Mesa Boogie
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| Private | |
| Industry | Amplification |
| Founded | Petaluma, California, United States (1971) |
| Founder | Randall Smith |
| Headquarters | Petaluma, California, United States |
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Key people
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Randall Smith |
| Products | Amplifiers |
| Website | www |
Mesa/Boogie (also known as Mesa Engineering) is an American company in Petaluma, California that manufactures amplifiers for guitars and basses. It has been in operation since 1971.
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 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.
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 young 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 in Orinda, CA and graduated in 1964. His freshman year he attended UC Santa Barbara, as parents wanted him removed from the influences of Berkeley (20 minutes from Orinda). However, he would hop freight trains nearly every weekend from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area to see friends and return to the Beat coffee houses and bookstores of Berkeley. The next four years he attended UC Berkeley studying humanities, English Literature and "invitation only" creative writing courses where he mostly wrote accounts of riding the rails with various hobos, but never quite graduated. Most interesting is that he never once took an electronics course in high school or university. His first major electronics was scratch-building Ham Radio transmitter using 6146 power tube. At only around 60 watts, the signal reached Alaska and most of the US.
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Wikipedia