About Me
Ruetz Amplification has been more than 20 years in the making. The story behind my amps stretches all the way back to when I was a teenager in 1980s. I had my first electric guitar, but couldn't afford an amp, so I enrolled in an Electronics and Computer repair course as a high school sophomore, the goal being to learn how to build my own. During the next two years, I received a thorough grounding in electronic safety, theory, troubleshooting, and repair, and I single-mindedly devoted myself to this training, always with a view toward the goal of building my own amp. The other most significant thing that guided me was a small piece of advice from my uncle, Ron Wayton, an accomplished guitarist: "Make sure your amp has tubes, they sound best." By this time, of course, the heyday of consumer vacuum tube electronics had come and gone. But I'm old enough to remember pulling tubes out of the family television and taking them down to the local department store to test them on the retail tube tester (which even had replacement tubes in stock). Thus, I committed myself to learning as much electronic circuit theory as I could -- and, in particular, as much as I could about vacuum tube circuits.
Searching for Clues
Fortunately for me, there were still plenty of tube television sets in for repair in those days. When I wasn't troubleshooting these sets on the bench, I would dig through the schematics and Sam's manuals, searching for clues. I dug circuit boards out of the junk piles, brought them home in brown paper grocery bags, salvaging what valuable components I could find. (I'll bet I was the only 16-year-old in northern Michigan with a fully-stocked junk box full of resistors and capacitors!) Unfortunately for me, however, while there was a steady stream of TV sets to work on, nobody ever brought in tube audio equipment or guitar amps for repair. And neither did I have much luck finding any schematics for tube amps in the filing cabinets at school. At that point, I realized that I was pretty much on my own. And, thus far, the only thing I had ever plugged my electric guitar into was the microphone input of a portable tape deck lying around the house.
Breakthrough
My first big break came during the summer after my sophomore year. There was a garage sale ad in the classifieds which listed a "Fender bass amp" for $30.00. After begging my parents, they reluctantly gave in and took me to the garage sale. Low and behold, there sat a nice little Fender Musicmaster Bass combo in like-new condition. I still remember sticking my head around back to check if it was a tube amp, and how my heart began to race when I saw those glass bottles hanging from the chassis and that big 12" speaker. At the time, I didn't even have a guitar cord, so I couldn't plug into to it right away. But within a half hour of bringing that amp home, I had cracked open the chassis to have a look at the circuit inside. My love was in full bloom.
First Steps
By the time I was a junior in high school, I had experimented with numerous mods to that Musicmaster Bass amp, mostly without success. I wanted to sound like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, but even that modest amp was much too loud to crank up around the house. I well remember digging a small wirewound L-Pad out of my junkbox, sticking it to the back of the speaker magnet, and wiring it as a volume control for the speaker: a crude speaker attenuator. With the L-Pad dialed all the way down for maximum attenuation, and the amp fully cranked, I had an incredibly saturated tone at a whisper-quiet volume. Suddenly my guitar sounded very similar to the Jimi Hendrix songs I had heard on the radio. Notes and chords exploded with distortion and overtones I had never heard before, and sustained for what seemed like forever in waves of fuzz and harmonics. Put simply, it was the most incredible thing I had ever heard. Now I was onto something!
Later that year, I received a copy of the very first Groove Tubes/Aspen Pittman tube amp book as a Christmas present from my grandmother. For me, it was a treasure trove, and the collection of guitar amp schematics in the back of that book was worth more than gold. I studied those schematics on the school bus, as well as the Heathkit circuit theory books I would borrow from school. By this time I had rewired the tone control in my amp as a master volume, and replaced one of the 6AQ5A output tubes with a 12AX7 preamp tube, to experiment with adding more preamp stages. I had also breadboarded countless circuits on my little Radio Shack breadboard, from op amp and transistor boost circuits, to photoelectric tremolo circuits, to active bandpass filters to approximate the wah wah. My quest for tone was now well underway.
Along the Way
By the time I graduated high school, I had moved on from Clapton and Page. I was listening to Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Queensryche, and Ozzy Osbourne, and I had a new set of heroes: Van Halen, Satriani, Vai, Malmsteen, Lynch. I had saved up for a brand new Westone guitar, complete with high output pickups and locking vibrato, and my parents had helped me to pay for a new amp: a solid state Ampeg SS-35 combo (which, by the way, wasn't a bad sounding amp back in the day). In those days, I was more interested in playing the guitar than building amps -- after all, I had a brand new high-gain amp and my old Fender was collecting dust. I continued to experiment with various overdrive circuits on my breadboard, and eventually turned the Fender into a tube preamp with which to overdrive the Ampeg (inspired at the time by Satriani's use of the Chandler Tube Driver).
Throughout the early 1990s, I acquired a number of amps in various conditions which I repaired and modified, including an old Gibson GA-45RVT, a '67 Deluxe, and an early '80s Fender 75 combo. During this time, I built my first few amps from scratch, using whatever salvaged parts I could get my hands on.
Another Breakthrough
By the late 1990s, I had been building amps off and on over the years, but most of my time was devoted to raising a family, working a full time newspaper career, and studying philosophy and English at the state university. When I did find time to play guitar, I was most often frustrated with the amps I had built -- even after endless tweaking, I could never quite achieve the tones I was hearing in my head. I didn't really have any money to invest in gear, so I was playing all of my amps through the open back cab of my old Fender 75 combo, loaded with a generic 15" bass speaker. I had no idea how crippling a limitation this was.
Another breakthrough happened in 1999, when my uncle Ron called and asked if I needed a speaker cabinet to use with my amps. Shortly thereafter, at a family Christmas gathering, he pulled a beat-up 2x12 Celestion cab out of his trunk -- "Here, maybe this'll help." I eagerly took it home and hooked it up to one of my homebrew amps. And I was immediately blown away. My ears were greeted with a sound that was big, warm, and rich with harmonic overtones. Nothing could have prepared me for my experience that night. Gone was the small, flat, tone of the generic speaker that had been crippling me all those years -- for the first time in my life, I heard what one of
my amps really sounded like. And it was huge.
The Quest Renewed
Plugging into that speaker cabinet not only transformed my amp -- it changed my life. I began building circuits again, and saving up money for transformers and parts. My quest for tone was renewed.
Many things happened during the next few years. I graduated college, and entered graduate school to study philosophy. I was maintaining a popular DIY guitar amp website, through which I sold circuit boards to the DIY community. And I was honing my skills as an amp builder -- refining and perfecting each circuit to be better than the last.
The first official Ruetz prototypes were built during 2003-2004, the culmination of my years of homebrewing. The first RJ model was designed and built for my uncle Ron, who had always been searching for a big and bold amp with just the right combination of headroom and breakup. From the very beginning to this day, Ron has been a tone-mentor for me, and so it is fitting that the RJ circuit bears his initials. The first J1 model was designed to embody all of the great lead tones that have haunted my dreams since I was a teenager ... EVH (on 1984), Satriani (on Surfing), Lynch (on Back for the Attack), Marty Freidman (on Rust in Peace), Vai (on Passion and Warfare), Reb Beach (on Winger). Those are the tones that inspired the J1, and what continue to inspire my own playing.
The Quest Continues
That's the story behind Ruetz Amplification -- the tones and experiences that have inspired both me and my circuits over the last 20 years.
Enough about me. Now it's your turn. Are you ready to be inspired? You are most welcome to join me on this quest.
Warm regards,
philip ruetz
