About Me/FAQ/Contact
About me:
My name is Noah Miller. I'm an amateur vintage instrument aficionado, and I have a small collection of guitars, amps, mandolins and other instruments that I pretend I can play well. My taste is skewed towards obscure, cheap and bizarre old specimens; I leave the vintage Fenders and Gibsons to those who can afford them and I concentrate instead on less desirable manufacturers like Valco. I've found that there is a general lack of information available on such companies and their instruments, and misinformation often shows up in Ebay listings and even in magazine articles. This is particularly true for Valco, which is why I've created this website.
I've culled information from a variety of sources: old product catalogs, other Valco fans, magazine articles, various websites (including that irreproachable bastion of veracity, Wikipedia), and my own experiences playing guitars and amps. This website shouldn't be taken as the final word on the subject, but I hope it will be a starting point for someone looking for more info on that Supro they saw for sale.
FAQ:
I do not have any instruments to sell. This site is for informational purposes only, and I am not selling any Valco-related or other instruments or amplifiers.
I
do not give appraisals. There are several reasons for this. First, prices
are all over the map for Valco-built instruments. Prices have never been
standardized the way they have for Fender instruments, for example. Second, I
don’t have time to go searching Ebay, Gbase and blue books for you. I’d be happy
to point you in the right direction to begin your own investigation, though.
I welcome comments, suggestions and corrections. I’m just a hobbyist doing this for fun, and there are plenty of things that I don’t know or will probably get wrong as this page develops. By all means, please send me any obscure Valco-related info you think this page could use. However, I’m no HTML maven (yup, this site was done in FrontPage), so advanced inter-web-netting stuff is out.
I’m not an electronics maven. I know the basics of how tube amps work, and I have a reasonable idea of how different major components affect the overall system, but the nitty-gritty circuit questions will go right over my head.
Please send me your pictures! I welcome pictures of your Valco products, so long as they are in reasonable resolution and fairly clear. Any info you can provide about the subject will be most helpful, including its age and model. If you don’t know anything about it, or if you’re not sure if it was made by Valco, I’ll do my best to figure it out before it goes on the site. I also welcome your amp schematics, and please include whatever info you can (year of build, brand(s) and models, etc.). Any other vintage paper, such as catalogs, hang tags or other booklets is always welcome as well.
No, I will not send you spam or sell your email address to the terrorists. I don't have a mailing list of any sort, nor will I sign you up for someone else's. I also don't give out the contact info of people who have contributed to this site.
Contact:
My email address is ValcoPages@hotmail.com.
Updated 1/4/2009