Hartke is a brand of electronics best known for their bass guitar amplifiers and speaker cabinets. They also produce amplifiers and speakers for keyboard and acoustic guitar, as well as effects pedals, strings and other accessories.

History

In the late 1970s, electronics gurus Larry Hartke and Ron Lorman began tinkering with the first prototype aluminum cone drivers. It wasn’t until 1980 that they released their first products, an aluminum cone, free edge tweeter and a two-way bookshelf system with an eight-inch aluminum woofer, under the Hartke name.

In 1984, while Lorman was working as a stage manger and engineer at New York’s famous Bottom Line Club, the two crafted the first aluminum bass speaker cones into one of Jaco Pastorius’s old 810 cabinets. Only that single cabinet was made and shared by a lot of the players on the scene. When Pastorius tried out the new cabinet, the solid, coherent low end and the extended frequency range of the mids and highs produced by the aluminum cones inspired him. As a result, Pastorius began using the cabinet at all of his shows.

By 1985, the word had spread about the sound of Pastorius’s 810 and Hartke began mass production of its first aluminum cone bass cabinet, a 4 x 10” module dubbed the 410XL. Eventually, Hartke developed an entire line of XL cabinets, including the 115XL, 210XL, 410XL, 4.5XL and 810XL, which have been played on stages around the world by players like Pastorius, Marcus Miller, Darryl Jones, Jack Bruce, Will Lee, Garry Tallent and many others.

While most of these models are still in production, that first Hartke/Jaco 810 now resides in the window at Hartke’s 48th Street Bass Lounge in New York City.

Fast forward to 2005. At Madison Square Garden, Jack Bruce reunited with fellow Cream members Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker for the first time in nearly 30 years. Bruce played through a pair of Hartke’s traditional paper cone cabinets, and a classic 410XL aluminum cabinet. After the show, Hartke began to find that, like Bruce, many Hartke artists liked playing aluminum cabinets alongside traditional paper cone cabinets.

Hartke engineers began working on fusing the aluminum cones with traditional paper cones. The result was the HyDrive Series. Hartke’s HyDrive Bass Cabinets have become the basis for the sound that world-class musicians like Victor Wooten, Nate Watts, David Ellefson, Frank Bello, Stu Hamm and many others rely on night after night.

Today, the XL and HyDrive cabinets are only part of Hartke’s line of bass gear, which also features LH and HA Series Bass Amplifiers, AK and VX Series Bass Cabinets, countless accessories for bass and much more.

Range of amplifiers and speakers

Hartke makes a wide range of amplifier and speaker models for instrument amplification, and they are distributed worldwide. Hartke's speaker products utilize both paper and aluminum cone speakers as well as a hybrid combination of aluminum and paper speakers known as "HyDrive". Today Hartke is one of the largest producers of bass amplification.

Hartke Artists

Eric Bass (Shinedown)

Frank Bello (Anthrax)

Jack Bruce (Cream / Solo)

JD DeServio (Black Label Society)

David Ellefson (Megadeth)

Chuck Garric (Alice Cooper)

Stu Hamm (Solo / Bx3 / Joe Satrini)

Tim King (Soil)

Marco Mendoza (Thin Lizzy)

Mark Mendoza (Twisted Sister)

Byron Miller (Luther Vandross / George Duke / Santana)

Jaco Pastorius (Weather Report)

Paul Romanko (Shadows Fall)

Billy Sheehan (Mr. Big / Solo)

Dale Stewart (Seether)

Nate Watts (Stevie Wonder)

Victor Wooten (Solo / S.M.V. / Bela Fleck & the Flecktones)

External links

• Hartke Systems
• Samson Technologies Corp. Official Site