Bruce Egnater
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bruce Egnater is a guitar amplifier designer.
Bruce was born & raised in Detroit, Michigan and started playing guitar at age 13. Through years of playing in local rock bands, he found himself constantly tinkering with his gear to get new sounds. After attending the University of Detroit Engineering School, he opened a guitar and amplifer repair shop in 1975. Bruce's shop (The Amp Lounge) still operates in the Detroit (Berkley) area.
He is known for his TOL (Tone of Life) MICA series of amplifiers as well as for his collaboration with Rocktron. The latter resulted in the TOL100 and TOL50 head-and-combo amplifiers, the IE4 preamplifier, and the Vendetta 100W head and combo.
Bruce's most recent amplifiers (MOD50/MOD100) and preamplifiers (M4) use a modular architecture, which supports 2-4 vacuum tube-based modules in a footswitchable configuration. By changing out the modules, a wide variety of classic guitar tones can be achieved. There are 12 modules currently available, covering amplifier styles from classic Fender/Marshall/Vox tones through modern high gain tones.
Bruce's collaboration with Randall Amplifiers resulted in the Randall MTS series of guitar amplifiers and preamplifiers, which follow the same modular design but use less expensive parts than amplifiers Bruce builds and sells himself. The Randall models include the RM100 head & combo, RM80 combo, RM50 head & combo, RM20 head & combo, RM4 preamplifier, RT2/50 power amplifier, and close to 20 modules. Several endorsees of the Randall modular system include Ty Tabor of King's X, George Lynch, Dan Donegan of Disturbed, Brad Delson of Linkin Park, and recently Kirk Hammett of Metallica. Bruce has also contributed to the designs of the Randall RG50TC, RH50T, V2, and T2 amplifiers.
Finally, in October 2006 Bruce and the Amp Lounge crew began offering 1-2 day amplifier building seminars. The amplifiers are described as a "JCM800 master volume model on steroids", based on a modified Mojo JTM45 kit with some components swapped out and some pre-assembled.
The newest product is the Egnater Tourmaster series, which contains the Tourmaster 4100 Head, the Tourmaster 4212 2x 12" Combo and 4x 12" cabs (slant & straight version). The amps are all tube, 4 channel and the power amp has a special grid to choose a preselected power for each of the channels between 10 and 100W. All cabs are loaded with Vintage Celestion speakers. Combo is loaded with Celestion Elite 80 speakers, custom made for Egnater, which are a variation of Custom Lead 80 speaker Celestion makes.
