dedicated to our favorite little monster-the 9 VOG Amp
This little amp came to life about a year ago when I was looking for something that will recreate my favorite fuzz/overdrive tones from the 60’s early 70’s.
I wanted something for my own musical projects that will sound epic without making my ears bleed. Something that is studio friendly and portable.
For this adventure, I teamed with guitar effects guru Guy Shapira.
It took tremendous efforts, sleepless nights while bidding on eBay for rare parts and forgotten guitar effects and then it took months and months of experimenting with different types of speakers, cabinets, designing analog circuitry and so on.
The moment I knew I hit dirt was when we assembled one of the last combinations, turned it on, plugged the guitar and was simply blown away.
It had this fantastic crunch and warm organic tone that you get from a great vintage overdriven guitar amp on full throttle with a vintage fuzz or treble booster pedal.
But most importantly it sounded different from most of the things out there. As a matter of fact, I liked the sound so much that I’ve used it for vocals, harmonica and even re-amped drums and keyboards as you can see in this demo.
When we introduced the 9 VOG amp two months ago we didn’t know how people from all over the world would react to this little amp.
We speculated that we will sell a few pieces over 2018 but we didn’t predict the number of orders we would receive within two months.
So we went to create all the cabinets, circuitry, brass parts etc.
Finished the first ones. Took one, plugged the guitar and it sounded nice, like an overdriven 57 deluxe which was nice but not quite the same. What happened???
We disassembled the original amp and measured everything, but all the values were the same. At that moment I recalled stories about reissue models that didn’t sound the same as the original ones because the original components weren’t produced for decades.
Is that the same case here?
Hours went by and then I got a call from Guy. He told me that out of despair he decided to change the capacitors on one of the new amps to the old ones, despite the fact that it of the same type and carries the same value. Lo and behold -the glorious tone came back to life.
The second thing we did was acquiring a huge stock of these capacitors, just in case…
So without further ado here are some nice demos of the amp with our Spirit of the Wind and our Thunder Child guitars
