Hard-Core Gear Porn Friday!!!

Yet another HCGPF from our favorite thread on Vintage Synth Explorer’s forums. This nice little setup belongs to one Spookyman, of Jura, Switzerland. It obviously isn’t as over-the-top as our normal entries, but he’s got some fun shit I thought worth noting. In the picture above, obviously the blue Rhodes is the first thing to catch your eye. I don’t know if that’s actual blue tolex, or if it was painted (almost certainly the latter) but I like the looks of it. Good ol’ Jupiter 6 and a Korg CX-3 round things out. I don’t know what that Sisme Space Master amp thing is, but I want one.

Spookyman is very much a traditionalist with his synth collection. This leads me to believe that he is a keyboard player, as opposed to a keyboard collector. Everything he owns that I can see in the pictures is very playable. The odd bit is that, of the five pictures provided, except for little spoilers here and there, you’d not be able to peg the date of the pictures.

Right after Spookyman’s pictures in the Thread That Never Ends are a couple from a guy (girl?) called elsongs that are also worth a gander.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’ve stopped running Google ads on this page. If you’re curious, there is a reason behind that. If I didn’t ask for clicks, I would do, on average, $2 to $3 a day. On HCGPF when I did ask for clicks, I’d get $40 to $100. So the three or four fridays together would add up to a couple hundred bucks a month, which is more than enough to pay for the box this site sits on, and leave some money left over for Rocket Chocolate and a pack of Hebrew Nationals. However, pretty much every time I’d ask for clicks, Google would write me saying that asking for clicks is a violation of their TOS. I didn’t really give a fuck about their TOS, and told ’em so, and they turned off my ads to punish me. So I said “fine, go fuck yourselves.”

So, now I will run paid advertisements and affiliate programs on the right side. Here’s the deal, though. I don’t particularly care for companies that rely on advertising for their bread and butter, but say “we’re not responsible for the content of these ads.” I think that, if you take payment, you’re responsible. So the ads that appear on the right side will only be for products I use and support. If a company (and you better be boutique; otherwise don’t bother writing) wants to advertise on this site, you need to send me the product you want to advertise, and if I like it, I’ll run your ad, and the product will be your payment. If I don’t like it, I’ll send it back, and that’ll be that. So then you, the readers, know that I’m not going to run any bullshit ads that are for stuff I don’t stand behind.

Whether that’s a wise course of action or not remains to be seen, but I’ve had it with this whole “monetize your site” thing, and I’ve really had it with Musician’s Friend and Sweetwater ads for Behringer shit mixers and Edirol monitors.