A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE KIMOCK (continued)

PM: Do you talk about all the amp stuff? Is that fair game, or is that more proprietary?

SK: Well, you and I have both done the art -- you know, done our time, done our penance on the musical instrument manufacturing thing, from a bunch of different angles. In case anybody that's checking this out doesn't know, Frank and I both worked at Mesa/Boogie for a long time. We put in some hours and days and months and years in that stuff. There's a tiny amount of proprietary stuff, you know. People will come to me and ask me at gigs sometimes, "So, what's happening?" I just tell them, you know, "Sorry, top secret. Top secret stuff." That's just because I don't feel like talking.

PM: Yeah, it's your mother's fuzz box.

SK: Right, exactly. But the amp thing is really...it's pretty simple. I have an old 50-watt Dumble that I like, that I've been playing through for I don't know how many years now. It's just broken in so nice. I just love playing through it.

PM: Does he [Alex Dumble] still make amplifiers?

SK: I bet he does. He's kind of an enigma. Everybody's making Dumble type clone amps these days. Or trying.

PM: I wonder how they even make any clones. I mean, didn't he always used to goop all the parts inside so that you couldn't even tell what it was made of?

SK: Oh, you can tell. You can tell what's in there. And a lot of the Dumbles were different. I have two Dumbles. I have a 100-watt and a 50-watt -- totally different amplifiers. The 100-watt normally is a spare. I use it on some bigger gigs. I got the 100-watt hoping to get a bigger 50-watt, but it's not like that at all. And I've just come to realize that I just like 50-watt amplifiers, two output tubes, fine.

PM: Right.

SK: That sounds good. Four somehow just waters it down. You don't really get...you get less of everything and it's louder [laughs], you know. See, I don't want that. I've been working for many years with Bill Krinard on just trying to figure out how to make a guitar amp sound good. Bill Krinard is one half of a thing called K & M Analog Designs, and they make amplifiers called Two Rock Amps.

PM: Two Rock, like the place.

SK: Two Rock, yeah, out there by the Coast Guard station [west of Petaluma, CA]. People probably think it means something else. But, no, Two Rock is an actual location. It's a little place in the hills where these two rocks stick out, and it's a farmhouse. Bill was doing some repairs years ago, had a little shop next to Zone Music in Cotati.

PM: That's where I met him...

SK: And he would go, "Here, listen to this." You know, he'd have some old Selmer amp or something, or some old Fender, or some miscellaneous this, or he had converted some Heathkit into something, or whatever it was. And we would just start listening to amps and listening to tubes, and after a while, man, we'd find something that was really cool, I'd say, "Okay, you just hold on there." I'd go get my old 50-watt Dumble, and listen to the 50-watt Dumble, and sure enough, man, the Dumble was just a more special amp, just in every way, just sort of more balanced.

PM: Alex Dumble, a bit of a genius, a very, as you say, enigmatic fellow.

SK: Yeah. And the more we tried to figure how to get stuff to sound good, the weirder it became. I'm a big fan of everybody who's doing that -- and that's another unfortunate tag, the boutique amp thing. There's lots of guys making amps right now, too.

PM: Sure.

SK: Lots of guys making guitars. But lots of guys making amps, and lots of guys making really good amplifiers. And my hat is off to them. You know, I mean, we both know how hard it is to make an amp at all, and there are guys out there that are doing a really good job. It's important that they keep doing it. I follow a lot of the internet chat about a lot of the amp stuff. It interests me to see what people are thinking, and how guys that are coming up in it are perceived, how the public perceives these things, you know. I think there's maybe a handful of people, of all the guys that play guitar, that even have a clue why the amps sound the way they do. It's not like voodoo, it's not magic, but it's not what you think. It is not what you think. [Here Steve did go into some proprietary thinking and discoveries at great length that were very interesting but which I'm not at liberty to disclose.]

So I use the 50-watt Dumble. I use the Octave Two Rock, which is a great sounding amplifier, and for some reason is louder in class A. You know, it's 60-watt amp switchable A/B to class A. It's louder in class A than my Dumble. [laughs] It doesn't make any sense. I have the old Mesa Baron power amp that I use in bigger rooms to add another 2x12 to fill things out. I love working with the musical instrument manufacturing thing. You know, again, just to noodle around, trying to figure out why stuff sounds good, or works better.

PM: Yeah. There's always been a scientific aspect to your personality that's satisfied by that investigation.

SK: I'm attracted to it. I don't have the time to really pursue it, although someday I'll get around to building an amplifier. I certainly know enough about what not to do at this point that I could build something that would probably work, if I didn't electrocute myself in the process or burn the house down. The speaker thing is really out of control these days, man. Maybe you've read my little speaker blurb on the website.

PM: I haven't yet, actually, but wanted to.

SK: Oh, okay. Well, you can refer to that. Remember those Altec speakers I used to use out on the farm? When we moved to California -- when our whole band moved to California ten million years ago -- I took those Altec speakers with me.

PM: 417-8Hs, or whatever they were?

SK: Yeah, they were just like the Santana yahoo speakers. I actually think I might have had two different ones. But I had two Altec speakers. Then I took them to John at A Brown Sound in 1975 to have them reconed, because I was going to play bass through them, remember?

PM: [laughs]

SK: Make them for bass, take the metal domes off and recone them? God, those speakers sounded so good. Everything I took to the guy sounded good. And eventually, we got into a little going-around trying to get the speaker thing to sound right, and he wound up with a product, out of all that hustling and running around, just making these Tone Tubby speakers, he calls them now.

PM: Tone Tubby?

SK: Tone Tubbies, that are sort of a knock-off of the Vox Blue Bulldog, different cones and different...his own parts, and been using the Weber baskets and magnets. But now he's getting some new cones made. He's got these hemp cones.

PM: Hemp cones?  continue

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