Petaluma, CA (August 10, 2016) -- Mesa/Boogie is excited to announce the addition of four new signal management products aimed at preserving the integrity of the signal sent from instrument to amplifier. The product line includes the Stowaway Buffer, High-Wire Dual Buffer and Line Driver, Clearlink Send Line Driver and the Clearlink Receive ISO/Converter.
Mesa points out that in virtually all guitar and bass rigs, tone quality is won or lost at three major crossroads; input, effects loop and output. In today’s pedal-heavy era, signal chain variables create a constant challenge for those looking to achieve and preserve great tone, so it makes sense that Mesa has turned their attention to connectivity. “Approaching 50 years of building high performance amplifiers we’ve learned a thing or two about tone. Early on we realized that every single component in the signal path truly is a tone control. So it’s only fitting that we would begin looking for areas where we might apply our experience to improve performance in the peripheral components connected to our amplifiers, or any amplifier for that matter. We’re proud to unveil our progressive line of signal management solutions aimed at preserving, and in many cases improving, the performance of your Mesa–or really any brand of amplifier you may use.” said Doug West, 35 year veteran and point man in R&D and Marketing at Mesa/Boogie.
Known for world-renowned tube guitar and bass amplifier designs, Mesa looked to expand their engineering and design team for developing the new products. They found a perfect fit in partnering with Mario Marino. “Mario is a highly respected designer in the area of signal management, switching solutions and electronic component design. Combining his expertise with our experience and production skills allows us to offer the highest quality signal management and switching solutions available…we are excited to have him on the team,” said Jim Aschow, Executive Vice President at Mesa/Boogie. Addressing a variety of scenarios for players and technicians alike, it is clear that Mesa has tapped a wealth of experience in the development of the new product line. The four new products deliver remedies, upgrades and enhancements, all aimed at preserving the integrity of the signal from instrument to amplifier. Whether it’s instrument to amplifier, instrument-to- pedalboard, pedalboard-to-amplifier, amplifier-to- outboard processing and back or, all of the above. The focus from Mesa is clear; ensure that guitar tone is the very best it can be, in any environment, controlling for any variable that can possibly be controlled.
Mesa’s first offering, the Stowaway, is a compact 100% discrete Class-A input buffer designed to remedy an array of Input challenges caused by issues such as impedance loading and mismatching, unpredictable changes in guitar pickup or sound character as a result of varying effect pedals’ input impedance and interconnecting cables’ capacitance. The Stowaway has been engineered to deliver the stable, consistent load an instrument needs to sound as intended. A small footprint allows the Stowaway to be mounted underneath or on top of the most crowded of pedal boards, while its feature set is professional and comprehensive in its category.
The next in the series, serving as a Dual Buffer and combined Line Driver, the High-Wire addresses both input and output challenges in the same compact chassis. Between instrument and pedals, it provides a stable, consistent load for a guitar’s pickups, ensuring that the signal arrives at the first pedal intact. From pedalboard to the amplifier, the High-Wire buffers the signal, ensuring optimum impedance loading and performance, while also allowing for increased signal levels for extra long cable runs via the built-in Line Driver (Footswitchable Boost) feature. As with the Stowaway, the High-Wire buffer circuitry is 100% discrete Class-A. The High-Wire also incorporates a fixed +3dB BOOST on a top mounted mini-toggle. The Footswitch is Dual Function and allows both the variable BOOST when hit once and a MUTE when held for one second.
Aimed at line driving issues, the Clearlink Line Driver is designed to go between the last pedal on a pedalboard and the input of the amp. It’s capable of sending either a balanced or unbalanced signal that compensates for losses in guitar tone quality due to increased capacitance in long cable runs. With +12dB of available output gain, it has the ability to drive long cable runs easily, and when used in conjunction with our Clearlink Receiver it can drive balanced lines of up to 330 Ft./100M with unsurpassed noise immunity and signal integrity. When combined with a Stowaway input buffer, the Clearlink Send forms an “Effects Loop” for the instrument-to- pedalboard-to-amp signal chain that will reclaim the integrity of sound through buffering, impedance matching or boosted levels. Whether used alone, or with the Stowaway as a comprehensive “Front End” solution, the CClearlink Send will provide the needed “stable impedance source” to ensure the components in the guitarist’s rig “communicate” well. It can be used for balanced signals via two different output jacks, standard 3-pin XLR or ¼” TRS and also supports unbalanced signals via the standard ¼” mono jack.
Finally, the Clearlink Receive ISO/Converter is Mesa’s big-stage solution for all instruments where signal must travel longer than 15 to 20 feet. It’s most common application is receiving a buffered and balanced signal through XLR cabling from its companion product–the Clearlink Send. Upon receiving the signal at the tail end of a Pedal Board, the Clearlink Receive converts the XLR balanced signal back to a ¼” unbalanced signal, appropriately matched for feeding an instrument amplifier input. It can also be used for any isolation job or ground lift where grounds cannot be shared, such as a multi-amp switching setup, as well as any balanced XLR to 1/4" unbalanced conversion. Along with Stage applications, the Clearlink Receive is well suited for the Studio too, enabling a very long cable run from the Control Room to the Cutting Room, where an amplifier is often mic’d. The Clearlink (Receive) Ground Lift and Phase Flip switches round out it’s usefulness and feature set.. With the ability to isolate and convert from most pro signal sources, the Clearlink offers a solution that is in high demand for the gigging musician, recording artist or savvy guitar technician.
For more information:
Mesa/Boogie
Hats off to Carmen Vandenberg of Bones UK, our celebrity Question of the Month respondent.
Guest Picker - Carmen Vandenberg, Bones UK
The cover of Soft, Bones UK’s new album, due in mid-September.
A: My favorite method these days (and to be honest, from when I started playing) is to put on my favorite blues records, listen with my eyes closed, and, at the end, see what my brain compartmentalizes and keeps stored away. Then, I try and play back what I heard and what my fingers or brain decided they liked!
Bone UK’s labelmade, Des Rocks.
Obsession: Right now, I am into anyone trying to create sounds that haven’t been made before—bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Jack White, and our labelmate, Des Rocs! There’s a Colombian band called Diamanté Electrico who I’ve been really into recently. Really anyone who’s trying to create innovative and inspiring sounds.
Reader of the Month - Sam C. Schiff.
Sam spent endless hours trying to learn the solo Leslie West played on “Long Red,” off of The Road Goes Ever On.
A: The best way to learn guitar is to listen to some good guitar playing! Put on a record, hear something tasty, and play on repeat until it comes out of your fingers. For me, it was Leslie West playing “Long Red” on the Mountain album, The Road Goes Ever On. I stayed up all night listening to that track until I could match Leslie’s phrasing. I still can’t, no one can, but I learned a lot!
Smith’s own low-wattage amp build.
Obsession: My latest musical obsession is low-wattage tube amps like the 5-watt Fender Champ heard on the Laylaalbum. Crank it up all the way for great tube distortion and sustain, and it’s still not loud enough to wake up the neighbors!
Gear Editor - Charles Saufley
Charles Saufley takes to gear like a duck to water!
A: Learning by ear and feel is most fun for me. I write and free-form jam more than I learn other people’s licks. When I do want to learn something specific, I’ll poke around on YouTube for a demo or a lesson or watch films of a player I like, and then typically mangle that in my own “special” way that yields something else. But I rarely have patience for tabs or notation.
The Grateful Dead’s 1967 debut album.
Obsession: Distorted and overdriven sounds with very little sustain—Keith Richards’ Between the Buttons tones, for example. Jerry Garcia’s plonky tones on the first Grateful Dead LP are another cool, less-fuzzy version of that texture.
Publisher - Jon Levy
A: I’m a primitive beast: The only way I can learn new music is by ear, so it’s a good thing I find that method enjoyable. I’m entirely illiterate with staff notation. Put sheet music in front of me and I’ll stare at it with twitchy, fearful incomprehension like an ape gaping at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m almost as clueless with tab, but I can follow along with chord charts if I’m under duress.
The two-hit wonders behind the early ’70s soft-rock hits, “Fallin’ in Love” and “Don't Pull Your Love.”
Obsession: Revisiting and learning AM-radio pop hits circa 1966–1972. The Grass Roots, Edison Lighthouse, the Association, the Archies, and Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds—nothing is too cheesy for me to dissect and savor. Yes, I admit I have a serious problem.
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos” Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero” Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”