Its funny to be here typing this again for a new website. Many years ago I shut all of this down wanting to focus more on family and my own peace. I think what most people don't understand about the "boutique" amp market is how much work, time and money go into this. It is truly exhausting and quite difficult to make a living, not to mention how saturated this market truly is. EVERYBODY is either a pedal builder or cabinet builder or amp builder these days. We live in an age of entrepreneurship so whatever you are doing...it BETTER be good and it BETTER stand out.
I may look familiar to a lot of people. Some will remember me from when I ran a small company called RDK Sound Design. Some may remember me from when I built amps under the name "Blythe Engineeering" for a very small stint once before. Some may notice me from my 4-5 years that I spent managing a different amplifier company, where I managed production, managed social media, designed and organized build and assembly processes, did all of the in-house photography and video, marketing, training, designed files for CNC router, and managed and built OEM projects from other well known amp companies.
While building under the name of "RDK Sound Design" I got to meet and work with some amazing people. I built a few cabinets for famous musician Nick Perri. We even worked together on a small run of cabinets of his design where we sold out of his shop on Melrose Ave in Los Angelas. That specific model of cabinet was very popular. At one point, famous songwriter and producer for Bruno Mars, Ari Levine picked one up. Around 2016 we got to build an amp taylored to Nicks preferences for him to use on his new record with his band at that time Mount Holly.
Unfortunately the NP30 combo didn't see too much light. After Nick completed the album it came back to our shop. I ended up taking the amp apart to impliment some new ideas. Honestly I have no idea why. It was a great amp as was, but I ended up rebuilding the whole thing. Or at least starting to. Right around this time I shut the business down all together and this amp sat and sat until eventually it was tossed. Probably the saddest part of the whole ordeal. I talked to Nick a few times during that time about rebuilding it, I just never was able to fit it in to my new schedule.
While under the name RDK, we built somewhere around 150 custom cabinets for people all over the US as well as one order sent to China. My two favorite cabinets to build were 6x12 guitar cabinets and this custom puzzle piece joinery style cabinet that we built from Ambrosia Maple with a Walnut front frame. I know of 2 of these in existance at least. There could be more. I often find myself randomly remembering cabinets and amps that I have forgotten about.
There are countless custom color custom grill cabinets out there. When I had the idea to start this back in 2007, the first thing I thought of was getting images screen printed on the grill cloth. I didn't end up using that method however. I found a local company who could do this in house. The cabinet coating was not your standard tolex, but a coating called Duratex. At the time I was ordering from speakerhardware.com. They sold this stuff so I thought I would try it, since I hated tolex. It worked out well, but ultimately it wasn't as durable as I would have liked, though touching it up was very easy. I ultimately stopped using it as I didn't think it looked high quality enough.
Sometime around 2016, I built a small number of multi and single channel amps. Even though I wasn't offering these for sale, I would still get an itch to put together one of these ideas that I couldn't get out of my head. It seemed to be that the ideas would come regardless if I wanted to build or not. It always seemed to light a fire and get something new started.
These last few builds, I have completely built by hand. Everything was designed and laid out using various types of software to ensure there wouldn't be any surprises during assembly. The chassis was eventualy laid out in V-Carve to be cut on the CNC router. From there, they were bent, corner welded and powder coated.
Moving forward I won't be able to do so much by myself. I design and layout all my chassis, but they are all being done by another shop. I have designed all of my new designs with both ease of installation as well as ease of service in mind. I have multiple new builds (cabinets, amps, and various other pieces of gear) completed and will slowly be adding each one to the products page.