Rockers Roll With That Valley Sound : Electronics: Music stars turn to local firms when they’re purchasing top-of-the-line amplifiers and speakers.

They may be pipsqueaks in the $3-billion-a-year worldwide music business, but a handful of local entrepreneurs are making a lot of noise among hard-core consumers of rock ‘n’ roll gear.

Valley companies started in garages by struggling guitar players--with firm names such as Groove Tubes, Matchless, Soldano, SWR and VHT--are selling guitar and bass amplifiers to famous musicians and scores of garden-variety players willing to pay $2,000 and up for an amplifier and speakers.

Although their music products are never advertised on television or radio, the obscure firms were a trendy force among the 800 or so manufacturers who showed off their wares at the National Assn. of Music Merchants’ trade show in Anaheim last month. The winter NAMM show is held for about 40,000 music retailers to inspect and order products for the coming year.

Despite tough times and big-name competitors, these local electronics wizards have moved from garages to industrial warehouses, churning out handmade amplifiers that are two and three times as expensive as those mass-produced by music equipment giants such as Fender and Peavey.

“The Valley happens to be a nest of high-end amp tweakers,” said Paul Rivera, 40, whose Sun Valley amp firm, Rivera Research and Development, was bought in 1991 by JBL, the big loudspeaker concern owned by Harman International Industries in Northridge.

Besides the amp makers from the Valley, there are several guitar makers, as well as inventors seeking their niche in the music business.

At the four-day music convention the largest and most elaborate rock ‘n’ roll displays belonged to firms with widely recognized music trade names, such as Marshall, Fender, Yamaha, Ibanez, Gibson, Peavey and Roland. Crowds gathered there to watch notable musicians give demonstrations, while sales people hustled orders.

With a fraction of the floor space, the Valley firms had to rely mostly on their products to draw a crowd. The exception was noted designer Mike Soldano, whose amplifier display also included a 1932 Ford Roadster. That probably wasn’t necessarily--guitar legend Eric Clapton uses his amps, which are made in Van Nuys.

Meanwhile, Rick Perrotta relied on a display of the wire and tube innards of his Matchless amps to draw lookers. Like most popular guitar amps these days, it is vintage 1950s technology.

Rock guitar players have for years favored the sound of loud tube amplifier distortion despite the efforts of many large manufacturers to push the cheaper, transistor-powered versions.

The irony is that Perrotta and partner Mark Sampson employ out-of-work aerospace technicians, NASA-certified solderers, to perform the meticulous hand wiring on their amplifiers.

“A big company can’t build this. They want to make a lot of money and quickly,” said Perrotta, who sold off a guitar collection and a restored Mercedes convertible two years ago to help start the company.

His company in the past year has moved from his house to a North Hollywood factory with more than a dozen employees on the strength of word-of-mouth praise and a highly favorable review in Guitar Player magazine that noted, “We were unable to coax anything less than a stunning tone from this amp.”

Last year, Matchless sold close to 1,000 of its amps, which range from about $1,200 to $2,600 apiece, Perrotta said.

Matchless amps were on stage during the recent reunion of the 1960s rock band, Cream, and one was shipped to Washington for use by Don Henley’s band at a presidential inaugural ball. After the NAMM show, the band U2 ordered two of the amps rushed to Dublin, Perrotta said.

Another new music entrepreneur, Stevie Fryette, had no training, but desperate for a job, applied for an amplifier repair job at the Valley Arts Music store in 1979. He escaped being fired after the shop’s former repairman, Paul Rivera, happened to stop by and helped him quickly learn the basics of repair.

Fryette, who after 10 years became known among musicians for his amp repairs and modification work, started his VHT amp company in 1989 from his Studio City apartment. Now, he employs six workers and recently moved from a small North Hollywood factory to larger quarters in Newbury Park.

Sales for VHT amps went from $250,000 in 1991 to $500,000 in 1992, he said.

Like many of his counterparts, Fryette, 29, considers himself a guitar player first and a businessman second.

“If I had known in advance it was going to get this big, I wouldn’t have done it because of all the responsibility,” Fryette said.

Another local music firm is run by former guitar player Steve Rabe, who quit the 1960s band, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, just before its one hit single. He finally hit it big with his bass amp design that he created in 1984 in his Sun Valley garage.

Through a friend in the studio rental business, Rabe auditioned the amp for bassist Louis Johnson, who used one to record “We Are The World,” the famine-relief fund-raising song that featured just about everybody in the rock business.

Word of the amp spread quickly after that. Now, Rabe employs 27 workers in his SWR Engineering Inc., factory in Sylmar. Last year, the firm sold about 4,500 of the amps, which can cost as much as $3,700 apiece.

And inventor David Borisoff, 39, of Hipshot Music Products in Van Nuys, has drawn praise for his Trilogy Multiple Tuning Bridge--a $200 device that allows guitar players quick access to more than 700 different tunings by changing the pitch of each string.

Alternate tunings, which dramatically change the sound of guitar chords, are now the rage among younger rock players after New York band Sonic Youth began employing them in the 1980s.

“Last year I sold about 400 without any advertising and I want to sell 2,000 in 1993,” said Borisoff, who has also invented several other add-on products for electric guitar and bass.

Former Encino hair stylist Chris Bradley, a newcomer to the music business, is hoping his “Music Rule,” a $20 plastic slide rule for calculating musical intervals, will be carried by music students worldwide.

So far, his most famous customer, he says, is Clint Eastwood--who happens to also play the piano.