Todd Sharp is surrounded by a mountain of guitar amps. But he’s quick to say some of them are better than others.

“That’s kind of my motto here: life is too short to play s—y amps,” he says with a smile.

Todd Sharp and his mountain of guitar amps

He plugs his guitar into one of those amps. He plays a riff, and the amp barks back the notes. It sounds tinny, and electronic.

“It’s flat,” he says. “It’s a little lifeless.”

Then, he plugs into a better amp. It roars to life. The riff crunches together. It’s gritty. Alive.

“It just makes you want to play the guitar more,” he says.

The secret sauce?

That amp has vacuum tubes.

They look like little light bulbs. They’re the glowing heart of high-quality audio amplifiers.

Paige Pfleger WPLN News

Todd Sharp holds a vacuum tube — what he considers the key to high-quality sound from an amp.

“Vacuum tubes are unique because they have this dynamic feel to them that transfers right to the tip of your fingers,” Sharp says. “Can you hear it? Yeah. But you more feel it.”

He says these tubes are the difference between a mediocre sound, and a magical one.

The hitch is that there are only two factories in the whole world that make them.

And one of them is in Russia, owned by an American businessman known as ‘the godfather of effects pedals’ — Mike Matthews.

He hops on our Zoom call with a cigar in his mouth, drinking coffee out of a red solo cup.

A few weeks ago, Matthews found out his vacuum tubes were on a list of items that could not be shipped out of his factory in Russia, because of retaliatory sanctions against the United States.

So, he let hundreds of his customers know.

“That’s why we have what we call a worldwide tube panic,” Matthews says.

That’s right: a worldwide tube panic.

“I think it’s safe to say there were no more vacuum tubes in North America,” says John Capito, who builds and repairs amps in Nashville.

People were in a frenzy, he says, wiping out the local stock of tubes. It was like toilet paper at the start of the pandemic. People even started posting the tubes on eBay for double, or triple the price.

“That is something that really reaches all the way across the ocean to my daily life,” Capito says.

He’s hoping that once the panic subsides, the market will even out again.

Mike Matthews hopes the same thing. He’s just waiting on approval from the Russian government to start shipping again.