Getting the tone of Larry Carlton's Dumble

My opening salvo... ehem.

You'll love this... there are many guitarists (myself included) that revere a particularly famous L.A. studio musician by the name of Larry Carlton. If you haven't heard of Larry Carlton, just pull up some pop records from the '70's and '80's and you'll find his name in the liner notes. During the 70's Larry was the busiest session guitarist in Los Angeles, doing as many as 500 sessions a year.

In 1977, Larry was invited to join Warner Bros. Records -- he didn't ask, WB came to him. Larry has gone on to release a bunch of solo albums that garnered Grammy nominations and later Grammy awards. He replaced Lee Ritenour as the guitarist for the popular smooth jazz group "Fourplay." He is a legendary guitarist.

I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Carlton in Franklin, TN at this little gig he did at the factory with special guest, Michelle Pillar who is easily ten times more charming than (her husband) Larry is -- but that's another story. Chris Kent, a bass player whom I've worked with since 1989, introduced me to Larry. Chris toured as Larry's bass player for several years and is on the Grammy award winning project "No Substitutions" featuring Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton, live in Osaka, Japan.

A second meeting between Mr. Carlton and I occurred when I was playing a gig at Mere Bulles in Nashville, TN. Chris Kent was again on bass and we were backing up a jazz vocalist by the name of Chris Blizzard. They talked Mr. Carlton into sitting in for a tune and I had the pleasure of watching Larry Carlton, also known as Mr. 335, play my Gibson ES 335, the guitar that he made famous.

Larry Carlton is known for his incredible guitar tone and some people have spent thousands of dollars trying to emulate that tone. In an upcoming blog, I'll explain more about the reasons that it is almost impossible to duplicate Larry's tone. One of the main reasons is that he owns an amplifier that is worth tens of thousands of dollars, known as a Dumble amp, made by Mr. Howard Dumble of California. Dumble won't just make amps for anybody, he only makes an amp every year or so and only for the very cream of the crop players. He also covers his circuitry with a heavy goop in an attempt to protect his circuit design. This highly coveted amps can fetch $20-30,000 dollars and up depending on who owned it and played it originally. Larry was selling one of his for $50,000. recently. John Mayer owns six of them.

In 2004 I set out on a search to find the best Dumble type amplifier available to customers like me. There were two established companies offering Dumble type amps -- Fuchs Audio Technology and Two Rock. After some research and review, the consensus was that the Fuchs was winning the shootouts and from what I could hear, I agreed that the Fuchs was the best sounding of the two amps. Best yet, it came at half the price of the Two Rock (John Mayer also uses Two Rock amps.)

At that time I became an endorsed artist and later began selling them to guitarists in the Nashville area because they didn't have a dealer here. A lot of players began to find me and next thing I knew I was selling them across the country, became a rep for the company, A&R contact for the Nashville artists and their top sales outlet in 2006. I began collaborating with (or annoying) Andy and his sidekick Scott Lerner, who has helped contribute to the successful sound of the amp. This all just kind of happened by accident.

To make a long story longer, I recently decided to see if I could duplicate Larry Carton's famed $50,000 tone with my $3500 Fuchs ODS 50, personally hand tuned by Andy himself. Here's how I did it;

I took a little audio clip from Larry's live performance at The Crossroads Music Festival in Dallas, TX a few years back. In the beginning of the track, the band plays 4 bars with no lead guitar over it. It's the same part that is played at the beginning of the first verse when the guitar comes in, so I took that section and created a track for myself. I then attempted to match the Larry Carlton's guitar tone as closely as I could and played the performance in a similar manner.

I then took the two clips (Larry's and mine) and spliced them together in a couple of places and came up with this little sample. Part of it is Larry Carlton and part of it is me. I wanted to see if I could match his tone close enough that people couldn't tell. It switches a couple of times during the song. I've posted an offer that for the next week or so, the first 10 people to guess who is who on each part of the song will win a prerelease copy of my Blue Street CD. Many have claimed they could hear the difference, but so far, no one has been able to correctly identify Larry's part from mine.

I began by creating a setup that was similar to Larry's -- featuring my Gibson ES 335 (that he played a few years ago), a volume pedal, a Fuchs ODS 50 (hand tuned by Andy Fuchs), same speaker that Larry uses etc... I'm going to write a newsletter about this, so sign up to get all the details at: http://fuchsaudio.com/newsletters

Afterward you can't take the poll asking how close you think I got. Later I will post my clip separate from Larry's so you can hear each one more clearly.

But for now, here's the clip -- part Larry Carlton, part Michael Lewis.

http://www.michaellewismusic.com/forum/download.php?id=171&f=19

Read more about this on our forums:
http://www.michaellewismusic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2030

Michael Lewis
Nashville, TN