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Looper's Delight
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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 |