Part 1

If you’re not familiar with the name Jeff Bober, you at least should be familiar with Budda amps. Now owned by Peavey, Budda was co-founded by Jeff in 1995 and he also was the company’s chief amp designer. In other words, he was the man behind the tone.

Since parting ways with Peavey, Jeff has been kicking around amp ideas, and this year those ideas materialized into EAST Amplification and the Studio2 and Club18 amps.

I and many other folks first heard these amps at the recent NY/NJ Amp Show, and were completely blown away. Stunning, particularly the huge-sounding and tone-filled Studio 2. As I wrote in my Amp Show roundup, “if you play the 2-watter, you will in this order 1) be amazed 2) be transported 3) be in shock 4) be a customer.”

Judging by the orders Jeff has received since that show, I think my attempt at putting tone – or at least the experience of tone – into words was pretty much dead on. That said, I liked the very similar-sounding Club 18 better because I like the punch of more watts (I was going to say that I like to “feel the balls” of more watts, but that doesn’t really work…) and I loved the boost.

In the EAST Amplification room at the Amp Show, I just played and listened, played and listened and for a while I forgot where I was – that was the “be transported” part. Loved it.

I could go on, but let’s let Jeff do the talking. I managed to chase him down in his mad scientist laboratory for this short interview.

AmpGAS: How long has EAST been in business?

Jeff: March of this year is when I actually incorporated. I was dabbling in different designs for EAST since I parted ways with the Peavey organization.

How long were the Studio2 and Club18 designs kicking around?

Some version of a full-featured lower-power amp had been in the back of my mind for a while. For whatever reason I never had time to do it while I was still at Budda, and it really was something I wanted to do after leaving.

People know me from the beginning of the low-wattage amp revolution. When we first did the 18-watt [Budda] Twinmasters, people were looking at me like I was crazy, like, “Everyone’s playing 50- and 100-watt amps, who’s going to play that?” Then all of a sudden it caught on – having a low-wattage amp, relearning the use of the volume knob on your guitar, and you have this palette of tone. Low-wattage amps really came into the forefront of the industry after that point.

Then we took that into the [Budda] Superdrive series, which is basically the same output stage of the Twinmaster. So we then became known for that.

Now everyone’s playing 20- and 30-watt amps, and there seems to be a growing need – whether it’s a niche or further than that – for much lower-watt amps: recording capabilities are better, everyone has home studios, guys are playing really small rooms where even an 18-watt amp is too much. I thought I’d do something very full-featured yet very unique. So what I did ended up being the Studio2.

Did you ever consider not going back into the amp business?

For a brief minute. Probably up until the point where I had some sort of working prototype of the Studio2. Then I thought to myself, I really should go back and do this – it could quite possibly be really well-received.

Can you give us a quick rundown of your amps.

Here's the Studio2 head and cab (click to see it way bigger – EAST photo).

Sure. The Studio2 is a very full-featured, versatile, great-sounding, low-powered amp. The output tubes are two 12AT7s [normally used for preamp tubes] and the pre’s are three 12AX7s.

Has anyone ever done an amp like that, with those output tubes?

Not that I know of. I believe there are a couple of single 12AX7 amps out there in a single-ended format, but to my knowledge I’m not sure anyone else has done a push-pull output stage with two 12AT7s.

[Jeff noted that a push-pull output stage is the traditional output stage in most amps with normal output tubes. He explained that push-pull refers to the configuration of the output stage in that half the output stage reproduces the positive half of the signal and the other half reproduces the negative half of the signal. These two halves are then combined in the output transformer. This is typical of most amplifiers, whether they're Class A or Class AB. "If it has two or more output tubes, it's generally a push-pull amplifier," he said.]

How about the Club18?

The Club18 has two EL84s [power tubes] with three 12AX7s in the front end. It has a very similar, almost identical, preamp stage to the Studio2, just a slightly different feature set. In the boost mode, it switches to an alternate master volume control so you can boost the level of your solos, and it also engages the front-end gain control, so you can add more gain and saturation to the front end of the amp for solos.

The gain control in the Studio2 is operational all the time, and instead of second master has a presence control which just adds to the versatility of the amp in the studio.

- End of Part 1 (of 2) -