Digital Amps Making Some Noise

The digital revolution has made Thousand Oaks-based Line6 Inc. a hit performer in an intriguing new music industry category: “smart” guitar amplifiers that, among other things, can turn a country musician into a heavy metal performer with the twist of a few knobs.

Technically known as digital modeling amplifiers--and resembling oversized stereo speakers--the high-tech devices were introduced three years ago by Line6, then a high-tech start-up.

As other companies join the category, privately held Line6 is still No. 1 in digital amp sales and No. 5 in the $400-million annual overall U.S. guitar amplifier business. That puts Line6 in a league with long-established players such as Marshall, Fender and Crate--whose amps create classic rock sounds with vintage vacuum tube technology.

Each guitar amplifier creates its own unique sound, and certain amps create tones that are familiar to certain styles of music, be it rock, country, blues or even Hawaiian music. A guitarist either adopts that sound as his own or buys a garage full of amplifiers if he often performs different styles of music.

“If you’re a country and western band, you don’t want that Guns ‘N’ Roses sound,” explains Zeke Zirngiebel of Winnetka, who works as a TV session guitarist and contracts with Line6 as a tester and consultant.

Indeed, the classic “Marshall stack” of two large amp cabinets has been an on-stage fixture at virtually every major rock concert for at least 30 years. When amplified at high volume, many musicians agree, the Marshall stack produces a unique sound virtually impossible to recapture in a music studio.

That is, until digital modeling amps came along.

“They’ve actually got [digital amps] to sound very close to the original,” said Culver City guitarist Michael Thompson, a Line6 devotee who regularly works on major-label pop music recordings behind artists including Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton and Babyface. “I’ve done a lot of [comparison] tests with their modeling and they really get the essence of the thing.”

Line6’s CEO is 40-year-old Mike Muench. He’s a former vice president at Apple Computer Inc. and an admittedly frustrated rock performer who now sells digital modeling amps so that musicians and bands can instantly change their sound from soft jazz to hard rock or from disco to grunge. “But we don’t supply costumes,” he adds wryly.

“The new [digital] modeling amplifiers were brought out by Line6 and they have the lion’s share of that new business,” says David Angress, senior VP and general merchandise manager of Guitar Center Inc., the leading U.S. musical instrument retailer.

Traditional analogue amplifiers still account for the majority of sales., Angress said. But even so, Music Trades magazine reported last year that digital modeling amps have been rapidly gaining market share since 1998 as guitar players discover the new technology.

Digital equipment has “breathed a lot of life back into the guitar amp business,” says David Bergstrom, marketing chief at Yamaha Corp. America--which, he adds, is second only to Line6 in the category.

What’s the attraction of these new devices? Bergstrom explains: “If you’re sophisticated enough in the programming of these modeling amps . . . you can sound like just about anything.”

Modeling technology was introduced by L.A. audio engineers Marcus Ryle and Michel Diodic, who in 1996 obtained a patent under a company they founded called Fast Forward Designs Inc.

Modeling uses digital signal processors--generic chips commonly found in audio devices such as cellular telephones. Line6 was spun off with the backing of Palo Alto-based Sutter Hill Ventures.

Muench, who joined Line6 after 11 years with Apple, was a trumpet player at Westminster High School when his idols included the brassy rock band Tower of Power. He later took up keyboards and played professionally in a handful of L.A. rock groups, driven by dreams of stardom until, he said, he realized he was surrounded by vastly more talented and more driven musicians. After graduating from USC, he earned an MBA at Harvard.

He was lured away from Apple, he said, because music has always been his passion.

“I find there is a high correlation between people who are in music and people who are in computer technology, because of the structured thinking in both,” he said.

At Line6--the name has no special musical meaning, Muench said--he found that educating the market was a crucial hurdle. So he borrowed a strategy he developed at Apple in selling PowerBooks at leading retail stores. He dispatched an army of 12 expert guitarists to visit 700 retail stores nationwide to demonstrate Line6 equipment and to coach salespeople in how to use it.

Line6 sales more than doubled last year to $20 million from $9 million in 1998, with the help of the product specialists, who show often-skeptical consumers the benefits of the high-tech gear.

“People don’t care about technology per se, they want solutions to their problems,” Muench said. “For us, it’s a simple thing like putting knobs on products instead of menu pages and LED displays. It’s the real simple things that people are more comfortable with.”

Line6 has endorsements from a stable of more than 50 music celebrities--among them country legend Clint Black and Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx--to help reach its primary target market: millions of hard-core guitar enthusiasts among an estimated 18 million U.S. guitar players.

Muench said his typical customer is 30- to 40-year-old male with an above-average income who plays, either with a band or on his own, at least two or three times a month.

Line6’s 130-member work force--including engineers, research and manufacturing workers at its Woodland Hills plant--produces modeling amplifiers with various features, priced from $399 to $999. The company’s $299 POD non-amplifying modeling device, which resembles an oversized video game control module, allows a player to input directly into a recording device without an amplifier. Those categories account for at least 80% of company sales.

Line6 also markets a line of $249 effects pedals to create delays, fuzz and distortions, and its $500 software product, called Amp Farm, duplicates tones from a specific series of classic old amplifiers. Line6 also has rolled out a line of software products that lets customers upgrade their products via the Web.

Digital modeling technology has spread rapidly through the music industry. Guitar Player magazine last December reviewed five modeling products. In addition to Line6 and Yamaha, other manufacturers represented in the review were Johnson Amplification of Sandy, Utah; Rocktron of Rochester Hills, Mich., and Crate, a division of St. Louis Music.

Acknowledging the versatility of digital modeling, Guitar Player nonetheless pointed out a few shortcomings in the new technology, notably an audible hiss--Yamaha is an exception to that--and an inability to slice through rhythm and bass as readily as do vintage amplifiers using vacuum tubes.

Which brings up one of the major hurdles facing the makers of high-tech digital modeling amplifiers.

“There are people who will never give up their tubes,” says Zirngiebel.

“Maybe in 100 years, tube amps will be in museums,” he said. “But there will still be those great old sounds, and they’ll all be on little chips.”