![]() ![]() The small production began in the first floor of our building in Irvington, New Jersey. In the beginning, my father had subcontracted the assembly of the electronics to Jack and a small staff of women that did the point to point wiring. When I did get involved with Sano, a man by the name of Jack Gentile, a protege of Stanley Michaels, took over (continued) as a technical consultant to Sano. I was only 13 and had no active contact with Sano at the time. "I only knew Stanley Michaels by way of introduction for a short time in those days. This is what Fred Zonfrilli had to say about it: It seems that if he had any involvement at all with Sano, it was brief. Having said this, I saw in Greg Hopkins' great book on the history of Ampeg, a photo of Stanley Michaels, one of the original Ampeg people, standing beside a very early Sano amp. Both companies were in operation at the same moment in time, and Joe told me that at one point Sano had considered buying an Ampeg factory that was relocating, but there was no business relationship between the two. One prevalent myth is that Sano was in some way affiliated with Ampeg. With the pickup came the need for an amplifier, and so in 1951 came the first Sano amps. At some point near 1950, an accordion player named Nicholas Sano, wanted a pickup for his accordion, and Joe designed and patented one of the first pickups for what had until then been a purely acoustic instrument. Here's what I've discovered so far.Ĭirca 1940, Joe Zonfrilli, Sr., founded music schools called Major Music, in Irvington New Jersey. Many thanks to Joe and Fred for their time and patience with my long winded questions in search of the history that only they could tell. Now through a series of phone calls, I found my way to the brothers Zonfrilli, whose father founded the company in 1951. Until recently, the only thing known was the amps were built in New Jersey and looked to be of 60's vintage. It was made by a company called Sano that no one seemed to know anything about. It had a nice tremolo, a 12" speaker for the full bass response I wanted, a lot of "headroom," and it was all crammed into a small cabinet easy enough to drag around New York in a taxi. in New York I chanced upon a small off-brand amp for $100. I tried various solid state amps made specifically for the clean acoustic sound, but I missed the warm tube sound. There were feedback problems and too much of the midrange "skank" sound that is intended for screaming electric guitars. My Fender "Vibrolux" amp that I recorded with and named the album after, didn't work well with an acoustic guitar in the live setting. ![]() After I recorded my "Vibrolux" album, I went searching for an amp to reproduce the tremolo sound onstage. ![]()
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