From Stones to Stoner: The Accidental SVT Legacy
Except for the genesis of guitar equipment manufacturing, consumers in this sector—this means you—have always been presented with an increasing amount of choices in everything; guitars, pedals, amps, and all of the complementary accessories are more abundant than ever before. But before we had the Internet, the pathways were far less trodden and word of mouth was king.
If you were only a casual music enjoyer and not necessarily a creator, concert backlines would have you believe that Marshall and Fender were the only two amplifier manufacturers to exist. And back in the ‘60s, that was much closer to the truth than today. Still, as the needs of players began to evolve, those needs resonated with upstart companies and more manufacturers entered the fray to meet those needs.
One of the biggest turning points in gear production was the rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the mainstream. As crowds grew, venues grew, and suddenly underpowered amplifiers weren’t getting the job done. One company that rose from this movement was Ampeg, who unveiled their flagship SVT bass amplifier at the 1969 NAMM show. SVT stood for “Super Vacuum Tube”—an understatement, as it contained no less than 14 tubes and weighed in at just under a hundred pounds. It is this amp from which we took our inspiration, but just why we chose to do that is one of gear history’s most opportunistic strokes of luck.
The Rolling Stones were about to embark on a world tour in that same year and arranged for their Fender amps to be shipped to the States for practice. Forgetting their amps were configured to run on the UK’s 240V grid, switching them on led to catastrophic failure and suddenly one of the biggest bands in the world was halfway across the world with no amps.
Ian Stewart—at the time the Stones’ keyboardist—phoned a man named Rich Mandella, who threw the SVT prototypes and some guitar cabinets into his own truck and raced to meet them. The Stones loved them, and so Ampeg got its proverbial foot in the biggest door around.
While Ampeg would soon become synonymous with bass amplification and dominate the market for decades, Keith Richards made great use of them for electric guitar. As luck would have it, two dates on that very world tour saw the Stones record select tracks for the iconic Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! live album that features the roaring SVT prototypes in all their glory.
One of Ampeg’s design philosophies apart from searing volume was to preserve and replicate an instrument’s inherent hi-fi qualities, preserving linearity through the omission of cathode bypass capacitors. Including them usually means more breakup as the AC gain is increased but keeping them out leads to a lightly compressed clean sound.
More tubes generally means more headroom, and more headroom means that the amps have to be cranked more until they distort. Adding in those cathode bypass capacitors increases the propensity of the amps to distort, and oftentimes the simple act of introducing them into an amp where none were originally present changes the character of the amp dramatically.
Our SFT is about two things: both the additive, pristine qualities of the AVT’s original purpose and the “what-if” scenario of a higher-gain modern tone given by an SVT with these capacitors included. We found that including them changed the character of the amp in an extremely dynamic way and comes much closer to what stoner rock bands of the ‘90s got out of the Ampeg line—punishing, character-laden distortion at extremely high volumes.
We chose to include the option of switching those capacitors in our out at your leisure in what we call “Stones”, the original, fat high-headroom Ampeg sound and “Stoner”, the overdrive-meets-fuzz approach of bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Kyuss. As such, our SFT is equally comfortable with a guitar or bass plugged in, for whichever genre you’re playing.