Mesa/Boogie (also known as Mesa Engineering) is an American company in Petaluma, California, that manufactures amplifiers and other accessories for guitars and basses. It has been in operation since 1969. Mesa was started by Randall Smith as a small repair shop which modified Fender amplifiers, particularly the diminutive Fender Princeton. Smith's modifications gave the small amps much more input gain, making them much louder as well as creating a high-gain, distorted guitar tone. Prominent early customers included Carlos Santana and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Exposure from these top players helped to establish Mesa/Boogie's position on the market, and it is frequently referred to as the first manufacturer of boutique amplifiers. Subsequent design revisions to Mesa's early amps lead to the Mark Series, which popularized modern, high-gain circuits, while the 1990s saw the introduction of Mesa's flagship Rectifier amps, the success of which made the brand a staple of modern rock tone. In 2021, Mesa/Boogie was acquired by Gibson. Randall Smith Randall Smith was born into a musical family in Berkeley, California in 1946. His mother and sister played piano and his father was the first-chair clarinet with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, played tenor sax, had a radio show and led a hotel dance band. Smith believes all of his early musical experiences taught him how to hear tone. As a Boy Scout, Smith became friends with his troop leader's son and they built ham radios together. Smith's father had a friend, Ernie, who built hi-fi turntables and gave him a couple to experiment on until he was 11 or 12. Smith attended Miramonte High School in Orinda, California, and graduated in 1964. During his freshman year he attended distant University of California, Santa Barbara, as his parents wanted him removed from the counterculture influences of local University of California, Berkeley. However, he would hop freight trains nearly every weekend from Santa Barbara back to the Bay Area to see friends and return to the Beat coffee houses and bookstores of Berkeley. During the next four years he attended UC Berkeley, studying humanities, English Literature and creative writing courses, but never graduated. Smith wanted to participate in the burgeoning San Francisco music scene, having been taught clarinet and a little sax by his father, but he took up drums, as it was the easiest to learn quickly. He played with a local blues and jam band and co-founded the