Mesa-Boogie

Mesa/Boogie (also known as Mesa Engineering) is an American company in Petaluma, California, that manufactures amplifiers and other accessories for guitars and basses. It has been in operation since 1969.

Mesa was started by Randall Smith as a small repair shop which modified Fender amplifiers, particularly the diminutive Fender Princeton. Smith's modifications gave the small amps much more input gain, making them much louder as well as creating a high-gain, distorted guitar tone. Prominent early customers included Carlos Santana, and Ron Wood and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Exposure from these top players helped to establish Mesa/Boogie's position on the market, and it is frequently referred to as the first manufacturer of boutique amplifiers.

Subsequent design revisions to Mesa's early amps lead to the Mark Series, which popularized modern, high-gain circuits, while the 1990s saw the introduction of Mesa's flagship Rectifier amps, the success of which entrenched the brand in modern rock genres. In 2021, Mesa/Boogie was acquired by Gibson.

Randall Smith

Randall Smith was born into a musical family in Berkeley, California in 1946. His mother and sister played piano and his father was the first-chair clarinet with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, played tenor sax, had a radio show and led a hotel dance band. Smith believes all of his early musical experiences taught him how to hear tone.

As a Boy Scout, Smith was interested in earning a merit badge in woodcarving. Stan Stillson, the Boy Scout leader became a mentor. Smith and Stan's son, Dave, were close in age. They became great friends and built ham radios together. Smith's father had a good friend, Ernie, who built hi-fi turntables and gave him a couple to experiment on until he was 11 or 12.

He attended Miramonte High School in Orinda, California, and graduated in 1964. During his freshman year he attended distant University of California, Santa Barbara, as his parents wanted him removed from the counterculture influences of local University of California, Berkeley. However, he would hop freight trains nearly every weekend from Santa Barbara back to the Bay Area to see friends and return to the Beat coffee houses and bookstores of Berkeley. During the next four years he attended UC Berkeley, studying humanities, English Literature and creative writing courses, but never graduated.

Smith wanted to participate in the burgeoning San Francisco music scene, having been taught clarinet and a little sax by his father, but he took up drums, as it was the easiest to learn quickly. He played with a local blues and jam band and co-founded the band Martha's Laundry, which later morphed into Prune Music store, with keyboardist Dave Kessner. They opened the store in 1967 inside a building that had been a Chinese grocery store. He worked as a repair tech in the back while Dave ran the front of the store. Offshoots of Prune Music continue in Berkeley to this day with Subway Guitars, Sam Cohen (aka Fat Dog) and Guitar Resurrection in Austin, TX with former Martha's Laundry guitarist, Jim Lehman (aka Lizard Slim). They were partners until 1975.

History of Mesa/Boogie

Name

Mesa/Boogie began with a practical joke when Smith was commissioned to secretly convert the 20-watt Fender Princeton of a local guitarist into a significantly louder 100-watt amp without altering its appearance. He accomplished this by replacing the amplifier section with that of a Fender Bassman and replacing the 10-inch speaker with a 12-inch speaker. To ensure the joke would work, Smith asked Carlos Santana, a customer at Prune Music, to demo the amp. Despite initial skepticism at the sight of the seemingly stock amplifier, Santana played it and was impressed, exclaiming, "Man, that amp really boogies!" Word spread of Smith's small and powerful amp, and he ultimately made more than 200 of these so-called "Princeton Boogies".

The "Mesa" name came about through Smith's other job, rebuilding Mercedes engines. Smith decided to set up Mesa Engineering so he could purchase wholesale parts for amps and engines. He needed an official sounding name through which to buy Mercedes parts and building supplies, and chose Mesa Engineering. As the demand for his amps grew, Randall decided it would be best to move his workshop out of the storefront to get away from the distractions. He relocated to what was formerly a plywood dog kennel, then, eventually, to his home.

The 1970s and the Mark I

If hot-rodding Fenders was the first breakthrough, the second was developing an extra gain stage for the guitar input. Smith was building a preamplifier for Lee Michaels, who needed a pre-amp to drive his new Crown DC-300 power amplifiers. Smith added an extra tube gain stage to the preamp, with three variable gain controls at different points in the circuit (what is now called a "cascaded" design), creating the first high-gain amplifier. He set about designing a guitar amplifier around the new principle, and in 1972 the Mark I was released.

He produced a number of custom variations on the Mark I through the late 1970s, with options including reverb, EQ, various speakers (most often Altec or Electro-Voice), koa wood jointed cabinets, and wicker grill. The Mark II was released in 1978. Smith ultimately produced over 3000 amps out of his home workshop in the 1970s.

The 1980s and the Mark IIc+

As Mesa continued to grow, Smith moved the company to Petaluma in 1980 and continued to improve his amp designs to meet players' requests. Revisions to the Mark II resulted in amplifier milestones such as channel switching (Mark IIA) and the first effects loop (Mark IIB). Notably, the Mark IIC was voiced to "sound heavier and more menacing," and the IIC+ variant became popular with early heavy metal guitarists like Metallica's Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield, who was dissatisfied with Marshall amps at the time and wanted something "percussive tight and in your face."

Throughout the decade, Mesa continued to produce combo and head amplifiers, and began production of rack power and pre-amps, developing power amplifiers such as the M180/190 and Strategy series, as well as pre-amps such as the Quad and Studio. Other models developed in the 1980s included the Mark III, Mark IV, the Son of Boogie, and the Studio .22.

The 1990s and the Rectifiers

As the 1980s came to a close, the complicated features and boutique styling of the Mark series began losing popularity in favor of simpler designs by Marshall, Bogner, and Soldano. Particularly inspired by Soldano's SLO 100 - itself derived from the Mark series circuits - Mesa introduced the Dual Rectifier in 1991. With a "raw, aggressive bass-heavy sound" and sporting a characteristic industrial steel faceplate, the Rectifier became highly popular among heavier styles of rock music in the wake of grunge, most notably nu metal. Mesa continued to revise the design of the Rectifiers as the decade went on, with Revisions F and G having a darker, looser sound that extended the model's popularity into the 2000s.

Mesa followed up the success of the Rectifiers with the short-lived Maverick and Blue Angel models, as well as the Nomads.

The 2000s to present day

Mesa has continued to introduce new models in the 2000s and 2010s, with models such as the Road King II, the Lone Star and Lone Star Special, the Stiletto and Express lines along with lower watt versions of its large amps, such as the mini Rectifier, and the Mark V:25 and Mark V:35.

On January 6, 2021, it was announced that Gibson had acquired Mesa/Boogie. As a result of the acquisition, then-75-year-old Smith joined Gibson as "Master Designer and Pioneer of Mesa/Boogie and beyond."

Notable users

References

External links

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{{Gibson Guitar Corporation

Guitar amplifier manufacturers
Petaluma, California
Companies based in Sonoma County, California
Audio equipment manufacturers of the United States