Nice!
Was this a solo thing once you came on board or design collaboration with Rob?
Anything else on the drawing board?
The Gaucho is a great example of how Jim and I have come to work well together... the story... as best as I can remember it... went something like this...
Jim and I were chatting about everything and nothing as we do and I mentioned that I would love to come up with an amp that would fit in what we'd kept as an open slot in our old nomenclature (ME-1, ME-3, etc)... the Desperado already fit in between the ME-3 and ME-5 (and we did actually build two ME-4's before changing to the new names... compliments to Ralph Barenthien on those)... so Jim said he'd built a couple of 10W Class A amps that turned out pretty cool so I said 'what do you need?' and he spec'd the transformer set and we had them made by the fine people at BLS... Jim gave us a 'fag-packet' layout and I drew and made the turret board for it... we had some chassis' kicking around that were too small for the Gringo but were suitable so we modded them and built two prototypes of this design... his original circuit called for 6BQ5/EL84's but I prefer to use 6V6's as they are more robust mechanically... they did turn out pretty cool (if a bit 'hot' - not a lot of clean headroom but a great overdrive sound) and Ralph wasn't 100% sure that it was quite right for us so the circuit design was designated 'JH-1' and we put it aside for the time being...
We then thought what would the same sort of front end sound like with a Class AB output stage?... we had a handful of suitable transformer sets on the shelf that were originally built for the old ME-3 so I asked Jim to see what he could come up with and sure enough he came back with another design for which I did the layout...we knocked up a couple prototypes and hey presto... a viable alternative to the Gringo that fit into the range was designated 'JH-2' in our design archive and the 'Gaucho' was born... the original circuit had a pre-set mix of the two 1st stage pre-amps (what are in effect the normal and bright 'channels') but I thought why not try putting in a pot so the mix could be altered instead and a 'Blend' control was added to the volume, treble, midrange and bass controls... a bright switch was added to give it a bit more sparkle if required and there you have it... that's how Jim's design became what is rapidly becoming a very popular amp in our line-up...
After nailing that one down we went back to the JH-1 and did some mods to chill the gain out a bit and now have the Hobo 'Graduate'... a 5/10W Class A amp (running either 1 or 2 6V6's) that fits in perfectly between the Hobo and the Gaucho... we also have a Harp 'N Guitar variant of the Caballero that has a dedicated input for the hottest of the hot overwound harp mics and is how the 'V-Stack' control came to be... the V-Stack is a six position rotary switch that gives you 6 different passive tone stacks... the first two (fully anti-clockwise and the next) are primarily intended for harp mics but are great for getting cleaner tones out of overwound guitar pickups, the next two are more 'F*nder' sounding and the last two are more 'M*rshall'... we have bass amps coming too... there's no rest for the wicked!!
As an aside... a lot more goes into an amp design than the electronic circuit... chassis, turret boards, control panels, and cabinets all need designing and drawing... 3rd party manufacturers need to be instructed... components need specifying or selecting... it's quite a process... but one we do enjoy... we both have a hand in assembling and testing the finished products and as corny as it sounds... I really enjoy having Jim around... he's a damned good repairer, good at tweaking stuff and it's just great to know that there's someone else on-board that gets what we do...
