| Founded | ; 37&#;years ago&#;() |
|---|---|
| Founder | Mike Zaite |
| Website |
Dr. Z Amplification is an American manufacturer of boutique guitar amplifiers.
The company was founded in by Mike Zaite, a.k.a. Dr. Z. Zaite grew up the child of a television repairman and learned about vacuum tubes at an early age.[1] He played the drums, and started producing tube amplifiers in his Cleveland, Ohio, shop while maintaining his day job as a medical electronic technician at G.E.[2] As the son of a TV repair shop owner, Zaite learned the ropes at the age of thirteen when he began tinkering with amps and PAs.
His first amplifier was built on a reverb amplifier for a Hammond organ. He sold a few hundred of those, and then re-engineered them so he could build them from scratch. His first commercially made amplifier was the Carmen Ghia, an watt amplifier with nothing but a volume and a tone control, 12AX7 and pre-amp tubes, and two EL84 output tubes.[3]
In , Zaite provided Joe Walsh with a SRZ model amplifier. In Zaite received a call to build several more amps for Joe to use on the Eagles World Tour. Subsequently, he quit his job to focus on amps full-time. The following year, a Guitar Player review of the SRZ boosted the company's public profile in the boutique amplifier market.[citation needed]
Dr. Z collaborated with Ken Fischer of Trainwreck Circuits to build amps for Brad Paisley, who has been using them since , but they were never taken into production, Ken Fischer having died that same year.[4] After the Tennessee floods, which destroyed huge numbers of musical instruments owned by players of the Nashville music scene,[5] Dr. Z replaced Paisley's destroyed amps, and added the Z Wreck model (whose heart is a Fischer-designed output transformer) to its regular line-up; in , Guitar Player magazine listed it as one of their Editors' Picks.[4]