Our goal at Egnater is to become your “Tone Partner” and to provide you with the best tools we can to help you express yourself to the fullest. Your amplifier is an integral piece in your never ending “Tone Quest”. Our commitment to helping you achieve that goal is our passion. We hope you will take advantage of the years of innovative tube amp designs we offer and use it to find the sound that is “in your head”.  We designed the Tourmaster Series with four channels, countless wattage setting configurations, voicing switches and responsive controls with the tone to cover any music style from classic rock to classic clean.  Thank you for your interest in Egnater.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. A relentless tinkerer throughout my childhood. Got my first guitar at age 13. A Rickenbacker solid body and a Silvertone Twin Twelve amp from Sears and Roebuck’s department store (wish I still had both of those). The Detroit rock scene was just starting as I became a teenager. Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad etc, etc. were all just upcoming local bands.

I found myself sneaking into any number of happening local concert halls (I was underage at the time) every weekend checking out the bands and their gear. Even played at a few of those places later on. Then around 1969 two new groups came along that changed my world. Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Both were my inspiration to become a professional musician. I practiced for more hours than I care to remember. Actually became a pretty good guitarist. Played in a few popular local bands. Got into the progressive rock scene and played in a few of those types of bands for years. We even learned the entire side one of Close to the Edge by Yes.

A monumental task at the time. We got to play it one time at one of the premier local clubs and got fired that night. I guess they just weren’t into that type of music. I continued playing but I could see the dream of making the big time was just not going to become a reality.

Why does any of this matter? All the while I was tinkering with my gear. Pursuing new ways to get the sounds I wanted but couldn’t find in the amps of the time. No one had invented master volume controls or high gain tube amps so all we could do is crank our Marshalls to unGodly volumes just to get “that” tone. Then we started to discover overdrive pedals. A step in the right direction for getting the high gain rock tones we were all seeking but still not the answer.

One day I had this crazy idea. I took a little Gibson amp, hooked up a resistor in place of the speaker and jammed the output of that little amp into the input of my 200 watt Marshall. Wow…now I was onto something. I could get the distortion of the little tube amp at concert volumes. What a revelation. Other players started to take notice. Soon I found myself hooking up similar setups for other local players. Well, of course this abuse took its’ toll on the gear so those same players needed someone to fix their amps when they blew up.

I ended up being the repair guy partly by default and partly because I had a knack for fixing things. I guess all that tinkering paid off. Since I could see by now I was not going to become a rock star, I decided college might be a good idea. I went to the University of Detroit Engineering School in hopes of joining the corporate world. Alas, music continued to be my one true ambition. If I couldn’t be a rock star, what could I do to be involved in music? My Grandfather, Ed Kreske, once said to me “Don’t be the guy who digs the ditches, be the guy who makes the shovels”. I didn’t realize at the time what a profound statement that was. I opened my first amp and guitar repair shop around 1975. There weren’t many places for players to get their gear fixed so the business grew quickly. Still the player at heart, I never stopped questing for “the tone”. I really started studying what the amps of the time did and didn’t do.

One thing I had always wanted was an amp that could get great distortion but somehow get a great clean sound also. Mesa Boogie had just come out with their Dual Mode amps where you could switch on the lead mode and get a good distortion tone. Unfortunately it was a compromise because you couldn’t set two very different tones for clean and overdrive because the single tone controls were shared between the two modes. I decided to design an amp that could have a clean channel and an overdrive channel with separate controls for each.

I made a prototype for myself and it worked great. Other players started to hear about this radical new tube amp. I began making these amps for quite a few local players. I could see that there may be a future in this amp business. These were the small beginnings of what would later become Egnater Amplification.

30 years later Egnater Amplification continues to be the relentless innovators. Our patented modular tube amplifiers are a radical departure from conventional tube amp thinking. Our amps offer a level of flexibility not found in any other tube amps. Of course, the quest for “The Tone” has never wavered. “Tone First” is our motto and the credo we live by. Thanks for your interest

Thanks for your interest.
Bruce Egnater