BOGNER Amplifiers: Eccentric Genius from Los Angeles
Published on 09 August 2024
Have you heard about the craze of modding Marshalls back in the 80s?
Back in the hard rock glory days, gunslinging Californian guitarists needed a little ‘more’ from their Marshall stacks. The tone was there, but they all just needed a little extra juice; a small bump of grit and snarl to really push their tones over the cliff, as it were.
These guitarists went to modders who worked out of their garage workshops in the suburbs of Glendale, Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley with their trusty amps. In the backyards of suburban California, these mystical amp wizards would modify the circuits of these Marshall amps (it was invariably Marshalls) to sound richer, chunkier, more saturated, and basically more ‘hard rocking’ right?
This is how Bogner started. Just like Friedman amps have evolved from David Friedman’s successful amp tinkering, so Bogner became a legendary name in amps thanks to Reinhold Bogner’s amp mods in late 80s California.
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Idiosyncratic Amps with World-Class Sounds
The Bogner Brand
Bogner has been a brand since 1989, when German immigrant Reinhold Bogner built on the success of his amp mods and developed his own circuit into what became the Ecstacy.
Actually, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Reinhold Bogner (whom LA Weekly compared to a ‘character out of a Disney film, an absent-minded professor’) had been building amps since he was a teenager, and when he moved to LA, he worked for Andy Brauer, who rented out top-end equipment to the likes of Michael Landau and Steve Stevens. It’s a fact that every spandex-clad gunslinger with a JCM800 sought out an amp wizard to basically get Eddie Van Halen’s guitar sound (we talk about him a lot here but it’s true), but amp mods were wanted by the majority of the 1980s Los Angeles mob.
A year or two later, Jerry Cantrell used a Bogner-modified amp for Alice in Chains’ debut record, bringing that boutique sound to the grunge generation. A true tone connoisseur, Cantrell has stuck with Bogner since, which says loads.
Anyway, Reinhold’s first complete amp builds were very Fender Bassman-like, and so the theoretical blueprint of the Ecstasy - the company’s first ‘product’, if you will - was to combine Fender amp elements with those much-loved modded Marshall sounds.
It’s fair to say that he touched on something! The idea of having a hundred watt amp head that delivered that rich, searing distortion but also supplied expansive cleans was something that nobody had particularly conquered, apart from Michael Soldano perhaps.
Van Halen bought early amp examples from Bogner, as did Allan Holdsworth. Steve Vai’s Sex & Religion touring rig - proudly photographed in the album’s sleeve - displayed a Bogner Ecstasy head. Word had caught on, and the legend grew wings.
Bogner Amps
Any company with a 30+ year history is going to have quite a legacy, so I’ll concentrate only on the more famous/notable examples. As with most boutique brands, there are a large number of special and limited editions out there, so today’s rundown is more of a general brand appreciation.
Bogner Ecstasy
Google this amp and you’ll see giddy comments like ‘the Rolls Royce of guitar amps’. Whilst I’m not one for hyperbole (I’m not!), it does demonstrate the sort of esteem that Bogners are held in generally, and this amp in particular. The Bogner Ecstasy was the first original production amp. Available in two 100 watt versions, one had an 6L6 power amp section (often with an ‘A’ in the model name to indicate the American - in other words, Fender) and the other had EL34’s, like a Marshall. This one had the ‘B’ designation, for ‘British’.
I mentioned in the intro that players like Van Halen and Vai had this amp, but what’s perhaps even more interesting is the fact that a number of country players also value the Ecstasy for its clear and three dimensional clean sound.
Bogner Ecstasy Pandora EL34
Going back to his prized debut model, Reinhold first modded his Ecstacy amp design to the ‘101B’ model, a take on the British EL34 Ecstasy with extra features to help players further sculpt their tones.
Relatively recently, he returned to that 101B amp and redrew its parameters. This has resulted in the Bogner Ecstasy Pandora, a 120 watt, 3-channel monster amp with an exceptional level of control at your fingertips. There are depth controls, mini-switches for multiple modes and extra ways to alter the sonic response and frequency focus.
This means that you can apply a somewhat ‘best of’ approach to your tone-chasing. You can use a channel that sounds like the classic Ecstacy from 1992, but then flip a switch to add in some of the low end response of the Uberschall, for example. It’s tempting to start using preposterous adjectives like ‘chewy’, ‘syrupy’ and even ‘biscuity’, depending on how the controls are set, but I’m a grown-up, ok?
Bogner Shiva
The Bogner Shiva is a slightly more vintage sounding amp, if it’s fair to call any Bogners ‘vintage’ sounding. The fact is, it still absolutely delivers that chunky thump that you’d expect if you’d played an Ecstacy previously, but it seems that the emphasis is on the expansive richness rather than the more saturated ‘modded’ sound.
Most Shivas are two channel amplifiers, and you can hear more of Reinhold’s love for classic Fender Bassman amps in the Shiva when the gain is calmed and the volume raised. It’s still most certainly got that Marshall-esque harmonic spread, and it’s - to my ears at least - a good deal looser sounding than the likes of the Ecstacy or the Uberschall (see below). There’s a darkness to the overall EQ of most Shivas that I’ve played, so they definitely play well with brighter sounding guitars and speaker cabs.
Different people hear different things but my ears always enjoy the luxurious looseness of the Shiva. It’s like the vintage rock amp that never actually existed in the past.
Bogner Helios
To my mind, the Bogner Helios - originally designed and built for the company’s 25th Anniversary - is the one that’s most pointedly going for the ‘early Eddie’ sound. The front panel is an obvious tip of the hat to a Plexi head (albeit one that’s been gleefully defaced with psychedelic scribbles) and there’s even a ‘Variac’ mode to simulate the very technique a young Edward famously developed to get more from his amps.
The Helios is available in a few guises. One is a 50 watt head (more than enough these days, particularly if you’re after the crunch) with two channels, but it’s the old-school two inputs with different levels-style here rather than ‘clean and dirty’. It’s the type of amp that nails one particular goal rather than trying to be everything for everyone.
The other offers up the same tone and sensibility, but as a 100 watt ‘Helios Eclipse’ head with three channels. That’s how Bogner talk about it anyway, but to me this is like a single channel amp with three sets of gain and volume levels. You can get lots of versatility here but all of the channels share an EQ, for example. If you think about this as a super-versatile single channel with controllable volumes, that might better describe how it appears to the casual player.
Needless to say, it sounds thick, crispy and delicious!
Bogner Uberschall
German for ‘Supersonic’, the Uberschall is the amp you need if you plan on taking over the planet. It’s an absolute stun gun of an amp, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Designed apparently in response to a Bogner user suggesting to Reinhold that he’d love an amp with ‘more bass and more gain’, he very much delivered on that promise. There’s a huge amount of thunderous gain on tap here, with a tonal character that is neither Marshall nor MESA/Boogie. The Bogner Überschall has its own sound, and enough low end to have your neighbours calling for the local exorcist.
Since you’ve obviously pushed me to describe the sound, I’d maybe share my opinion that there’s something special happening in the low mids and bass area of the sound that I don’t often hear with other high gain amps. There’s also that characteristic darkness (don’t mistake this for ‘dull’, because the Uberschall is anything but) that helps you sound great in a mix. Though tighter sounding than some other Bogner models, there is still a looseness to the bottom end that gives it a huge sense of size. I can see why Jerry Cantrell likes this, but I can also see the thrash metal guys lamenting the lack of tightness. Hey, that’s what a Tubescreamer’s for!
Idiosyncratic Amps with World-Class Sounds
Bogner belong to that rarefied group of amps that have the mist of legend about them. They’ve appeared in the right places, played by the right people, and continue to impress, squarely on the merits of their own terms. They aren’t dinosaurs by any means, but by sticking to their own path and doing their singular thing, Bogner have remained relevant to anyone who cares about outstanding guitar tones.
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