Traynor Amp Drop.. will it still work

[Eracer_Team-DougH]

Long time ago (before Obi Wan..) Peter Traynor.. which I did meet in person... made some pretty darn good amps for a startup gear rental company called Yorkville Sound which also started Long and McQuade music store and also started Traynor Amp's

legend had it that Pete dropped some of his amps off a roof of the warehouse he was designing and building in.

which started a 'tough as all .. ' slogan for the amps.

Pete's gone now.. but the name still lives on ,, this is an older video.. but .. 

wonder if it's true.. watch here.

 

 

Edited February 20, 2019 by Eracer_Team-DougH
words

[guitarben]

Thank you for posting this! I'm canadian and I didn't even know that Traynor amps are canadian or the connection with Long & McQuade... 

[Eracer_Team-DougH]

Actually the night I met Pete Traynor,, I also me Jack Long

If anyone is interested Yorkville Sound posted some time ago a "History of Yorkville Sound" .. 56 Pages long.

but I'll post just a few excerpts here 

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1956 - 1958 
 
Jack Long opened a small music retail/teaching operation, J.E.Long Music Co.,  in 1956. A year later, he and his friend Jack McQuade - now his partner - opened a shop at 803 Yonge Street and named it Long & McQuade Musical Instruments. 
 Despite Toronto’s vast urban sprawl, Yonge is still considered the city’s version of  "Main Street" and has the distinction of being the world's longest such thoroughfare at around 1,400 kilometers. Back in the fifties, the southern stretch of Yonge was home to most of Toronto's hottest nightclubs and major music stores. Long & McQuade Music was thus a little off the beaten track, up on the east side of Yonge just across from the terminus of Yorkville Avenue and walk-in trade was somewhat limited at first, but that wouldn’t last. 
 While Jack McQuade concentrated on selling and playing drums, Jack Long shouldered the role of general marketer. One of his ideas was to stock a good selection of high-quality electric guitars and amplifiers, something the more established competition was slow to do. But then they were also slow reacting to the huge youth market that was springing up. Instead they stocked a majority of cheaper guitars and amps "for the kids" and kept a minimal stock of good stuff locked behind glass or adorned with Do Not Touch signs, presumably awaiting grownups bent on forsaking the mortgage payment in favor of a Les Paul. 
 
Jack's abiding interest in young people - he and Carol have six children - would continue to guide his marketing approaches right up to the present. Back in the fifties when other music stores were cold-shouldering anyone under the age of twenty-one, Long & McQuade were spoiling them. This tended to leave youthful customers babbling about the place to anyone who'd listen then dragging them there to show it off. No wonder, Jack was like Santa. He’d even lend brand new, high-quality guitars and amps to aspiring musicians for try-outs - at home (no Hands Off signs here). Of course he also loaned things to friends who might be in a spot and needed the temporary use of something, so good will was being spread around evenly - just not very profitably. 

 

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1958 - 1963 
 
Two years had passed and both Jacks were still playing at night, Long on trumpet or occasionally bass, McQuade on drums.  Enjoyment aside, playing put food on their tables and roofs over their heads since whatever the store earned was going back into the business. Consequently Jack Long often found himself casting about for cashflow boosters, one of which was the idea of charging a few dollars for lending things out. The amounts would have to be small enough not to offend customers, but anything would help, and help it did. Jack had inadvertently sewn the seeds of Canada's first music equipment rental operation. In later years it would grow to mammoth proportions and affect the future of much more than this one operation, but for now things went slowly. 
 Jack found himself frequently covering for Jack McQuade whose hectic playing career was now keeping him out of the store for much of the workday. This meant the good Mr. Long was putting in ten to twelve hours at the store and playing until late at night six days a week. And when the twins, Jon & Cathy arrived, he found himself getting home from the gig in time to help with the 2:30 AM feedings. Ah, parenthood. 
 All in all, life had become a serious grind for Jack Long. Things would have been a little more bearable if the store were paying off, but sadly it remained a profitless effort sponge. Tired and discouraged, Jack finally sold out his interest in 1960, hired a helper for Jack McQuade, a drummer named Fred Theriault, and left for a life of comparative normality in the real estate business. 
 
Our story might end here but for the fact that Jack wound up back in the store regularly and in time concluded that working there would be more enjoyable than selling real estate if he could actually get paid for it. After a year or so he’d managed to save up some money and could buy back his portion of the business if a suitable financial arrangement were made. It was and thereafter Jack Long was back to stay. 
 Rentals had continued their gradual growth in Jack’s absence with amplifiers proving to be among the most popular items. In many cases, young guitar and bass players were blowing their meager bundles on instruments leaving amplification as an afterthought. Then all they could afford was a toaster-sized squawkbox suitable for practicing but not much more, so when they finally emerged from the basement or garage to play that allimportant first gig, the kids were making a bee-line for Long & McQuade to rent decent amps. 
 Reportedly the competition were becoming convinced that L&M was about to go out of business - “How can kids be trusted?”. But young musicians turned out to be very reliable renters.  Many older guitarists and bassists gravitated to amp rentals as well, thus Long & McQuade's amplifier inventory was constantly becoming more substantial. Despite that, customers were sometimes being turned away because there was nothing left to rent, at least nothing that worked. Death, taxes and repairs, it seemed, were inevitable. 
 
The store's repairs initially went to an outside shop, then in 1962, Jack was approached by a would-be serviceman who wanted to rent space at the back of the store to fix TV's, radios, etc. for residents of the posh Rosedale area nearby. He also agreed to help out with the store's non-functioning inventory as much as possible, although instrument amps were not really where he was grounded.  Jack agreed and the arrangement continued for the next year or so. Although it soon became clear that an in-store repairman seemed ideal in principle, the man in question was having problems keeping up as dead amps and speakers began forming mute pyramids outside his room. 
 

 

[Eracer_Team-DougH]

 

 

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1963 
 
Pete Traynor was a Long & McQuade customer in his early twenties. The son of an electrical engineer, Pete had been repairing amps for his friends and playing bass in local bands since highschool. He would hang around the store for hours, like many young musicians, and frequently mentioned to Jack that he could do a good job of fixing amps if given a chance, a claim which Jack recalled when the repairman eventually sought less frustrating pastures elsewhere. 
 It was agreed that Pete would perform the store's repairs on a piecework basis whenever he had time and Jack settled back, prepared to hold impatient customers at bay a little longer. But to everyone’s astonishment, nearly the whole mess - several month's backlog - was cleaned up in very short order. Pete continued to repair things part time for a couple of weeks, then he was hired full-time. 
 Pete Traynor proved to be a frenetic worker with little regard for "factory original" parts. More accurately he lacked the patience to wait for them. But so did the customers. If something wouldn't work with off-the-shelf components he'd  modify it so that it did, a trick which required more than the average amount of technical acumen. But occasionally a power transformer had to be ordered from the manufacturer resulting in a long-term wait. This left Pete grumbling and vowing that if he were ever to design an amplifier, his power transformer would be virtually bullet-proof. 
 
Pete was developing a growing list of retail parts suppliers - Alpha Arakon, Electrosonic, etc. - and eventually he even found a speaker manufacturer, Marsland Engineering, who would sell to him.  It was seldom difficult for Pete to obtain speakers, parts, tools, test equipment, etc.; he was spending Jack Long's money and Jack had trouble saying no. 
 In time Toronto began awakening to the fact that there was someone at Long & McQuade with the ability to fix almost anything. High-calibre audio/video repairmen were around back then, but few knew or cared enough about instrument amps to work any wonders. By comparison, Pete Traynor seemed like Merlin with a soldering iron. As if to further such notions, he took on the added task of modifying things. In this pre-fuzz-box, pre-master-volumecontrol era, he could make guitar amps provide the distortion and sustain popularized by ex-band-mate Robbie Robertson. Pete even sawed someone’s Hammond L100 organ in half to make it portable (Ray Harrison – that was his solo on Del Shannon’s “Runaway”). Such legendary stuff, along the magnetic pull of Long & McQuade, drew even more customers to the little shop on Yonge Street. 
 
A few weeks after Pete started working at the store full time, a customer requested that he design and build a pair of portable PA speakers for him. This appears to have prompted one of those ‘lightbulb’ moments. Incredibly, noone seemed to be building portable speakers for public address, nor portable amplifiers, nor anything else. There were commercial PA amps which ‘could’ be adopted for portable systems, but they were clumbsy to set up and offered only one or two mic inputs, and who cares - there were no speakers to use with them anyway. Meanwhile, the systems built into most playing venues were awful antiques that squealed and distorted or didn't work at all. 
 The dreaded no-PA syndrome may have spared dance bands fits of grief; their music is generally around ninety per-cent instrumental. But rock & roll is about ninety per-cent vocal and that’s what most of the store’s customers were playing.  So what did rock & roll bands do when there was no PA? Too often they played the handful of instrumentals they knew, over and over until the audience threatened violence. Then they packed up and fled into the night, often penniless. Obviously portable PA could solve some nagging problems. 
 After puzzling over possible designs, Pete took a page from one of his reference books and conjured up something called the "sound column" based on a principle developed by RCA in the mid nineteen-thirties. These first columns each contained six eight-inch speakers and two ten-inch speakers which made them better than six feet tall, hence they could get sound out to the back of a hall or club even from a low stage. As well, that vertical speaker alignment promised to spread sound over a large area. 
 The finished columns were covered with dark purple material to match the band's suits and placed in a corner of the store, awaiting the group’s return from a tour. That's when the customer enquiries started. People would ask,” What are those things?" and Jack would reply, "Sound columns. You know - portable PA speakers". This prompted reactions generally typified by a brief pause (while their lightbulbs turned on) followed by, “Do you have any more?”. 
 Pete soon found himself building columns whenever he had a free night. These ones contained six eight-inch speakers, no tens, that just made them too tall for station wagons (Econoline-style vans were rare 1963). They were covered in black vinyl - more durable and subtle than purple cloth - had metal corner pieces, quarter-inch jacks for quick connections, strap handles and steel glides to stand on. Best of all, Pete had located a metal fabricator to cast script-style "Traynor" logos out of aluminum (ah, instant immortality). The only accessory needed was a pair of speaker wires, 30 ft. long with a 1/4-inch plug at one end and bare wires at the other so that it could be connected to the screw terminals on a commercial PA amp. Pete made these too and called them “column lines”. 
 Now Pete wanted to design a bass amp. They were always out of stock for rentals and he'd roughly calculated that, even paying retail prices for parts and raw materials plus whatever a machine shop would charge to make the chassis, he could still build the amp and price it reasonably, with enough margin left to cover operating costs including labor. Jack agreed to fund the project and further asked Pete if he could build a few rather than just one. Pete agreed. 
 
IInitially dubbed "Dynabass" (40 watts sine-wave rms @ 8 Ohms) and later to be re-named “Bass Master”, this amplifier “head” (no speakers built in - the kind with speakers are called “combos”) was designed with both bass and guitar players in mind. There were two pairs of input jacks, each with its own volume control and sound with channel two being brighter for guitar. An internal wiring gimmick provided a little extra distortion for guitar players if they patched a short cable between one of the jacks in each channel then turned up both volume controls. There were also bass, treble, low and high (midrange & treble) “expander” controls. 
 Perhaps reflecting on the oath he'd grumbled earlier, Pete included a third transformer in the Dynabass to act as a buffer for the power transformer. This he deemed important because tube amplifiers will self-destruct if you neglect to plug in a speaker or if your speaker goes dead. Usually the musician switches off the amp as soon as he/she notices there is no sound hence the damage is hopefully limited to the output tube sockets and possibly the output transformer, components which can generally be obtained from retail electronic supply shops.  But if the amp doesn’t get shut off in time, the power transformer is next to go and that’s always a custom-made part available only from the amp manufacturer.  Pete’s buffer transformer would sacrifice itself to save the power transformer which is bigger, more costly and much harder to get. Replacing the buffer transformer was still an expensive proposition, but a repairman had the option of simply wiring around the burned out component which would cost very little, albeit the safety margin would be removed. 

 

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1965 
 
On January 1st, 1965, Jack Long and Pete Traynor officially became President, Vice President and sole shareholders of "Yorkville Sound Limited.".  Now the little operation settled into its new role as a real company complete with invoices on which the product chronology herein is partially based, and soon a mandate to move out of Long & McQuade's cramped attic. This was accomplished later in the year when the company relocated to the second floor of an elderly industrial building in Toronto at 431 Dundas Street East near Parliament Street. The facility had room for added people and machines plus a design lab which would later house a small but growing technical staff. There was even office space for Jack Long whose direct guidance was needed more regularly as the company grew. 
 Jack McQuade opted out of the store to devote his full time to playing drums in 1965. For business and personal reasons, Jack Long decided not to change the store name. 

 

 

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1972 
 Pete stayed hunkered down in the lab, basically hiding from bands still wanting him to custom build things. He claimed to be working on a project which, it turned out, was the truth. More about that later. One band, Crowbar, did manage to corral him and Pete spent some time trying to solve the singer’s dilemma. 
 
Little Kelly Jay (aka Blake Kelly Fordham, a large rock & roll  performer) played keyboards and sang. He couldn’t hear himself properly through forty-five degree floor monitors like the ones developed for Pete’s system because, at six -foot-six, he needed something that aimed upward at a steeper angle. Pete’s response was to design a cube loaded with an Altec 604E coaxial speaker. The cube was then mounted in a swivel assembly and that did the trick. It was very expensive and rather impractical, but it got Yorkville thinking about multi-angle floor monitors which would pay dividends in future. 
 

 

 

 

I think you had enough history on Yorkville

I can't find the spot.. but Pete had built a arena system for one of those 12hr concerts and all his amps started blowing up. the stress was so much.. he quite Yorkville.. sold all his investment in it.. and lived on an island in Northern Ontario for the rest of his days.. sort of Howard Hughes..  

[Oldjock]

Thank you for the L & M history lesson Doug. As a customer of L & M I had always wondered about its history. It is a very classy store (staff wearing ties & very knowledgeable), a great selection of products and ideas. Hoping to hear the next chapter from 1972 to the present 80 store franchise mammoth company.

Henk

[guitarben]

Wow very interesting and information, thank you Doug!

[Eracer_Team-DougH]

ok for those that want to read ALL 56 pages of the history of Yorkville Sound from 1956 to 1991 here is the link

 

http://www.yorkville.com/downloads/other/yorkvillehistory.pdf

 

Nobody has done a history from 1991 forward. 

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Company History

Founded in the back room of the original Long & McQuade Music store in downtown Toronto in 1963, co-founder Peter Traynor, a repairman at the time, developed a bass guitar amplifier dubbed the \"Traynor Dyna-Bass\" as a rugged and reliable alternative to amps currently available at the time. The Dyna-Bass amp was specifically designed and built to withstand the rigors of rentals and the road. Shortly thereafter, he and Jack Long officially started Yorkville Sound, and by the end of 1963 Yorkville was making P/A column speakers as well as bass amps and cabinets. After incorporating in 1965, Yorkville Sound expanded its sales into the USA and soon after added a guitar amplifier (the YGA-1) and a powered P/A mixer (the YVM-1) to the line. Throughout the 1960's Yorkville continued to grow and become a serious force in North America for P/A and instrument amplification products.

In 1972 Yorkville expanded distribution into Europe with representation in the UK and Sweden. Growth continued in various phases through the 1970's and early 1980's, when the Yorkville design lab had an influx of new blood. In 1986, Yorkville introduced élite speaker cabinets and AudioPro mixing consoles which proved to be incredibly successful, pumping new life into the company. Since 1986 Yorkville has become even stronger. The addition of the AudioPro amplifier series in 1987, the continued growth and refinement of the élite series speaker systems, the addition of the TX-Series concert loudspeakers in 1996, and new up-to-date versions of the AudioPro powered mixers helped bring Yorkville to its present day prominence.

In 1999, Yorkville Sound purchased Applied Research and Technology (ART), based in Rochester New York and continues the development, manufacture and distribution of products under that brand.

The re-introduction of Traynor all-tube guitar and bass amps was witnessed in Spring 2000, beginning with the Custom Valve40 and expanding exponentially over the next decade. Most recently new releases include the Traynor DarkHorse and IronHorse heads and cabinets, the reissue of the highly sought after hand wired Traynor YGM3 guitar amp, and most recently the introduction of the Traynor YBA300 300-watt all tube bass head.

Always ones to push the boundaries of modern loudspeaker technology, we introduced the Unity™ loudspeaker horn and cabinets in late 2003 as part of a two year joint development project with renowned loudspeaker designer Tom Danley. This marked a significant leap forward in horn technology, arguably the first major advancement in horn development in the last 60 years.

In 2009, Yorkville Sound introduced their flagship touring and line array brand, VTC ProAudio utilizing their patented Synergy™, Paraline™ and tapped horn subwoofer designs. Manufactured with precision to a rigorous quality control standard at the Pickering facility, Canadian made VTC ProAudio products are beginning to gain a solid reputation for design innovation and outstanding performance in the highly competitive Line Array category.

Yorkville Sound is still a privately owned, wholly Canadian Company with its corporate head office and manufacturing facility in Pickering, Ontario, Canada, a suburb of Toronto. Currently employing over 220 people, Yorkville designs and manufactures all of its North American built products at the 150,000 square foot Pickering facility. We also maintain offices in the USA with a sales and distribution center in Niagara Falls New York and additional engineering office for ART based in Rochester New York.

We manufacture a full line of professional PA products including mixers, amplifiers, active and passive loudspeaker cabinets and lighting in Canada, at the Pickering facility. Yorkville Sound also designs and manufactures a complete line of Canadian made tube and solid state instrument amplifiers under the Traynor brand for Canada, the US and export markets.

Over the years Yorkville has also launched a complete line of microphones, headphones and accessories available domestically and for export under the Apex Electronics brand, and has established a full catalog of instrument cases and bags, cables, stands and accessories.