moltenmetalburn
Active member
boltzthrower":30w8p3z4 said:vchizzle":30w8p3z4 said:VHT was more elusive, no one REALLY knew what it stood for.
Valve Harmonics Technology
It's printed on the back of my 2150.
Not Quite: Voluptuous Hog Tramp
14. “What does VHT stand for?”
VHT founder Steven Fryette moved to Los Angeles from Seattle in 1976. After a few years playing guitar in Southern California cover bands he began focusing on original material and needed a day job to pay the bills. With an innate ability to tinker and coax broken things back to useful life, Steve eventually landed a job doing amplifier repairs and modifications at Valley Arts Guitars, then the epicenter of groundbreaking custom guitar and amp activity in LA. While at Valley Arts, Steve honed his skills doing repairs, modifications and custom work for the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Tommy Tedesco, Ry Cooder, Buzzy Fieten, Carlos Rios, Duane Eddy, and many other legendary players. Pretty soon his experience in finding innovative solutions for guitarists led him to try out some of his own ideas in guitar amplification.
After several years of building experimental prototypes, Steve decided to go live. Thus began the search for a suitable company name.
“Outside of my circle of friends and clients, I wondered how much sense it made to put my name on the front of an amplifier. Something about that struck me as arrogant or presumptuous, as in “who’s this guy?” I decided to try a pseudonym first. If I failed to come up with something suitable, I’d go with my family name.
I worked on it for weeks…reading, researching; drawing…it reminded me of my days sitting in the back of the class in grade school drawing pictures of drums and guitars. It was also just like trying to name a band – everything I could come up with seemed to have been taken and everyone I discussed it with offered the usual predictably useless suggestions.”
Steve worked tirelessly on this project while developing the prototype 2150 power amp and preparing for the first production run. Time for coming up with a brand name was running out.
“One day a factory rep from TC Electronics visited Valley Arts to demonstrate a new TC product. I was intrigued with the product, but much more interested in the name. I asked the rep what TC stood for. In his thick Danish accent he replied “It stahnds for nussing rilly. It just feelz goot to say in ze mouse.” That was a watershed moment for me. I went back home and began putting letters together that I thought sounded good. It was just as frustrating an effort as what I had been doing already, but I had a renewed enthusiasm for it.
I read where David Byrne of Talking Heads had cut words out of magazines and scrambled them to create song lyrics. I tried that with letters and made a chart of combinations that “felt good to say in the mouth”. Eventually I settled on VHT.”
With the help of some friends in the graphics business, Steve tried various logo ideas. Nothing clicked. He realized there were too many cooks advising him on what a professional logo should look like and went off on his own, eventually settling on a homemade font style using raised letters with a shadow supposedly representing light coming from a sharp angle. It was a very complex logo design.
“It only looked right at a certain height to width ratio. If you messed with that ratio even a little bit, it looked awful.”
His graphics buddies commented that the “light” was all wrong. Steve didn’t care. Once he got the ratio right, he liked the way it looked and besides, time had run out.
“Once I had the logo I soon realized I was going to find myself in the same spot as the TC rep. What does it stand for? I didn’t like that TC “stood for nothing” It must stand for something. I started trying to attach meaning to the letters – an endeavor even more frustrating than coming up with the letters in the first place. Vintage High Tech, Valve Harmonics Technology, Very Heavy Tone. They all sounded stupid and contrived and I realized that this was because it was contrived – so obviously after the fact.”
Larry Latham, a fellow employee at Valley Arts jokingly suggested Valley Heroin Transport
“It was brilliant. I knew it wouldn’t fly in the long run, but it was a signpost – a way forward. I could make a joke of it. I have a terribly sarcastic streak and the idea of making fun of myself was appealing. I went back to the task of finding the right keyword and eventually it came: Voluptuous. It jumped right out at me. I then remembered my fondness for 60s underground comics- Zap Comics in particular - and a gruesomely funny motorcycle gang; the Hog Riding Fools created by the great S. Clay Wilson. One of the characters was a mammoth biker mama riding on the back of a chopped Harley. She had a black scar on the inside of her thigh where she got burned by hot motor oil. “Burnt the livin’ piss outa me and I didn’t even blink” she grinned. In the next frame appeared a crosseyed top heavy biker chick. She was perfect; a Voluptuous Hog Tramp. My work was done.”
