Who are we and what do we do?

Hi, my name is Paul Gough. For over twenty years I’ve been in charge of Zilla Cabs, a custom guitar and bass speaker cabinet maker in England and in that time I’ve been involved in a whole lot of R&D. My background is in maths and physics so I’ve always taken an analytic approach to looking at gear (whenever appropriate), but as a player for much longer than that I’m always looking for cool sounds. Iif there’s one thing I’ve learned, music is an art, not a science…

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to customer, dealing direct to put the right gear in the hands of players and I want to share a bit of that knowledge here. Mostly because there’s a whole lot of misinformation out there on speakers, and probably worse, a whole lot of opinion dressed up as fact. With the help of a couple of friends, Gary and Ilse, we’ve tried to put my years of working with cabs and speakers in one place.

Zilla will never be able to satisfy a fraction of the market for speaker cabs, it’s a small boutique company already at maximum capacity. This page isn’t about selling our cabs, it’s about putting something back to the music community. In short, if you’re using or buying a cab, it probably wont be one I’ve worked on, but I still want to get everyone access to the information we give to our customers, hopefully allowing you to hone in on what’s best for you. If you’re buying a speaker, we want to give you the chance to listen to different options rather than just spending money based on what the manufacturer or internet says, and if you’re just interested in things that shape your guitar tone, then I want this to be the place for you.

I’m going to repeat this phrase a lot… there are no rights or wrongs in music… playing guitar is supposed to be fun, and good sounds are subjective, that’s what makes it fun.

As a thanks to Gary and Ilse, not to toot our horns too much, but the three of us have some unique skills with a fair bit of overlap, I’m not sure if I could have done with this any other two people I know. This wasn’t simple, we’re talking thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of lines of code (if not millions) and tens of thousands of pounds. We’ve had to build our own programs to record an analyse our results when existing programs didn’t do what we wanted, and develop some completely new approaches to do doing it. This wasn’t easy at all but it was a shit load of fun… and there’s loads more to do.