I love my Powerball

I'd been out of work for almost 6 months. I'd been laid off by Adobe after working there for 6 years and my life had turned upside down. My daughter, Kiley, had been born about a year before the layoff, and we were hoping to add another one soon. Thanks to a great friend and former coworker at Adobe, I had just landed a new job working for Freehand Systems. The painful and exciting 6 months of freedom and exploration was almost over but there was time for one last indulgence.

I called ahead and spoke to Ed Yoon at Tone Merchants in Anaheim. They were the only dealer within my drivable radius that carried a variety of boutique amps. They actually had them all in stock, so I asked about their hours to see if I could drive to Anaheim and select my next guitar amp. Ed explained that they had relatively loose hours but he'd make sure to be in the shop on Friday when I drove down and I could check out any amp I wanted to.

I got up very early on Friday morning, threw my Tom Anderson Drop-Top in the trunk of our 2002 Camaro and headed south. I reached Tone Merchants by early afternoon, parked the Camaro and grabbed my axe out of the trunk. The shop was a relatively nondescript street-level retail space, and when I entered there were no customers in the store. Ed came out of the office and, after introductions, we started talking about what I was looking for and what I should try. He pointed me to a bunch of heads, a Rivera, a Diezel, an H&K and the ENGL Powerball (first generation model).

Now, what followed was Ed's single stroke of genius, his moment of perfection (at least with respect to this customer). He said something like, "Take as much time as you need. I'll be in the office if you have any questions. Don't worry about cranking these up, you need to hear them loud to appreciate them." And, then he left me alone for a couple hours. No other customer ever came in; I had the whole place to myself and got to put every one of those amps through its paces. When the dust finally settled, the decision was obvious. The ENGL Powerball was the right match for me. It has everything from a ridiculously over-the-top high gain distortion, ranging from dark and evil to bright and singing. And it also gives me great clean and crunch tones. I fell for the Powerball that day and I continue to love it almost 10 years later.

But, there was a minor hiccup along the way. I was building my rig around a Sound Sculpture Switchblade and planned to use its relays to channel switch the Powerball. I built all my cables by hand, carefully soldering every connection and reinforcing all the connectors with heat-shrink tubing. I got everything wired up, flipped the switches and started configuring the Switchblade. And then, it all went wrong. The Switchblade wouldn't switch the Powerball consistently. Sometimes the channels would change, other times they'd remain the same. The relays would often work the first time, then stop working after that. Another day or two of debugging and talking to the folks at Sound Sculpture revealed that not only were the Switchblade's relays getting wedged, but the Powerball was very likely to blame.

Despite strong evidence from my own debugging and advice from Sound Sculpture, it still took quite awhile to get this resolved. First, I contacted Ed Yoon and he put me in contact with Bernd Aufermann, a rep for ENGL in Germany. I worked through another round of triage on the problem with Bernd and finally he put me in touch with Horst Langer, ENGL's amp designer. To this day, I am so pleased with Horst's response. He immediately took my problem seriously and did some debugging of his own. It took months to reach a solution but after additional email with both Sound Sculpture and Horst, I received an email from Horst explaining how to build a custom cable to use for the Switchblade relay jacks that I connect to the Powerball. I very carefully assembled the cables and once again hooked up the entire system. Finally, thanks to all the hard work from Sound Sculpture, Horst Langer and yours truly, I have been able to control the Powerball via the Switchblade without a hitch.

I never looked back. The Powerball has operated flawlessly ever since. I've tracked guitars for two albums and a number of side projects, all using the amp. I still love it. In fact, I love it so much that when I ran across an ENGL Sovereign combo on eBay, it was a no-brainer. I bought the amp sight unseen and unheard. Now I've got the same great tone in a small package, one I can easily carry to rehearsals and sessions.

ENGL makes great amps that are a perfect fit for my tone needs. What's your favorite amp? What do you like about it? What did you have to go through to make it your main rig?