Golden Era

This year marks the 50th birthday of the legendary Californian amp builder Mesa Engineering, founded by amp hot-rodder Randall Smith, who profoundly influenced the electric guitar universe with a steady stream of game-changing innovations developed from the original cascaded gain Boogie amplifier series. As if the Boogie wasn’t enough, Mesa precipitated another paradigm shift in the early 1990s with the creation of the Dual Rectifier, which quickly became the benchmark for modern rock guitar tone, imitated by practically every digital modelling plug-in ever since.

We’d hazard a guess that most people’s concept of a Mesa amplifier would include lots of functions and dozens of switches and knobs. However, from time to time,