The story behind Jimmy Somma''s hand-built amp heads
As I take the train from New York City to Sommatone Amplification in Somerville, New Jersey, lush greenery and farms flash by the window and it’s easy to see why the area is called the Garden State. The Sommatone factory is actually part of a three-car garage nestled in the woods behind a ranch-style house abutting a large swimming pool. This is where Jimmy Somma designs and builds some fantastic-sounding heads and combos.
Somma brings a lot of playing experience to each amp design, too, and that’s because he spent years slogging it out in New Jersey’s highly competitive club circuit. His creations are not academic exercises based on oscilloscopes and ohm readings, nor are they flashy furniture pieces designed for the dens of wealthy hobbyists. They’re real-world workhorses created with a player’s ear for sound, and they’re built to a touring musician’s roadworthiness requirements. Somma eschews building Fender, Vox, or Marshall clones in favor of fashioning products that include some of the best features of each, with a range of models to suit just about any performing or recording need.
Jimmy Somma stands behind an alluringly daunting wall of amps at the New York Amp Show last June. Photo by Chris Kies
As his employees assemble amps, Somma explains how he got started and what differentiates his amps from those of other custom builders.
How did you get into guitar?
Ace Frehley—he was pretty much it. When I was six, I saw the cover to Alive! and discovered Kiss. My parents didn’t want to buy me the album, so my grandparents did. Hearing it, I knew I wanted to be a guitar player. My grandfather was a garbage contractor, and he would find broken guitars for me. My parents saw I was taking guitar seriously, so at seven I started taking guitar lessons. After a year, I didn’t think I was getting anything out of them, so I quit and started picking things up by listening to records. At 14, I took lessons again for about two years.
Did you fix any of those guitars your grandfather brought home?
Yes, though at first I had no idea what I was doing. But I’ve always been good at figuring out stuff on my own, so I started by restringing the guitars and by the time I was 12 or 13, I was replacing their pickups. I didn’t realize it was anything unusual—I just figured that’s what people did. My grandparents and dad were really handy and would teach me about tools and repairing things. With that little bit of knowledge, I just took off.
How did you start repairing amps?
I got into Eric Johnson, who is all about tone. That started me thinking: Why do classic guitar tracks sound the way they do? Why do certain amps sound better than others? I started reverse-engineering amplifiers to find out. I’ve owned Fender and Marshalls over the years, and I’d tweak them by experimenting with tubes and speakers. I began doing repairs for friends, and then for friends of friends, and then I started getting paid for it. For years, I repaired amps and guitars part-time, but eventually I quit my day job and went for it. That was eight years ago.
It’s one thing to solder pickups, but getting inside an amp can be dangerous.
The front panel of Sommatone’s new Vibe-45 head, which features a badass tooled-leather covering and plexi-Marshall style interface. Photo by Chris Kies |
I took a very basic electronics course in high school, but I’m largely self-taught. I did a lot of research in old tube manuals and whatever I could find in the library about old electronics. I just focused on audio circuits. A lot of it comes down to being a player— it’s an important aspect of designing an amp properly. If you can’t make it sound good, how do you know it will sound good for anyone else? Even if you get feedback from other players, that’s only useful to a certain extent. Not to knock other builders, but listening to some of the sound clips on their websites, I feel like saying, “Please get someone who can play guitar to do your demos.” People ask me, “What is the most important thing in an amp?” Actually, tone is more of a recipe—a combination of the player, pickups, guitar, amp, and effects, and how they all interact.
How did you make the transition from repair to manufacturing?
Back around 2005, I was prototyping the original idea using some transformers and an old dual-EL84 Sano amp I gutted for the chassis. As I kept tweaking my design, it sounded better and better. I got some great feedback from players who tried the amp. I loved the way it responded. I had been gigging through a bunch of other amps and suddenly I had one that felt different than anything I’d used before. That became the Roaring 20—my first production amp. Then I got hooked up with my first artist endorser, Earl Slick [David Bowie, John Lennon].
Somma’s ultra-clean workbench is outfitted with the requisite Lodestar audio generator, a Tenma oscilloscope, and a boatload of spray bottles. Photo by Michael Ross |
Our first dealer was Black Creek Guitars in New Paltz, New York, which is Earl Slick’s backyard. At the store, they told him, “You have to check out this new amp, we know you’ll love it.” He played through it and bought it on the spot. The owner called me up and said, “Earl Slick just left with your amp. I think you should talk to him.” Slick told me he loved it, but he might need a higher-output version for some gigs. That’s why we decided to build the 40-watt Roaring 40.
Does it have EL34 power tubes?
No, both models have EL84s. The Roaring 40 has four EL84s with a half-power switch, so you can run it at 20 watts. After designing the Roaring 40, I approached Slick about doing a signature model. That’s when I came up with the Slick 18. He wanted a small, low-wattage amp he could really crank up in his home studio without annoying the neighbors. A week after I brought it to him, I called and asked, “What do you think? Are there any changes you’d like?” He said, “Nothing. I think you are in my head.”
Sommatone’s first signature model, the EL84-powered Slick 18, came about after famed David Bowie sideman Earl Slick got hooked on another Sommatone at his local guitar shop. “A week after I brought it to him,” Somma says, “I called and asked, ‘What do you think? Are there any changes you’d like?’ He said, ‘Nothing. I think you are in my head.’” Photo by Michael Ross |
We have the Outlaw, our high-gain amp for hard rock and metal. It uses a pair of 6550s and pumps out about 70 watts. The Outlaw has lots of gain, but with the clarity I always felt was missing in high-gain amps. They sound mushy and overly compressed to me. We avoid that by having a type of high gain where you can hit a chord and all the notes are there. My employee Danny Arango was a big part of that amp, because he grew up playing metal.
Then there’s the 35-watt Overdrive 35, which is a 6L6-based, class-A design. You can get a lot of different sounds out of it, from tweed clean and tweed crunch to Dumble-style fusion—even close to Marshall sounds. I’m a huge fan of running things in class A. I think the response is completely different—it feels livelier. You’re not going to get as much power as with class AB, but when you roll the guitar volume back on a class-AB amp it still breaks up quite a bit. When you do that with a class-A amp, it becomes very clean, and it responds much better to your pick attack and guitar volume settings.
The Sommatone showroom is well stocked with a variety of combos and half-stacks in varying wattage and covering options. Photo by Michael Ross |
I can’t understand the mentality where a guy will drop crazy money on a goldtop or a ’59 Les Paul reissue and then play it through a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. The amp is a bigger part of the equation. A ’59 Les Paul through a transistor amp is going to sound like a Les Paul through a transistor amp. But put an Epiphone through an amazing tube amp, and that guitar will sound really good.
What is the essential difference between your amps and the other custom amps out there?
The layout and the construction. A lot of manufacturers are doing a massaged kit. They’ll use a chassis from a kit supplier and basically make a Marshall or Fender. In the process of doing repairs, we’ll often open up “custom” amps and see another Fender or Vox clone with a different logo on it. We design our own chassis and a sheet metal company manufactures them for us. Most of our amps have true point-to-point wiring, as opposed to using a tag board. It is all about the purity of the signal path and having as little as possible in the circuit that is going to denigrate the tone and the sensitivity. When you have lengths of wire running close to one another you get interaction, even though there’s no contact. Your signal is not pure. So, where the components are located, how the wires are run, and keeping the links as short as possible are all important.
Does this affect the sound or the feel?
Both. A lot of times when you play through an old amp and push it hard, you’ll hear buzziness on top of the note—a shrillness. You can dial that out, but it shouldn’t be there to begin with. That’s parasitic oscillation. You don’t hear it as amp noise, but when you’re playing, it’s present as an impurity. A well-designed amp takes out those impurities and gives you this perfect sonic character. That’s the difference between a mass-produced amp with a PC board and someone who is paying attention to detail and designing the amp for perfection.
Do you have dealers where people can check out your amps?
Yes. You can find a list of dealers at sommatone.com. We’re actively expanding our dealer base because, ultimately, for people to hear the difference in our amps, they need to be able to play through them.
It’s almost over, but there’s still time to win! Enter Stompboxtober Day 30 for your shot at today’s pedal from SoloDallas!
The Schaffer Replica: Storm
The Schaffer Replica Storm is an all-analog combination of Optical Limiter+Harmonic Clipping Circuit+EQ Expansion+Boost+Line Buffer derived from a 70s wireless unit AC/DC and others used as an effect. Over 50 pros use this unique device to achieve percussive attack, copious harmonics and singing sustain.
Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is one of the loudest guitarists around. And he puts his volume to work creating mythical tones that have captured so many of our imaginations, including our special shoegaze correspondent, guitarist and pedal-maestro Andy Pitcher, who is our guest today.
My Bloody Valentine has a short discography made up of just a few albums and EPs that span decades. Meticulous as he seems to be, Shields creates texture out of his layers of tracks and loops and fuzz throughout, creating a music that needs to be felt as much as it needs to be heard.
We go to the ultimate source as Billy Corgan leaves us a message about how it felt to hear those sounds in the pre-internet days, when rather than pull up a YouTube clip, your imagination would have to guide you toward a tone.
But not everyone is an MBV fan, so this conversation is part superfan hype and part debate. We can all agree Kevin Shields is a guitarists you should know, but we can’t all agree what to do with that information.
This episode is sponsored by Fender.
Learn more: https://www.fender.com./
He’ll forever be remembered for his unparalleled mastery of the Telecaster, but Roy Buchanan kept an open mind when it came to his guitars.
Perhaps you’ve read something where an artist or a brand is dubbed “authentic.” It’s marketing hype that’s both real and manufactured, but I assure you it can be both a legit and important concept. The problem is when it gets used in the first person. Who judges whether something is authentic or not? Critics? Magazines? The internet? A brand itself? What does it mean to you? We often refer to things as the “real deal,” so is that the same? Not exactly.
The real deal can be something that is what it purports to be—like a working cowboy. But if you see his hat brand in a store in New York, is that authentic? If you think this is splitting hairs, you might be right. We’d like to think that when we choose a guitar to play, our desire for playability and sound is at the forefront of the decision-making process, and mostly it is. But that blacked-out, pointy axe with the studded strap just won’t fly in your bro-country cover band, so you glom onto a paisley Telecaster, even though it doesn’t feel as good to you. Does this make you authentic? Personally, I’d love to see some chicken pickin’ on that pointy fiddle. Busting down barriers and breaking rules is the spirit of expression and creativity, and that’s authentic.
There’s no shame in honoring tradition and nodding in reverence to your influences, but you don’t have to bow down so low that you can’t be yourself, too. I used to think I was a “Gibson guy.” To a large extent, I still am, but many of you know my love of the Strat and Tele. My music room is full of other brands that I adore and use for certain applications. I believe that you have to use an instrument, effect, or amplifier to get what you need for the situation you’re in, no matter what the social connotation is.
“If Roy freaking Buchannan can rock out on a Les Paul or a Hamer Standard, you can break some rules, too.”
One night in the late 1970s, I answered the phone at the Hamer Guitars factory, mostly to see who on Earth would call at that late hour. To my surprise it was Roy Buchanan, the original master of the Telecaster. He wanted to chat about our Sunburst model that was fairly new to the market. His questions revolved around scale length, fretboard width, fret size, and weight. When I asked why he was interested in our guitar when he was known for playing Telecasters, he told me that he already had one of our Explorer-shaped Standard model guitars! I found this even more puzzling than the fact that Roy Buchanan had cold-called our office at night. Roy went on to say that in the studio he used a lot of different guitars, including a Les Paul with P-90s that he liked a lot. He used the Tele onstage, he said, “because people expect me to do all those Telecaster things.” He didn’t ask me to ship him a guitar for free or inquire about an artist discount. He said he’d check one out at a dealer. I recommended one near him, and we said goodnight. I began to wonder if it was a crank call.
I’d forgotten the whole episode until recently, when I saw a newspaper photograph of Roy Buchanan with his young daughter, Jennifer. I thought about how happy they looked and how sad it was that his death had stolen that little girl’s father from her. And right there in that photo, he’s playing that Hamer Standard. I’m not gonna lie and say that I didn’t cry.
So there it is, folks. If Roy freaking Buchanan can rock out on a Les Paul or a Hamer Standard, you can break some rules, too. I’m certain that he was most comfortable onstage with that beat-up old Tele, but it wasn’t his only love. It’s just the one that people think of when they imagine the authentic guy.
Songwriters often say they strive for connection through authenticity in their music and lyrics. And at the very core, that’s what it’s about—human connection. If you love that cowboy hat and live in Philadelphia, I’m not going to criticize you—just go ahead and wear it, dude. It’s about wearing the hat for its intended purpose, not putting it on to hope it makes you authentic.
Introducing the Martin M-6 and M-7 Johnny Marr signature guitars, featuring a unique seven-string configuration to honor Marr's sound.
The standout feature of the Martin M-7 is its unique seven-string configuration, adding an octave G string to the mix. This design delivers Marr’s unmistakable jangle, making it perfect for replicating the lush, intricate sounds of his most iconic tracks. Also available as a standard six-string model, the M-6, and designed in close collaboration with Marr, these guitars feature a genuine mahogany neck with a full-thickness profile and slightly thinner width at the nut for a unique feel, allowing for fluid transitions and complex chord structures.
Wide like a Jumbo with the thickness of a 000, its Grand Auditorium (0000/M) body size ensures plenty of comfort and projection while offering a precise distinction between the treble and bass. Equipped with LR Baggs Anthem electronics, these guitars ensure your sound is perfectly captured on stage or in the studio with volume, mix, mic level, and phase controls.
“I've now got my own signature guitar that makes me sound like in the studio when I've put this really great old compressor on it with a great mic and a little hint of the high string in there,” says Marr. “All of these things that I do on record using a few guitars, I've all got it in the one guitar that I can carry around with me, and if I go play with a pal or go and guest with someone, I sound like me.”
Marr’s history with Martin guitars is storied – his beloved 1971 D-28 has been the backbone of several classic Smiths songs, including “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” and “Cemetry Gates.” The M-6 and M-7 pay homage to that legacy while ushering in a new era of sonic possibilities. A hardshell case and exclusive Souldier™ strap are included.
For more information, please visit martinguitar.com.