How many ‘Speakeasys’ can one player need?

If you’ve got multiple keyboards, your best bet is mutliple speakeasy products. Here’s one of our customer’s hearty rigs and an email he sent us about his gear and his feelings about all 3 of his Speakeasy products (Stereo Rack Vintage Tube Preamp, Vintage Tube Preamp Pedal, and Vibrato Stagebox)

Thanks again for your time this evening discussing the various options for me going forward. Your gig rig speakers and, once it comes out, the Nord Electro3, will ultimately be excellent choices for me — at least for this next phase(!)

There’s some great gear up there, but key for Speakeasy is that there are no less than three of your preamps onstage.

The Nord Electro 2 runs through your stereo/rackmount preamp. I can no longer go to the gig without it — the tone and ability to hear myself more clearly onstage is really that much better.

The Korg BX3 (recently replaced with a Nord C1) runs through the classic tube clone preamp into the Leslie 45 shown — which, by the way, has been modified to a 145/two speed with your assistance and Caribbean controls products. This preamp functions beautifully, and the build quality stands up to lots of abuse (footswitch use, kicking the tone/gain knobs on the fly to adjust them, etc.). When I run the Nord C1 through this preamp into the same Leslie cabinet, I literally can not tell the difference between it and my 1959 Hammond B3/Leslie 147 combo — other than the expected uptick in bass response of the 147 vs. 145….

The Rhodes Mark 1 is running through your ping pong vibrato preamp which is by far the best out of four different preamps I have tried for it (other options from BBE, ART and others added noise and did not have the “fatness” of tone that your preamp does). The Rhodes is also fitted with a pickup/wiring harness that you fabricated for me — to replace the defective original harness.

All keyboards except the Korg are then submixed to a Mackie mixer and monitored with the MotionSound KPS100.

The rig sounds fantastic – but it would not be the same without all of your components. I still am amazed at the improvement in tone, harmonics, frequency balance/separation, and overall “hearability” onstage that I get when I use your preamps. I really appreciate your company’s total dedication to quality — especially after having tried cheaper substitutes that, in the long run, cost more because they were not durable or did not improve my sound and had to be re-sold at a fraction of their purchase price. When I buy your products, I don’t need to worry about resale price, because I never have a need to re-sell. It really is best, from a value standpoint, to just buy the right thing the first time — even if it takes a bit longer to save up for the purchase.

Please feel free to use this letter and pictures on your site or in other promotional materials as a sincere endorsement of your product line.