About
My life with amps began when I started playing guitar in 1965 at the age of 12. Not much later, I played with bands and gigged. Soon after, I began fixing my own amplifiers. In 1978 I worked for a short time at Electro Harmonix testing pedals before they were shipped out from the NYC factory. I was hired by Unicord in 1980 (which later became Korg USA) and rose through the ranks from product specialist to Executive VP. For much of the 32 years with the company I was in charge of the distribution of Marshall amps for the US market. In 1992 Korg acquired VOX and I took responsibility for resurrecting the VOX brand. When VOX once again became successful, the reins were taken over by Korg Japan and a team of dedicated professionals at VOX UK.
In 2010 when I left Korg USA, I started my own amplifier company. After introducing a couple of wish-list Colby amp designs, I acquired the Park brand and for ten years resurrected Park by building the high quality hand-wired classic amps which were originally built by Marshall in their UK factory. After a couple of years, I introduced a few new and updated Park amplifier designs which have become staples of the brand. Park was sold to Hiwatt in 2022.
In 2019, along with Perry Margouleff and Jimmy Page, I recreated the amp that Jimmy used on Led Zeppelin 1. This exacting recreation finally offered guitar players the sounds that Jimmy used to changed music in 1969. That’s because Jimmy had hidden the amp and it’s secrets for 50 years. ;-)
It’s now 2023 and I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. The newest addition to the Colby arsenal is ELPICO®, a newly resurrected amplifier brand. There are a number of very cool things about ELPICO that inspired me to recreate this obscure British brand. One reason is it’s unusual circuit design. Paul McCartney is known for using one as a teenager and as it turns out, he still has his Elpico AC55 to this day. Also, and more significantly, the Elpico AC55 was the amp that Dave Davies of The Kinks used in 1964 to record “You Really Got Me”, one of the very first British recordings of distorted guitar. Go to the ELPICO page for more info on the Colby ELPICO, which is a head version of the newly recreated AC55.