John Harrison looks like an unmade bed, talks more than Larry King and says he sees sound as color. He makes speakers out of hemp, and to spend any time with him leaves you thinking he’s smoking some of the product.

It would be easy to dismiss him as a lovable, eccentric old hippie. But the man might just be a mad genius. He has rethought the most fundamental part of a speaker -– the cone –- and traded paper for hemp. The result is the Tone Tubby, and it makes guitar amps sing like Aretha Franklin. You’ll find them in rigs used by everyone from Billy Gibbons and Carlos Santana to Keith Richards and the guys in Metallica.

“Carlos Santana was my very first customer,” Harrison says. “He’s one of the guys I’ve had for years. Of course, he told Clapton, so Clapton had to get some.”

If you’ve got an amp with two (or more) speakers, Harrison suggests going half and half with an alnico and a ceramic. Wire them up, plug in your guitar and stand back

"Working with John Harrison at Brown Soun, the original Tone Tubbies installed in [Clapton's] first Cornell amp were eventually replaced by a new hemp cone speaker with a lighter, copper-clad voice coil. This 'Clapton coil,' as we called it, made the speaker a bit brighter and dramatically enhanced sensitivity, which also eliminated the perceived drop out of certain notes when subtle, low-volume passages were played on stage, which Denis had previously noted among all the speakers tried."

Denis Cornell, Clapton's guitar tech of 3 decades
Tonequest Report August 2004

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