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An Interview with an Amp Guru
Once again I was surfing on MySpace.com and accidentally came across this amp guru named Myles S. Rose. Myles has worked with some of the finest musician in the music business. He offers guitarists and musician’s many different services…. From getting that certain tone from your amp to artist management and development. After checking out his websites you’ll see what I mean. When I emailed Myles about some more exposure, he told me that his site gets an enormous amount of hits a day. He even emailed his stats to me to proove it! I almost felt silly emailing him back. He told me he really did not need the exposure but would be willing to help me out anyway. However, I knew if he got that much traffic, he had to be good at what he does. I wrote him back and told him that Guitarz Forever.com would benefit immensely by giving us more credibility as a guitar-site if he would let me do an interview with him and spotlight his websites for my readers. So, without further ado…
An Interview with an Amp Guru
1.) I was going over your Myspace site and your Guitar Amplifier Blue Printing Site and I was wondering what is the single most factor in your life that has brought the two worlds of sailing and amplifiers together? And, what does one have to do with the other?
I think nothing brought these two things together other than I started both of these passions about the same time.
I started the accordian at the age of five and played it until I was eight. I will never admit this by the way so when it shows up in the article I may dispute it :) Back in the fifties there was not much on TV. The big show was Laurence Welk. It was filled with accordian players. Accordian must have been cool back then I suppose. I hated the instrument but it did help me to learn to read music and play keyboards. At the age of eight I moved to acoustic guitar. I took lessons until I was fifteen. At the age of fifteen I changed to electric guitar right at the height of the sixties.
I also started sailing at the age of about eight. My father had a friend with a boat and a daughter. I had a father that had season tickets for baseball. I hated baseball. The daughter hated boats. The two parents would swap kids on weekends and I'd go off sailing and the daughter would go off with my dad and younger brother to the baseball game.
I suppose there is tie together in a few minor ways. Sailing and music are two things you can do all alone. I love being alone.
2.) From one to ten, how would you rate yourself as a guitarist and in what style do you play?
This is hard to answer as there are many scales. Compared to Carl Verheyen, Buddy Whittington, Brad Paisley ... I am a minus 14. Compared to the power chord rockers in Los Angeles and elsewhere (one chord ... all downstrokes), I may be considered an eleven.
I love showing shredders that with enough gain all you have to do is crank things up and tap anywhere on the fretboard to sound like a monster. With enough gain, the fundamental note is gone. All that is left is compressed distortion overtones. You can play any note on the fretboard and it works. Kids in their late teens and early twenties really give me the "eyes open" when I play against a lot of them. How can this old dude play that fast?
My personal style is sixties rock and blues. Michael Bloomfield, Kal David, Roy Buchanan. Jefferson Airplane pre Grace Slick, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company.
3.) Tell us of your association with Guitar Player Magazine?
Guitar Player Magazine is part of musicplayer.com which has keyboard magazine, EQ magazine (I believe), bass player magazing, guitar player magazine and maybe some others. Back in 2002 I was asked to take over the guitar player forum and host a post (column on the net) called "feel free to ask Myles". There are now over 3000 pieces of writing in there and I still answer questions every week. I am also the moderator on the Carl Verheyen forum and on the Dr. Z forum which have the same "ask Myles" columns. I have friends at GP like Terry Buddingh and some of the other writers.
4.) You say that "at times I feel the folks from Nashville are more fun to work with than folks right here in Los Angeles!" Could you give us a little more thought on that?
It is pretty simple. They are the best players I have ever heard with the least amount of attitude. They all help each other extensively and are terrific folks to work with. In the L.A rock crowd things can be a little more chaotic to use a word without too many bad connotations. If you listen to a lot of the Nashville folks, Austin folks, and others, you find it very hard not to make some strong observations.
But, I will say that the best guitar player I have ever heard in my life is a Los Angeles fellow. His name is Carl Verheyen. He plays every style from classical guitar to banjo to blues, rock, jazz, shredding, etc. You hear him everyday if you every watch a movie or turn on a TV show or listen to a TV commercial. His DVD Rumor Mill from last year is a must for any serious guitar player. It won multiple awards which was no surprise. I am sure that I will get flack when I say that Carl Verheyen is the best guitar player I have ever heard. Then again, one of the major guitar mags voted him as the best studio player year after year until they stopped doing the poll. Another magazine listed him as one of the ten best guitarists in the world. Ok ... so I put him at the top of the list of ten I suppose.
5.) So do you have to have an electronic engineering degree to do what you do?
No formal degree in electronics. I started working on amps as a teenager and went to after school electronics programs in junior high school. I hated it. Electronics folks were geeks. Back then it was not cool to be a geek either. In 1967 I went into the military. They wanted me to go to electronics school but I told them I'd prefer structural mechanics school and went the "mech" route rather than the "tweet" route to use Navy terminology. Later on in 1973 I attended Control Data Institute on a computer hardware path. Back then you had to fix things, not just swap them. They put us though a 1000 hour course from basic electonics through digital electonics of the time. I then worked for Control Data in 1973 and 1974 in the large systems branch and from 1974-1979 for Data General where one of my jobs was running the regional depot in California.
6.) Tells us about leaving the corporate world in 2002 to shift your life full time into the music business... Believe me, there's millions of us that would love to do the same thing!
I worked in the computer and data comm business from 1973 until 2002. My only break was from 1979-1981 when I went through a divorce and ran away on a boat. I should have never come back to the USA as a side note.
I felt I had paid my dues for decades in the corporate world. In 2002 the company I was working for, Infonet, shut down one of it's divisions. I felt this was a good time to leave rather than try to return to the parent company. Ten years there was long enough.
I have never looked back on the decision. Life is too short to wake up one day in the hospital and spot your 30 year pin from Bank of America on the nightstand next to you and realize you are dying from nothing but old age.
7.) Do you make a good living in the music business, and what advice can you give to others who want to build and design amps?
Many people have made a statement that sums it up ....
"How do you make a small fortune in the amp business?"
"Start with a large fortune".
It is a job you do because you love the music, the players, and just having fun.
8.) By the way... what's up with the fine models on your Myspace Page?
Many of those gals are from Saunders Stewart Models. Saunders is my middle name. Stewart came from Nicole Stewart who was a model and a singer. SSM is part of Guitar Amplifier Blueprinting. Something of one stop shopping. We can suppy the amp work and supply the model for the music video.
One of the models, Ashley Danielle, is the head of artist relations at Guitar Amplfier Blueprinting. She was seen at the 2006 Amp Show and is the gal you see in the gray 65 Amps T-shirts when she is biasing amps.
You can get a lot of the story on how the agency started on my OMP page at www.onemodelplace.com/photographer_list.cfm?P_ID=86597 that explains a bit. It's also a page that some feel is easy on the eyes. The main SSM page is at http://www.guitaramplifierblueprinting.com/models.html or you can also get there via www.saunders-stewart-models.com
9.) How do you go about working with a guitarist when they are looking for that special no one has ever heard tone?
That is what blueprinting is all about. You cannot bring an amp by and drop it off to pick up later. From the time the amp is turned on until it is turned off the amp owner / player will be there. They will learn the innards of their amps, how to service and adjust the amp. We work together and make adjustments and tube changes and document every step of the process so it can be replicated if necessary.
I have written quite a bit on today's tube variability. Many times you retube an amp just to find it worse then when you started. As one basic example, a 12AX7 preamp tube at standard RCA book test spec should have an output of 1.2 milliamps as one of it's parameters. Most tubes today average 0.6-0.8mA. Right off the bat you have lost the life in your amp. Your amp may have had 1.2mA and over time the first gain stage dropped to 1.0mA. You plug in a new tube and it has 0.7mA. Right there you are 30% down from where you were with the old tube.
Look at some of the tube racks I have set up with touring techs. Chad Weaver (Brad Paisley) has sets of tubes that all have numbers on the boxes. Brad knows what he wants to hear. If he wants things tighter or looser, more or less compression, brighter or darker, we make changes on the road during soundcheck. We may pull out a "145-150" short plate R3 and go to a "155-170" long plate R2. It is fine tuning on the fly. Nascar tuning suspension for a given driver on a given track when the temperature on the track raises ten degrees.
10.) Lastly, Give us a short inspirational story between you and another well known artist...
This is an easy one.
1. Go watch Carl Verheyen's DVD Rumor Mill and listen to the song Slang Justice at the five minute mark. I built the "car" and Carl drove it. That is what a Strat is supposed to sound like! Then go listen to "Place for me". Those are inspirational. Carl's band tours extensively.
2. Jimmy Messina - one of the finest human beings on the planet. Listen to him play "Angry Eyes" live if he does another reunion tour as he did in 2005. Great player, producer, engineer, and just a sweetheart of a human being.
3. For some of the best blues on the planet listen to Michael Burks (he tours extensively everywhere) www.michaelburks.com for his tour schedule and Buddy Whittington (John Mayall's guitarist).
Any of those folks are inspirational and all of them care about their tone and have spent many hours tweeking things to get it to where they want it to be.
If you want to talk about any of this just drop me a note or call.
Regards,
Myles
Myles' MySpace site: Myles Rose
Guitar Amplifier Blueprinting.com
"If you like this article, you may dig this one too!" Thoughts on Modeling Amps
"I can honestly say that this guitar learning program is one of the best in-home instructional courses I've seen to date. I have the Learn and Master the Guitar course, and it's everything and more then I expected." - Riffmaster
Updated: 2/24/07
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