
L-R: Gibson’s Cesar Gueikian, Mesa/Boogie’s Randall Smith and Gibson’s JC Curleigh, pictured when Gibson acquired the brand in 2021.
Over three-and-a-half years after Randall Smith sold Mesa/Boogie to Gibson, Smith has completed his time with Gibson as the brand’s master designer and pioneer. Through his ground-breaking work at Mesa/Boogie, Smith was responsible for innovative modifications that gave small amplifiers more input gain, making them much louder, as well as creating an all-new high-gain distorted guitar tones.
Mesa/Boogie began as a small amplifier repair shop and was founded 55 years ago in 1969, in Mill Valley, CA by Smith who simultaneously respected and improved the vintage classics with his inventions. Smith’s ear for tone, passion for tube technology, and vision for building handcrafted high-performance amplifiers continues to redefine how we experience sound. Beginning at Prune Music in Northern California, Smith reconfigured amplifiers for more sound and power for all the great San Francisco area bands over 50 years ago when vintage gear was new. Being close to so many great guitar players, from Bloomfield to Santana and The Rolling Stones, Smith learned the virtues and shortcomings of the era’s gear and began a process of innovation, excellence, and invention that continues at the Mesa/Boogie craftory in Petaluma, CA today. Mesa/Boogie was the first boutique amplifier builder and revolutionized amplifier performance in ways that impact rock music worldwide.
Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s a score of additional innovative and patented improvements saw Mesa Engineering emerge as the leader in tube amplifier technology. Today, Mesa/Boogie amplifiers and cabinets are renowned worldwide and unparalleled in performance and quality, every product is still hand-built, and our artisans are tenured with an average of 15 years at their post, many for much longer. We still hold true to the simple but increasingly rare principles Smith used to catapult Mesa/Boogie onto the world stage, hand-building the very best amps and cabinets and treating each customer as we wish to be treated.
Smith has positioned his legacy to be carried forward through the Mesa/Boogie team's continued commitment to quality and tone, and for the last two decades has been training the next generation of Mesa/Boogie designers.
Smith has been instrumental in growing the Mesa/Boogie portfolio with exciting new product offerings and overseeing the launch of the popular new Gibson Falcon amplifiers.
“I am incredibly grateful for Smith’s pioneering insights, design, and trust in Gibson,” says Cesar Gueikian, CEO of Gibson. “Randy’s DNA will always be present, and over the last few decades he has trained the new generation of designers that have been leading the way for Gibson and MESA/Boogie amps. As we evolve our Gibson Amps collection, including our Gibson and MESA/Boogie brands, Randy, and his original design ideas, will continue to inspire us to make the best and highest quality amplifiers we’ve ever made.”
“We’ve all talked about this day and have prepared for it in many ways over the years, but Randall Smith is a ‘force of nature’, and you can’t imagine it coming to fruition,” adds Doug West, Director of R&D at Mesa/Boogie. “Now, I reflect on the fact that few in this world ever get the chance to be mentored, coached to excellence and to perform at their consistent personal best in the ways our design team, and everyone here at Mesa/Boogie, have under his tutelage. Randy leaves us in good stead to carry on his legacy and tradition of excellence. With our respect for him and our shared love for what Gibson and Mesa/Boogie represent to music, Randy can bask in the contentment of knowing he has spread Tone and Joy the world over with his creations and that his contributions to music have made an indelible mark on generations, and the sound of electric guitar and bass over the last 55 years.”
For more information, please visit mesaboogie.com.
Andy’s axe!
The Police guitarist’s go-to guitar is the source of a few mysteries, so let’s crack the code.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this column, we’ll take a closer look at the wiring of Andy Summers’ famous Telecaster, as well as some of the many mysteries of this guitar that remain unsolved today.
Best known as the guitarist from the Police, Summers was born and raised in England. He picked up the guitar at a young age, and moved to London when he was 19, aspiring to become a professional musician. Eventually, he played with some legendary bandleaders, including Eric Burdon and Jimi Hendrix. Summers studied classical guitar and composition in Los Angeles at California State University, Northridge, graduating in 1972. After moving back to London, he played with Joan Armatrading, Jon Lord, Mike Oldfield, and many more before meeting Gordon Sumner (aka Sting) and Stewart Copeland and joining the Police in 1977. The rest, as they say, is history.
The guitar Summers is most associated with—and which you can hear on a lot of the band’s hit records—is a well-worn and heavily modified sunburst Fender Telecaster. Let’s dive into what makes it so unique.
The story goes that before returning to the U.K. from Los Angeles, Summers bought this Telecaster from one of his guitar students for $200 (approximately $1,420 today). It was already highly modified, and Summers instantly fell in love with it. Modifications included a brass nut and brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles. The bridge pickup was installed directly into the body and there is a humbucker in the neck position, plus it had a phase switch on the bridge pickup and an additional third pot and switch controlling its active boost circuitry. The only mod Summers did on the guitar after receiving it was installing replacement Schaller tuners.
Summers has stated that the guitar is from 1961, although, because of the double binding on the body, it’s quite possibly a sunburst Telecaster Custom from 1963. The serial number on the neck heel indicates 1961, suggesting Fender may have used pre-produced necks from an earlier batch for the first run of Telecaster Customs in 1963. Or maybe it was a custom order from someone who wanted double binding in 1961? Dennis Galuszka from the Fender Custom Shop was the lucky guy who had the pleasure of taking the original instrument apart to closely study it while collecting info for the Tribute series. In September 2024, he told Guitar World: “If I had to guess, it looks like the neck came off a ’50s Tele because it actually had a little white blonde paint—like they used on ’50s Teles—left on the butt. But the neck pocket had no date written or stamped on it, which was weird. And the body has been routed out so much under the pickguard that all traces of a date are long gone.” There are no records at the Fender factory that can shed any more light on this, so it will remain a mystery—but not the only one.
Putting a neck humbucker on a Telecaster was nothing too special at this time; same goes for the phase switch. But while brass hardware had become a popular mod to many guitars by the mid-to-late ’70s, it wasn’t something that was common on Telecasters (or on Fenders in general), making the brass nut and bridge plate unusual.
Another mystery is the active booster circuitry inside this guitar. When the Fender Custom Shop released the Masterbuilt Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster in the mid 2000s, it was equipped with the mid-boost circuit from the Eric Clapton Strat. This circuit first debuted in 1983 in the Fender Elite Stratocaster, 10 years after Summers received this Telecaster. So the circuit used in Summers’ Telecaster must have been a different one. Keeping the timeline in mind, it’s likely that it was one of the many treble-boost circuits from this era—maybe something like the Dallas Rangemaster, EHX LPB-1, or something similar with a single-pot boost control. Or maybe it came from a cannibalized stompbox or was a home-brewed device ... again, this will remain a mystery. My personal guess is that the original circuit in the guitar stopped working after 1983, and one of the guitar techs had to replace it. Maybe Summers was not interested in those details, and as long as there was a boost available, he didn’t care what was going on under the hood.
Belt-buckle rash? A bit.
Photo courtesy of Ten-Guitars (https://ten-guitars.de)
Another mystery is the identity of the student who he purchased the guitar from. Summers has never shared their name, and we don’t know who modded it. Interestingly, in all those years, no one ever spoke up to earn the credits for this modding work. This alone fuels speculation as to who really did all these mods.
Now, let’s take a look what features this guitar has:
• 2-piece alder body, white double binding, 3-tone sunburst finish
• Quarter-sawn maple neck, C profile, 21 vintage frets, 7 1/4" fretboard radius, brass nut
• Scale length 25 1/2", width at nut 1.650"
• Brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles
• Schaller M6 tuning machines
• Two butterfly string trees
• Rectangular jack plate held by only two of four screws
• 3-ply mint green pickguard with ’59 PAF humbucker in the neck position and ’60s Telecaster single-coil pickup directly mounted into the body
• Standard Telecaster 3-way pickup selector switch with modern wiring: bridge/bridge + neck in parallel/neck
• 250k master audio volume, 250k master audio tone controls
• Mini-toggle phase switch for the bridge pickup on the control plate
• Extensive routing on the back housing the active boost circuitry, 9V battery, and the additional third pot for controlling the amount of boost, all covered with a homemade backplate out of 3-ply black pickguard material
In the next installment of this column, we will break it down piece by piece, talk about the wiring, and how you can build your own Andy Summers tribute Telecaster, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!
Xvive wants to make sure you take some time for yourself and your tone with their new More You HUB. It's the starting point to bulid out your studio or rehearsal space with an expandable audio interface and personal monitoring system for up to eight people and 24 inputs. The More You Hub (1st slide) is the heart of the system, with two combo inputs for microphones and instruments, and outs to your DAW, headphones/IEMs, and studio monitors. True gain mic preamps with 60dB of gain in 1dB steps for precise setting and recall; 48V phantom power, phase and hi-pass filter available on all inputs; each user controls Level and Reverb for themselves on their two inputs. Talkback mics on each unit allow musicians to communicate without removing headphones and all settings automatically recall after shutdown and restart. The second slide shows the additional, expandable MORE YOU 2X Expansion Unit that works with the HUB.
Tsakalis AudioWorks Phonkify X and Mothership Tube Overdrive + Preamp Demos | NAMM 2025
The latest iteration of Tsakalis' expansive envelope filter is a pure funk machine. All the classic '70s-era sounds are packed in there, but with three separate filters, you can get so much more out of it. Both the octave and filter are switchable, and with effect order switching you can really push the limits of out-of-this-world wah sounds. It will be available in March for $229.