Doctorzamps2

Last updated 04 FEB 2004

Dr Z. Amplifiers - ToneQuest Interview

Click on the Tone
Quest above to
head to their
website

Not an amp of mine, but this has to be one of the best
looking amps I have ever seen. Just sort of a magic
balance to it all

Keep in mind that this interview was done a while ago, so any pricing information may not be accurate.
The Dr. Z line has been expanded with new offerings, and items such as the Air Brake.

Every day we receive questions about all kinds of amps?from $150.00 Alamos rescued from an
eBay-er?s basement, to Fender VibroKings and everything in between. Some players want an amp to
gig with, and others seek the perfect living room tone machine. But what you all clearly share is the
desire to make your amps sound better, or the need to finally discover an amp that will do what your
current amps can?t. There are hundreds of choices, it?s all subjective (although the cream inevitably
rises to the top in the court of public opinion), but perhaps Todd Sharp put it best; amps remain the
great enablers in the Quest for Tone. One trick ponies are fine if you can afford to own a roomful of
amps, otherwise, versatility becomes paramount, doesn?t it? We recently journeyed to Cleveland,
Ohio, home of The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Dr. Z Amplification, to spend a day with Dr. Z and an
evening with ToneQuest advisory board member Buddy Whittington and John Mayall and the
Bluesbreakers. Our interview with Dr. Z follows, and in our next issue we?ll treat you to a blow-by-blow
description of the entire line of Z?s. What makes Dr. Z amps worthy of your attention? They are
hand-built, sensibly priced, simply and sturdily designed, offered in configurations to suit any
application, and?they deliver unmistakable, signature tone that runs the gamut from clear, clean,
harmonic complexity with headroom to spare, to thick, authentic, in-your-face raunch (at less than
ear-shattering volume when needed). Little wonder that Z?s are usually sold well before they ever
reach a dealer?s floor. Our sincere thanks to Dr. Z, Buddy Whittington, and The Bluesbreakers for
giving us an eye-opening glimpse into these wonderful amps, and the best 20-hour day on the road
that one could imagine. Enjoy!

Let?s start with a little history on the Doctor and his amps.

We?ve been building amps for 10 years, and I spent a couple of years prior to that doing repairs.

How did your interest in amps begin?as a guitar player?

Well?actually, I?m a drummer, but I was lucky enough to have a father who was in the radio and TV
repair business. I?m 48, and in the 50?s that was the heyday for tube amps, and our basement was just
filled with tubes and electronic gear. I built the PA?s for the bands I was in at a very early age, and we
used to rehearse at my house (evil chuckle). It?s kind of funny looking back?I feel sorry for some of
the guitar and bass players that were in bands with me because I used to really mess with their amps
when they were gone. If they only knew some of the things I did (and undid) to their amps! I went on to
college and graduated with an electronics degree and spent about 14 years in diagnostic medical
electronics. I was with General Electric medical systems when I decided to do amps full time, and
nuclear medicine cameras seemed to be where my strength was, because those cameras had 55
photomultiplier tubes inside the detector head. I was always considered the ?analog guy? at GE.

So you flipped the standby switch, so to speak, in ?90?

I continued to work my ?day job? if you will until 1992, and that was the time when a lot of decisions
were made for me. One of them was that Joe Walsh got one of my amps and took it out on an Eagles
tour, and I thought, ?Wow, I think I?ve got something!? At that time, I pretty much decided to direct my
attention to building amps full time.

How did Joe get your amp?

Well, he lived in Cleveland and he attended Kent State and studied electronics. We knew each other,
and we had crossed paths over the years?we even played in a battle of the bands together years ago.
His band came in first and mine was second, which ought to tell you something. His former manager
was a good friend of mine, and he thought Joe would dig my amp, so we met one night and Joe took
the amp back to his hotel room and promptly pulled it all apart. I didn?t hear anything from him for
about a year or a year and a half, and all of a sudden I got a call to make Joe another amp and a
speaker cabinet. He needed a backup for the Eagles tour, and the rest is history.

Clearly a pivotal point for you.

Yeah, well I had a very lucrative position in medical electronics and a family to support, but things had
been changing. I was always the guy with the earring and long hair, I was very good at what I did and
they left me alone to do my thing. Then the atmosphere suddenly became much more regimented at GE
and it seemed like a good time to move on.

What was the model amp that you built for Joe?

It was an SRZ 65, which was a 65W, EL34-based amp with gain and master volume. It was the only amp
that I ever built with a cascaded gain circuit. The SRZ evolved into a reverb combo that was reviewed
in Guitar Player back in 1993-94. It had some Marshall characteristics to it, with an ultralinear output
transformer. I?m thinking about reissuing that model. Players? tastes have changed a bit lately and
more powerful amps are coming back into vogue.

Was that truly your first amp?

Not really. The Carmen Ghia was the first amp that I ever sold. To this day, I?ve probably built more of
those heads than any other?somewhere around 400. It wasn?t even called the Carmen Ghia at the
time. I named all of the early amps after my children?my grandson Carmen for the Ghia, and the SRZ
was named after my daughter Sheree Roses. The original configuration for the Carmen Ghia was based
on a Hammond reverb amp. I have a friend named Charlie Jobe, and if you look on Jimmy Smith?s
albums you?ll see him credited?he was the Hammond organ master in the U.S., and he was almost in
his 90?s when I met him. His house was just filled with Hammond stuff, and one day I saw these little
EL84 amps sitting on a shelf and I asked Charlie what they were. He said, ?Oh, those are Hammond
reverb amps?they weren?t very popular.? They were optional for a B100 and it would tie the input from
one of the speakers and drive its own separate speaker through a reverb pan. I thought that would
make a cool guitar amp, so I built a few, and I?d take them to guitar shows and sell every one I?d
brought for around $350 each. Of course, all of the $1,000 amps that I?d brought would be carried back
out at the end of the show because in those days, no one wanted to spend $1,000 on an amp at a
vintage guitar show.

Why did the Carmen Ghias sell so well, aside from their attractive price?

They were just really cool and people dug the tone. People liked the idea of that output tube distortion
at a lower volume, and I think that was around the time when they began to realize that you don?t need
100 watts. But I was also developing the SRZ 65 because I wanted to build a real stage amp. I realized
that was going to be crucial to the future of the company, but at that time production was really slow. I
might have built 5-6 amps a year while I was also doing repairs and working my day gig.

Can you describe what you were trying to achieve with your amp designs?

Well, I wanted to build an original-sounding amp that was going to be very durable, first. And I also
used design ideas that I had used in medical electronics. For example, I?ve always built my amps on a
chromate-converted aluminum chassis.

Why?

In medical electronics, the FDA is very concerned about ground leakage. You can?t scan someone
who might be hooked up to life support equipment and risk shocking them, so ground current has to
be very, very low. One way we got around that is by using chromate-converted aluminum. Aluminum is
already a very good conductor, but the chromate conversion raises conductivity almost to the level of
copper without the cost of a copper chassis. The higher conductivity allows for better grounding,
better earthing, and when I did this with my amps they were clearly very lively and bouncy with that
chassis.

The early Marshall amp chassis were aluminum?

They sure were, and so were the Trainwrecks. Aluminum is a lot more expensive than steel.

What other features are unique to your amps?

Well, some of them are ultralinear.

Please explain?

Sonically, it makes the amp respond like a triode because the screen and the plate are very close to
the same potential, so you get no cross over notch, and the smooth, rich sound of a triode but with the
power of a pentode. It?s also kind of articulate?you hear the primary note and the harmonics without
any mushiness, like with a Hiwatt, for example. I suppose I also just wanted to do something different.
It?s always difficult to describe the tone of my amps because people want to know, ?Does it sound like
a Marshall or does it sound like a Fender?? I just know that a lot of recording artists like the originality
of the sound of my amps because they tell me, ?Man, that?s the sound I?ve had in my head, and I
could never get it out of a Marshall or a Fender.? It?s been more difficult, because it would have been
easier to copy an amp like a Bassman, but I didn?t want to do that?I never did. It?s already been done.
It?s like music?certainly, you learn from the past and it influences you, but you want something original
that builds on the things that have come before.

Are there any other components that are unique to your amps?

I went to Sprague and had coupling caps formulated for Dr. Z amps, and I had one formulated that
brought some of the older Asteron sound, even though those old wax-impregnated caps can no
longer be manufactured. They were highly carcinogenic. But what it really brought me more than
anything else was consistency, because purchasing a very large lot of these components insured that.
If you buy a hundred at a time, they can vary from batch to batch and you wind up fighting that. Maybe
one batch is a little harsher, another brighter. Then you get different lots of tubes and they sound
different, and pretty soon you?re like a dog chasing your tail. So having these capacitors made in
quantity eliminated one of the variables in making the tone of my amps consistently reproducible.

This potential role in the consistency of components keeps coming up when we discuss the tone of
?magical amps? vs. ?dogs? of the same type and era. Guitars often fall within that discussion too. Maybe
we should talk about the Golden Era of Ludwig and Rogers drums while we?re at it.

Exactly. Perhaps the biggest example of this is Marshall. In the early days they would go off on the
weekends and scout around for parts. The values may have been the same, but they might be from
different manufacturers or made at different times. Fender, on the other hand, at least had their shit
together in manufacturing, and they did buy large lots, like those Asterons and the blue-molded caps
used during the blackface era. I remember buying blackface amps when they were new and you?d be
hard-pressed to find 3 identical amps that didn?t sound the same. They were all very, very identical. So
I was really relieved when I realized what those caps were going to do for me in manufacturing.

Can you take a stab at describing the hierarchy or rank of various components in determining and
influencing the tone of an amp?

It?s kind of hard to say, but resistors probably the least, filter caps next, tubes?well, yeah, they?re
pretty important because different manufacturers? tubes have different responses. Output and power
transformers are a very critical part?the heart of an amp, and speakers are the single most important
component in an amp. They?re the final transducers. If the speaker isn?t right for the amp, no matter
how great that amp is, it?s not going to sound that good because that?s what you?re going hear. The
speaker has to be tweaked and designed as part of the system when you design a combo amp.

What kind of speakers do you prefer?

More often than not, Celestion. I?ve had some luck with Weber VST, and I?m in the process of building
my own 10? speaker, getting British cones and American baskets and doing the final assembly here.
The last employee I hired was the hottest speaker reconer here in town, but inhaling all of that glue
finally got to him and he wanted out of reconing, so he?s building speakers with us now.

How did you arrive at the speaker choices you currently use?

It all depends on the individual amp itself. I use a lot of Celestion Vintage 30?s as well as the G12H30,
which is the 70th Anniversary 30W speaker. They initially only shipped that speaker to the U.S. for a
year. I loved that speaker, and I talked to my Celestion rep and asked him why they weren?t coming
over anymore. He said, ?Well, Z, you were the only guy using them.? I said, ?Get outta here! They
sound great!? I discovered that Celestion continued to make them, but they just stopped bringing
them in, so I put some pressure on to get those shipped here again and I still use them now. I find that
the Vintage 30 has a rich harmonic that leaps off the cone and a nice brilliance, but they kind of lack
lower mid and bass response. The G12H30 is just the opposite?very rich in lower mids and bass
response. Think of the early Hendrix and Clapton recordings. So when you combine those 2 speakers
together in a cabinet you really expand your bandwidth, almost like a hi-fi cabinet where you have a
tweeter and a woofer. They compliment each other, and you?re not notched into a specific sound. It?s
very friendly to all different styles of music and players, and they really dig it.

Now, our Theile ported 2x12 cabinet?far be it for me to blow my own horn, but I haven?t heard a better
sounding 2x12 cabinet. I?ve never seen a 2x12 Theile ported cab?the single 12 has been done before,
and I thought that if 1x12 sounds good, then 2x12?s will sound even better. The key to the Theile port
design is that it does have a shelf as well as a port, and by adjusting the shelf width you can adjust the
midrange response of the cabinet, and by adjusting the depth of the port, you adjust the low-end
response. By selecting the driver, you also determine the treble response. So I can really dial in the
cabinet to accentuate or balance whatever frequencies I want just by the way that cabinet is built, and I
tune it to 30Hz. There are bass players that use our 2x12 cabinet and they are loaded with 2 heavy
drivers. That?s a little bit low for guitar players, but there are still beat notes and harmonics generated
that now come out clear and don?t turn to mud like they do with other cabs. The horizontal front port
also gives you the ambiance of an open-backed cabinet, because you hear what?s coming out of the
cones, and then you hear what?s coming out of the port, like the sound that?s coming out of the back
and around the cabinet in an open-back design. So it does have a nice ambiance, and it?s not as
focused and beamy as a 4x12.

There?s also another design we do that?s interesting. Going back to the Eagles tour, I noticed
something that was being done by Clair Brothers Sound, which is one of the biggest companies that
builds sound systems for the big tours. One day I was looking into their side-fill cabs and I noticed that
the speaker was recessed a couple of inches behind the baffle. So I get a flashlight, and I?m looking at
these cabs and one of the guys from Clair Brothers says, ?Hey Man, whaddya doin? Get away from that
shit!? It turned out that this guy was one of their engineers, we started talking, and he explained what
they were doing with what was known as a tone ring in the Fender days. Well, they do the same thing
with what they call lens technology. I now make a lens that consists of two ¾ inch thick sections of
plywood that the speaker is mounted behind, and what that does is enable you to dial in the projection
of the cabinet by the depth of the lens. It makes those 2x10?s in the MAZ Jr. sound like 2x12?s
because essentially I?m adding an inch and a half to the cone diameter. You know how 2x10 amps
sound really nice when you?re a guitar cord length away from them, but get 20 feet away, and they
begin to sound a little tiny? The lens technology gives them a much bigger sound. It?s a little like the
old horn technology where they calculated different throw lengths for those horns.

This lens technology is used only with your open-back cabinets?

Yeah?the closed-back cabinets don?t need to be any louder. It?s a very big sounding cabinet, and it?s
interesting?2 Vintage 30?s are initially very impressive when you hit that first chord, but after 30 or 40
minutes, they tend to become a bit fatiguing to my ear, and I want to reach over and either turn down,
or turn off. But when I coupled the Vintage 30 with the G12H30, we got a lot more pleasant sound with
great sparkly top-end and big low-end, and it brought the db level of the cabinet down very nicely.

Do you consult with your customers on their power needs and speaker configurations?

I do to a degree. I hope that people will defer to a specific design that already exists since I?ve done
so much research in developing them, but if someone wants Vox Bluebells, we?ll do that.

We asked Buddy Whittington if he had any problems with his amps, touring so much in Europe?

Yeah, he?s taken that little Studio Deluxe around the world 3 times, and with the exception of one
instance where it was dropped so hard that the transformer was left dangling from the chassis, he?s
had great luck with it. Buddy has connected with my amps about as well as anyone I know.

The first time we heard ?Dead City? on Blues for the Lost Days it really was a wake up call. A big part, of
course, was Buddy?s touch, but the sound of those amps was also so definitive and unique?

Yes, I think my amps are especially suited to touch-sensitive players like Buddy.

Let?s talk about the individual models for a moment. One of the major barriers to consistently achieving
great tone seems to be rooted in a problem that we hear about often from readers and Web surfers. They
flirt with a big, impressive-looking, beautifully built amp, and once they get it home or take it to a gig, it?s
revealed to be way too much amp for the room and they?re relegated to squashing their signal through a
stompbox or settling for wimpy tone at ?2-3.? The amp is never able to really cook. You?ve come up with
different amps to directly address that problem, right?

Yes. I went at it from the point of, OK, a Super Reverb?using that as the sound level and volume
that?s very usable for 75% of the bands out there playing 100 seat clubs. Well, 38W was the key, so I?m
going to start from there and work forward from the input jack. 38W gives you plenty of power, it gives
you enough of that nice singing output distortion that you can push the amp into without being
obtrusive, and you still have enough clean headroom to be able to play clean passages at a gig. And I
also found that 38W was still a bit too loud for a lot of people?those who maybe don?t play out, who
play with their buddies and enjoy their music, but who don?t want to kill their families at home while
they?re getting their ya ya?s out. That?s where I think a lot of the first 18W Carmen Ghias went. People
got these little amps and they were amazed at the harmonic complexity from 2 knobs. They were so
simple and kind of brainless. Just set the tone for your guitar, adjust the volume and go. But it?s not
exactly a bedroom amp?it has a lot of girth, and it certainly does have some power and a lot of low end.
People started using them to play out, and if you aren?t concerned too much with clean headroom, the
Ghia is a blast. It?s a very inspirational amp. You can have a ball playing it and nobody is giving you
dirty looks because of the volume.

Then came the MAZ Jr.?2 EL84?s, no negative feedback, master volume, reverb, a cut control, and
either a single 12 or 2x10?s. It?s a little bit different design than the MAZ 38, but it uses the same front
end as far as the tone stack and reverb circuit. From the phase inverter on, however, it?s a totally
different amp, and more akin to the Ghia. It?s probably closer to 22W?24W, and it will produce a nicer
low-level distortion with its master volume because it has no negative feedback. The harmonics are
there?it?s very rich?but it also has enough get up and go because I use very, very efficient speakers
in the 2x10 and a Celestion Greenback in the 1x12. Coupled with the lens technology used in building
the cabinet, it makes for a pretty damn loud amp.

Can you describe the cut control?

It?s a little filter network that inputs the grids of the output tubes, similar to the way a presence
control works, but a presence control adjusts the amount of frequency that?s in the negative
feedback. Presence is supposed to make the amp sound closer to you without being louder, by
increasing some of the top end. The cut control is a little different? almost like a single tone control
that works the output tubes. It?s a nice control for a couple of different applications. If you?re going to
play with a lot of distortion, perhaps turning the master volume down and using a stompbox to boost
the signal coming into the amp, you can set the cut control at about 9 o?clock and it gets rid of all of
the top end zizzy shit that comes with more gain. Now you have this big, thick, chunky distortion at low
volume that sounds like a big amp?thick and rich. Or, let?s say you?re playing a Tom Petty tune and
you want that sparkling, chimey sound. Turn the cut control up, and now your high strings are just
ringing with that ?tinsel coming off the ceiling? kind of sound. As far as I know the concept was first
developed with the Vox AC30. The cut control also gives you the ability to scoop frequencies and you
can subtly adjust the volume of your amp by simply nudging the cut control, too.

What other specific features are unique to your amps?

I probably have a couple of original designs that are unique to my amps, and they were all evolved
from a circuit that?s called a conjunctive filter. It?s a filter that goes across the primary side of the
output transformer. The Carmen Ghia has a very traditional conjunctive filter, or corrective filter, as
it?s described in the RCA Receiver?s Handbook. It affects the primary impedance of the transformer
and allows frequencies to be very flat, or balanced. From say, 100Hz to 3K, the amplitude is the same.
So from the high E to low E strings if your pick attack is the same, you?ll get the same volume from the
notes. The volume of individual notes isn?t frequency dependent. So going back to what we were
saying earlier about the touch dynamic of our amps, all that is related to the conjunctive filters that we
use, and you?re really in control because of them.

And this is unique to the Z?s?

No one else uses it. It?s something I found in an old RCA book of my dad?s, and again, it?s referred to
as a corrective filter. It was just a little side note on how to make an amplifier more linear within a
certain band of frequencies. When you strum a chord, each note makes it?s own contribution to the
sound without one note overpowering the other. Jazz players love it when they?re playing those big,
6-string chords?it really puts a twinkle their eye when they hear it.

The Prescription is another one in which I went with a different approach with the conjunctive filter. I
have Todd Sharp to thank for that. We were in the tuning room for a Rod Stewart show and I?d sent
Todd some parts for a Dr. Z Prescription he was using. We started playing around, and before you
know it, we had evolved it into a really cool sound with different values of resistors and caps that we
used. It?s funny how working with artists, you develop things.

Which model of all the Z?s is the most popular?

Looking at ?99, it?s pretty close. The Route 66 was at the top, followed very closely by the Carmen
Ghia and The MAZ Jr. The MAZ 38 has always been a constant seller, especially whenever Buddy is out
on the road. Wherever he plays, I always get a call the next day. One of the reasons is that Buddy is
just so open and friendly. He doesn?t have that rock star attitude, in fact, he?ll talk your ear off.

How about The KT45?

Well, all of this information is available on our web site but the short answer is, listen to The Who Live
at Leeds. That?s the sound of The KT45.

What?s on the horizon, Z?

The Z28 will be a 6V6 based amp with an EF86 front end in a 4x10 combo initially, and I?ll probably build
it as a head eventually. Simple control layout?volume, treble, and bass, along the lines of The Route 66
and KT45. It?s a perfect club amp, voiced somewhat like the old brown Deluxe with a little more
modern sound.

And that?s it for now?

Yeah?well, I have a product that I build when I see fit called The Mazerati. Here comes Joe Walsh
again. Joe comes into the shop, puts his arm around me and says, ?Z, I love the Carmen Ghia, now go
build me a 100W Carmen Ghia.? I said, ?Joe, I can?t do that, but I could build you a double-power 30W
Carmen Ghia with 4 EL84?s.? He said, ?OK, do it,? and that?s The Mazerati. It sells for $999, and I?ve
sold a lot of them to guys that have Ghias and wanted a little more power and volume.

Do you sell direct?

Just the Carmen Ghia and the speaker cabinets, but if people want to know where they can find a
specific model, or who among our dealers is due to receive a specific model, I can usually help them.

Do you have a personal favorite?

Oh, that?s like saying which child do you love the most, you know? It?s kind of a toss up from day to
day, but certainly the one I?m most proud of is The Route 66. It?s my latest design?it?s the first of my
amps that won the Guitar Player Editor?s Pick Award, and it is a very different, unique, and original
design. And it?s also a very simple amp, meaning that it?s what every manufacturer wants, which is an
amp that sounds great and is also very easy to build. I offer a lifetime warranty for that amp because it
is so?

Over built?

Yes. The output transformer is probably rated for 3 times the power output that I use. The power
transformer is just an exquisitely built Schumacher that is 2-3 times rated for its use. I used my own
Genelex Golden Lion KT 66?s out of my McIntosh hi-fi amp in the development of Route 66, and I did all
of the things that Genalex proscribes for the proper installation and construction of an amp with
KT66?s. For example, the tubes are 3.5 inch center-spaced. That?s a concern that Genalex had
because the KT66?s are such large glass-bottle tubes that radiate so much heat that the spacing must
be 3.5 inch center-spaced. The original Genalex tubes were rated for 10,000 hours of service. Now, I
don?t know if the Valve-Art KT66?s that I use will last 10,000 hours, but the testing that I?ve done
shows that we?ll get at least 5,000 hours out of the Chinese tube.

There are a lot of relatively small boutique amp manufacturers today, and Matchless, for example, became
known for building supremely overbuilt amps, yet ultimately the company failed. What has enabled you to
be successful?

I think the biggest problem that Matchless had that I?ve avoided is that as I?ve developed new amps,
they?ve gotten better and better. The problem with Matchless was that their DC30 Series was a
wonderful sounding amp, hands-down, but they subsequently failed to come up with anything that
could match it. They spent a lot of time and money on R&D and they could never improve on the DC30.
It was also a very labor-intensive amp that was extremely well-built, but that was one of the problems.
Look inside of one of them?there were no shortcuts. You?d have a tech sitting at a bench for days
building one of those amps. My best amp is the next one I?m going to do, as far as I?m concerned.

Do you think that perhaps 14 years of prior experience in big business helped take your interest in amps
from your basement to a full-fledged, successful company?

I believe so. It was very easy for me because I went into it with a rigorous background in product
development and engineering. Also, if I make a commitment, I?m going to meet it, and I try to run my
company so that we are efficient and we can get out 30-35 pieces every month. That seems to be about
as much as I can do, and doing any more doesn?t seem like it?s going to get me a lot more. I don?t
want to flash out and expand so much that my overhead makes us no longer profitable. Sometimes
success is more difficult to deal with than failure. Your overhead goes up, you hire more people,
you?re going thought parts at a faster clip, your suppliers start sending you junk, you have to keep the
flow going so you accept substandard quality from your suppliers, and it trickles down into the quality
of your amps. I can?t do that. You have to be in a position to reject substandard parts. If they?re not
right, they go back, because now your name is on the product, not the guy who made the chassis or
the tranny. They don?t give a shit?just pay your bill in 30 days, you know? But my name is on the amp
forever.

How do you maintain quality control?

By overlapping my supply orders so that I?m never in such a bind that I don?t have ample time to test
and check components.

Do you mean that you check all of the transformers that come in?

No, but I spot-check them. Believe me, trannies are the least of my problems. Purchasing from
Schumacher and Cin-Tran, both are wonderful tranny companies. Each transformer is individually
wrapped and the quality is pretty unbelievable. I was fortunate to hit if off with the reps from both of
these companies in the beginning, and even though I was just getting started, they treated me like
mine was a very large company.

Sounds like that was a sign that you were doing what you were meant to do. When that happens, things
tend to fall into place don?t they?

I guess so?there were so many things that worked that way with Joe Walsh, Charlie Jobe, all of the
things that have happened in this business. I have to say that luck, or somebody up above looking out
for me has directed me to make the right decisions and keep the company going. It?s relatively stress
free. I come in at 7:30 a.m. and I have just as much energy at 7 in the evening. Perhaps the other thing
that differentiates us from other boutique manufacturers is that we have 7 or 8 different models and
they kind of do fit 7 or 8 different niches. I sell tons of amps in Nashville, and I never would have
believed it. I found out that Nashville is the place. Better than L.A., better than Chicago, better than
New York. There are so many players, they all want their individual sound, and they don?t mind
spending money. To those guys, that?s their life, man. It?s true in other places, but in certain pockets
of the country some people are always pushing me for an endorsement. I don?t know how many phone
calls I get a day asking me about my endorsement program. I tell them it?s pretty simple?you endorse a
check to me and I build you an amp. That?s my endorsement policy. I found out a long time ago that
when you give something to someone it really doesn?t mean a lot. It?s the investment in time and
money that creates something of value to people, and when you give it away, more often than not it
just ends up collecting dust. If it?s not getting used, what?s the point? Hey, I?m kind of an
underground cat anyway, and I like it like that.

My thanks to ToneQuest at www.tonequest.com for producing this article.