Matt Bellamy designs his own signature Manson Guitar Works instruments and took ownership of the company when Hugh Manson retired in 2019.
Decked out in black ninja-like uniforms with mosaic mirrored masks obscuring their faces, Muse opens their current shows with the powerful, sing-along chant of “Will of the People,” the anthemic title track off their latest album. From that song’s infectious shuffle until the very end of the concert’s encore, people are jumping out of their seats, and appear to be completely mesmerized.
Muse’s guitarist/frontman Matt Bellamy describes the song’s concept: “‘Will of the People’”is a fictional story set in a fictional metaverse on a fictional planet ruled by a fictional authoritarian state run by a fictional algorithm manifested by a fictional data centre running a fictional bank printing a fictional currency controlling a fictional population occupying a fictional city containing a fictional apartment where a fictional man woke up one day and thought ‘fuck this.’”
Muse Won't Stand Down (Live at NOVA Rock Festival 2022)
This live version of “Won’t Stand Down” (the first single from Will of the People) from the Nova Rock Festival in Nickelsdorf, Austria, sees Bellamy playing exotic melodies unaccompanied on a drop-tuned guitar to open the song up. Bellamy’s early classical influences can be heard in the secondary dominants used in the chord progression of the song’s chorus.
Fictional, perhaps, but art imitates life, and the whole vibe is connecting explosively with Muse fans upon the return of being able to experience one of the best live shows around. After all, the trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dominic Howard view themselves as a live band, first and foremost, and the concert experience informs every aspect of their writing process.
“It’s unavoidable for us because we’ve probably connected to our audiences more through live performance than we have through pop charts or anything like that,” says Bellamy. “We’ve never been embraced by the mainstream. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Top 40 single or anything like that. We’ve always been kind of alternative outsiders regarding recorded music, but where we connect with our audience is onstage. I think it’s totally inevitable that when we’re in the studio, almost every song we’re creating—I mean not every moment, but almost—we’re thinking about that, rather than like, ‘Oh, this is going to be on X radio station, or it’s going to be in this film.’ We’re not thinking about any of that stuff. We’re thinking, ‘We’re making this song and we’re going to go onstage and play it.’”
Bellamy has been Muse’s main songwriter since the band formed in 1994, when they were originally called Rocket Baby Dolls. After the songs are drafted, the band collaborates on production, song arrangements, and the sounds to be used on each album. Over the years, Muse has tinkered with outside producers, but for Will of the People the band decided to keep it in the family.
“We haven’t produced an album since The Resistance in 2009 and The 2nd Law in 2012,” Bellamy says. “Then, we felt like we needed some outside input, and we went to Mutt Lange for the Drones album. On [2018’s] Simulation Theory, we worked with a whole bunch of different producers. But on this album, we felt like it would be good to get back to our original process.”
“I’ve always been anti-authoritarian by nature. If you read some of my school report cards, you’ll probably find that I wasn’t the most compliant student.”
Bellamy recalls, “Lange leaned towards the human side but wanted the humans to play their parts accurately rather than use computers to repair an inaccurate performance—a very humans-first approach.” Other producers “wanted to program a drum beat and just start with that.”
Muse doesn’t operate with a singular magic formula. “Songs like ‘We Are Fucking Fucked,’ ‘Kill or Be Killed,’ and, to some extent, ‘Will of the People,’ benefit from being a bit more human sounding, a bit more relaxed, and not perfectly tight in all the different spots,” explains Bellamy. “Sometimes you can tighten the life out of a track, and we’ve noticed with Muse that could be a problem. If we make it too tight, we lose elements that we like to tap into, like chaos or feeling slightly out of control.”
The sense of reckless abandon is huge in Bellamy’s music. “I grew up on things like Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, or Jimi Hendrix. Those are the two guitarists that I probably loved the most. And the element that they brought into guitar playing was, obviously amazing guitar playing, but also an element of chaos, an element of being slightly out of control. Sometimes When you edit it out, you end up losing a little bit of that chaos feeling. That’s something that we’ve been trying to balance a little bit. It’s difficult because it’s so tempting to try to tighten everything. There was a bit of that on certain tracks. Something like ‘You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween,’ for example, is much more on the tighter side.”
TIDBIT: Muse returned to self-producing on their ninth studio album, Will of the People, which was recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in London.
That is, until the blazing guitar solo enters. “When the guitar solo comes in, it’s really like, ‘Just let it rip. No editing,’” says Bellamy. “It was like, boom, whatever happens, happens. It’s just a balancing act with rock where you want to make sure you don’t erase the feel of it, if that’s part of what the song is trying to convey.”
Muse’s label had hinted at the band making a greatest-hits album. But for Will of the People, Muse wanted to create a new take on that concept. Rather than rummage through their discography looking for the “best” songs, Muse wanted to make all new songs for Will of the People,with the aim of making “greatest hits” in different styles. To that end, it seems like they’ve succeeded. Bellamy has said “Compliance” is the best pop track they’ve ever done, and “Kill or Be Killed” is the best prog-metal song they’ve done.
The latter will appeal to lovers of guitar pyrotechnics. It features a lethal whammy-infused, drop-tuned opening riff, Lydian pedal chords, and an over-the-top dramatic solo that could make envious shredders want to quit. But Bellamy cautions them to hold off giving up.
“If you listen to the Grace album by Jeff Buckley, you’ll notice the guitar sound is very glassy, very bright but very, very clear at the same time.”
“I’m plainly cheating in that solo [laughs],” he says. “I’m basically tapping and using a whammy pedal to do octave shifts. It sounds like I’m doing insane arpeggios. I’m not a shredder at all. I’ve never been a very good shredder, but I found ways to cut corners. On that one I’m doing a simple tapping technique, but the octave is being pitch-shifted as I’m tapping to make it sound like a really broad arpeggio.” Bellamy used this setup before to great effect on “Map of the Problematique” from Black Holes and Revelations [2006].
The Multi-Faceted Musician
Being a guitar virtuoso is far from Bellamy’s priority. “I’d say I’m a jack of all trades but not necessarily a master of one,” he confesses. Initially, in his formative years, Bellamy went down the road of trying to be a flashy, technical guitarist, but soon changed course.
“Trust me, there are thousands of guitarists on Instagram that are way better than me [laughs]. I see them all the time. I sort of realized I was never going to be like Steve Vai or something. To me, probably where my specialty is, is in playing guitar and singing at the same time. That’s something I’ve had to work on quite a lot because it’s hard—at least it was hard for me in the early years. Especially playing certain rhythmic parts or rhythmic patterns and detailed kind of singing. That’s what I focused on. Sometimes you have to work out where your upstroke is on the guitar and how that connects to which syllable of the vocal.”
Bellamy has always been less myopic than his peers in the guitar community. Starting in his late teenage years, he had a dual musical personality. On one hand he was in bands that were all about rock, U.K. Indie music, and grunge, but on the side, he would be at home listening to classical music. “I just loved it,” says Bellamy. “I was getting into the electric guitar, but in my school there was a classical guitar teacher. That was the only guitar teacher who was available, so I decided to just go down that road because I was already playing guitar a little bit. I learned about different modes and scales, and different ways of moving chords around. I studied a bit of [Heitor] Villa-Lobos and learned a little bit about that back then, but I never really became serious in the classical realm, guitar-wise. I did it for a couple of years and then, through listening to that stuff, it led me to discover great piano composers, like Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt.”
Matt Bellamy’s Gear
Muse’s Matt Bellamy makes a point with his main axe, a Manson DL-1.
Photo by Hans-Peter Van Velthoven
Guitars
- Manson 007 MB
- Manson ORYX custom fanned-fret 6-string
- Jeff Buckley’s 1983 Fender Telecaster
- Manson MB Drone 003 with Manson PF-1 bridge pickup and Sustainiac
- 1966 or ’65 Gibson LG-0 acoustic
- Manson MB Standard with Manson PF-1 Humbucker Bridge pickup and Sustainiac in satin “Matt Black” finish
- Manson MB Standard with Manson PF-1 Humbucker Bridge pickup and Sustainiac in gloss “Red Alert" finish
- TogaMan GuitarViol Bastarda
Microphones
- Sennheiser MD 421
- Royer R-122V
- Neumann U67
- Neumann U87
- Shure SM57
Amps
- Diezel VH4
- Mesa/Boogie Badlander
- Marshall Handwired 1959 Super Lead plexi (modded)
- Orange Rockerverb 100 MKIII
- Gibson EH 150 (1940)
- 1964 Vox AC30 Top Boost
- Laney 100-watt Klipp head and 4x12 cab (1972)
- Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box
- Mills 4x12 cabinet with Celestion V30 8-ohm speakers
- Marshall 1960BX handwired 4x12 cabinet with 25W Celestion Greenback 16-ohm speakers
Effects
- Dwarfcraft Necromancer
- Pro Co RAT
- Death by Audio Total Sonic Annihilation
- Korg SDD-3000 digital delay
- Pete Cornish TB-83 treble boost
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball (.009–.012–.016–.026–.036–.050)
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
While Bellamy is the band’s sole guitarist, he is completely fine with not including the guitar on everything Muse. He’s made it a point to also showcase piano, and the instrument plays prominently on the new songs “Liberation” and “Ghosts (How Can I Move On).” The latter is the big piano number on Will of the People and opens with an arpeggiated keyboard figure similar to Adele’s mega-hit “Someone Like You.” This song indirectly spawned from a small solo side project Bellamy was working on over the last several years, which mostly saw him redoing Muse songs with just piano and vocals.
“That is what led to that song,” recalls Bellamy. “That was the first time I really tried to do a simple piano/vocal ballad. I guess you’re always going to be in the company of people who have had big hits with those kinds of things. For us it was a bit of an unusual move. I’ve always had piano here and there, but never really a song that’s just vocal and piano. To be honest, I played the song for the guys in the band, and we weren’t sure if it was going to be on a Muse album. But they really liked it and we thought, ‘You know what, this adds a little bit of color, so maybe it can be on.’ I’m not sure yet to what extent it will be played live.”
The Manson Connection
In his time away from the stage and studio, Bellamy keeps himself very busy. In 2019, he became the majority owner in Manson Guitar Works and is very involved in everything from overseeing all the new designs to going to the shop and meeting new employees. “It’s great. I love it. It’s a local business in the area I’m from in England. When I was growing up in Devon, South West England, there was a guitar shop in Exeter, which is the nearest college town. It was kind of the best guitar shop really,” says Bellamy, who, as a teen, lusted after a Manson custom build.
Muse - WON'T STAND DOWN (Official Video)
“I bought my first couple of guitars from there, but I couldn’t really afford the custom-made ones. We found out that the guy who ran the place, Hugh Manson, used to be Led Zeppelin’s guitar tech. He’s a luthier that makes his own guitars to whatever spec you want. So, as soon as Muse had any kind of success and I could afford to buy a nice guitar, around the year 2000, I went to him and said, ‘I’d love to have a custom-made guitar.’”
Bellamy’s first custom Manson was an aluminum guitar, with a finish similar to a DeLorean and a Z.Vex Fuzz Factory and MXR Phase 90 built in. “It became my main guitar from about 2001 onwards. Then I went back to him to get a couple of others that were similar in shape. I designed the shape. I wanted a unique shape that hadn’t been seen before. I worked with him on custom guitars throughout the 2000s and this just went on and on, to the point where all the guitars I use onstage are Manson guitars. Then, around four or five years ago, Hugh retired and wanted me to take over ownership of the company, to keep it running, and to take it to the next step.”
Manson sells a good amount of custom guitars, but the big seller is the Manson Meta Series MBM-1, which comes in at the lowest price point. “That was something I introduced to the company when I took over. I really wanted there to be a more affordable version available,” explains Bellamy. “We have some of those parts manufactured in Europe and some in Indonesia, and we have those parts brought to our warehouse in Devon where we put them together ourselves. The more expensive ones are handbuilt and handmade in the factory in Devon. Since the last 20 years, he’s employed a bunch of amazing guitar makers. There’s an amazing workshop where people hand-make these things.”
Matt Bellamy prefers an element of chaos in his music, which Muse mirrors in their thematic tours and potent onstage presence.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
While Bellamy is mostly a Manson loyalist, he employed a unique instrument called the GuitarViol for the pizzicato string parts in the verses of “Won’t Stand Down.” “It’s got a similar range as a guitar, only a few tones up from where a cello is based. When you play it, it sounds a bit like a cello,” he says. “I’m not a fretless player. It’s a way of adding string sounds to songs. I was playing it like I play a guitar or bass. It’s a cool instrument because, rather than using sound libraries, I just played that instrument.”
Bellamy also recently indulged in the purchase of a trophy instrument: Jeff Buckley’s 1983 Grace Fender Telecaster. Rather than store it away in a glass case, Bellamy uses the instrument quite often. “It appears a couple of times on the album and I love it. It’s a great guitar. Rather than just stick it on the wall, I think it’s nice to give it some use and keep it involved in music,” says Bellamy. “I used it on ‘Will of the People,’ on the lead part, which is the high bluesy bit. I may have used it on the verses of ‘We Are Fucking Fucked’ as well. It’s such a great instrument. It’s just a unique, strange-sounding Telecaster. I had it looked at by the Manson team and they were saying there’s something odd about the pickups. They seem to be slightly out of phase, and it causes this very glassy tone. If you listen to the Grace album by Jeff Buckley, you’ll notice the guitar sound is very glassy, very bright, but very, very clear at the same time.”
“If we make it too tight, we lose elements that we like to tap into, like chaos or feeling slightly out of control.”
Populism and Power Struggles
Many songs on Will of the People, such as the title track, “Compliance,” “Liberation,” and the closer, “We are Fucking Fucked,” revolve around matters of oppressors and the oppressed. “I think it’s a theme that you can find across Muse’s career. It’s part of my nature,” explains Bellamy. “I’ve always been anti-authoritarian. If you read some of my school report cards, you’ll probably find that I wasn’t the most compliant student. I’ve always been kind of skeptical of power structures and those that have power—the concentrated few who take advantage of their power over the masses and so on. It’s not one particular thing that I’m aiming at. It doesn’t matter where it exists, I have a natural inclination to feel like that should be always disrupted.
“You can apply that to anything from corporate structures, banking structures, economic structures, to political structures. Any structure where a concentrated few have incredible power over a large population. I’ve always been intrinsically questioning that and wondering about the quality of the people who are placed in those positions of power, and how did they get there? It’s been a lifelong fascination for me, and it’s obviously translated into the music and the songwriting, going back as far as songs like [2009’s] ‘Uprising’ and so on. It doesn’t matter where they exist. The fact that extreme wealth can be concentrated in a handful of tech entrepreneurs, for example. Or the fact that powerful lobbyists can have such an influence on senators.”
Having lived in L.A. since 2010, Bellamy gained new insight into the class politics that divide America, and this seeped into many of the songs on Will of the People. “During the troubled period of the crossover from January 6, and when all that stuff started to fall apart, it kind of played into this idea that populism can actually be quite scary,” says Bellamy. “When the masses do topple something, it can be quite chaotic and crazy as well. On the one hand, the masses overthrowing power structures is appealing, on the other it can actually be quite frightening. This album explores both sides of that.”
Muse - Map Of The Problematique [Live From Wembley Stadium]
Matt Bellamy employs effects in uncommon ways to achieve his musical goals. “Map of the Problematique” was the first time that he used whammy pedals. “I basically sent a program to make it turn on and off in a certain rhythm,” explains Bellamy. “So, it would make the octave change in a rhythmic pattern. For example, in ‘Map,’ I’m just playing a power chord, but it goes (sings fast arpeggiated repeating phrase) and that’s kind of a program telling the whammy pedal to change octaves. I used that same technique for the solo on ‘Kill or Be Killed.’”
Bassist Sebastian Steinberg’s credits range from deep-cut avant-jazz to the highest levels of pop stardom.
Think weird samples, colliding harmonies, and half-sung boho poetry, all over some seriously sick grooves, with Steinberg driving the bus to Beelzebub with his thick upright tone and funky feel.
“In the middle of every groove, there’s the stupid part,” he told me then, drawing my attention to, as an example, the steady high-hat part in Sly & the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” If a groove makes your head nod, he said, “there’s something absolutely idiotic weaving its way down the middle.” As a bass player, he cautioned: “Sometimes you’re it.”
This idea stuck with me over the years, so I thought I’d see what Sebastian was up to. I caught him at a good time. After three well-received albums in the ’90s, Soul Coughing went their separate ways, and Steinberg went on to play both upright and electric with a variety of artists, including several that he describes as “fearlessly original.” That’s him on Fiona Apple’s acclaimed pandemic release, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, as well as singer-songwriter Iron & Wine’s latest album, Light Verse. This summer he’s touring Europe in a trio with drummer Matt Chamberlain and pianist Diana Krall (who didn’t want to play with “jazz guys”), and in the fall, he’s hitting the road with a reunited Soul Coughing.
I asked what it was about his approach that appeals to certain artists. “I like to play songs,” he answered. “But I have a musical curiosity and I can throw in my own ideas. My hands tend to be the smartest part of my body, so I can follow where the music leads.”
Steinberg says Fiona Apple’s 2020 record, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, “surpasses anything I’ve ever been involved in.”
Interestingly, when Sebastian started working at different points with Apple, Iron & Wine, and Krall, all three artists asked him not to listen to their previous albums. They wanted to create something new, current, and genuine, rather than, as Sebastian puts it, “trying to do stuff that’s already happened.”
“I’m not the bass player for everyone, which I’m really delighted to discover,” Steinberg continued. “But I’ve been sort of working out that there is a place for me. I’ve always been drawn to music that tends to ruffle feathers rather than smooth them. I gravitate towards people who are really strong individual thinkers, sometimes very much at the cost of their convenience, comfort, and public opinion. But the music is real. When musicians are real with each other, they’re as real as it gets.”
Sebastian describes the making of Fetch the Bolt Cutters as this kind of very real, exceptional experience. “It surpasses anything I’ve ever been involved in, including Soul Coughing,” he says. “I haven’t made an album so true, where nothing like this music has existed before, since Soul Coughing’s first album,” he said, referring to 1994’s Ruby Vroom. “Both albums were alive, unfettered, and truly unexplored territory.”
Fiona put the band together in 2016, inviting Steinberg, drummer Amy Aileen Wood, and multi-instrumentalist David Garza. “The four of us would go to the house, stomp around, sing in a chant she’d made up, and literally play like children or birds. After a while, songs began appearing. By the time we started going into the studio, we’d developed a level of trust and intimacy with each other, because we’d been playing in this non-specific but very personal way together. It's the most powerful band I’ve ever been in.”
“There are so many ways to approach music that transcend what the instrument was built to do. But you should know what it was built to do, because that’s a great job. It’s the best seat in the house.”
Sebastian notes that you do have to balance this kind of boldness with musical functionality. “Bass is a function, not an instrument,” he says. “There are so many ways to approach music that transcend what the instrument was built to do. But you should know what it was built to do, because that’s a great job. It’s the best seat in the house.”
So how does one go about getting real? “It’s about getting out of the way of whatever niceties musicians tend to inflict on each other,” he says. “You have to overcome fear and let the truth speak. Find the music and play it. Don’t bring your ego into it, but don’t let somebody scare you off from the music. And if you believe in what you’re doing, stick to it.”
A note of clarification
Last month’s column was about playing style, with Funkadelic bassist Billy Bass Nelson as an example. However, the magazine was already off to the printer when I finally connected with Nelson after several attempts. He told me that he did not play with a pick on Fred Wesley’s “Half A Man,” but often used his fingernails to get a similar attack. He also suggested two other songs that exemplify his style: Parlet’s 1978 track “Love Amnesia,” and the Temptations’ 1975 single “Shakey Ground.”
Steve Carr’s first amp build was a Fender Champ clone. It didn’t work on the first try. Luckily, that didn’t stop him.
After college, he moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he met an amp repairman that he started hanging around. He wanted to apprentice under the fellow and soak up his wisdom, but the guy wasn’t interested in taking on a student. “Finally, he said, ‘I don’t have time to have anybody around here, but you should do what I did when I was a kid, which is build a Fender tweed Champ,’” remembers Carr. He’d have to track down the schematic, figure out how to read it, source the necessary parts, then assemble the amp. Flipping through issues of Vacuum Tube Valley and Angela’s Instruments, he got on his way.
Building that Champ clone taught him how to navigate industrial parts suppliers, valuable know-how that would come in handy later on. At the end of the build, he flicked it on, and nothing happened. The amp wouldn’t sing. “I was super depressed,” Carr says. “I couldn’t believe it.” But he didn’t quit—he spent the next few weeks troubleshooting the circuit and got it to go. By then, in his mind, he was a bona fide amp repairman. Between Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro, there were tons of young gigging bands who needed their amps in working order, so Carr got a breakneck crash course in amp repair over a few years. It wasn’t long before he thought: “Maybe I can make my own amp.”
Carr’s lineup has included 22 different amplifier models over its 26 years of business. Clockwise from top left, we have the Skylark, Rambler, and two Mercury Vs.
Photo by Tim Coffey
His initial idea was to combine two amps that he loved, his black-panel Fender Deluxe Reverb and 50-watt non-master-volume Marshall. He wanted to marry the Fender’s cleans and reverb with the roaring drive of the Marshall. The Frankenstein experiment produced Carr Amplifiers’ first amp: the Slant 6V. It was just intended for Carr’s personal use. But it wasn’t too long until his friends encouraged him to build more, and in the fall of 1998, he made his first two sales.
Eddie Berman was working at the Music Loft in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a local musician called him up to say that a friend of his was building amplifiers, and wanted to bring one by the shop. Carr brought those first two Slant 6Vs by, and Berman and his colleagues jammed on them at rehearsal that evening. “I went, ‘Oh my goodness, we have to have these amplifiers,’” says Berman. The clean channel was unbelievable, Berman continues—broad, cinematic, and sweet-sounding, free from any top-end harshness or “nails on the chalkboard” overtones. It was so intoxicating that he used to tease Carr: The clean channel was so good, why did he bother to put a dirty channel on, too?
There was more to the amps than just rich tone. Berman remembers that the first amp had the same electrical plug as one might find on hospital emergency room equipment. “We know anything that he touches is going to be golden,” says Berman. There was one other element, too: Steve Carr was just a good dude. Ph
From his very first build, Carr has manufactured his amps to impressive, durable specs—two different sources mentioned independently how robust and secure that even the amplifiers’ power cords are.
Photo by Tim Coffey
That was more than 26 years ago. Carr Amplifiers, located in Pittsboro, North Carolina, has grown into one of the most respected companies in the boutique amplification market, thanks to their versatility, exacting construction, and, of course, beautiful sounds.
In his first builds, Carr pioneered a combination that would become a signature for all his models: expensive polypropylene capacitors and more classic, old-school components like carbon-composition resistors. “Those two items have a certain sound that is a family trait in the amps, which is a very dynamic, open, transparent, but also a very warm and liquid sound, at once,” says Carr. “They’re sort of in a way opposite concepts, but they come together.”
Carr attributes his success in part to the initial demise of Matchless, the amp builder that helped carve out the beginnings of the boutique amp niche in the 1990s. When Matchless went out of business in 1998 (they returned some years later), Carr realized that their dealers would probably be looking for replacement amps in their shops to appease the boutique crowd, so he phoned them up and pitched his amps.
“Those two items have a certain sound that is a family trait in the amps, which is a very dynamic, open, transparent, but also a very warm and liquid, sound at once.” - Steve Carr
The business grew, and in May 1999, the Carr brand launched its second amp, the Rambler. Carr describes it as “a collage” of a black-panel Princeton Reverb and a tweed Pro. By this point, the rising amp-maker had solidified another characteristic: He liked squeezing two amps into one box, without sacrificing fidelity on either end. “At first, they don’t really want to work well together,” says Carr. There’s a whole lot of prototyping to get to the point where the circuits can behave copacetically, and represent both elements of their parent amplifiers without causing problems. But succeeding in that analog alchemy is one of Carr’s greatest achievements. “It’s got influences,” he continues, “but it becomes a new, unique amp.”
Working with expensive components, like choice capacitors and near-obsolete resistors, drives the price of Carr amps up, but Steve Carr insists that they make an audible difference. Here, Carr builder David Quick assembles a Mercury V.
Photo by Tim Coffey
Carr started building his noiseboxes out of the spare bedroom of his wife’s home in southern Chapel Hill, and after his first sales, he sprang for a wooden-floored barn in the woods. It had electricity, but that was about it: no HVAC, no water, no bathrooms. But the price was right, so he rented the spot and hired his first employee. The operation lasted a year there, where they built Slant 6Vs and Ramblers, the latter of which became the company’s first perennial seller and a favorite of Nashville session players. “The names of these folks, people may not know, but you’ve probably heard a lot of these session guys who’ve got Ramblers,” says Carr.
The “barn era” lasted about a year and a half, until Carr and his wife relocated to Pittsboro. He got a tip that some space was up for rent in an old chicken hatchery downtown, where they leased two rooms initially. When the business in the neighboring units moved out, Carr Amplifiers expanded to 4,500 square feet. They’ve remained in that building since, growing the operation to fill the high ceilings and spacious rooms.
One of the major additions to the business was in-house cabinetry building. In the early years, Carr hired carpenters from around the state who built cabinets for the amps. At one point, he was picking up cabs from a woodworker named Peter Mather in Virginia Beach, Virginia, loading up a van with 30 of the wooden frames. Even though it was wintertime, Carr drove with the windows down, because the glue applied to adhere the Tolex to the wood was still fresh, and the fumes were potent. Eventually, Mather, who passed away in 2023, offered to travel to Pittsboro to teach Carr and his staff how to manufacture the boxes. The onsite cabinet-making started in 2003, and in the two-decades-plus since, the team has developed their distinctive cabinet design into a key piece of their identity. It’s important that Carr cabs both look great and fit the physical needs of the circuitry inside.
At Carr, the name of the game is cutting cabs, not corners. Here, a stack of naked Bel-Ray frames show off the shop’s woodworking and design prowess.
Photo courtesy of Carr Amplifiers
“We have a certain aesthetic sense,” says Carr, naming 1920s through ’60s design and art trends, chiefly art deco, as major influences. “I’ve always wanted to have that in the cabinets, because so many guitar amps are very basic-looking, and if somebody’s buying something that’s handmade with great care, it seems to me that you want to make it fun-looking, too. You want to take that same care with the whole aesthetic look of it and make it a real pleasure to have. That’s been a goal from the beginning, and it’s part of why we decided to take the extra expense. There are a lot of machines you’ve got to buy to create a cabinet shop. But now we have control over the beauty of the design.”
But the box is only as good as what comes out of it. Carr says it takes roughly nine months of process between when he brainstorms a design and when it comes to life, but it always starts with a classic amp—or a few. “I often joke that it’s kind of a sonic divining rod, where I’ll start off somewhere and the amp eventually becomes what it wanted to become,” says Carr. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“I often joke that it’s kind of a sonic divining rod, where I’ll start off somewhere and the amp eventually becomes what it wanted to become. I’m just along for the ride.” - Steve Carr
The Bel-Ray, released earlier this year, is Carr’s most ambitious design yet. Previous builds like the Super B and Mercury V incorporated rotary switches that allowed users to change between specific voicings—already a mean feat in a small combo with analog circuitry. But Carr wanted to take it a step further and create a combo amp with a “triumvirate of British amp voices”: classic Vox, Marshall, and Hiwatt noisemakers. It was a big challenge, he admits. The output section was fairly simple—two EL84 tubes—but Carr wanted to incorporate an EF86 pentode in the preamp. It has a distinct flavor from the two other 12AX7s in the preamp, but is so dynamic that the potential for microphonic problems is elevated. That took some finessing.
The tone stacks, though, were the most labor-intensive code to crack. It took Carr a long time to get the feel for Hiwatt’s midrange and treble signatures, which he likens to those of old Valco and Supro amps. While the Marshall and Vox tone architecture were similar enough in structure, the Hiwatt’s was trickier to squeeze in. “The parts just don’t connect in the same places or in the same way, so you’re not able to just change a value here and there; you have to change how it’s all hooked up,” he explains. To accomplish the complex maneuvering, the Bel-Ray uses a number of dual, stacked pots, and the rotary switch changes not just capacitor values, but also which deck of the dual pots the user is manipulating. “There was a lot of massaging and tweaking and thinking to get all three of those vibes there,” he says. “And then, the amp became its own thing. It has characteristics of all those [amps], but it’s not exactly those.”
Carr Bel-Ray Amp Demo | First Look
PG’s John Bohlinger takes the Carr Bel-Ray through its paces in this First Look demo.
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Part of Carr Amplifiers’ “mojo” comes from Carr’s exacting standards for individual components, which contribute to the significant price tag on his amps. He favors U.S.-made signal capacitors from Ohio-based Jupiter Condenser Co., which are patterned after ’50s and ’60s caps but can cost 10 to 20 times more than the average capacitor. Another parts vendor sources him with his treasured, near-obsolete carbon-comp resistors. Unless you have a backstock (which he has amassed), Carr estimates you won’t be able to find them within a few years. This all might sound a bit over-the-top; how much difference can one tiny component make? Carr insists that when he’s testing components in the circuits, the value (pun intended, I guess) becomes clear.
“There’s a lot of really great amps out there, and I love a lot of amps. I’m not saying this is the only one, but it sure is a good one.” - Bill Frisell
It’s obvious that he’s onto something. In the early 2000s, Bill Frisell was in Nashville recording with bassist Viktor Krauss when Krauss loaned him a Carr Rambler to record with. He loved it. A while later, he played a Carr Mercury during a session in Portland, Oregon. “That’s where I really was like, ‘Oh man, I gotta check this out more,’” says Frisell. His parents were living in Chapel Hill, so during a visit, he popped down to Steve’s shop and picked up a Mercury of his own. When the Sportsman came out, Frisell bought one of those, too.
On the road, Frisell uses mostly Fender amps, but at home, he keeps his prized amplifiers: a small Gibson combo amp from the early ’60s, an early ’60s Fender Princeton, and his Carr Sportsman. “There’s this thing with these older amps,” says Frisell. “There’s a clarity and warmth that’s happening at the same time. I can’t put my finger on it when I try to describe the sound. Whatever it is with the Sportsman, that’s the one for me that has these qualities, these older amps that I love.
“There’s a lot of really great amps out there, and I love a lot of amps. I’m not saying this is the only one, but it sure is a good one.”