James Demeter | TapeOp

One-time major label artist turned gear designer James Demeter talks about tubes, spring reverb and building gear for REO Speedwagon. Demeter Amplification was one of the first companies to re-embrace tubes for mic preamp and DI use in the early eighties, and has also been building quality guitar and bass amps, stomp boxes and excellent spring reverbs.

When did you start and why, and were you schooled or unschooled?

Unfortunately, I'm remarkably unschooled. I actually studied psychology in college, but I should point out that my father was a HAM and I was around this all the time. I had great fun in my childhood blowing stuff up, just because I was playing around with electronics. I had an aptitude toward it but I didn't think it was going to be my profession. I know it's weird how these things work, because I wanted to be a rock star.

Yeah, don't we all...

Well, I'm a has-been. I actually quasi-succeeded. I was in a band called The Heaters and we were on Capitol Records — they put out two albums. I was there for the first one. Actually, I did the second one, but that one wasn't released. The third one, which would be the second one the public saw — I had the brains to be out of the music business by then. We only racked up half a million dollars in debt and were going strong.

No way. Really?

Oh yeah. Well, you know back then the record companies had lots of money to burn on new bands, and they did.

And about what year is this?

I joined the band in 1974 and was out of there by 1980.

What did you play?

I was a guitar player and of course I was tampering with my amps. I built the PA system and before that I was service manager at Shelley's Stereos. I always wound up in electronics. It was my destiny.

Obviously.

I was building Heathkit amplifiers and Dynakits and piddling around with them even back then. I had a friend by the name of Paul Rivera in my Heater days and he didn't want to diddle with my amps himself, he'd just tell me what to do over the phone. So I was tweaking with my stuff even back then. During that period I built and ran a mobile recording studio. I was using a Tascam 8-track and my Tascam board. It was called Tiny Truck Recorders and we basically recorded stuff at the Whisky and places like that for bands that I was friends with, The Heaters or my brother's band. It was kind of fun.

So you basically started more from the amp side?

I actually started more on the hi-fi side. I modified my dad's old turntable, because it was mono and I wanted stereo back when I was probably thirteen years old. I got another cartridge for it, because he gave me his old mono stuff when he was done with it, and I tried to cobble together a stereo system using stuff I could find. So my original technical knowledge was much more on the hi-fi end than on the guitar amp end. That's why I was calling Paul Rivera, because I frankly didn't know too much about these things. Now I could probably build one blindfolded, but back then that was different.

In 1980 I needed to find a legitimate way to make a living and I had a friend named John Caruthers who had a repair business. He started using me part-time to rewire guitars and stuff like that. Then he took on guitar amps and I kind of figured out it was as good a time as any to learn. I had enough theory behind me so it wasn't that difficult to figure out what was going on. I started fixing guitar amplifiers and then that's when I discovered my cousin was working for Jensen Transformers. He started talking about some pro audio things and I started to come up with a few little designs on my own and he helped me through it. Like ICs — I didn't know much about them, I knew about tubes at the time, so he kind of spread out my education. He worked at Harrison Consoles and then Jensen Transformers. He was designing computerized audio analysis back then, which wasn't being done at the time. I started to learn more theory and more design principles from him. During that time we came out with my first pro audio product, which was called a Red Box FET Direct Box, which was a MOSFET direct box — high impedance to a Jensen transformer. We didn't sell too many of them. It was a good-sounding piece and it led to the tube direct box. I started learning more about tube theory and I was going through an RCA book and it had this input for a VTVM [vacuum tube voltmeter], which is an infinite impedance — just about 108 ohm impedance — circuit so that when you test something it doesn't load it down. I also knew a lot about guitar pickups. In fact, the only patent I ever got was for a pickup on a guitar. I knew that because pickups are inductors, you know, magnetic ones, and piezoelectrics are capacitors, that obviously the load is extremely important because it affects their tonality by the way they resonate and where they roll off. I said, "Well why not have an impedance as close to infinite as possible so when you plug into it the guitar doesn't see it?" Of course, the circuit had to be a little more high fidelity than a test meter. I took that and modified it for audio and then matched the impedance to a Jensen transformer and the first tube direct box was born. The first one I built I gave to the road guy for REO Speedwagon, because when I was working at Caruthers one of the motivations to do this kind of stuff was I started running into the premier players and bands of the time — The Eagles, Ry Cooder, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Frank Zappa — I mean the list is unbelievable. I even worked on a Hendrix guitar there. I mean, it was pretty bloody amazing. The REO Speedwagon road guy took it for the band to hear it because they were recording some record, and he brought it back. The studio guy wouldn't let him use it because he said, "I got rid of those damn tubes and I never want them back."

I guess there was a lot of that going down around that time.

Yeah, the tubes were getting tossed out by the shovelful. If I only had some money, what I could have bought. So anyway, that didn't go [well] for me, but I got one to Ry Cooder and he bought three or four of them and he turned on Ocean Way and Alan Sides bought a few of them and then Alan Sides turned on different people that came through there. David Lindley bought a bunch. He's still using the originals, too. It's pretty funny — they're indestructible. Tons of guys started to buy them. That was my first pro audio project and it did fairly well for me.

So when did you decide to make a spring reverb? The Real Reverb that you sell is really cool.

That was done because I really hated the sound of digital reverb. I know springs aren't the best thing in the world, so my idea was to try and get a spring reverb with no hum and as little noise as possible and a little bit of high frequency. Somehow the coil there, it's an inductor and you have this high frequency filter, so I decided to use a current amp on the front end — as the impedance rises so does the gain, so it essentially keeps the signal going into the coil flat. Because of that you put the coil in the feedback loop, essentially.

I have to confess: I own two spring reverbs, but they're low-end units. I have an old Furman and then just a spring reverb that's on a Roland 501 echo box that's really hummy.

Yeah, they're all noisy. I actually used a transformer that's probably four times bigger than it needs to be and then it's wrapped in its windings' out. Actually, the metal they wind the transformer with, they have that going on the outside too, and then wrapped inside because that shorts out the outside layer of windings and lowers the noise there by quite a bit, almost 12 dB. And that still wasn't quite enough because it's 65 dB on the gain, on the return. So each set of springs we wrap with about five dollars of metal on each one... just enough overkill to make it all work right.

Sounds good to me.

Yeah, I like the way it sounds too!