I've been dreaming of meeting the man who made such amps as the "Garnet SessionMan", "Garnet BTO", all-tube American-Woman overdriver "Garnet Herzog" plus many other great sounding guitar and bass amps ...
I asked Gar about some early background stuff, his designs, his current work ... of course, I was supremely interested in his Output Tranny specs and his approach to designing with them and also if and how they varied through time ... he said that most of the adjustments came with core mass finetuning and that his winding ratios were set to 5k most of the time, except for different short periods where 8k and 3.8k were used ... he told me that he wasn't aware of different grades of output tranny specs on SessionMan amps, combo or head and he found it interesting that I thought there might be differences based on my experience of playing them mostly at cranked levels ...
... we talked about variable bias and he explained to me that in the sixties he'd get boxes of Mullard tubes and out of 300 tubes not one would have shifted specs, turns out he's not against variable bias at all ...
Gar is 80 years old and still comes in from his cabin up north to work in his shop on amplifiers of designs new and old ... he still makes them all by hand on his bench at the back of his shop (the front bench is for repairs and mods) ... he had me demo a 6L6GC-based single-ended Champ-style amp which he calls the "Mohawk" and he's got this class-A 6v6 push-pull amp that sounded really nice, not too sweet ! .. Gar informed me that Garnet.Com's Pete Thiesen and his dad were making cabs for his amps which have reversible chassis entry, meaning the amp chassis can go in forward or backwards so the control knobs face front or back for protection ... nice idea and good looking cabs ... Gar told me that he estimates there's around 40,000 Garnet amps out there, around 125 BTOs and maybe a few more thousand amps sold through arrangements with secondary companies and retail chains ...
The Herzog is another beast I was interested in finding out more about - needless to say, the Hertzog design is something we've all thought of doing except Gar went ahead and did it ... Gar still makes Herzogs, he showed me a letter from Randy Bachman requesting twelve units to give to friends ...
... a superb gentleman, if you're in Winnipeg drop by and visit a tube amp lengend !
