There was no hope for it after that experience. I ended up playing steel through the hall's P.A. System...sounded terrible.

One of the facets of my electronic career was as a Bio-Medical Technician in a hospital Open Heart Clinic. One of the schools I attended was for Electro-Surgical units that used an HF current ( A Radio Transmitter actually.) to replace a scalpel (SP ?).

The school was in Boulder CO and to show how safe their units were, one of the reps would be connected to the unit with a light bulb in his mouth and when the unit was keyed, the bulb would light up. Since then, when ever we play in an electrical storm, I wonder if my teeth will light up. Perhaps I should be worried if I'll be augmented or diminished by the electricity should it happen to me. I know a lot this sounds funny but I also wonder if it really is.....

Regards, Paul <FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Paul Graupp on 11 November 2001 at 05:23 PM.]</p></FONT>

One of my friends in grade school took a dare and a bet for $5.oo that he could "whiz" on a John Deere tractor spark plug, while the old two cylinder "poppin Johnny was running." Suffice to say he was not a member of the mensa club. He did say there was a "beneficial" side effect for a few days. He was built like the adult film star John Holmes, but only temporarily.

Jim Bob: I've heard nurses talking about the John Holmes effect when they were in a defib situation. Those paddles to jump start your heart made a MAN out of you but back then it didn't seem so funny to me. I've heard of TONE you'd die for but never a BONE !!

Regards, Paul

Paul.......you're almost terrible! Almost!!

I don't know about the rest of you guys but after reading over some of these posts on errent electricity, and I don't doubt the validity of a single one of them, not even for a brief moment, I am not only shocked but somewhat REVOLTED!!

Ray: Is that like being reignited ? There are times when I could use some of that !!

Regards, Paul

Has Electricity been good to me? My electric steel guitar sounds much better than a gas operated one and it is much cleaner and no smell, haha, Gary

I've been foolin' around with "blue stuff" since I was 7 or 8. And, like Jack Stoner, I've been "bit" more times than I care to remember. The worst was when I once made a "Jacobs ladder" (that device you see in all the old sci-fi films, where the arc of electricity travels up to the top of two rods which form a sharp "vee"). Well, I used an old ignition transformer, from an oil burner (since I didn't have the neon-sign transformer they normally use). And, since I had been working with the "blue stuff" for many years, I knew I could handle one "hot" end as long as I wasn't grounded. WRONG!!! With that much voltage (about 14,000) the "blue stuff" don't much care if you're grounded or not! I got an "instant buzz", and a burn, as a reminder that there's some things best "left alone"!