Steve Vai Legacy 2 guitar player magazine cover

I had the good fortune of being hired by Carvin and Steve Vai in 2007 to re-design the new signature Steve Vai Legacy 2 tube amplifier which was release at the 2009 winter NAMM show. Working with Steve Vai for the better part of two years was a pleasure and an honor. Steve made my job very easy because as a player and as a person…he knows exactly what he wants to hear and had a great command of how to convey his thoughts and ideas in a way that let do my work effectively and without a lot of trial and error. Needless to say it was one of the highlights of my amp designing career and hopefully Steve and I will be able to work together again in the future.

Here is a quote from Steve Vai from the his 2009 guitar player magazine article:

“The most interesting new thing, gear-wise, is my new Carvin Legacy 2 amp”, he says “I got with Benjamin Fargen – who is this fantastic, brilliant amplifier designer in Northern California and he lent his expertise to what the Carvin engineers had done. We added another channel, although it’s not really another channel as much as it the clean channel with the boost. With a lot of amps the clean channel goes from 1 to 50 and then the dirty channel goes from 80 to 100, so there is this whole middle ground that’s missing. So we designed this boost on the clean channel, and it gives you that very warm,breaking-up,pushed-but-not-quite-distorted tone.”

steve vai guitar player ben fargen quote