At: Guitar Center

Reinhold Bogner is a quintessentially “high voltage” guy, both for his stupefying design work on of some of the most desirable guitar amplifiers of the last 20+ years, and his electric/eclectic threads and personality. Last Thursday evening at Guitar Center’s Hollywood store, he plugged into a crowd of over 100 tube-amp-loving musicians to talk about his legacy, and show off his latest 2-channel amp offspring, the Alchemist series, launched through his partnership between his company, Bogner Amplification and Line 6. It was all part of the Guitar Center Sessions program, our on-going event series designed to supply customers with musical nourishment and inspiration from leading industry luminaries and artists.

Reinhold was surrounded by tubes and amps as a kid in Germany, where his dad was an electronics buff and collector of old radios. At 13, he picked up an electric guitar and enough savvy to start home brewing his first amps based on store-bought schematics and Aspen Pittman’s classic tome, The Tube Amp Book. His early creations were a gumbo of classic Fender, Marshall and Mesa Boogie influences, along with his own signature innovations. He gained a wizard’s reputation while still a teen, and soon musicians started asking him to build or modify their rigs.

As Reinhold tells it, he arrived in the US from Germany in 1989 carrying $600 and a Marshall head, which he ended up selling/trading to Eddie Van Halen for a few hundred dollars and a guitar.  He quickly gained a fierce reputation as a prodigious modder and custom tube amp builder with clients that included Steve Vai, Steve Stevens, Dan Huff, Allan Holdsworth as well as EVH. Bogner Amplification was born as a full-on amp maker in 1992, and continues to prosper on its own and in partnership with Line 6.

Reinhold is a tube guru. But for him, there is one place where solid state amps also get the juices flowing: modeling technology. His relationship with Line 6 grew from their desire to model his hand built amplifiers for their Vetta amp. He was subsequently brought on to weave a tube power amp web for the Spider Valve – an intriguing combination of tube/valve, modeling and DSP technologies.

Bogner’s new Alchemist, however, is a purely tube affair. The concept is to deliver a Bogner-quality and sonic personality at roughly half the price you’d expect.

We couldn’t resist asking Reinhold which of his amplifier children that he created over the last 20 years he loved best.  “After about two years I get tired of the same thing no matter how good it is”, said Reinhold. “So my favorite is always the newest amp, because it’s fresh”.

Hmmm. Another high-performance designer, Enzo Ferrari, said essentially the same thing when asked about his favorite Ferrari.

One of the coolest parts of working at Guitar Center is the way it attracts employees with a love for and deep knowledge of music. The folks who work here are pretty indistinguishable from Guitar Center customers, to tell you the truth. Most of us have been playing all our lives. Lots of us are in bands or record. We all believe (at least secretly) we are only one axe away from greatness. It’s as true in our headquarters as it is our stores. Walk down the halls and you hear live music coming from the offices. Instruments of every conceivable species are everywhere, ready to be tested, borrowed, jammed with and critiqued.

Seriously, it’s a kind of heaven for us.

That’s where the concept for the At: Guitar Center blog came from. We want it to be the eyes and ears into the inside world of Guitar Center. Because every day, we’re lucky enough to see and hear things that would enormously useful and interesting to our customers. We meet with the top vendors. Gain access to famed musicians, producers, and technicians. We are often the first to hear about new products and ideas, often right from the entrepreneurs or inventors themselves. We are constantly moving around the country (or the planet for that matter) at festivals, factories, conferences, at the homes of interesting people and the headquarters of interesting enterprises. Moreover, we’re underwriting, creating and organizing musician-oriented performances and events all the time.

Aside from having unique access to all this content, our company pulses with musical DNA. Collectively, we have experts in virtually every area of product and performance – even authors, serious composers, and musicians who have toured or recorded with major acts. Because of our passion, we are rarely “off the clock”, and can be found during non-working hours at concerts, in garage band sessions, twiddling knobs on workstations, and acting, in general, exactly like the customers we sell to.

So here we go. Switch on.