NEWS

Hello, My Name is Venture

By: Dino Monoxelos

So why Venture? And I don’t mean WHY, as in why did Ampeg create the Venture Series heads and cabinets. That’s a topic for another blog actually. What I’m talking about is the actual name “Venture”. Why did Ampeg land on that name?

One of the coolest things about developing new products is coming up with a name for them. It’s also one of the most difficult and tedious processes. You wouldn’t think so but trust me, I thought the same thing… until we actually HAD to come up with a name. First we, (myself and Ampeg Product Manager Dom Liberati) make a list of all potential names we might like. Then we distill that list down to something a bit more manageable and start passing the names around to all other parties involved.

Here’s where the tedious part comes in… passing every name through our legal department to make sure we’re not stepping on anyone else’s trademark. Our amazing legal team does all the “heavy lifting” on this part. They need to search through the trademark records and then register the trademark once it’s decided. That can be time consuming and expensive. I personally learned a lot about this process and can fully understand when a company’s trademark gets infringed upon, they will defend it tirelessly. Did you know, you actually have to defend your trademark to keep it valid. Could you imagine if another auto manufacturer started calling their new sports car “Corvette” or “Vette”?

The really frustrating part is when you really love a name but you can’t use it because it’s too close to, or directly infringes on another manufacturer’s trademark. That’s when it’s back to the drawing board.

You’d laugh at some of the names we originally came up with…
Portaflex v2, Moda, Pathfinder, Flex and ReFlex were some of the early ideas.

So again… Why Venture?

Well… this new series of amps represents a new “venture” in Ampeg’s history. Here’s an interesting fact for you… in the history of Ampeg, we’ve never produced any head or cabinet this light and portable before in each model’s respective category. In other words, for each model in the Venture series lineup, we’ve never produced anything that light! That was quite the amazing venture of our development team (wink, wink). And in another play on words, because of it’s portability and light form factor, we like to think it allows the player to “venture” out to new gigs and opportunities. Anyway you want to look at it though, we think Venture is a very appropriate name for this new series of heads and cabs.

Where have you ventured out with your Venture? Please share below.

Dino has spent over 25 years in the Ampeg world conducting seminars and clinics all over the globe. He’s also the author of four instructional bass books by Mel Bay and his own publishing company, MonoTunes Music.  His favorite bass to play is his MTD 534-24.