The spirit of Do It Yourself alive and well: the Teye/VOX-amp…
My beautiful flamenco dancer wife Belén and I would often, after one of our gigs in downtown Austin, go unwind in a club on the way home, where they always had excellent live bands.
One night as I walked in I was hit between the eyes by a more than fantastic guitar Tone. The band was the Dan Dyer Band, the guitar amps VOX AC-30’s, my thought: “How could I have forgotten about the VOX?” You see, when I was 15, my heroes were The Rolling Stones, and a dutch band The BINTANGS, both avid AC-30 users. And when I went to London ‘to become famous’ as a 17-year-old, I bought a small VOX practise amp…
So after that evening out, I simply had to have a VOX amp again! Prices of AC-30s had become quite high, and also the output volume of the AC-30 was a bit more than I needed, so I opted (of course!) for the following: I bought a broken and gutted VOX-combo-enclosure on eBay and built an amp in that from scratch, using a Hoffmann eyelet board, I made a weird cross between an AC-15 and an AC-30, had a lot of fun building it (this is also when I first used the campertop-caravan truckbed-trailer that a friend had given me and that I had as a guestroom behind Belen and my Airstream trailer, as a workshop!) The amp turned out glorious, I ended up playing many gigs with it, I recorded two CD’s with my band ‘The Barbarians of Sevilla on that amp, and then I used it extensively to demo my guitars at the different guitar shows.
Plus, making this amp basically from scratch, upped my self-confidence so that the following year I simply built myself a ‘Tony Zemaitis guitar’ which soon (the ‘in’famous Triple-oh or ‘000‘) turned into the blueprint for my veritable dream guitar, my ‘La India’ 001.
