Behind the Bolt: The Black Magick Series

This fall marked the debut of the latest addition to the Supro’s iconic Black Magick series. This time, rocker Tyler Bryant has left his sonic imprint on the legendary amp, further enhancing a timeless classic for a new generation.

Alongside his band, The Shakedown, Tyler has been packing out venues around the world for over a decade and has earned major cosigns and opening gigs from countless giants of both modern and classic rock. Despite his young age he’s had a long and storied career full of praise and accolades for musically punching well above his weight class.

Further expanding a storied Supro lineage, this version of the Black Magick has evolved from its original iteration as an ode to the rock-god stylings of Led Zeppelin I, to the bespoke appointments of Lenny Kravitz, and finally to the hot rodded sensibilities of Tyler Bryant. The story of this amplifier is one of lightning striking not once but thrice.

The Black Magick Combo 

“Reverse Engineering a Legend”

“The Black Magick was in my sights from the very beginning,” says Dave Koltai, Supro’s Chief Technology Officer. His years of tweaking designs at his Long Island workshop, reanimating long extinct materials and developing faithful methods of reproduction, all seemed to be in indirect service of eventually replicating the famed modded 1959 Coronado model used by Jimmy Page.

“The great irony of the brand is that, in 1969, when Zeppelin I came out and created a whole new step in the evolution of rock music, the Supro brand went out of business because of a merger between its two parent companies, Kay and Valco. So from that moment on, you really couldn’t get a Supro.”

While the original sat behind glass in great museums of the world for its clear contribution to pop culture, attempts to replicate it were left to thin transistorized facsimiles and homebrew mods, leaving a bolt-shaped hole in the market that sat unfilled for decades.

“My central goal with it was to absolutely capture that vibe, right there in the room, right through the amp,” Koltai states. “But it had to be a robust, stage-volume amplifier that you could gig and tour with.” Koltai and his team strived to break the sound and feel of that circuit down to its component parts, clearing the path of gratuitous features or extraneous circuitry, functionally getting out of its way in an effort to keep things pure and powerful.

Taking special care to replicate the feel of the original but with modern power, he designed the power amp section around a pair of 6973’s, what Koltai lovingly refers to as “oddball jukebox tubes,” that he states are central to the vintage Supro sound. “This was very purposely done to recreate something that had just been gone for a very long time. Our modern Supros have every bit of that tone, but they can get much louder than the old ones… I like loud.”

The unencumbered signal path and robust, aggressive vibe of the Black Magick made the amp an immediate hit and was quickly embraced by a number of major players like Aerosmith’s Joe Perry and The Cure’s Robert Smith, who both took their amps on marathon global tours. But among the amplifier’s laureate class of admirers, one artist was eager to make a mark of his own. 

The Black Magick Reverb Combo

“An Artist’s Overhaul”

“One day I got a phone call from Lenny Kravitz…” recalls Koltai. “and I was like… oh my God, it’s Lenny Kravitz.” The artist gushed about the sound and feel of the original Black Magick, praising its touring dependability and citing it as an inspirational force on his latest record. What initially began as a discussion regarding a few custom appointments quickly elevated the project into entirely new territory. Principle among Kravitz’s requests were reverb, master volume, and expanded gain and EQ capabilities.

“The Black Magick Reverb really combined every element of what we had learned about amplifier design at that point.” Koltai recalls, but the daunting task of improving upon perfection paid off. “It became the number one Supro amp and it’s stayed in that slot ever since.”

The Black Magick Reverb – Tyler Bryant Edition

“Powering a New Generation”

“This all started with the Black Magick Reverb, I got that amp and started taking it out on the road. I loved it in just about every situation,” says Tyler Bryant. Bryant, a globally renowned performer who has caught the ear of true giants of rock and blues, is an artistic embodiment of everything the Black Magick sound is built around– guttural, full boar expression played fast, loose, and loud with style and technique all on “ten.” 

Though the Black Magick Reverb’s sonic sensibility seemed tailor made for Bryant’s style, if given the keys to the store, Tyler admits that the first item on his wishlist would have been more power. “It was great in the studio, great in clubs, it was great in large rooms, but I did find myself occasionally needing a little bit more…”

After an exploratory visit to Supro HQ, Bryant and Koltai zeroed on a sound for their aggressive new refresh. Once Koltai had heard the imposing power and physicality of Tyler’s playing through some of the line’s more robust models, he went digging around Supro’s back catalog to find the right power section to better drive his livewire playing while keeping the essential soul and sound of the Black Magick Reverb intact. Ultimately, the Supro team devised a platform that combined the incisive tonality of the Black Magick’s beloved preamp section with the “thunderous” power section of one of Supro’s inaugural models, the Thunderbolt. “It was pretty clear he needed to be coupled with a much more powerful dual 6L6 output stage,” says Koltai. “ There’s this percussive nature to his playing and he was just getting this satisfying kick out of those bigger amps.”

The individual tweaks of the amps topology served as tonal ballasts to one another, taking broad swings into bold new ranges of EQ with each successive alteration. As the power amp adjustments produced thunderous low end and moved more air, the preamp voicing received additional brightness by way of a specialized capacitor, offsetting the low mids for a balanced, broad-spectrum projection. The cumulative effect of these mods resulted in a far broader sonic footprint, boasting shimmering highs and a tight, kicking low end— a hi-fi enhancement of its snarling rock sound. “The overall result of doing these select adjustments is that this is one heck of an amp,” Koltai reflects. “It’s bangin’!”

One of the chief compliments paid to this model is its versatility,  from the brighter preamp to the British influenced functionality of its dual input blending, but the term shouldn’t scare off those hungry for sheer analog brawn. In an industry where versatility is too often a euphemism for average-sounding, the Black Magick shirks the middle of the road in favor of careening from the shoulder to the fast lane, finishing with donuts in the parking lot.

Alongside the re-voiced preamp and updated power section topology, Koltai gives due credit to the transformers for providing the special sauce. “You can’t understate the importance of transformers. That’s the most expensive part in the amp and it really does the most. The output transformer plays an enormous role in any given amplifier and the feel of it.” This core component remains the fiery beating heart of the amp, with all 50 watts lovingly crafted by Bruce Zinky, a revered amp design legend and one-time steward of the Supro name. “Like every other part of this amp,” Koltai remarks, “nothing’s off-the-shelf.”

When it comes to the end result, Bryant couldn’t be happier. “This amp is helping me to amplify my ideas in a way that sound like I want them to… I feel good about putting my name on it. To be aligned with a brand like Supro that has such a rich history, and to have an amp that has my thumbprint on it, it means a lot to me.”

Everyone involved with the production of these fire-breathing rock and roll machines, from the artists to the technicians, remains equally excited about carrying the tradition forward. Koltai, finding himself far down a road that began with the inspiration to reignite a long dormant spark in the world of guitar, remarks, “it’s been a hell of a trip. But it ain’t over yet.”