Guitar Amplifier Design: Tubes and Semiconductors Play Together is a look over the shoulder during the process of designing a unique guitar amplifier. Insights and opinions on design principles and best-practices for getting great tone in any design. Novel approaches and solutions to common circuit-design problems. Performance and tone improvements for common tube circuits. Explanations of cause-effect relationships that lead to better designs and better tone.

Dr. Ulrich Neumann is a professor of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He completed a Bachelors and Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo and was granted a computer science Ph.D at the University of North Carolina at Chapel hill. His academic research relates to Computer Graphics and Computer Vision.

He received an NSF CAREER award. He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He Held the Charles Lee Powel Chair of Computer Science and ELectrical Engineering, and was the Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), an NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC). Prof. Neumann teaches classes on Computer Graphics and Music Amplifier Circuits.

In his commercial career, he designed multiprocessor graphics and DSP systems, cofounded three companies, and independently developed and licensed technologies. He is the inventor on six granted US patents.

His musical background is in piano and guitar. He has pursued a passion for amplifiers and music throughout his life and this book reflects his accumulated experience in circuit design and tone shaping. He enjoys playing the amplifiers he builds.