Last night when I was with the band, halfway through our jam session I made the decree (It should be noted that many years ago I decreed that I could now decree things) that we should play our songs differently than how we usually do. To me, this is always fun because it opens things up to new ideas and better yet, a lack of preconceived ideas. No one can say, "You aren't playing it right!" It was very fun and I think we sounded pretty great! I was also not experiencing that awful crackling sound through my amplifier that I had last time we jammed. After removing components one by one from my system to try to isolate the cause, I decided the likely culprits were my guitar pickups which had become loose and were moving and vibrating. Dave informed me after, that during the testing phase, we plugged his guitar into my system and got the same noise. Darn! That was true! However, the bad noise was now gone leading me to conclude that it was one of those all-too-common situa...