Re: LIVE NOW - Guest Luthier Series - Rick Turner / Rick Turner Guitars
Re: LIVE NOW - Guest Luthier Series - Rick Turner / Rick Turner Guitars
Hi Rick, thanks for this.
I was wondering where the idea for the Mama Bear came from. Your background seems to be very much in the fine craft of instrument building; meanwhile the Mama Bear is a very high-tech digital device. A lot of people with your background would shun such a thing, yet you seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly. Tell us about the ideas and inspiration that brought us this very unique and incredibly useful device.
The idea for Mama Bear hit me in 1989 when I was the head of Gibson Labs West in North Hollywood. We were the West Coast R&D and Artist Relations departments, and we also were in charge of the Photon Guitar Synth project that Gibson had bought from Kevin Kent. With Photon came engineer Cliff Elion who had done his advanced degree work in digital modeling...and bear in mind that this was way back. He had previously been involved in the Lynn Drum Machine project...the first real sampled drum machine.
Cliff got it into his head that he could build a digital model of a tube amp right there in his IBM desktop computer...and he did...and it was not only pretty ****ed impressive; it was also more than likely the first digital modeling amplifier. As soon as I heard it I understood the basic principles behind it...that in order to model an acoustic event you have to be able to encode not only the frequency transformations and non-linearities of the system being modeled, but also the phase response. Everything you run a signal through changes that signal in frequency content and timing, and that makes for the signature sound of that transforming device whether it's a pickup, a preamp, an amplifier, or an acoustic instrument. If you can untangle the signature, you can model it, and Cliff had done so years and years before Line 6 came out with their amps.
My second question to Cliff after hearing the Marshall stack in a computer was "Can you do this for acoustic guitars?" His answer was, "Yes..."
We reported back to Nashville on what we were doing both with this project and with a pickup system that I came up with that had the potential do double the tracking speed of any guitar synth, and we got shot down on both ideas...
Upon leaving Gibson, I stayed in touch with Cliff and bit by bit came up with the basic functions you see on the face of Mama Bear...an input switch to let the device know something about the incoming signal, and output switch to select the guitar model desired, a pan pot to fade between the direct sound and the effect, and the usual input gain and output volume controls. The basic functional design was complete by about 1993, but I had no way to build it...I'm not an electrical engineer though I'm a decent tech, and I certainly had no software development skills. So the device remained in my imagination until the NAMM show of 2001 when Evan Skopp invited me to participate in focus group on the future of acoustic amplification. He knew that I'd helped start Highlander, designing the pickup element for that system, and that I'd written a lot on acoustic amplification for Acoustic Guitar Magazine.
I came in a bit late to the meeting, and everyone was talking about pickups. When it was my turn, I gave my opinion that we were in the end game on pickups design. Yes, there might be incremental improvements, and yes, the preamplification could be majorly improved by going to higher supply voltages, but that in my experience we were really hearing the pickup location, that what we were hearing was fairly accurate for that spot, and that the answer was to digitally model what the wood and air of the guitar did to that UST signal.
Evan, Kevin, Cathy, and Seymour invited me to come down to Santa Barbara and further explain my theories. I did, they invited me to form a new company with them, we got Cliff (now an independent designer) involved, and embarked on the Mama Bear project.
