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Mesa Boogie Factory Tour
Mesa Boogie Factory Tour…
My Mesa Boogie 400+, all tube bass amp, had a rough go of it at a recent gig. I was playing at a very remote location high up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains – a location so remote that the band was shuttled in by helicopter. All electrical power was provided by a large diesel generator, which is shunted to a distribution box to provide 120 volts or 250 volts – depending on your need. To make a long and painful story a little shorter (but just as painful) my amplifier was somehow plugged into a 250 volt outlet – hence the visit to the Mesa Boogie Factory.
Acknowledgement
I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank all the staff and management that I met while visiting the Mesa Boogie factory. Everyone I met was genuinely friendly, knowledgeable, and more than willing to provide me with information and assistance. I did not have an appointment for a tour and was amazed at their willingness to have staff interrupt their busy schedules to provide me with access to their facilities and to let me play around with their newest all tube bass amps.
The Facility
The Mesa Boogie factory is located in an unassuming business/industrial park in Petaluma, California. It is basically a very large warehouse that is divided into many working spaces, some of which are office sized and many very large spaces devoted to manufacturing amplifiers and speaker cabinets. While the production of Mesa Boogie products is in an ordinary looking building, the processes used are anything but ordinary in this day and age. All Mesa Boogie products are completely made in the USA and all amps are hand wired. While I was on the tour, we ran into Randall Smith, the founder and CEO of Mesa Boogie. Mr. Smith came across as a warm, engaging individual who is completely immersed in ensuring that Mesa Boogie maintains the highest standards and values – with the end product of high quality tone being the paramount target.
The Tour
The first stop on the tour was “The Pit” – a small room that contains all the prototype amplifier designs of founder Randall Smith.
This little room is basically an active museum for all things Mesa Boogie. The shelves are stacked full of early versions of Mesa Boogie Amplifier prototypes. This room is a little dusty and reeks of Mojo – very cool!
Walking into the factory proper, the first large piece of machinery is the Auto Assembly Machine. All of the smaller electronic components are inserted by this machine into a printed circuit board, where they are also soldered into place.
Live technicians take to circuit boards from this point forward and quality check them visually for any defects that may need attention and then the boards are hand wired and the larger components are added.
Each board then receives more quality control tests with the components fired up and various electronic tests are run. Each chassis is struck several times with a hammer handle to make sure it can handle some abuse and that everything is tight and working as it should.
The amp then gets a first sound check to make sure it’s sounding as it should.
The amps are then are put through the “Burn-in” where they are left on for a minimum of 24 hours and then cycled on and off a few times to make sure they can take some abuse.
After the amp successfully completes the Burn-in, it is taken behind another set of sound muffled doors and then subjected to a final play test by another lucky Mesa Boogie employee.
After all this, the folks at Mesa Boogie have even developed there own special packing molds to safeguard the amps on their shipping journey to a store near you.
Mesa Boogie also has an impressive carpentry shop in the same facility where all of their speaker cabinets are produced. As with everything else here, they tend to blend hi-tech processes followed up with a hands-on approach to the finish work. In this case, Mesa Boogie takes Baltic Birch plywood and makes all their initial cuts, routes and joinery using computer controlled routers on mechanized benches.
They then hand sand and assemble the cabinets. The next stage is to paint and then follow up by wrapping the cabinet in a wide choice of coverings.
On request, Mesa Boogie also produces speaker cabinets from many other varieties of wood.
As a final treat of ice cream piled on top of a huge chocolate cake, tehy took me upstairs and let me play around with the Walkabout, the new all-tube line-up of the Bass Prodigy and the Bass Strategy amps! These new all tube amps really have some girth to give your bass playing some added authority when laying down the low end!
I didn’t want to leave, but the musician’s version of the Willy Wonka Chocolate factory had work to do… and I still had the drive home through some bay area traffic ahead of me!
Thanks again to all the folks at Mesa Boogie who let me peek behind the curtain and see the magic first hand.
For more information on Mesa Boogie products, go to mesaboogie.com
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Photo: Self-portrait by Melissa Auf Der Maur
Melissa Auf Der Maur is a Canadian bassist who played with Tinker, Hole, and The Smashing Pumpkins. She released her own work and is a photographer with photos published in Nylon, Bust, and National Geographic. She released her ‘90s Rock Memoir “Even The Good Girls Will Cry” on 17 March 2026.
KB: Did you always want to be a singer-musician growing up?
I’ve played music my whole life. In school, I played trumpet and sang in a children’s choir, so music was always within me. My mother was the first female disc jockey on the Montreal airwaves; her record collection played a huge role in my inspiration and love of music.
KB: When did you start playing bass, and why this instrument?
When I was 19, the early 90s music explosion began to percolate in tiny clubs around the world. I was lucky to be a ticket girl at Montreal’s underground music club. In one year, I saw Hole, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie, and The Breeders – all had female bass players. That’s when the seed was planted. By the age of 22, I was the bass player of Hole.
KB: Which brands of basses have you used in your career, and which one are you using now?
The first bass that I learned on was a vintage Squier Precision. Hole was sponsored by Fender guitars, so I upgraded to Fender Custom Shop Precisions. That is all I play, but I have a cool vintage 8-string Greco that I use on recordings to thicken up guitar parts.
KB: What equipment do you use or have you used with your basses?
Ampeg SVT amps and cabinets, a couple of Sans-Amp pedals, and that is it.
KB: How did you become a member of Hole, and what is your fondest memory of that time?
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was helping scout a replacement for (RIP) Kristen Pfaff, Hole’s bass player. My band, Tinker, opened for them on the Siamese Dream tour, so Billy had seen me play and could vouch for me. Courtney trusted her talented friend, and that was it. I initially said “no thank you” due to my commitment to my photographic studies and the drama and chaos surrounding the band during the “Live Through This” album release. Courtney took it as a good sign that I said no, so convinced me to reconsider, and soon after, I accepted their invitation, in the name of helping put females in the male-dominated landscape of rock music. My fondest memory is every show we played as a mostly female band, symbolizing what a woman could do in a rock band. Every show had a purpose: get more women to play music.
KB: You are a photographer as well. What makes a great picture? Do you shoot in color or b/w?
I started shooting photographs at age 15. Initially only shot black & white and worked in the art school darkroom. In university, I took a color photography course, and shifted mostly and forever to that, because it was easier to process film on the road when I joined a rock band. I experimented with many cameras, point and shoots, manual, polaroids, medium format, and vintage finds. The trick to a good photograph is to shoot many and all the time – the magic is in the edit and selection process.
KB: Are there artists you would love to collaborate with or wish you had?
??I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some of my favorite musicians in my career. I would still love to collaborate with a new generation heavy electronic artist on an analog bass, heavy electronic drums, and synths collaboration project. Take me out of my usual zone, merging the past and future: my love of 80s dark new wave and new artists exploring that genre. It was very futuristic back then, and we are now, after all, living in the future. I am in the mood to play bass to heavy beats I want to dance to.
KB: What are your 7 favorite bass lines in music across all genres? And why these 7?
“Mountain Song” – Jane’s Addiction (love a rambling, rolling bass line – feels like the ocean waves)
“Black Top – Helmet” (was the first bass line I taught myself)
“Gold Dust Woman” – Hole from “The Crow 2” Soundtrack (it was my first bass line contribution to the band)
“Get Ready” – The Temptations (Motown just feels so good, because of the bass)
“Lucretia My Reflection” – Sisters of Mercy (makes me want to hit the dance floor and play bass simultaneously)
“Be My Druidess” – Type O Negative (full chord bass playing at its best by iconic, demonic, Peter Steele, RIP)
“Romantic Rights” – Death from Above (1979 – unique distorted overdriven tone, combined dance rhythm and melodic intelligence, all in one shot – also! Shout out to a bass & drum only band, which is awesome, and we should have more of, but the bass player needs to be a killer to fill that role.
KB: What are you currently up to?
Releasing my ‘90s Rock Memoir “EVEN THE GOOD GIRLS WILL CRY”. Visceral healing process, it was to get it out of me and write it, but I suspect the real magic will begin by putting it into the world and reflecting with others on what the magic of the ‘90s was all about. Powerful music decade that carried us into what is now a brave new world of digital corporate weirdness – may the past shed a light on our future. That’s my hope for this book release and tour.
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