We pull Mesa’s designer and president, Randall Smith, away from his soldering iron to tell us about the genesis of the new Express amps
Nick Guppy
What starts the ball rolling when you commence a new design?
“Part of the process is picking the things we know work well and seeing where they can benefit another product, especially the weaker points of existing products. For example, our amp circuitry has traditionally required quite a number of separate power supplies to make everything work. But by modifying the power transformer(s) and reconfiguring many of the sub-circuits, I was able to replace four separate low-voltage power supplies with a single one. This opened up space on the board so I could add another preamp tube – and in the Express amps, that tube is dedicated to the reverb circuitry. Another example would be the power amp switchable between high-power push-pull and low-power single-ended configurations whose patent has just been approved.
An important part of the creative process is just fantasising what would make a really cool amp – which sonic voicings do we want to include and where do we get them? For the Express amps, the blues and crunch modes are both brand new, whereas the clean and burn voicings are evolved from earlier designs.”
We’ve often heard the phrase ‘black magic’ mentioned when you talk about the way you lay out a printed circuit board. How much of an effect can the PCB layout have on the amp?
“It took me almost a year to produce the Express line, and most of the time was spent designing the board. But it’s worth the effort because a well-done circuit board provides both density and consistency that you can’t get any other way. You couldn’t build an amp like the Road King using point-to-point, and something like the Express would cost three times as much and suffer from scattered, inconsistent results in terms of delivering that magic. It’s more difficult, and I think more important, to deliver consistency than to occasionally produce magic: what good is magic if you can’t produce it consistently? I’ve got to sleuth out where that magic is coming from. It may no longer be ‘magic’ once I’ve understood it. But the important thing is that the ‘magical performance’ can then be built into each and every amp.”
The Express has its own palette of sounds, yet we can hear hints of other famous Mesa amps in there too. What tonal ingredients went into the Express?
“Parts of the Express circuitry trace their lineage back to the Studio .22 of the early eighties. Parts of it came from the Lone Star – whose own history goes back to the Mark I. There are bits borrowed from the Stiletto, more bits from the F Series and some of it is entirely new. And of course, without the great founders of Fender – the original tweed and blackface amps – none of this would have evolved.”
How much time and effort goes into the styling of an amp like the Express?
“We discussed how the cab should look and Jim Aschow knocked it out of the park the first time. By the next day he had made some sample cabinets and we hardly changed anything after that. What gave us the most trouble was the name… and then the logo. We’ve used so many good names in the past, it’s getting hard to come up with new ones and this time we were changing the name right up to the first run of the chassis! It was going to be the Subway Express and the Magnum Express. Also, we wanted to bring some attention to that patented feature that allows these amps to switch down to five watts single-ended.”
How easy is it for you to keep coming up with new ideas after all this time and where does the inspiration come from?
“It’s almost easier now because we’ve got so much more to work with: more ideas, more experience, and a lot more great circuits. It’s still exciting for me to be designing new amplifiers with things I’ve just discovered, and then seeing even more possibilities emerge as each new design unfolds. But 95 percent of my time is spent locked in on doing the actual design and layout work, solving the problems and sweating the details. In between the excitement and the fulfilment, it can be daunting and tedious. But if you’re going to make something good, you’ve got to do more than work at it, you’ve got to live it. And if you’re going to live it, then you’d better love it.
Thanks for your interest in Mesa/Boogie all these years. Now go out and play!”
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