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OT: Dumble amps



I know this is a bit off topic but I thought some of you analog heads and guitar tone freaks might get a kick out of this.

As you may know, Alexander (don’t call me Howard) Dumble is a legendary custom builder of guitar amps that now because of there rarity and celebrity connections (Robben Ford, Larry Carlton, and more recently, Carlos Santana to name a few)  fetch ridiculous amounts of money. John Mayer single handedly drove the price up and then down a couple of years ago when he bought as many as he could find, kept and had cloned his favorite one, and sold the rest, thus flooding the market temporarily. There are only around 300 of these amps in existence, so half dozen amps is flooding the market. This is information coming from what I believe to be reliable sources, but even if its urban legend, it’s a testament to how revered and coveted by collectors these amps are. I was the test driver of an amp that was sold by the widow of a prominent local musician a while back, and I’ve played a couple of others over the years. The amp I most recently played hadn’t been played in over 10 years, so it needed to be cleaned up a bit but all of the tubes where good and once it had been burned in for a while, it played and performed like Dumble Amps are known for, amazing clean sounds at any volume and creamy versatile overdrive at any volume, with fantastic headroom and touch sensitivity. It was a 100 watt overdrive special head with a two twelve cabinet with EVM speakers. It sold for $50,000!!!!!!  Dumble started building amps in Santa Cruz before moving to LA, so I knew people back in the day that owned them, I even owned an early  60 watt slave power amp for a little while in the 80’s but I let it go. It was nothing Like his flagship amps. Recently I have become intrigued with trying to capture that sound without spending $50,000.  Dumble amps are a unique combination of solid state and tube designs, with the solid state portion being an FET preamp at the front end of the amplifier , soft clipping and driving the preamp and power tube stages, in other words a built in distortion box in front of and amp largely inspired by fender blackface designs. I own a great overdrive box called the Zendrive by Hermida Audio, inspired by that bit of circuitry at the front of dumble amps that he hid from view with black silicone glue, and in front of a fender black face style amp (which includes the clean channels on modern fender tube amps), it sounds very dumble-like to my ears . A product called the Ethos which resembles the front panel of a dumble amp and can be used for direct recording as well, has recently caught my eye and while reading a review by a Berklee college Prof named Thaddeus  Hogarth http://thaddeushogarth.berkleemusicblogs.com/,

 I came across this Dumble catalogue from 1990, be sure to read down the page to the part about consultant fees, hysterical.

http://akamai.www.berkleemusic.com/assets/display/14614697/dumble.pdf

 Other than briefly coming out of retirement to build an amp for Carlos Santana, Howard, I mean Alexander,  Dumble is all but retired from amp building, and his eccentricities are legendary, but he new how to build a better amp. As the article by Prof Hogarth states there is an entire cottage industry of amp and pedal builders trying to capture that sound.

What can I say, I love the analog sound.

 Bill