$120
So much bullshit:
From Gil Ayan:
What do you get when you cross a degreed engineer and a musician? Trouble for sure, but over the years I have sometimes been able to sort of merge these two disciplines with good results. For a while I was primarily interested in optimizing the performance of my own gear, and that led to hot-rodding some guitars and performing mods on a couple of my amps. This year, I set out to try to reach an overall improvement in tone by tinkering with some mods, and accidentally stumbled on the idea of designing a signal conditioning device that could be used by those with a sophisticated taste for tone who are never quite satisfied with the performance of their rigs. The premise here is that you are a guitar player, you use vacuum tube amplifiers, you are not happy with the current supply of tubes, and you choke at the thought of spending some $75 per tube on N.O.S.
Those who have old Fenders may have had this experience: you outfit your Twin with a new quartet of 6L6 GCs and you find the bottom end is loose and muddy, and the top end sounds cold and shrill. Yes, it happens to a lot of us regardless of whether the amp uses 6L6s, EL34s, 6V6s, etc. If you fall in this category, then Smooth & Slim may be for you. Comments from those who have tried my two prototype versions of the unit have been very favorable: "the reason I like my distortion with the Smooth & Slim so much is because my amp actually doesn't sound distorted!" (yes, taken literally it may seem like a contradiction, but if you dig good tone you will know exactly what this guy is saying!); or "I love what this thing does to my Deluxe Reverb, it seems to enhance the sustain and upper midrange in a very musical way." Okay, okay, so much for plugging my own creation, but to be honest with you, it is the best companion for my Boogie Mark I.
From Gil's Partner, Carlos Holguin:
My name is Carlos Holguin and I've been playing music, first as a bass player and then as a guitar player, for over 25 years. I play mostly rock, but also blues (doesn't everyone?), some Latin, classical, and folksy finger-pickin' stuff.
In my early days I went through a number of the usual amps: among them a Fender Super Reverb, Twin Reverb, Bassman, and a great old Gibson amp with two big knobs on the front and a single 15" speaker, which I could kick myself for unloading. Although all of these amps could cop a decent clean sound, what I really wanted was a set-up that would do that endless sustain thing, a la Carlos Santana.
In about 1974, I read a review in Guitar Player Magazine - the Alembic Report, as it was called - of a new amp put out by Mesa Engineering. Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin were playing them, and according to McLaughlin, it was real easy to get endless sustain out of the little combos. There was no place to demo one of these amps down here in L.A. because they were being hand-built, a few at a time, in a garage up in northern California, and no music stores had'em yet. It was a leap of faith, but I went ahead and sold all my gear, added some cash from my gas station job, and put in an order.
Now, back in those days Mesa offered a number of options to anyone buying their amps. You could get reverb, a graphic EQ, a JBL speaker, or an extra pair of power tubes, which you could switch on to kick the amp up from 60 to 100 watts. If you wanted one of these options, it would set you back $80 bucks, two options $160, and so on. All I could manage to scrape up was enough for one option, and since I already had an old Fender outboard reverb that I liked - and I sure didn't want my partners blowing my new amp away with their Twins - I opted for the 100 watt switch. That little Boogie combo has been my main amp ever since.
Soon, Mesa became famous and started pumping out with a bunch of other models, and other amp companies started copying the Boogie's cascaded preamp. But when they first came out, these little Boogies had something no other amp had: a bunch of extra gain stages that would make your guitar sustain for days. The amp was also very heavy on midrange, and its basic tone therefore contrasted quite a bit with, say, the scooped midrange sound made famous by Marshall amps. Both are classic great sounds, but very different.
Anyway, after tweaking around with this amp for a while, it was clear that the lead sound just wouldn't happen if the bass control was set at anything over 2. Running it up any higher would cause the amp to spew out this muddy, sloppy distortion that just sucked. This is commonly described as a "farty" or "flabby" sound, and it's pretty ugly indeed. For many years, I just zeroed out the bass control and adjusted the treble and middle knobs to taste. I thought the amp sounded pretty good this way, especially with a humbucker-equipped guitar, but the tone was still a bit thin for my taste. It seems that dialing out the bass robbed bottom end, but that was nevertheless a better choice that the flabby bottom. Over the years I tried many things to work around this compromise: expensive NOS tubes, different pickups, strings, stomp boxes, and so on. Nothing worked too well, so my final solution was to play through two amps: a Fender set clean and bassy, and the Boogie, overdriven, with lots of mids and highs. This gave me what I considered a great sound in the toughest venues, such as the great outdoors, but it was a royal pain to haul around all that extra gear, and I'm not getting any younger.
Then, thanks to the Internet, I managed to hook up with Gil Ayan. [He's the first guy I ever met face-to-face after exchanging messages over the Internet, kinda weird when you don't have a face to go with a name, but that's another topic.] He's an electrical engineer, a tone fanatic, and a damn good guitar picker. He also favors Boogie Marks, and he'd apparently been ruminating on the thin-or-flabby dilemma for some time. He posted a couple of messages theorizing that, somewhat like Jim Marshall later implemented in his high-gain line of amps, if one were to realign selected portions of those bass frequencies before hitting the gain stages, one could get good, smooth distortion, and then the bass control could be turned up without adding flabby bottom. Gil's set out to achieve these results without the need for amplifier modifications, and eventually came up with the box that pulls off this trick, called Smooth & Slim.
Well, it worked... I mean, it really worked. The distortion on the Boogie immediately became way smoother, to the point where the amp didn't sound, well, distorted. And, because I could now run up the bass without flabbiness, I recovered a good deal of the bottom end I had been losing all those years. The amp started singing with a very cool sweetness. I got really excited and spent some time comparing the tone of the amp through the Smooth & Slim and Santana's "Europa" sound off the Moonflower disk. Now, that's a great guitar tone without a doubt, but I could still hear a little raspy edge to his distortion, whereas mine had all of the good stuff, but none of that objectionable rasp. Wow! Another bonus was that I could now use my single-coil Fender Stratocaster and make it sound great as well - Strat users are probably very familiar with the rather shrill tone that results when using these guitars in conjunction with Boogies set for overdrive. When Gil asked me to help him build a few of the boxes, I was more than happy to oblige, and thus our partnership was born.
Is the Smooth & Slim for everyone? Probably not. There are lots of players who like a raw, edgy distortion, and quite a few who are perfectly happy with the clipping a stomp box delivers through a Twin. Hey, whatever's cool. On the other hand, if you're a player who likes the smooth, sweet sustain featured on Abraxas, or if you lust for a smoking Dumble Overdrive Special, to take just two examples, you owe it yourself to try out the Smooth & Slim. Not many of us can afford Dumbles, but there are quite a few decent high gain amps out there that the average picker can latch on to for not too much green, and, with the addition of the Smooth & Slim, he/she could find him/herself in Tone Heaven quite inexpensively! Okay, so they won't sound as good as a Dumble right off the shelf... what's a tone prospector to do?
Most cats start by forking over $75 a pop for some really high quality power tubes. Still not there? Pickups might be next - you can replace them out at about $100 each and hope you pick the right one within the first two or three tries. Then, stomp boxes are yet another choice. And these are the cheap fixes, as anyone who has seen the prices lately in Vintage Guitar Magazine will tell you. I went down this path myself for many years and many dollars. (Actually, I'm still a sucker for anything that might improve my tone, budget permitting.) Truth is, none of it made as much difference as putting the Smooth & Slim in front of my amp. You might be surprised at just how smooth and singing your amp might sound with one of these gizmos, too.
After testing the original Smooth & Slim design with several amps, we've added some final touches and hand-built the first units, which will be ready to be offered for sale soon. We will make an announcement on some of the newsgroups popular amongst guitarists and we'll be gald to take orders at that time. If you have any questions in the meantime, just holler: Gil's email address is shown at the bottom of the Home Page, and mine appears below. We're excited and proud to be able to bring to all of you a product both Gil and I believe in!
AUDIO SAMPLES: Coming soon...
What's inside the magic box?
