Meet the Makers: Dr. Z/Mike Zaite

In the mid-60s, a teenaged Michael D. Zaite would take a long bus trip into the heart of downtown Cleveland, OH to window shop. But it wasn’t the latest fashion, or even the newest records he was hunting for; it was to gaze at one particular display at Higbee’s department store. Mike planted himself in front of diamond checkered grille clothes on chrome stands and marveled at the blue-belled speakers and gleaming copper tops of the amplifiers he saw on TV with his heroes, the Beatles, and dreamt of standing alongside those very amps on the bandstand one day.

Inspired by his father, a TV repair tech in the days when a vacuum tube in every odd appliance was the norm, Mike pursued a degree in Electronic Engineering and landed as a repair technician for General Electric’s medical electronics division. With his passion for music still burning, he also kept busy as a drummer for the region’s bands, and with his background, stitched up every broken amp his bandmates would bring him. But a chance encounter with a stockpile of old Hammond organ reverb amps soon sparked a new venture. Using the bones of these old Hammond chassis, Mike (now referred to as Dr. Z) built what became his first and still longest-running design, the Carmen Ghia, one of the first lunchbox-sized 18-watt amps to come to the market back in 1988.

Since then, Dr. Z Amps have been hand-drilled, hand-pinned, and hand-wired in Cleveland, OH with Mike’s designs becoming cornerstones in the boutique amplifier market and played by professional musicians including Joe Walsh, Brad Paisley, and Steve Miller, on stage and in studios across the globe. With a current lineup of 15 amplifiers, Dr. Z Amps have been used in a plethora of genres from country, to jazz, to hard rock and have created classic, vintage-voiced sounds for more than 35 years.