Live Sound / Oral History
"We're Pissing Off Showco and Clair Brothers"
Jim Gamble on Tycobrahe, the Blueboard, and Building Consoles in a Garage
As Vice President and Director of Engineering at Tycobrahe Sound Company, Jim Gamble designed the blue board, the BFA 2000 amplifiers, and the speaker systems that put Tycobrahe on the Stones' tour and center stage at the 1974 California Jam. After Tycobrahe he built the first EX48 and EX56 consoles out of a garage in Redondo Beach — the design was later taken up by Crest Audio, who produced the remaining run. Then came the DCX, hand-soldered in Lake Tahoe.
Gamble called out of the blue one afternoon in 2021. He'd heard about the project and was ready to go — by the time Chris Leonard got a recorder out, fifteen minutes of stories were already behind them. What follows is what remained.
When I came into Tycobrahe, we had Mac tube amps and these stupid Beach Boys blivets. I said to Bob [Bogdanovich], this whole thing needs to be completely redesigned. From the ground up. And that's when we built the Tycobrahe blue board, the Tycobrahe cabinets, the BFA amplifiers. You know what BFA stands for, right? Big Fucking Amplifier. The BFA 2000s. They were 1500 watts of low frequency and 500 watts of high frequency, and they powered four cabinets. That whole design thing was done by Marvelous Marvin. He went to UCLA, got his degree in electronics and whatever, and he had the handle on transistor technology at the time. We were able to steal from AMPEX their design for the ramp and use it for the Tycobrahe amp — because Marvin worked for IBM at the time. We're doing some shit here, we're pulling it off. We're pissing off Showco. We're pissing off Clair Brothers. That's our challenge. Got it?
The silverboard came first. I built that in my living room in Hermosa Beach, right behind a surfboard shop. We walked on surfboard residue all over the floor the whole time — before Bob bought a building a couple of blocks away. The blackboards came after. They had Spectrasonics cards inside them, and some of my own design. A combination. But they were never going to be the answer to the problem. We needed to start from scratch and do a really good one. That's when we started on the blue board.
I was making pedals at the time and I was hating it. We had a whole production line doing pedals, sending them off all over the place. I decided we need to do something real. So that's when we started on the blue board from scratch. Sixteen input channels, three stereo subgroups, four auxes. And it was stereo. Lots of people were into stereo at that point — but nobody was doing it at PA level. We made about twenty-four of those.
The color? Blue is my favorite color. So I made everything blue. That's what you get when you're the chief engineer — you get to choose. We had a metal fab shop right down the road that did government contract work and built stuff for IBM. That's where we stole the IBM blue color. IBM blue was a registered color that nobody else could use. I went, alrighty then — that's what color we're going to make everything. I said what I want to the shop, and they went, okay, no problem, we'll steal it from IBM. The cabinets, the consoles — all of it in blue. All the speakers were covered in blue indoor-outdoor carpeting.
How did we end up with the British bands? We did a benefit for the Stones — for some country that was having a problem, I don't remember which one. We did it for free. The Stones were there, a bunch of other British bands were there, and that's what happened. The other bands saw what we were doing and figured it out.
How did Dirk Schubert come along? I hired him out of high school. He was a part-time employee because there was a program where you could work and not put so many hours in at school. He just knocked on the door and asked for a job. There are a lot of stories about how that works. If you're willing to take this on, you're hired.
After Tycobrahe, I started my own company. I had to come up with new consoles — that's where the HC32 and HC40 came from. All done in my garage in Redondo Beach.
Jackson Browne was the first person to take out the HC40. He arrived at my house in the middle of the night and before he even gets in the door he goes, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it was a garage operation. I knew it. He loved it.
The Doobie Brothers came by in their bus and parked right in front of my place. They came running in — they had some weed so sticky it stuck to your fingers. They're rolling joints and smoking pot and we're cranking the tunes and carrying on in the middle of the night. They're going, yeah, we like this place, man. That really happened, by the way.
Redondo Beach eventually told me I had to get out of there because guys were pissing behind the garage — I didn't have a bathroom — and the neighbors complained. So I moved into Manhattan Beach.
The EX consoles — the EX56 and EX48 — we made a hundred of those. A hundred of them, and they're all still working. Every one of them. They get repaired by Kevin Krecke: you send him your console with a check for five thousand dollars and he'll make it like brand new and send it back to you. There are a hundred of them out there, and they're all still doing shows every day.
The DCX is my pride and joy. Fifteen years of software development went into that thing. Even that started from zero.
Would I tell someone to go into audio? My sister asked me once if I wanted to become a professor and teach a course on music. I went, no. Here's what I'd say: don't go into audio. That's been my experience. Sorry.
Even though it didn't work out financially, that doesn't mean it wasn't a success — those consoles are still out there. People still want them, still restore them, still use them every day. Regardless of whether you think you are or not, you are a legend and a rock star to the live sound community.
That's a very nice thing for you to say. Just thought I'd mention that little fact.