He worked as a repair tech in the back while Dave ran the front of the store. They opened the store in 1967 inside a building that had been a Chinese grocery store. He played with a local blues and jam band and co-founded the band Martha's Laundry, which later morphed into Prune Music store, with keyboardist Dave Kessner. Smith wanted to participate in the burgeoning San Francisco music scene, having been taught clarinet and a little sax by his father, but he took up drums, as it was the easiest to learn quickly. At only around 60 watts, the signal still reached Alaska and most of the US. His first major electronics project was a scratch built Ham Radio transmitter using a 6146 power tube.
Most interesting is that he never once took an electronics course in high school or university. During the next four years he attended UC Berkeley studying humanities, English Literature and "invitation only" creative writing courses, where he mostly wrote accounts of riding the rails with various hobos, but never quite graduated. However, he would hop freight trains nearly every weekend from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area to see friends and return to the Beat coffee houses and bookstores of Berkeley.
During his freshman year he attended UC Santa Barbara, as his parents wanted him removed from the influences of Berkeley (20 minutes from Orinda). He attended Miramonte High in Orinda, CA and graduated in 1964. Smith's father had a good friend, Ernie, who built hi-fi turntables and gave him a couple to experiment on until he was 11 or 12. They became great friends and built ham radios together. Smith and Stan's son, Dave, were close in age. Stan Stillson, the Boy Scout leader became a mentor. Īs a young Boy Scout, Smith was interested in earning a merit badge in woodcarving.
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Smith believes all of his early musical experiences taught him how to hear tone. His mother and sister played piano and his father was the first-chair clarinet with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, played tenor sax, had a radio show and led a hotel dance band. Randall Smith was born into a musical family in Berkeley, California in 1946. Exposure from these top players helped to establish Mesa/Boogie's position on the market, and it is frequently referred to as the first manufacturer of boutique amplifiers.
Prominent early customers included Carlos Santana, and Ron Wood and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Smith's modifications gave the small amps much more input gain, making them much louder as well as creating a high-gain, distorted guitar tone. Mesa was started by Randall Smith as a small repair shop which modified Fender amplifiers, particularly the diminutive Fender Princeton. Mesa/Boogie (also known as Mesa Engineering) is an American company in Petaluma, California, that manufactures amplifiers and other accessories for guitars and basses.
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