rj – I am a former worker from a government research laboratory where I applied my technical education and expertise to solving some important and interesting questions of science and physics. In my early days I had thoughts of being a professional musician and that blended with my technical curiosity, gave me the skills and interest that led me to establish the rj Audio Research effort.
My grand-dad was a fiddle player back in the heyday of barn dances and my own dad was a mandolin player. I can scarcely recall my first public performance with him when I was just 7 years old. As a teen I loved rock n’ roll and quickly found my way into the local garage band circuit. At the age of 15 I was blessed with a very cool Gibson ES-150 guitar and a 5 watt Tone-Master tube amp. My dad had told me if it ever started to feedback the amp would blow up… this sorta began my career as an experimenter… FWIW – the amp never blew up and I recognized that tube amps are really tough.
My first amp build was a HeathKit 100 watt Solid State amp that I built when I was a senior in high school. It was gratifying to build it myself but it seemed like it just wasn’t loud enough and certainly did not produce the sounds of my rock n’ roll heroes. I blamed it entirely on the amp and at that point in time I didn’t appreciate the skill level of the players required to get that great tone. Somewhere along the way I also learned that failure and disappointment are key in ultimately leading me down the road to success.
In the years following high school I made the decision to take a more traditional path in providing for my young family and my distaste for risk led me to the pursuit of some higher education and a secure income… but I never stopped being a part time musician or amp experimenter.
As the direction of guitar based music and myself matured, I found himself mesmerized by a handful of players that seemed to be able to coax the notes to ring with a warmth sweet tone that seemed to magically sustain and bloom into powerful emotional statements. Thus, the quest for tone began and remains one of my primary musical focuses in my playing and amp building.
One big realization that ultimately helped me was when I recognized how important “Distortion” was in creating good tone… not the highly over-driven ragged sounding kind but the sweet subtle kind. However, once I figured this out, there was still this problem that “Distortion” was typically best friends with “Loud”, it was apparent that it was going to be very difficult to separate the two of them.
Among the gigs I secured, many of them involved playing guitar at church functions. In this situation it became really evident that I needed good tone at low volume. However, a low volume clean tone seemed to be either too thin and made it hard to be expressive…. the quest was on. I tried small amps, pedals, isolation boxes, inefficient speakers, all the stuff. Some of it works but ultimately I believe that nothing ever sounds as good as “Loud” does in bringing the best guitar tone to our ears.
Fast Forward – Big tone in small doses is much more complicated than simply scaling down a sound spectrum. The formula gets complicated due to the way our ears process sound at various dB levels. It is the Holy Grail and while it’s not entirely clear that it can technically ever be fully realized we are starting to come close enough to satisfy the greatest of tone junkies. This is is the pursuit of rj Audio Research and we will continue to share our findings with you.
