About tre_audio

I’ve been playing guitar in heavy metal and punk bands since I was a teenager. Some of my favorite gigs were in basements with dirt floors or in friends’ apartments. Needless to say, playing a metal show in a basement with a low ceiling, hundreds of fans (okay, maybe 20 fans), and a keg can be hard on equipment. So I started searching for new gear that would be durable and could take a beating without failing on me. This was harder than it sounds.

There was one gig where I literally got to the venue, pulled my gear out of the truck, plugged it in, and started playing immediately. Sound check? Nope. Well, apparently, all of the knobs, switches, and settings on my amp got rearranged during loading. So the amp sounded like garbage. This amp had fourteen knobs on the front panel. Fourteen. It was a nightmare to fix all of those settings while the band kept playing and a room full of onlookers wondered what was going on.

Why did a guitar amp need fourteen knobs? Why did it have to weigh sixty-five pounds, too? Well, that was it. I needed answers to these questions and I needed better gear, so I started building my own effects pedals and tube amps. Then I started tre_audio. The mission of tre_audio is to design and build electric guitar amplifiers and other gear that sound great, have simple designs, and are robust enough to handle whatever gets thrown at them. No extra knobs to turn, no useless switches to break.

Our shop is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, where we design, build, and test every amplifier.

Cheers,

Tracy Butler