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There’s been a lot of justified attention paid to the recent passing of Les Paul, but another important music gearhead is now gone from the scene. Ted Weber died Friday.

Weber came to music with an engineer’s fascination in figuring out what made things work. He was best-known for his speakers — he had a whole line of repros of classic rock ‘n’ roll guitar speakers, with better build quality than the originals, and also had a few homebrew designs of his own. In addition, he also sold amplifier kits (!), speaker cabinets and electronic parts, among other products.

Ted served those of us who keep an instrument in one hand and a soldering iron in the other, and that’s a bigger crowd of folks than you might think.

Teresita, my Fender Tweed Deluxe clone, uses a Weber speaker of his own design. I also own one of his tweed-era Jensen speaker clones, which has a nasty grind all its own. The pine-and-white-Tolex cabinet that holds Teresita together is a Weber product. The rectifier in the amp, also from Ted, is a classic example of what Weber liked to do — it’s a solid-state rectifier that’s designed to emulate a tube, providing gradual warm-up to the power tubes and the “sag” that many harp players seek. It does that while being more reliable and using less power than its tube counterpart.

Ted ran his own computer message board and appeared to love nothing more than yakking back and forth with musicians about tone. He was big on dispelling myths — especially those about the “magic mojo” purportedly provided by overpriced, underperforming gear and parts. He put up with harp players in their personal search for tone — which is different in many ways than what a guitar player might want in an amp — and he could back up his claims with honest engineering.

Right now, Weber’s retail site features a graphic of a tombstone with a to-do list engraved on it. The items on that list:

– Build speakers for Jimi
– Lunch with Leo and Les
– Fix Lennon’s amp
– Dinner with Miles and Bird
– Make Heaven louder.

That’s a pretty good list. Weber was 58.

Yes, there is now a Snuggie For Dogs.

Despite its unnecessary wordiness, here’s one of the best explainers I’ve read of what went wrong with the newspaper industry. Make sure you jump over to Part 2, which confronts head-on one of the harshest realities: The staffs of the papers, from management down to the reporters, deserve a big share of the blame.

I have certainly seen that dynamic in action. In particular, I have dealt with more Luddites than I care to imagine over the last decade-plus. It’s one thing for a journalist to not want to engage in the Facebook/Twitter/social media world (although it immediately makes that journalist less valuable) but it’s another entirely for a journalist to still lack basic computer literacy skills some 25 years after personal computers became common.

But in newsroom after newsroom, this cluelessness is celebrated as some odd form of eclectic, artistic expression. You’d think journalists would know better than to celebrate ignorance — we’ve all seen what happens when this sort of thinking takes root in larger groups.

In the real world, successful journalists will learn to work across platforms and will learn how to use new platforms as they become available. And news organizations must learn how to adapt quickly to those new platforms. But even now, for example, most news organizations are minimizing their spending on products that show up on portable devices — using crappy automated solutions even as those devices explode and proliferate. Hell, a lot of news orgs won’t even let their reporters get their e-mail on iPhones yet for amorphous security reasons, even though thousands of companies seem to have resolved this apparently wickedly complex issue, oh, three years ago.

But it’s important, amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, for journalists to look at themselves and say, “This has been coming on for 15 years. Did I help or hurt in this fight?” For many journalists, the honest answer is the latter option.

As a pathetic musical gearhead, I can tell you all about Les Paul. His tone is the tone I love, his tinkering is the kind of tinkering I like to do (although I’m even more sympatico with Leo Fender, a guitar-builder who couldn’t play guitar), his life always made me envious.

I mean, the guy was still gigging in his 90s. I’ve managed to keep gigging at 49, but I feel fairly certain I will not be gigging in my 90s (if, indeed, I *see* my 90s, which would be a surprise). He made one of the two iconic rock ‘n’ roll guitars and definitely the nastier of the two (the Gibson that bears his name).

Les Paul died today. Here’s his obit on NPR.