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Life’ll Kill Ya…

2023-09-07T22:04:59Z

… Enjoy every sandwich.

“I’m a bookkeeper's son, I don't want to shoot no one”

It was twenty years ago today that Warren Zevon left this world, aged only 56 years old. And though it seemed too soon, he always seemed like someone who came from elsewhere, like a visitor from another planet. He was an artist who didn’t quite seem to fit the fame hungry rat-race of La La Land. Perhaps because he grew up in Los Angeles, despite being born in Chicago. His family had some interesting connections in the Windy City. His father, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, had been a boxer before becoming a special kind of accountant: the move to a new turf in California was carefully calculated. Zevon senior handled volume bets and craps games for LA mob boss and underworld legend Mickey Cohen. It’s said that Zevon junior’s first piano was acquired as part payment for reneged gambling debts. After the move West, Warren attended Fairfax Senior High on Melrose in the heart of West Hollywood. He dropped out in his Junior Year however, when his Dad gave him a Corvette won in a card game, and drove off across the country to explore the exploding Folk scene in New York.

Warren’s aptitude for music was spotted at a young age; one of his early teachers after his move to Hollywood was none other than neoclassical giant Igor Stravinsky. He would have his first minor hit record by the time he was 16 in a duo called lyme and cybelle. The follow-up single in 1966 was a cover of Bob Dylan's 'If You Gotta Go, Go Now' but it flopped. It was a pattern that would recur in Zevon's career. By the time he was 22 he'd got a song onto the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy and a year later he put out his first album, Wanted Dead Or Alive . It took him six years to release his second. That eponymous effort contained the phenomenal 'Desperados Under The Eaves'. Zevon had a wicked sense of humour and a forgiving sense of man’s folly: I think he was probably a natural cynic because of it. He was also, at certain times in his life a violent alcoholic. The self confessed Mr. Bad Example wrote about human nature because he was an intimate associate of human frailty.

As I write this I too am 56 years old and it gives me pause. I didn’t know Warren, but I spent a few days with him at the start of this millennium. Back in May of 2000 I got a call to go and join Mr. Zevon on tour and look after some of the backline, including his electric piano. He had already been playing the British Isles for a few days to promote his new album, kicking off with an appearance on Later With Jools and a radio session for Andy Kershaw, before heading out to Ireland and Scotland. I don’t know, maybe somebody else had left the tour. I was working with very different bands back then, touring with Red Snapper in 1999 (including a memorable fortnight in Zevon Senior's motherland), then seeing in the new Millennium with Orbital, before holidaying in the heat of the Australian new year with Basement Jaxx on 'Big Day Off'. My brief stint with Warren Zevon brought me back to the '70s music that was a big part of my life growing up.

If I remember right the keyboard I was looking after was a Yamaha P80 electric piano: 88 fully weighted keys in about as compact a chassis as you could expect and some great sounds for it’s vintage. My wife also owns one and we keep it at New Cut for studio use if you fancy giving it a try. Yamaha have been making pianos even longer than they’ve been making motorbikes of course. The Team Yamaha wheel emblem has spokes made of tuning forks for a reason. The only other one I’ve ever seen on stage was at Cornbury Festival when I was assistant stage manager years ago and it was being used by Jackson Browne. Browne of course was not only Zevon’s sometime producer he was also his champion. It was Jackson Browne playing the song all the time (as early as 1975 by some accounts) that got Warren’s biggest hit ‘Werewolves Of London’ noticed the first time round. Zevon's first album , 1969's Wanted Dead or Alive produced by Kim Fowley, had bombed; so it took some persuasion by Jackson Browne to get David Geffen to sign Zevon to Asylum. That album bombed too, but Browne got another chance to produce Warren two years later with 1978’s Excitable Boy and the lyrical lycanthropy of what would, for most people, become his signature song .

An American Werewolf…

After I met my wife on a Massive Attack Tour in 1998, we lived in Notting Hill and our local Chinese restaurant was called the Lee Fook. It suddenly struck a chord when I got to hear ’Werewolves… ‘ every night, because of course Warren’s hirsute hero “was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s, For to get a big dish of beef chow mein”. Zevon opens the song talking about the establishment in Gerard Street in Soho. But the one I used to go to with my dad in the ‘80s was it’s sister restaurant in Westbourne Grove. My father lived in the area from the early ’80s and told me that the proprietor was forced to change the name of the place after they first put up a sign with the first two words reversed. Apparently residents had complained about the amount of raucous laughter from passers-by after the pubs closed, when they shouted out what sounded like “Holy Fuck Chinese restaurant”. In David Bowie’s cover of ‘Werewolves…’ he very clearly sings it as “Lee Ho Fucks”. It’s long gone now but I found a reference to it online. “ In 2002 Ringo Lo moved his restaurant from Westbourne Grove to Surbiton in much the same way that he had previously left behind premises on Queensway to relocate to Westbourne Grove. ”

The song was christened by Phil Everly, the title coming from the 1935 monster movie Werewolf Of London , and some of those lyrics about a Chinese menu and Soho in the rain came from superstar sideman Waddy Wachtel. Here's a great video for the song which uses some beautifully sync'd footage from the 1935 movie . Wachtel and Jackson Browne jointly produced the parent album Excitable Boy , which would be released six days before Zevon's 31st birthday on the 18th of January 1978. There were some remarkable collaborators on this album: as well as Jackson & Wachtel there were appearances by Linda Ronstadt, Jeff Porcaro, JD Souther, Leland Sklar, Jenifer Warnes — by this time of course pretty much everyone knew Warren. Perhaps they also knew how important it was to be forever associated with songs like 'Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner' and 'Lawyers, Guns and Money'. Do I need to point out that this was only his third album? Warren's previous self-titled collection had an even longer list of names; the personnel list reads like a Who's Who of the '70s scene. As well as some of the players on Excitable Boy , legends like the aforementioned Everly Brother and Wilson Brother Carl rubbed shoulders with Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks, Don Henley & Glen Frey, Bonnie Raitt & Bobby Keys, and other session aces. People always wanted to play for Warren, even Bob Dylan guested on 1987's 'The Factory'. Here's a couple of Dylan anecdotes from Warren, the first from Letterman in July of that year, the second from that Andy Kershaw show on May 25th 2000, recorded just a few days before I worked for him.

The rhythm section on 'Werewolves... ' were a hairy faced pair — as well as being two of the most famous names in Rock N' Roll of the 1970s. Fleetwood Mac were recording in the same studio at the time and Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were apparently delighted to offer their services. It's said that the first take is the one that made the cut. Seven years before that Fleetwood Mac were forced into another one of their line-up changes when Jeremy Spencer quit by literally walking out. He disappeared on the 15th of February 1971 when he left the Hawaiian Hotel heading for Hollywood Boulevard and never came back. Ray Davies wrote ‘Celluloid Heroes’ in that same hotel but in Rock N’ Roll folklore it is most famous for the opening line of Warren Zevon’s ‘Desperados Under the Eaves’, a line repeated at the end of the song:

“I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel,

I was listening to the air conditioner hum.

It went hmmmmmmm... “

The Song Remains the Same

Warren never performed 'Desperados... ' during his many appearances on Letterman despite it being one of Dave's faves . (He had to wait for Dawes to do a version in 2015 about a month before he retired .) Letterman was a huge champion of Zevon, almost single handedly keeping him in the wider public eye. Warren's first appearance came soon after Dave became Johnny Carson's successor in 1982. As well as appearing regularly as a guest Warren sometimes sat in for Paul Schaffer as band leader. On one of those occasions he turned down Dave's request that he play 'Desperados...' live on air. I’m amazed you could never hear the air conditioner hum through the TV when watching Letterman . I once asked one of the crew why it was always so frigging cold in the Ed Sullivan Theater during Letterman’s tenure. Apparently during one of the new host's very early broadcasts he had taken his jacket off revealing sodden arm pits: the notices the next day could talk of nothing else. So every time you did the Late Show you knew to wear a coat onstage. "As long as its not in here, this is freezing" said Robert Plant the last time I did Letterman . Yeah, you heard me, that's a memory alright.

I only did Letterman a handful of times. I’ve done Stephen Colbert’s show, which took over in 2015, more often. The last time Warren did Letterman was in 2002, and he was the only guest for the October 30th broadcast. He would be dead within a year. He already knew he was dying of mesothelioma lung cancer and Dave raised the subject straight away. The last time I did Letterman I had one of the more surreal moments of my career. Also on the show were the surviving members of Led Zeppelin who had just been presented to President Obama at the 35th Annual Kennedy Center Honors. Watching ¾ of Led Zepp walk past me as I stood by my 6-way guitar rack was more than a little dreamlike. The first proper vinyl album I bought was Led Zeppelin II , and the second was Led Zeppelin IV . Looking it up, the episode aired on the 3rd of December 2013 and I was there on that occasion with Paloma Faith who I worked with for about five years.

We took a promo trip to New York and Los Angeles to perform the single ‘Picking Up The Pieces’ on prime-time TV; and to promote the launch of her second album Fall To Grace . It was highly unusual to be doing both Letterman and Leno in the same week; as rival chat shows they never usually wanted the same guests without a bit of separation, even with a big movie release. It seems like it was a result for Paloma however: on December 4th 2012 Digital Spy reported that the dual appearances had catapulted the album to number 13 on the iTunes US chart (even though we didn't do Leno until the 6th). Two days later as we were walking across the Burbank Studios lot before recording The Tonight Show I thought I'd give P an ego boost. "Look at you and your Betty Grable legs," I said. (Incidentally when Betty Grable was walking across the same ground in April 1939 to appear on The Bob Hope Show it was still known as NBC's Radio City West.)

Despite her flair for retro Hollywood glamour P didn't get the reference and I think she thought I was insulting her. Indeed she challenged me with something like "What the fuck does that mean?" Paloma was always exactly the same person offstage as on, just with a bit more swearing. I had to explain that Betty, and her legs, were painted on the sides of dozens of WWII aircraft and her pins had appeared in a million pin-ups. I also mentioned that, even if it was a studio publicity stunt, in the 1940s 20th Century-Fox insured her legs for a million dollars. (In a similar move in 2015, Taylor Swift apparently insured her legs for $40 million before going on tour.) Betty Grable should have had her lungs insured instead. In 1973 she died aged 56 of lung cancer, just like Warren Zevon would 30 years later.

“The shit that used to work — It won’t work now.”

Warren Zevon was a writer’s songwriter, the kind of artist that leaves you amazed at their turn of phrase. In ‘Desperados Under The Eaves‘ he conjures a Cali Calgary that leaves my heart in my mouth and says more about the Hollywood he grew up in than seems possible with ten little words:

“Don't the sun look angry through the trees,

Don't the trees look like crucified thieves?”

For me he was the Raymond Chandler of Rock, evocative and succinct, capturing LA at a time and place like no other. His songs are peppered with LA locations. The Hollywood Hawaiian is still there, close to the old Capitol Records Building, though it’s now called The Princess Grace Apartments. Walk East on Yucca a couple more blocks past the tower and, as the celebrity chorus asks of us in the closing refrain of ‘Desperados... ’, you can “Look away down Gower Avenue” — though it’s really called Gower Street.

The record Warren was promoting on that tour I briefly joined was called Life'll Kill Ya . His tenth studio album, it was released on the 25th January, the day after his 53rd birthday. In later years it would be named by Rolling Stone as his best since Excitable Boy . It featured an eerily prophetic song about a terminal prognosis: 'My Shit's Fucked Up' is a song that manages to be sombre and hilarious in equal measure. There are very few people who could manage that. There's a great solo performance of it from that Later... in May 2000 — I've found that on YouTube as well. The exhortation to "enjoy every sandwich" that Warren dropped into his final Letterman appearance a couple of times was taken up by his host at the end of the show and has become a mantra for Zevon fans, and even the title of a tribute covers album. I hope Warren is finding out that there really are 'Things To Do In Denver When you're Dead', a song that name-checks his 'Werewolves... ' co-writers LeRoy Marinell & Waddy Wachtel.

A short time before Warren's Letterman sign-off Bob Dylan had performed a few of Zevon songs over three nights at The Wiltern in LA. Warren's reaction showed he hadn't lost his gallows humour even as it cast its shadow across him: “Nothing tells a man he’s about to die like when Bob Dylan starts doing your music.” Maybe we should leave the last word to Dylan, as we’re talking about writers' writers here. When he sang “Play it for Carl Wilson too, Looking far, far away down Gower Avenue” on 2020’s ‘Murder Most Foul’ he was singing about the Beach Boy not as the man who sang lead on 'God Only Knows' and 'Good Vibrations', but who sang backing on ’Deperados Under The Eaves’.

PS, my youngest daughter just came in from work with her boyfriend. Everyone's hungry so I said I'd get Chinese and I swear to God young Matt just ordered beef chow mein. He's kind of a hairy guy, should I be worried? She grew up with the Twilight franchise after all.

©️Mark Vickers September 2023

Was The Beatles' swan song their greatest album?

2022-08-31T11:45:15Z

Super 8: Episode 4

The last album The Beatles ever recorded, Abbey Road was made at a secret location somewhere in north-west London and may have been their only album recorded entirely to 8-track tape. Nobody’s quite sure to this day where the studio was hidden away, but while we don’t know where it was made, we do know how — and that the album was largely recorded onto a 3M M23 8-track machine. Their earlier Sgt. Pepper… album of 1967 was kind of an 8-track album, in that some songs, such as ‘A Day In The Life’ were recorded on two synchronised 4-track tape decks (both Studer J37 decks I presume). But EMI didn’t install their extensively tested and somewhat modified M23 8-track recorder for use at Abbey Road Studios until 1968, during sessions for The Beatles . Some of that “White Album” was then recorded to the new 8-track machine, but up to that point the band had been going to Trident Studios to use 8-track tape. Recording the songs for the album that became Abbey Road began with ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ in February 1969 — almost as soon as the Get Back project was abandoned. But it didn’t happen at EMI Abbey Road Studios, because this song was also recorded at Trident.

It was at Trident Studios where they’d used 8-track tape for the very first time: to record part of ‘Hey Jude’ at the end of July ’68 followed by several songs for the White Album. Those songs were of course recorded through the hallowed Sound Techniques console built by Geoff Frost and John Wood. Gear guru Don Larking has gone on record as saying this about the Trident recorder: “ Malcolm Toft told me that Trident's first 8-Track machine was a 3M M59, it was the first 8 track machine in the UK. As the 3M was a US machine intended to run on 110 Volts at 60 Hz it needed an external transformer to drop the UK 240 volts to 110 volts to allow it to be used in the UK, but there was no way of increasing the mains frequency from 50Hz to 60Hz so the machine ran slow. ” At first the AC frequency was not a huge issue of course, because there were no other 8-track machines in the country so everything recorded on that deck was also mixed and mastered from it at the same speed. Indeed it was Malcom Toft who engineered the ‘Hey Jude’ session at Trident. When it came to mixing that song at Abbey Road and mastering to acetate, the recording sounded dark and “murky” when played back on the M23*. Abbey Road was also the only Beatles album largely recorded through a solid state desk: the EMI TG12345, which had 24 mic channels bussed to 8 tape outputs. It was the MK.IV of this desk that The Dark Side Of The Moon would be recorded through a few years later.

Although it was released before Let It Be , Abbey Road was the last album The Beatles made. The song that opens the album with a refrain that initially sounds like a chant of unity, ‘Come Together’ was ironically one of the last songs the group recorded before they fell apart. The Beatles’ demise had been on the cards for some time. In May 1968 the all-but-orphaned Lennon and the motherless McCartney both took up with strong young mums they’d like to fraternise. They wanted to fraternise them so much they wanted to form new bands with them — and give up on the biggest band there’d ever been. Watching Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back , Linda Eastman doesn’t look half as comfortable being in the studio as Yoko Ono does, but she was going to have to get used to it. The world at large was largely unaware when Abbey Road was released that it had a stillborn twin — Get Back was the Jesse to its Elvis. “ Part of the problem eating away at the band’s core was that, although the group had recorded two albums, only one came out… As media personalities and cultural icons of the world’s youth movement, the group continued to fascinate and inspire as well, their hold on the collective unconscious of the counterculture morbidly mirrored by the unchecked spread of the 'Paul Is Dead' rumour across the globe. ” ( The Unreleased Beatles , p.225, Richie Unterberger. Backbeat Books, 2006.)

Initially all audio for the Get Back project that would eventually produce the Let It Be album was recorded onto two mono reel-to-reel Nagra recorders, one for each 16mm camera used to film the Twickenham sessions. The project was supposed to be a bare bones document of a band prepping for a live show. The desire to play the old Rock n’ Roll songs they grew up with — and to record them simply — to get back to where they once belonged, was an attempt to save the band. Like Nirvana going back to Reciprocal before moving on to Pachyderm, if I can draw a parallel here with Episode 1 of this article. But the band weren't satisfied with the quality of the Nagra tapes. Four days into the project George Harrison’s personal 3M 8-track recorder was moved to Twickenham and consoles were discussed. Over ten years ago Unterberger wrote “ It’s known that Glyn Johns working separately from the film crew’s Nagra sound equipment, recorded the group (probably in mono) while they were rehearsing at Twickenham January 7-10 (and maybe January 13 too) ” ( The Unreleased Beatles p.275-6). He went on to say that at the time Beatles scholars didn’t believe they were used in any released form. Thanks to Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back project, which I’m watching at time of writing, a lot more of what went on to tape can now be heard, and also seen. When Mal & Kevin are packing up at Twickenham on the 16th Paul drops in to record a quick demo of ‘Oh Darling’ while the recording gear is still set up. Glyn Johns is clearly running a Studer 1” tape deck, which I initially assumed to be a 4-track J37 machine. Possibly they were synching two 4-track recorders as they had done in the past at Abbey Road. This may be the source of later confusion in the Apple Studio when subtitles in the movie make an ill informed statement about ‘syncing’ audio consoles together. Given that the idea of the Get Back project was to get the band up to speed as a live act and record audio as document, they wouldn’t have needed more than one of EMI’s Record Engineering Development Department valve desks capable of mixing multiple mics into one 4-track recorder in Twickenham.

The difficulties encountered down in Richmond (that resulted in George Harrison walking out and quitting the biggest band in the world) prompted a move to the Saville Row basement at Apple Corps to placate him. But the studio built there by ‘Magic’ Alex was both unorthodox & inadequate. It was also terribly noisy — so much so that in some histories George Martin is said to have brought down two 4-track machines from EMI, presumably both J37s. Some months ago before The Beatles: Get Back was aired I was speculating that these may have been replaced with an M23 8-track recorder. I found a picture of a tape box (Tape No. E90491) labelled in various ways up on thebeatles.com, and amongst the writing, including 2268 scrawled twice in large figures by different hands, it said APPLE 1, Mach M23 8TR, 24th January 1969. This was confirmed in Jackson’s version of Get Back — it is clearly stated that Harrison’s 8-track was moved in for the Apple Sessions and there are plenty of shots of an M23 being used; but as I said you can’t rely on these on-screen texts to be entirely accurate.

“He bag production… he got Ono sideboard…”

Although the rest of the gear that was lashed together was moveable and had come from EMI studios in Abbey Road it is definitely not “portable” equipment as described in the subtitles. The desks were modular so that they could be moved more easily: they could be used for location recording but they were not truly portable like the Nagra tape machines. ‘Portable’ of course, from it’s very root, means something that can be carried or worn. In the Apple basement footage Glyn Johns is often to be seen seated at a REDD.37 console but there appears to be another board on the side — what initially looks like a REDD.17 in the background off to his left. At first glance I saw a single pair of VU meters plus peak meter in a housing and thought it was a REDD.17, but as Johns moved in the foreground a second housing of two VUs appeared and there looked to be at least a dozen quadrant faders. Since the .17 only had 8 faders it had to be a later desk — the .37 and .51 both had fourteen Paintons. It has four VU meters which made me think it’s an older version of the .37 desk. It’s too big a board to be a sidecar, but was it being used as a submixer? You get a good look at this second mixer at about 1h:38m of the second episode of The Beatles: Get Back .

When you get a good look at the second desk, the middle section of the console looks like a .37 apart from the VU meters which are in two pairs separated by what could be a peak meter or talkback unit; and also the modules either side of the fader module are different. As I said, on-screen texts in the Get Back film say that two 4 channel mixers were “synced together”. Of course they weren’t synchronised because they’re not tape machines, they’re sound mixers — they do not have separate time elements that might drift apart. Either they were used in parallel or one was a sub-mixer fed into the other, and while the REDD.37 had 4 outputs it was an 8 channel mixer with up to 12 simultaneous inputs through modular TAB/Telefunken valve pre-amps. If the other desk was a .17 then it was built when only two outs were needed for tape decks. But from what I can see in The Beatles: Get Back I believe both consoles used at Apple each had 12 inputs bussed to 4 tape outputs. I guess the side mixer is just a REDD.37 with a slightly different meter bridge; these things were not mass produced, after all. Or maybe there was actually a REDD.27 console lost to history!

I also spotted a tape machine that I hadn’t heard associated with Let It Be/Get Back before. About 45 minutes into the 3rd episode of The Beatles: Get Back we get a few seconds of film of a Telefunken T9 valve tape recorder. In fact, it is clearly a T9U Magnetophon because it’s a 15/30ips machine (where the T9A was only 7½/15ips). The T9 debuted in about 1948 as a 2-track tube tape deck and was made well into the ’60s by the various Telefunken/AEG/Siemens group of companies. The T9 Umschaltbar came along around 1955 (including a 1” 4-track format) and they were often paired with the same Telefunken V72 valve pre-amps that were slotted into the REDD.37 desks (AEG T9A decks are often found with V67 pres). I have read that it was a T9 that Stockhausen used to record Kontakte ( The Computer Music Tutorial , p.373, Curtis Roads; MIT Press.) I had to search all the pictures on reeltoreel.com before I could identify this machine. Perhaps that second REDD desk was feeding the T9U.

“You don’t look different, but you have changed… ”

When Abbey Road was released there were only 3 months left of the 1960s, a decade like no other; and there were only 7 months left for The Beatles as a band. The final track medley feels like John & Paul emptying their pockets before going their separate ways. But for a band on the run-out groove, they were still pushing the technology to it’s limits. There is a raw energy to Abbey Road ; it isn’t as polished as Sgt. Pepper’s , nor is it as experimental, but for my money these factors impart immediacy to the songs. Not to mention they faced the added difficulty of Paul McCartney being dead by this point. As many fans have pointed out, you can clearly see his bare feet sticking out from under that white VW Beetle up on the curb on the record cover. Sorry, it’s hard to keep track of the “facts” in the Paul-is-dead fantasy. No-one’s ever been able to adequately explain to me how the three surviving Beatles, having full fiscal control over the McCartney doppelgänger, were unable to persuade Billy Shears to sign with Klein. So, you recruit an exact double to maintain the status quo, or at least your earning potential, and then you allow that employee to start acting like a full partner? “And in the middle of negotiations, You break down”?

Of course McCartney didn’t die in a rogue traffic incident in 1966. It was really Lennon who died like that and was replaced by a double. Which is why the whole Paul-is-dead diversion blew up in 1969 instead of 1966. The real story is that the entire Ono-Lennon clan expired in a car crash in Scotland, on 1 July 1969, at the very moment that Paul was singing “You never give me your money… You only give me your funny paper”**. Yes, I’m taking the piss of course — but come on, if Billy Shears wrote ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Hey Jude’ then he was as good a songwriter as the man who wrote ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ — and he managed to give them an equivalent disposition. And why would Lennon fire such slings and arrows at Billy Shears in ‘How Do you Sleep?’ especially in the words “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead”? Most of the Paul-Is-Dead hoax “evidence” is laughably deranged. Because it was all in fact a clever spin on the real events of 1966, to disguise a profound transformation McCartney went through. It didn’t happen on a “stupid bloody Tuesday”, though it did blow his mind out in a car.

“You and me, Sunday driving, not arriving…”

What had actually happened back in 1966 was that Paul was body-snatched by space aliens from his Austin Healey 100 at exactly the same time that Bob Dylan was whipped off his Triumph Tiger 100, and then the extraterrestrials swapped their brains around before sending them back to earth***. It’s all in the lyrics to ‘American Pie’, if you’re paying attention, which references all the main Rock N’ Roll alien abductions. Sometimes human evolution needs a bit of outside help, particularly when it comes to our appallingly selfish monkey brains, and music is the best tool for the job. The later consequences of this extraterrestrial interference resulted in George Harrison going off to Byrdcliffe, NY, near Woodstock, to hang out and write with Macca-in-Dylan towards the end of 1968, after Harrison saw the changes in Dylan-in-Macca, as he dumped Jane Asher after the Rishikesh recess and got an American girlfriend instead. It all came to a head a couple of months after that when he 'got back' in January ’69 with Harrison falling out with Dylan-in-Macca during the Twickenham rehearsals, such that he actually quit The Beatles.

George and Paul were school mates at The Inny, they learnt to play guitar together, Paul brought George into John’s band The Quarrymen in 1958. Yet between 1970 and 1994 they barely spoke. George played on John and Ringo’s solo work (including the visceral ‘How Do you Sleep?’ attack on McCartney) but never on Paul’s. Instead he became one of Dylan’s true friends and even formed a new band with him in 1988. In 1985 the man who had invented the pop charity concert in '72 refused to appear at Live Aid and sing 'Let It Be' with Macca. At that Concert for Bangladesh he had invited Dylan to perform with him but not McCartney. In 1975 Harrison was lauding Macca-in-Dylan to the Melody Maker thus: “ Bob Dylan is the most consistent artist there is. Even his stuff which people loathe, I like. ” Incontrovertible proof of my theory if you ask me! Of course the aliens’ biggest cranial transplant success was swapping John’s left hemisphere with Yoko’s when they were admitted to the Lawson Memorial Hospital after their Scottish car crash.

I don’t know if people have lost their sense of humour or just their ability to read between the lines, but in the age of "fake news" I feel I have to qualify what I’ve just said by pointing out that I am still ridiculing Beatles conspiracy theories here — by inventing new ones that I personally find far more entertaining. I really shouldn’t have to be so blunt but it seems satire has become redundant in the 21st Century and it feels like the human race is getting dumber by the week. I worry that films like Idiocracy and WALL-E might really be prophetic. I'm sure there will be some people who weren't amused by the first couple of sentences of this article. How is it that the most innovative band in the history of popular music got slapped with the most feeble conspiracy theories? Especially when there’s so much scope in The Beatles’ history for intriguing speculation. I can’t be the first person to remark upon the fact that the United Kingdom was changed forever when John Lennon looked into the homes of the nation down the barrel of a TV camera at London Airport on Hallowe’en 1963 and said “I’m not voting for Ted.”

"Ah ah Mr Wilson, ah ah Mr Heath."

The Baby Boomers reaching their majority were paying attention. Almost exactly a year later Ted Heath’s Conservatives lost their first General Election in 13 years to the Labour Party under leader Harold Wilson. Almost exactly a year after that Wilson got The Beatles their MBEs. Unlike his namesake in 1066 Harold won again in 1966, beating Tory leader Ted in the next General Election to remain Prime Minister. His moderate socialist government proceeded to abolish capital punishment and theatre censorship, and to relax the laws on divorce, abortion and homosexuality. These changes were socially seismic: suddenly everyone could behave the way the ruling classes had done for centuries, and also get away with it. Perhaps it wasn't the biggest change to British rule since the Norman Invasion, but it was the biggest change in British society since the Black Death kille d half the population. Bu bonic plague wiped out somewhere between 100 and 200 million people in the 14th Century and a labour market was established in Western Europe when the peasants suddenly became a commodity in short supply. Using a pandemic as an opportunity for positive change in society, ah, if only.

The cultural revolution in the second half of the 1960s that the UK experienced as a result of these huge shifts in collective freedom had a massive effect on society and behaviour throughout the western world. The ‘British Invasion’ of America wasn’t just about pop music, but also the common concerns of the young people playing it. You can bet your bottom dollar that the influence on young voters that Lennon exhibited at that pivotal moment in 1963 was remarked with disquiet in reactionary circles. Have a think about the synchronicity of Ed Sullivan passing through London Airport on the very same October 31st that Lennon nailed his political colours to the mast. Had he not wondered why this little English band were being met by so many screaming fans and TV cameras, then The Beatles might never have been quite so big a deal in America and 'the British invasion' might never have happened. Not that America hadn’t already been experiencing it’s own re-evaluation of morality with regard to race and gender politics in the aftermath of World War II. And of course if John Lennon hadn’t really survived crashing his Austin Maxi in 1969 there would have been no reason to assassinate him 11 years later.

In 1975 John Lennon took 5 years of semi-retirement as a house-husband. On November 17th 1980 he released Double Fantasy — his first proper album since 1974’s “lost weekend” record Walls & Bridges . Just three weeks later he was gunned down outside the Dakota. Lennon’s killer got him to sign a copy of the new record on his way out to a meeting. He & Yoko went to talk to David Geffen about the prospects for Double Fantasy overcoming its poor critical reception. If Lennon had proposed what happened next, as a marketing concept, well, he couldn’t have had a more profitable idea. When he got home from the meeting the same fanatic fired five .38 calibre bullets into his back. Double Fantasy won the Grammy for Best Album of 1981 and went on to sell triple platinum in the US alone. John Lennon died instantly on the street outside his home. He’d spent most of his last day on earth recording at The Record Plant. He was starting to say something as an artist again. Geffen had to wait another 14 years to get that good a turnaround on a poorly received album after the artist got shot dead. In Utero didn't win a Grammy, but it did go quintuple platinum.

“You know it has been for so many years…”

Let me see now, what other conspiracy theories can I cook up for you. Do you want to know what was really in JFK’s coffin when they buried it at sea on February 18th 1966? Do you think the bronze Handley Brittania casket that already weighed 400lb empty really needed an additional 240lbs of sandbags added to make it sink? Have I told you about Haile Selassie swapping identities with one Rainford Hugh Perry in Jamaica in April 1966? “Legba? Where you been at Slick? He done change his name to Scratch”. Maybe it was more than just identities that were exchanged — like I said, the aliens were doing a lot of brain swapping in ’66 — Space Echo baby. For the booklet to 1997’s Arkology compilation Perry said “ It was only four tracks written on the machine, but I was picking up twenty from the extra-terrestrial squad. ” Perry later revealed some of those secrets on his Jamaican E.T. album****. What else was I going to spill my guts over? Oh yeah, I also know where the acetate of the fourth Sandinista! record was kept hidden for a while. That’s the one that had the strongest songs — the one the label wanted to be sides 1 & 2 (and preferably the only two sides), but the band wanted it to be sides 7 & 8 so they perversely buried it.

I digress; as so often happens when talking about The Beatles. It is exceptionally easy to be short-hind-sighted when it comes to the impact The Beatles had on Western music. Nobody had changed the European song form this much since Monteverdi: not Schumann, not even Little Richard. While we’re on the subject, David Hepworth makes some excellent points in his 2008 article ‘The Beatles Were Underrated’ ( Nothing Is Real , ch.1, p.3, The Long Shadow Of The Fabs; Hepworth, 2018). Because when it comes down to it, The Beatles weren’t really all that influential, were they? It’s not like anyone remembers who they were these days. They’d long been relegated to the minor leagues of the pop divisions until Peter Jackson came along. As Nik Cohn said in 1969 “ Next came the Fab Four, the Moptop Mersey Marvels, and this is the bit I’ve been dreading. I mean what is there possibly left to say on them? ” ( Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom , p.126, Ch.13 The Beatles; Vintage, 1969, 2016). Yeah, nineteen sixty-nine he said that. What indeed. Well, maybe just this: if I'm right in my assessment of John Lennon's political impact, then he was the most influential artist of the 20th Century, helping to push humanity into the 21st — even though he had to stay behind in the old millenium. It's the the kind of martyrdom that makes for a good religion. What do you think — a couple of centuries for a Lennonist creed to take hold? He might end up bigger than Jesus.

I’ve looked at four different albums that were made on 8-track tape machines over these four related articles. If their structure has been a little erratic, well it’s been an erratic couple of years, particularly in The Music Biz. You’ll have to forgive me if I’ve strayed from strict studio protocol, but I believe you should try and amuse yourself in everything you do. I was talking about tape recording and I was talking about concision (even though I haven’t been exactly concise myself). So much of the way we now use unlimited tracks of DAW (and the move away from 24-track tape in the 1990s) is about keeping your options open. It’s about saving every version, it’s about comping what you can’t capture in a great take. It’s about compromise. “Comping” is of course the producer’s shorthand for compiling from separate takes, but it always sounds like compromising to me. I learnt to do it with a razor blade back in the ‘80s. When comping was a difficult thing to achieve from taped performances — physically cutting and splicing multitrack tape — it was almost a last resort. It was "destructive editing". You did it when your artist just couldn’t get that main vocal right, even with drop ins. As for the rest of the band — if they couldn’t do it in the first few goes then you’d sack them and get someone who could. Why do you think The Wrecking Crew was formed? But these days of course comping is standard practice, and I understand why. With a DAW it's a piece of piss. But here’s the thing, if you’re comping from several good takes, from several good performances, from the same session, then you’ll probably get good results. Do I need to make reference to silk purses and sow’s ears? Well, just as long as you think about it. As long as you have a word with yourself about what you’re trying to achieve. Lightning in a bottle — you can’t fake it from a strobe light in a dreary drizzle. You need the storm to rage.

There have been some great recordings released over the years that have the odd howling bum note in there somewhere. I think maybe these days young people getting into making music might have difficulty in understanding how that could happen. In the age of Autotune and quantising it is standard practice to give every record the fake smile of tooth veneers, the frozen death mask of botox, the dead ‘perfection’ of a mannequin. Have a listen to the full length version of 'Move On Up' by Curtis Mayfield, there are some howlers played by the brass section. ‘Why was it even pressed?’ I hear the youngsters cry. Because it is a phenomenal performance, because the energy is palpable, because you can feel the joy in the room. There is absolutely no way that the incredible precipitando of Ike & Tina Turner’s version of ‘Proud Mary’ could have been assembled from different takes. Here’s Johnny Cash talking about recording with Sam Phillips at Sun records: “ We both felt that if the performance was really there at the heart of the song, it didn’t really matter much if there were some little musical error or glitch in the track somewhere… Sam didn’t care that much: he’d much rather have soul, fire, and heart than technical perfection. ” ( Cowboys And Indies by Gareth Murphy; Ch.9, p.96) In the words of Neil Young’s old buddy and legendary producer David Briggs: “ In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin’ door with a record in their pocket, man. ” ( Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography , p.264; Jimmy McDonough. Vintage 2003)

We have that quote framed on our control room wall, it's an approach we try to encourage our clients to take. And that’s what music is really all about. Which might seem alien in a world where turd polishing has become a career path in many fields of artistic endeavour. Is that why people won’t pay for music anymore? Because so often these days it’s a mediocre collage? Let’s consult the Wizard of Waukesha for a final bit of advice, because it’s a sentiment echoed by all the greats of recorded music at one time or another:

“ I invented multi-tracking, so I know that you can record parts separately and punch things in, but I don’t do that. My thinking is that a song has to have one feeling, and when you punch in, you’ve got one feeling over here, another feeling in the middle, and something different near the end. When you piece it together, that’s what comes out—pieces. The feeling doesn’t flow. Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t punch in if you missed a note. I’m just saying that, generally speaking, a song sounds better and more alive as a continuous performance of how you’re feeling. ” — Les Paul, December 2005, http://lespaulremembered.com.

‘Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine’

Remember that quote attributed to Quincy Jones? “The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.” Which really should make you think about recording in compositional terms; to think about having a plan on paper or in your head as you go along. Having a limited number of tracks doesn’t mean you have to have your creativity limited. In many ways it focuses you more on how to perform as a musician and commit to artistic decisions. Mixing separately mic’d drums for example, or all your keyboard sounds, down to a pre-mixed stereo pair; bouncing down harmony BVs say, or doubled guitar parts; are all ways of freeing up more space for other instruments, as well as unifying particular voices or ranges in a song. It’s an approach that requires you to make mixing decisions early in the process and whoever’s wearing the producer’s hat needs to have an overview of the project. To record this way, as they did back in the day, musicians need to be well rehearsed. An overall ‘sound’ or character needs to be conceived of — even if it’s initially based on some other classic album for inspiration. The trouble is you need a bit of vision (and maybe a pencil & paper) to keep track of what’s going where on the tape.

For that towering 1966 landmark in Pop music Pet Sounds Brian Wilson recorded The Wrecking Crew’s accompaniment to 4-track tape (possibly on a Scully), bounced the entire backing track down to a mono mix onto one track of the custom built 8-track machine at Columbia’s Hollywood studio (Ampex 351 with four PR10s?) — and then used the remaining 7 tracks for vocal harmonies once the other Beach Boys got back off tour. Each of the six singers had their own track, with the occasional extra harmonic ‘sweetener’ instrument laid down on the 7th; because the human voice was that important an instrument fo r Brian Wilson *****. " On this logistically complex project that became Pet Sounds , Wilson also began using Columbia’s eight-track facilities for recording vocal harmonies. Byrds front man Roger McGuinn remembered how, at the time, 'the eight-track was in Columbia’s L.A. studio [but] the engineers were afraid of it-they had a handwritten sign taped on to it that said BIG BASTARD' " . ( Cowboys And Indies by Gareth Murphy; Ch.14, p.153)

Dave Stewart was also definitely of the opinion that capturing the power of one very particular instrument was far more important in great recording than the number of channels you used, when he wrote: “ With Eurythmics, and with all my productions, I’m one of those old-fashioned record producers who likes to make music around the voice…. People want to hear and feel the emotion in the human voice, and for me that’s the most important thing to get right. There came a point in music when you could have forty-eight tracks, then seventy-two tracks or so, and just create a giant wall of music. And not a good wall of sound, like Phil Spector’s — which was crafted always around the singer — but just a big wall with no dynamics, that would overcome the voice. I believed in following the voice on its journey, and that’s still my thing. The success of Adele is no surprise, as everything is built around her voice. ” — ( Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This: A Life In Music , Dave Stewart; New American Library; 2016). I refer you to Episode 2 of this article for the ways in which Annie Lennox's voice was complimented in ingenious ways.

So, from Les Paul’s 5258 through Nirvana’s 5050, Eurythmics’ 80-8 to the White Stripes’ A80 and of course The Beatles M23 (skidoo); I’ve tried to chart a path through the mists of time, to map out a guide to how and why a restricted number of analogue record-tracks might be a beneficial limitation when it comes to making a classic album. Les Paul had something interesting to say about just how elaborate the recording process would become: “ Modern recording equipment is much more complicated than it needs to be. One of the first things I learned in the multitrack business is that the machine can run away from you. It can run you, instead of you running the machine. ” And he said that in December 1977 — 14 years before Pro Tools came along. You know, if you need more than 8 tracks you can have as many as you want here at New Cut Studios, we also subscribe to Pro Tools Ultimate. So we can put your music through a UAD A800 virtual Studer tape emulation — or we can just mix down out of Pro Tools to our actual Studer A80 tape machine. Or you could try, as pointed out in Episode 1 of this short series, to limit yourselves to our Otari 8-track with all it’s analogue mojo. But I'll leave with maybe the most important question, as Les Paul once asked of John Hanti: “ So does Pro Tools smell like iron oxide on a two-inch tape? ”

* I haven’t been able to find any info on the M59 online but the M56 and M79 decks get quite a lot of coverage. Certainly the M79 was built in an 8-track configuration. Here at New Cut Studios we have Don and the legendary Larking’s List to thank for sourcing our 32 channel Neotek console which, coincidentally, was previously owned by John Wood. Check out the Music from big, pink moons, Floyds and sausages blog on this website for the heritage of our studio desk — as well as a bit more history about John Wood and Sound Techniques.

** Take 30, the version of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ recorded in Studio 2 Abbey Road on July 1st, does not have the outro refrain of “All good children go to heaven” that Paul added later when he heard that Julian and Kyoko had died in Sutherland along with their parents. Really… too soon? What are you people like… they were fine, Kyoko had to have four stitches and Julian was treated for shock at Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie. As an outpost of the Lawson Station convenience stores/alien monitoring stations it was the perfect hospital for a cover up by the Japanese government.

*** Yeah, yeah, yeah, McCartney’s Big Healey was a 3000 not a 100-6, but the first rule of urban mythology is to spin the facts just enough to turn simple coincidences into believable causalities. Then sprinkle on a large pinch of the improbable, something along these lines:
Not long after the success of the the Dylan-McCartney exchange to trigger the recording of Revolver and a new direction for the band, the same body snatching ETs visited The Beatles during their 1966 tour of Japan, partly to coach Lennon in his condemnation of the Vietnam war. Sadly the increased UFO activity over Mount Fuji during 1966 caused several commercial airline crashes. But the main mission the aliens had for the Fab Four was to annoy Imelda Marcos by stealing some shoes as a distraction while the aliens removed some of Yamashita’s gold from her husband’s secret vault. As a reward, The Beatles were enlightened by the extraterrestrials during their stop-over in Delhi.
See? it’s easy. First you select a bunch of factual events that could have suspicious circumstances. Then you just have to join the dots in a different sequence and still make a picture.

**** Lee Scratch Perry has died this week (at time of writing) and I am glad to see that his contribution to popular music has been noted and celebrated. For me he is up there with George Martin, Quincy Jones and Brian Eno in the history of recorded music. I didn’t really know Lee, and only worked with him a few times when I worked for some of the On-U Sound acts in the early Nineties — recruited as I was by international man of mystery Kell The Boy. But I have fond memories of watching Lee run conceptual circles around people with his "antic disposition". I saw him give an interview backstage at the 1995 Cactus Jazz Festival in Bruges while The Upsetter hung upside down from a tree and lectured the journalist on the importance of remembering our simian origins, “Hugging up the big monkey man”. The Black Arkist was crazy like a fox and shrewder than many people gave him credit for. He was Anansie, he was Wakdjunkaga, he was the Cairibbean Dalí, and he definitely knew a hawk from a handsaw.

***** Post Script: “Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?”
Incidentally Brian Wilson was one of the few failures the extraterrestrials had in 1966 with their pop genius brain transplant program. After Pet Sounds Wilson was a prime target for Alien abduction and trepanning. They initially tried to swap Brian’s brain with Phil Spector’s but there was violent tissue rejection and the operation had to be reversed. It did affect both men psychologically though, as well as creatively. In an attempt to salvage the program the aliens opened up Spector’s skull again when they tried to match him up with self-proclaimed necromancer Joe Meek. It’s no coincidence that both Meek and Spector would murder a woman with a gun before they died. The operation went horribly wrong and just a few months later Joe shot his eclectic landlady, and then blew his head off with a 12-bore shotgun. Conspiracy theorists claim this was done post mortem to obliterate the evidence of alien trepanning in his cracked cranium. Spector had to adopt a series of bizarre wigs to disguise the scars to his scalp — which he blamed on a car crash he had a few years later. God only knows where Brian Wilson went in 1966 but he took a long time to try and get back. It was a long, long time before he could raise a Smile. I guess he just wasn’t made for those times.

‘That’ll Be The Day'

As the momentous events of 1966 mounted up it all became too much for Joe Meek, and he committed murder-suicide at the start of 1967, on the third of February, “the day the music died”. Like I said it’s all in ‘American Pie’ if you read it right. "February made Meek shiver" — the third was a date that had tormented him for nearly a decade. It’s well documented that Joe Meek had been a year early when he predicted Buddy Holly’s death on February 3rd 1958 and that he tried to warn Holly on several occasions. Even though he was off by 12 months in auguring that Buddy’s plane would auger in to a frozen field just outside Clear Lake, IA, he was haunted by the ghost of prescience. He was convinced that photographs hanging in his studio were trying to communicate with him. telling him he was a victim of industrial espionage by the likes of Phil Spector. Instead of spectres trying to talk to him from the walls Spector actually tried to talk to him on a call. When Phil phoned Joe for real, Meek accused Spector of stealing his ideas, hung up on him and then smashed the telephone to pieces.

Hatful of Holloway, (head full of Holly)
The aliens had been messing with Meek’s head long before the Spector swap attempt. They’d been trying for about a decade by this point, initially experimenting with a cerebral teleportation device called Telstar, before resorting to surgical transplants. Joe himself claimed on several occasions that his obsession with outer space was the result of being controlled by aliens. The ETs first latched onto Meek when he was a radar operator in the RAF in the early ’50s and in their attempts to communicate he could “hear a new world”. By the time Meek was ensconced in the crowded studio he called The Bathroom in a flat above Shenton’s Leather Goods store at 304 Holloway Road, his head was stuffed full of ideas about audio engineering and sci-fi nonsense, and he was now claiming Buddy Holly gave him musical and commercial advice from beyond the grave. And for a time his odd business model really was successful. His huge hit ‘Telstar’ in 1962 was the first single by a British group to top the American hit parade: something that wouldn’t happen again until two years later with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. There were plenty of things he couldn't see coming however. Meek missed out on having that hit himself, turning down The Beatles, supposedly on four separate occasions, (so maybe everyone should cut Dick Rowe some slack) and telling Brian Epstein he was wasting his time. He also misjudged the potential of space oddity and future star man David Bowie who made his first recording at Meeksville Sound with The Konrads, not long after he fell to earth.

Dandy Ward Hole
Joe was tuned in to music he was receiving from the spheres, but before Meek could inherit the unearthly there was a price to pay. Early alien attempts at neurological teleportation in the late ‘50s hadn’t worked so well. They completely failed to bodyswap Meek with Les Paul, only managing to make Les record a version of Joe's song 'Put A Ring On My Finger'. Another early failure was trying at a distance to swap Joe Meek into Little Richard. On October 3rd 1957 during a flight from Melbourne to Sydney Richard’s plane was buzzed by a UFO. Richard said of the event that the plane would have crashed had it not been borne up by 'angels'. When the UFO appeared again the next night during his show, in the sky over the Sydney Stadium, Richard got truly scared. People tried to tell chicken ‘Little’ it was the launch of Sputnik he was really seeing. The ETs failed to swap the pop personalities but It caused Richard to cancel the rest of the tour, announce a religious conversion and quit show business to join a ministry. He headed for home on an earlier flight: his faith in his extraterrestrial epiphany vindicated when the plane he should have been on later crashed into the Pacific. The effect on Meek was no less disruptive. He started haunting graveyards trying to record disembodied voices; and public conveniences trying to experience more bodily communion. He developed a fascination for Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis which he passed on to a young session guitarist he employed by the name of Jimmy Page. He was now living in a violent demi-monde of speed fuelled cottaging, with the Kray Twins trying to muscle in on his operation. People close to him said he was just amphetamine paranoid as his behaviour became increasingly violent. He got in a punch up with Tom Jones when 'The Groans' turned down his physical advances. Sometime in 1964 he tried to force soon-to-be Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell to play a drum pattern the way he wanted by pointing a shotgun at his head. "Hey Joe, where you..?" Wherever it was it was a very dark place.

©️ Mark Vickers August 2022

Can’t ignore the Elephant in the control room?

2022-08-25T17:40:57Z

Super 8: Episode 3

In April of 2002 the White Stripes spent two weeks in the studio recording the bulk of what would become their 4th album: Elephant *. The record is a high point in their career and indeed, when it was released a year later, it went on to win a Grammy. It’s a great sounding record as well, both crisp and warm — you’d be forgiven for thinking it was done in one of those big Nashville rooms, through an enormous console with flying faders, into the latest version of one of those high end DAWs favoured by the film industry like SADiE. When actually it was done at Toe Rag Studios in the east London Borough of Hackney. Toe Rag had a modest live room, it’s desk was rather small (though it was an EMI REDD.17 from Abbey Road) and Elephant was actually recorded onto 8-track analogue tape. I know, in the 21st Century. Can you imagine: only eight tracks for a ‘Seven Nation Army’? All that notwithstanding, the record was made with some very nice old gear — though very little of it from the fine old vintage displayed on the label.

It was claimed on the album’s sleeve that none of the equipment used to make the record was more recent than 1963. I don’t know why that year was picked, it seems purely arbitrary. Much of the gear they used was newer than stated — including, fundamentally, the tape machines. Toe Rag owner Liam Watson said in Sound On Sound (October 2003 issue) that his Studer A80 machines, both the 8-track machine that was used to record Elephant and his 16-track recorder, were Mark II models — so they must date from no earlier than the early 1970s. Those decks run 1” and 2” tape respectively, for just about the best fidelity you can get on analogue tape. Three years prior to this there was a pre-Stripes article about Toe Rag in Tape Op issue #13 that listed the main recorders as a Studer J37 4-track (how's that for a nice Beatlesy match for the REDD.17) along with the A80 8-track that would later be used for Elephant **. As for the ¼” Studer RC stereo master recorder mentioned in SOS , well that A80/B62 series hybrid wasn’t put together for the first time until 1979. We too have a ¼” half-track at New Cut Studios for mixing to tape and guess what: it is a Studer A80. It has an inventory sticker for BBC Scotland and as I’ve done the odd TV show up in Glasgow’s West End I like to think it came from there.

“Had a dream that you pulled the trigger”

I also like to think that the rest of the Elephant sleeve statement about the recording process is true and that " No computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing, or mastering of this record ”. I don’t know how much of Elephant was recorded through the 12 channel valve REDD.17 desk or how much through the 18 input solid state Calrec M-series console which was also housed at Toe Rag at the time of the Elephant sessions. The REDD of course was definitely pre-1963: the first .17 was built by EMI’s Recording Engineering Development Department in 1958 and they made just three more, before improving the design to the REDD.37 the same year. Only three .37s were built and by Elephant ’s alleged 1963 cut-off the EMI boffins had just about completed the REDD.51 design with higher headroom courtesy of the new solid state REDD.47 pre-amps. Toe Rag’s Calrec M on the other hand, was a broadcast desk custom built for BBC Television Centre in the early 80s (when they shopped around for cheaper alternatives to Neve). It is this desk that seems to get the most mention in reference to Elephant and the REDD.17 may not have been used by the White Stripes at all. Funnily enough I got to see the Toe Rag Calrec in it’s next home after it was bought by Dan Hawkins of The Darkness. He installed it in his residential studio at Leeders Farm — a beautiful 17th century barn conversion just off the A11 between Thetford and Norwich. In March 2009 it was our base of operations for a UK tour with Dan’s other band Stone Gods. By the time I got to see it the quadrant faders (with trigger shaped red knobs: possibly Paintons?) that Liam Watson had put across the inputs had been restored to the Penny & Giles strips the Calrec was originally built with.

Either way, either desk would have had enough channels to handle the way Elephant was tracked. In a 2006 interview on the BMI website, Liam Watson gives an insight into how the recording sessions were structured to maximise the space available on an 8-track machine. I was particularly interested to read that Jack White’s guitar was recorded onto two tracks through two separately mic’d amps. For the rest Watson described his technique thus: “ I miked the drums with AKG dynamic and condenser mics, and used a Shure dynamic mic on the snare. I mixed the drums to a single track, except for the bass drum, which had a track of its own. ” Additionally the kick drum was also mixed up front with a fair bit of compression. The band would first track a live take with guide vocal and, once the Whites were happy with a take, another guitar part was added through the same dual amp & mic set-up. Recording the lead vocal was approached a little differently as well. Watson used a vintage Neumann large diaphragm condenser conventionally, but second mic’d with a Shure dynamic into “ a small guitar amp ” with an AKG dynamic in front of that. This AKG was mixed with the Neumann, processed with some tape delay, spring reverb, and compression and then recorded over the guide vocal track. A second vocal pass was then added to the last remaining track on the Studer. Finally a lead guitar part was tracked using the same two amp setup: this time mixed to that last track, dropped in between the vocal overdubs. The complete track listing is as follows: Track 1 guitar overdub - amp 1; Tr.2 main vocal; Tr.3 live guitar - amp 1; Tr.4 drums; Tr.5 bass drum; Tr.6 live guitar - amp 2; Tr.7 guitar overdub - amp 2; Tr.8 secondary vocals/lead guitar solo. I wonder what that “small guitar amp” was, a Fender Champ, or maybe even smaller like a Selmer Little Giant? Of course given the amount of evidence for post-'63 gear there’s nothing to say that it wasn’t completely modern and full of chips. The clarity of a solid state amp would work well for the vocal.

“Hear the Salvation Army band, down by the riverside”

The monster riff of ‘Seven Nation Army’, the opening salvo of Elephant ’s sonic assault — it’s a sound that has entered the collective consciousness. It’s been used from sports stadia to political rallies to video games (as I write this Samsung are currently running an advert with a 2012 cover of the song by Zella Day). I once heard it described as the second most identifiable guitar riff in history after the Stones’ 'Satisfaction'; if you’re under 30 it’s probably the first. The song was born of a sound-check riff when the White Stripes appeared onstage at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne, on the 29th & 30th of January during the 2002 Big Day Out tour. The title ‘Seven Nation Army’ came from a memory Jack White had of mishearing “Salvation Army” during his childhood in Detroit***. In the hypnotic video White mimed his parts on an Airline Jetson (at the time a long forgotten ’60s guitar) that he got really cheap from Jack Oblivian. This Jetson/Hutto model guitar didn’t debut until 1964, so again, past the cut-off date for the vintage voodoo vainglory declared in the ‘sleeve notes’****. Despite the red & white visual onslaught of the promo the song was actually recorded on a very brown guitar: a single pickup Kay K6533 archtop (although the fibreglass Airline was used extensively on the album). On page 174 of Guitar Stories Vol. 2 (Michael Wright; Hal Leonard, 2000), in the third column under Electric Hollowbody Guitars, the K6533 Value Leader lists the dates available as 1957-59. So there’s one thing at least that meets the pre-’63 protocol. I don’t know if Jack fell lax and broke his axe but his Value Leader ended up wrapped in vinegar & brown paper. White used the same K6533 recently to play the national anthem at the Detroit Tigers’ Comerica Park opening weekend and it’s still wearing the cut-price coverlet of a plain paper, ragged wrapper*****.

For ‘Seven Nation…’ the Kay’s ‘cheese-grater’ neck pup first went through a Whammy, then through a Muff, to create the octave-down bass line and fuzz-sustained slide parts. Presumably it was then Y-split, maybe with an A/B box and sent to the two amp set-up Watson described. And there’s a good chance that one of the amps in that twin amp setup was actually a Twin. The post FX signal was possibly split, as per his live rig at the time, into the Silvertone 1485 amplifier White then favoured and a Fender Twin~Reverb. In that interview for Broadcast Music Inc. I mentioned earlier, Liam Watson said “ Jack’s guitar was going through two separate amps at the same time; I miked these with AKG and Shure dynamic mics, each amp having its own track. ” The department store amp head (the 1485 was the largest of the amps Danelectro made for Sears) would have had to go into a matching Silvertone cab driving six 10” Jensen C10Q ceramic speakers. As we’ll see, the output stages of this amp require a very specific cabinet, unless the head’s been heavily modified.

Jack White used a 1484 on some of the Stripes earlier albums, up to and including some tracks on White Blood Cells . The similarity in nomenclature between the 1484 & 1485 Silvertone heads and White’s usage of both at different times is tricky to navigate. From the front the two amps look identical except the ’84 says Twin Twelve in the top right corner of the faceplate and the ’85 says Six Speakers: both labels in reference to their relative cabinets. According to Silvertoneworld.net both models were were introduced in 1963, so they just fit the pre-Kennedy assassination cut-off for Elephant . The more research I’ve done however, the less I think a Silvertone appears on Elephant at all. The consensus of opinion on the Silvertone/Fender pairing is that, certainly on stage, the 1485 was providing the grit and the Twin the chime — and of course the reverb. There’s a very integral atmospheric element in ‘Seven Nation… ‘ that has to be a spring reverb, so why wouldn’t that come from an amp with a tank? Those Danelectro-built Sears amps are great dirt boxes but their reverb is reckoned to be comparatively poor. It is a short single-spring device, in a metal can with a Masonite base, and if you drive it hard it sounds tinny and aquatic. You can get some unique sounds out of it though, which must have appealed to Jack White, and the Dano tremolo is decent. Incidentally Neil Young used a Sears six-ten with The Bluenotes.

There’s the further confusion of people ‘in the know’ referring to the 1484 & 1485 as 50 watt and 100 watt respectively. The Silvertone 1484 that White said he used on the first two albums has two 6L6 output tubes which in this Danelectro design will never give you more than about 35w RMS. If you upgrade the wimpy output transformer of a 1484 and pop in a pair of quality 6L6GCs you might get 50w out of it. Really though, this amp is much more like a Vibralux~Reverb rated at 35 watts — nothing like the “ 60 watts music power " listed in the old Sears catalog. But then that was probably a peak-to-peak reading. While Americans now usually accept RMS levels as the common international reference, people don’t always remember that the ‘Madmen’ of yesteryear always published the “bigger is better” numbers of peak-to-peak readings. Because of this, in older literature amps are often listed with both “American wattage” and “British wattage”. Then there's the confusion people have made with, say Marshall designs. The 1485 wasn't a doubled 1484, rather it had dual 1484 power amp stages. Instead of a nice big OT with lots of mass to handle the low end, the 1485 had two of the same feeble trannies as the 1484, each driving separate sets of three 10” speakers in the same cab, so nowhere near 100 watts root mean square. When White upgraded to the 1485 it was not to a nice big hundred watt stack. What he was really getting was an amp with two outputs, each of about 35w at roughly 2.5Ω. If you’re playing through two AC30s you’re not using a 60w amp, even if you build them both into the same box. You can build twenty Champs into one big cabinet and split your guitar signal 20 ways into all those 5 watt amps at the same time — you're not playing through a 100 watt amp and it won't sound like it either.

“And that ain’t what you want to hear…”

People often remark that Jack White’s use of Fender Twins in the live environment during this period (often disguised & draped in red cloth) means he was probably using them in the studio as well. Others have gone further and opined that the Silvertone amps were mere set dressing to bolster his mojo mythology. I can tell you now that I have worked with artists who were easily persuaded (after a few bad experiences of vintage gear failing at shows) that the mojo-rich pawn shop treasure that sounded so great in the studio would be better replaced by an industry standard bit of kit — even a vintage one like a nice '70s twin — that would be a more reliable tool on tour. And this applies to amps more often than any other type of gear. Especially a box made of MDF with a thin linen skin like the 1484/85, that’s going to split and crumble every time it takes a little knock. Danelectro always favoured cheap materials like fibreboard, masonite and old lipstick cases. But those Sears Danos are great overdrive amps so why wouldn’t he be using them, especially in the studio? White claims to have used old Silvertones for the first two Stripes albums, so why not use them again for Elephant ? In the years immediately following their Grammy win Jack White’s stage rig consisted of a Silvertone 1485 & 6x10 paired with a Silverface Twin~Reverb; both amps appeared to have been re-covered in a red material with white grill cloths as can be seen in the picture above.

At some point he got two red re-covered 1485 rigs and they can both clearly be seen sitting next to a red jacketed Silverface Twin, in the footage shot at BBC Maida Vale Studio 3 for their 2005 From The Basement session. There are some great shots of the red Airline too but the Jetson has had it’s neck pickup pulled, and most of its harness as well, judging by the paucity of knobs. We don’t have any Silvertone amps at New Cut Studios, but we do have a Twin~Reverb: and you know what? It’s a 1977 Silverface — although it’s had a few modifications to bring down the ultra-linear output level to a more Blackface wattage. From some angles in that footage you can also clearly see two Sonic Machine Factory combos stacked over-under, though from their position at Stage Left behind the keyboard rig I assume they were only used for keys (I later found a listing for one of these amps at Online Nashville Auctions being sold with its White Stripes flight case as Lot#:64 and it was labelled with gaffa & sharpie as "Wurly", so it was obviously used for White’s 200A electric piano). The faceplate of the SMF 15 Watters proclaimed them to be All Tube Class A, but their tube chart said they had a pair of EL84s. Now maybe they were two single ended channels in one chassis, but that would give you two 10 watt ouputs at best. I can only assume they are really a ClassA/B amp along the lines of an AC15. The same keys rig with two red SMFs appears again in more footage from MV3 (supposedly from 2007), but by this point the Silvertones have flown and there’s a row of three Blackface reissue Twins — in red coats, natch — and the Hutto once again has two pups. It’s maybe a different guitar.

“The Salvation Army seemed to wind up in the hole”

I can’t say for sure what amps were used on ‘Seven Nation Army’, or on the rest of the album, as there were some nice old amps already on the premises at Toe Rag. In that 2006 BMI article Watson said “ I was in a band that supported the White Stripes on their first UK tour. We told Jack about the studio and he came along to have a look, liked it and later booked a session. ” Having taken the tour Jack may even have decided not to bring his own amps to the sessions at all, given the complement of vintage boxes already housed at Toe Rag. There are photos in that SOS article (entitled 'Liam Watson & Toe Rag Studios') of some fine old heads & combos. Stacked up in one picture are, I believe, a Vox AC30, a Silver Croc Selmer Zodiac, a Vox AC50 head, and what looks like a 5D5 Wide-Panel Tweed Fender Pro. I’m pretty sure the Silver Croc is a Zodiac because the Twin Thirty & Twin Fifty Zodiacs are slightly wider than the Voxes it’s sandwiched between. Actually, Selmer 30 watt & 50 watt Twin combos (both Zodiacs & Thunderbirds) were similar dimensions to an AC30 but about two inches wider. So yeah it could be a Thunderbird, but Zodiac Twin 30s are more common. I’ve seen a few over the years but the only time I’ve ever toured one was with Alpha supporting Massive Attack on the Mezzanine tour in ’98. There’s also another SOS photo of a 50w Selmer Treble N’ Bass Mk.II with matching 2x12 cab in the hexagon grill cloth, Blue/Black livery, issued from 1965-67 which immediately followed the Silver Croc-skin era. By 1965 all the imitation silver crocodiles were hunted out of existence in the Essex marshes, and Kenney Jones & Ronnie Lane, having used up all the remaining hides, had quit Selmer to form the Small Faces. I own two of the mighty Little Giant amps Selmer made in the 1960s and one of them is a Silver Croc, the other a Blue/Grey. Now, the Little Giant is a true Class A amp pushing a single EL84 in a similar design to the Vox AC4. We also have our own Selmer Treble N’ Bass at New Cut Studios: a T N’ B Compact 50R SV, from the 1970-74 Silverface period.******

And yes, of course we have a Vox AC30 at New Cut, its a 1999 Marshall-built TBX with Blue Bulldogs. The AC30 in the Toe Rag amp stack pic is covered in black vinyl, but I read in a Guitar.com interview with Lincolnshire guitarist Eddie Tatton, that he bought a fawn AC30 that he was told was used on Elephant . Mind you, if the resident AC30 changed in the 6 months between the White Stripes occupation and the SOS article, maybe all of the other pictured amps were also newer acquisitions, flushed as Watson was with his elephantine earnings. Then again, Mr. Tatton may have been misled altogether, and there’s just as much argument for the two guitar amps on ‘Seven Nation…’ being the SIlvertone 1485 and Fender Twin~Reverb Jack White was familiar with. So there’s quite a range of choice for what that dual amp set-up might have been. Not that the same two amps had to be used for every track on the album.

I kept searching for a definitive answer on the question of ‘which amps’ and found people claiming in forums that White used both a 30w Selmer and an AC30 at Toe Rag because he didn’t want to bring his 1485 across the pond. But they don’t specify that it was a Vox/Zodiac pairing. I eventually found another, unreferenced quote online from Liam Watson that claimed yet another combination. I couldn’t track down the original publication, but it had more detail about the miking of the twin guitar rig as well : “ ‘We tracked on 1" analog tape using a Studer A-80 8-track,’ says Watson. ‘Jack used two amps for the sessions — his Fender Twin Reverb and a Selmer Truvoice Zodiac Twin 30. The Selmer took the place of his Silvertone amp, which he didn't want to ship to England. I close-miked the amps with Shure 545 and AKG D25 mics in various configurations. For acoustic guitar tracks, a borrowed Martin was miked with a single STC 4038 ribbon mic. (A Burns acoustic had been used for ‘It's True That We Love One Another’). Jack wanted to mic the acoustic in stereo for ‘You've Got Her in Your Pocket’, and I never really do that. I had to pull out my BBC recording manual from the late '50s and look up some stereo-miking techniques!’ ”. There’s a pair of BBC 4038s prominently used on bongos and guitar in the 2005 film from BBC MV3 during ‘Ugly As I seem’. You know I’m going tell tell you that we have a pair of Coles 4038s at New Cut should you want to try out stereo miking, or even recording bongos and acoustic. "Oh man, I need TV when I've got T.Rex ".

So there you have it, Watson himself specifies a Twin. In fact he says it was a pair of twins; a Selmer Twin Thirty as well as a Fender Twin Reverb (but no Sears Twin Twelve). But then in the same quoted passage Watson allegedly said that only one piece of outboard was used on the whole album — that being a Urei 1176 compressor on one vocal track. Doesn’t this contradict his remarks in the BMI interview about lead vocals also being put through tape delay and spring reverb? Ahh, unless he was only referring to the parallel vocal recording via a small guitar combo with internal and inline effects. So who knows, as I said before, different pairs of amps might have been used in different sessions. I would postulate that Jack White took a Fender Twin along (maybe even just a tour rental amp), and alternated pairing it with an AC30 and a Zodiac 30. The Selmer Zodiac is a fantastic amp and in the early ‘60s it was perhaps the the AC30s only real homegrown competition. Of course the AC30 could have predated 1963, it was first released in 1959, but the Zodiac was only introduced in 1963 and was only produced in it’s Croc Skin coat until 1965. In the 1961-63 Blue & Grey period the very similar forerunner of the Zodiac was called the Twin Selectortone.

“And the children drank lemonade”

With half of the tape given over to guitar (in fact there’s guitar on 5 of the 8 tracks, if we count the solo) you might wonder if some fancy processing was going on. For an album with a variety of great guitar sounds you might be surprised to discover that Jack White supposedly only used the same two effects pedals throughout (though I think we can probably add a third made by Boss). As for ‘Seven Nation Army’ one was a Digitech Whammy and the other was a Big Muff Pi, and they were apparently patched in that order, at least when he first started using that pairing. Now, the first Electro-Harmonix Big Muff π , version 1 ‘Triangle’ model, wasn’t made until a good six years after the claimed technological cut-off of 1963 — and I distinctly remember when Digitech first put out the Whammy in 1989. Whether White used any other pedals on Elephant or not, these two are the pedals most prominent on ‘Seven Nation Army’. The first model of Whammy White was seen to use was the XP-100 Whammy-Wah. As already mentioned, the Whammy was obviously used in ‘Seven Nation…’ to drop an octave for the distinctive ‘bass line’ riff. But during shows he was also seen to turn it’s input gain pot (the small black knob next to the input jack on it’s front panel) to overdrive both the Muff and his amps. This was a function that was later taken over by a Boss CS-3 Compression Sustainer, partly due to the Whammy having changed to a regular WH-4 with no input gain pot, sometime before February 2002. The CS-3 was in turn replaced by an MXR Micro Amp after about a year (possibly a tip learnt from supporting The Strokes in the summer of 2002). Maybe he kept the XP-100 just for recording, but if he used his WH-4 for Elephant then he may very well have used a Boss CS-3 in front of it. Maybe he only used the XP for ‘Well It’s True That We Love One Another’. And here’s an interesting point for all the vintage analogue diehards out there: with both the XP-100 and the WH-4, White’s guitar signal was digitised as soon as it went into the Whammy, even in bypass.

In all likelihood the Big Muff pedal Jack White used for the Elephant recordings was much later than the original 1969 Triangle model. The earliest reports of Jack White using a Big Muff reference photos from 2000 when he was using a Black Russian Sovtek Muff — and we have a 1999 Black Russian here at New Cut as well, as you can see in the middle of the Muff line up in the picture below. The Russian made Sovtek range that E-H founder Mike Mathews set up had been very popular (beginning with the first Russian Muff: the Red Army Overdrive in 1992). But by the end of the C20th everyone wanted retro gear (or at least the retro look) and that certainly included Jack White. And lets face it the Red & Black graphics of the ’70s π Muffs certainly co-ordinated with The White Stripes wardrobe. Which means that by the time he got to Toe Rag he had definitely been using a newer Muff. In concert through November 2001 to February 2002, he was seen to be using a stock Red & Black v.9 Big Muff π ‘NYC Reissue’ — the pedal top right in the picture below.

The ‘NYC’ name came from the fact that Big Muff production had started up again in New York, initially in Astor Place in Manhattan before moving across the East river to a facility in Long Island City, Queens. This was the heritage model designed to provide a classic 4 tranny Muff in a ‘70s style box. Boutique pedal engineer Fran Blanche, of Frantone fame, worked for EHX from January ’99 to summer of 2000, revising the reissue circuit — essentially the original Bob Myers π design with some component value changes. The Big Muff design had been in a state of flux during the 1970s, with the circuit morphing through many variants, including some op-amp designs. In Guitar Effects Pedals: The Practical Handbook (Dave Hunter, ch.6, p.203; Backbeat Books, 2004) Frantone marketing director Mia Theodoratus said that when Fran went to work for Electro-Harmonix “ she just got thrown into the gladiators’ ring, and learned how to make very quirky designs work with modern components, which pushed her up to the next level. After she did the New York City Big Muff and made it work — within Mike Matthews’ parameters and with the components she was given — that made her top of her game. ”

Give me Big Muff Pi to go…

By 2004 Jack White was seen using a much older Big Muff π that had been rehoused by Analogman in what looked like a red Hammond enclosure. Anyone who’s consistently put the boot into a large chassis E-H pedal for years will know how dished and dented the top panel of these thin, bent-metal wedges can get. It’s possible that this red house Muff was a first Red & Black chassis version 3 (introduced in 1977). It has an LED, but that could have been added by Analogman or even earlier by someone else even before it was re-boxed. Some forumites have claimed to be able to tell from the knob positions seen on this pedal that it must almost certainly be, definitely-maybe, a version 6. Since the v.6 was made from 1979 to 1984, and was fitted with both hockey puck and Dakaware pointer knobs quite arbitrarily during that time, I can’t imagine how anyone could be certain. But then again, the v.6 was the return to a transistor based fuzz circuit after the distinctive op-amp flavours of the v.4 and v.5, so that’s probably a better call on the red box Muff being a v.6.

Having said that, I’ve since found Kit Rae’s forensic foray into Jack White’s Muff stuff and did find the following observations on the big red π convincing: “ Based on the knob type, knob positions (all at 1:00), this is most likely a V6 Big Muff. The pots in the 1970's Big Muffs were soldered directly to the circuit board, and prior to the V5/6 versions, the 1:00 position shown on Jack's red Muff (above) would have made the tone completely on the treble side, but the knob type was only introduced with the V4 and V5 versions. ” Of course given that the housing had changed there’s no reason why the knobs couldn't have been changed as well. So did White get a v.6 before he went to Toe Rag, or was Elephant done with an NYC? Maybe Liam Watson had a pre-1963 fuzz pedal of the type I chronicled in this blog about the origins of guitar distortion . White would go on to use other fuzz pedals in his various musical outfits, including a white Wicker Big Muff with Wanda Jackson in 2011 and a Zvex Woolly Mammoth for gated fuzz, but he has often returned to both the Fran Blanche NYC and the Analogman Pi (in a variety of different paint jobs with different bands).

Our extensive collection of effects pedals at New Cut Studios is lacking a Whammy but we have several Muffs, both old and new — and as luck would have it, we seem to have the main models of Muff employed by Jack during his time as a White Stripe. The top row in the above image of the New Cut Electro-Harmonix arsenal goes like this: Big Muff π Red & Black version 6, 2nd edition from 1981; Black Russian Sovtek, version 8, circa 1999; and standard Red & Black NYC re-issue version 9, c.2000 with no Tone Bypass switch. The 1981 v.6 top left is easy to distinguish from the 2000 v.9 opposite as it has no LED between Volume & Tone pots and it has no battery hatch underneath. But it’s a lot harder to distinguish from an old version 3 without looking inside at the transistors (I checked, they’re 2n5088 NPN on the standard EH3034 PCB). Incidentally the Electric Mistress in the picture is a rare version (despite only being a 1999 version 4 reissue) as it is missing the dot on the second i of the screen print. The extra LED is a mod for rate indication. Our v.9 NYC Muff is definitely in the same family as it’s v.6 sire but it doesn’t quite cut the way the older pedal does. In fact, in comparison it’s a little wooly (though not in a Zvex way). It’s almost like it was being tailored towards the grunge market. Surely not.

Touring musicians often own a lot more gear than most people who like to speculate on forums (though there are some serious amateur collectors out there). Maybe you only want one Big Muff — your idol probably has 10 *******. So which one did they use to record your favourite song? Maybe there was an even older, much-more-major-mojo, Muff found in the pedal cupboard at the studio that sounded better than the three they brought with them. Just another reason why pointing to photos snapped over the top of a muso’s wedges might not evidence an informed opinion on their recording practice. Now here’s another roadie observation for you, where possible we like to have a touring rig that never get’s messed with. Backline techs hate it when musicians go into the lock-up. They always make a mess and they often break things; it’s like letting your kids play with the train set unsupervised. And no, they will not put it away tidily afterwards. It’s often the case that musicians will have a bomb proof, road-worthy pedal board built for them that never goes anywhere near a recording studio. I’ve made a few myself over the years, including the boards themselves (I stuck an image at the end of this episode showing a pedal board I knocked up, because I noticed I used a Muff and a Whammy when laying it out). And if the band are top headliners there will be a back-up pedalboard, and probably also a B-Rig board for festival leap-frogging. So wherever possible (especially as these days management don’t want to pay for crew to be around much during rehearsals, let alone during the recording process), we will try to keep touring equipment away from unsupervised usage. Because we are the ones who get shouted at when the gear doesn’t work even though we are not the ones who kick the shit out of it whilst full of adrenalin and god knows what else.

“I got a job for Salvation Army…”

I think I only spent time around The White Stripes once, and it just happened to be right at the very start of their Elephant expedition. I was working for stage manager & pirate captain Clive Taylor on a Channel 4 TV show called The Cut ********. It was shot at the Ocean, a venue that used to be on the other side of Mare Street from the Hackney Empire and it was presented by Jo Whiley. Looking it up I find that it was November 12th 2001, just 5 months before they went to record Elephant at Toe Rag — which was just a 20 minute walk from the Ocean. And of course that November was when they first went to try out Liam Watson’s studio, to record ‘Well It’s True That We Love One Another’. Maybe they recorded it that very day. They’d not long finished their first short UK tour of only about 10 dates that August (when they’d met Watson) and were just starting a proper European tour, still in support of White Blood Cells . They had only recently broken onto the scene in the UK like some mad, Mid West crossbreed of The Carpenters and the MC5.

My over-riding impression of the TV show was how cramped it usually was to get rolling risers around the set with larger bands. The White Stripes were much more manageable. I wish I’d paid more attention to the equipment (especially the amps) and taken some photos. I’m pretty sure that the Whammy was still the XP-100 (I'm sure I remember one of their crew pointing out that it was a Whammy-Wah when I remarked on it) and that the Jetson still had both pups. I vividly remember Meg’s ice cream swirl resonant head when we were setting up and her style of playing during the camera passes. Trouble is my memory of everything I was working on around that time is a bit sketchy: my first child Eloise was due 10 days after this shoot and she was born within the month, so I think I can be excused for my level of distraction. Here’s a clip from that TV gig which showcases the K6533 and the NYC Muff admirably.

Liam Watson’s approach to recording The White Stripes made a huge contribution to their career. The choices he made were fruitful decisions in every way. Vintage mics, into a small analogue desk and out to a quality analogue tape machine. That’s how we prefer to do things at New Cut Studios as well. And if you like vintage amps and want to go through more than one, well, we’ve got plenty to choose from — as well as a large collection of effects pedals. Check out our Equipment list from the menu in the header. Want to double track your vocals with a U87 but also send it down an SM7B through a Selmer Little Giant and out into an AKG D58E/200 maybe? Sick of staring at dozens of tracks of vocal takes and a blizzard of guitars? Don’t know where the plug-ins end and the music begins? Come and make a recording at New Cut Studios.

I am hugely indebted to Kit Rae’s exhaustive History Of All Versions Big Muff webpages as the only resource worth consulting on the subject; especially his in-depth discussion of the varieties used by Jack White; I wish I’d found that particular page earlier. His website is fascinating and informative and will give you a much better understanding of the Big Muff and it’s place in Rock n’ Roll history.

* They had already taped one of the album’s songs, ‘Well It's True That We Love One Another’, at Toe Rag the previous November and would add another recorded at BBC Maida Vale for a Radio 1 Evening Session: the excellent cover of ‘I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself’. It’s perhaps not quite as great a Bacharach & David cover as The Stranglers version of ‘Walk On By’ — but it’s pretty damn good. Someone even managed to persuade Sofia Coppola to film Kate Moss pole dancing to it for a promo. Not my cup of tea, but it’s alright if you like watching skinny girls who can’t really dance.

** Even Studer’s legendary J37 4-track didn’t arrive until 1964. The Swiss company were so careful in perfecting the best tape recorders conceivable, that they didn’t release the A80 until 1970.

*** I have a particular fondness for ‘Seven Nation Army’. In September 2013, in the interactive museum/gallery which at the time was called @Bristol (now re-named with the even sillier monicker We The Curious) I was playing with magnets, making bridges of iron filings with my eight-year-old twins. I heard the menacing rhythm of that E minor riff played perfectly in hauntingly hollow tones. Looking around I saw my eldest daughter Eloise, not quite 12 years old, sat at a kind of xylophone made from the long yellow polypropylene plastic pipes used for gas mains. There she was, playing ‘Seven Nation Army’ with beaters like foam rubber ping-pong bats. I was very proud. Incidentally I first saw an instrument just like that in Blue Man Group’s show Tubes at the Astor Place in December 1991. Back then it was the hottest ticket off-Broadway and I still don’t know how my then girlfriend got hold of them, but I think her public schoolboy brother had a connection.

**** As I was writing this I got distracted by plastic guitars and ended up writing far too much to include here about the history of Res-O-Glas Airlines: in large part because I also had a modern Eastwood repro version of the Jetson/Hutto model in my hands at the time. The synchronicity of this guitar being in for repair at exactly the same time meant I tried to work it into this article but I ended up with an entirely separate Jetson blog .

***** Later the same evening (April 8th 2022) Jack White proposed to his girlfriend onstage at The Masonic in Detroit, and then promptly married her for an encore. In November 2014 I was there with Chrissy Hynde when we played the building’s Jack White Theatre. Formerly the old Cathedral Theatre, it was christened for White after he donated money to save the building’s venues and keep them open. We also got given a private tour of the complex, which was extremely creepy and seriously weird. It is the largest Masonic Temple in the world and from the outside it looks like a cross between the Nazi Flakturm IV G-Tower bunker in Hamburg and a high-rise cathedral. From the inside it seems even bigger and contains a whole series of venues and theatres, chapels & sanctums. It is an extremely atmospheric place.

****** I used to wonder if the SV suffix was an abbreviation for the ‘silver’ face plate and knobs, which are really brushed aluminium in a totally ’70s HiFi separates stylee. Selmer Production Manager John Weir who helped develop the range claims the initials stood for Selmer Valve — the SV was to distinguish them from the host of cheap SS (solid state) amps that were increasingly prevalent at the time. Most of the changes Selmer made to it’s amplifier lines over the years were cosmetic, the basic circuits didn’t change very much, particularly the popular Treble N’ Bass and Zodiac amps. The Tn’B started out as the Bassmaster in 1962 and the Zodiac was a more marketable 2 x12 version of the Selector-Tone Automatic 1x15 from 1961. The original Selmer Bassmaster was basically a British beat era copy of the 6G6 Brownface Bassman, Selmer even copied the Fender piggyback slide brackets exactly. The 30w Bassmaster then grew into the 50w EL34 Treble N’ Bass — a solution that Marshall later adopted for their marvellously well marketed Plexi. I wrote a little more about those amps in my Traynor Bassmaster article .

******* J Mascis has an entire museum collection of about forty different Muffs and just last week Electro-Harmonix released a signature pedal based on his famous purple Rams Head model. If you want a really close copy of that sound however you need to get hold of the Fuzz Munchkin from Tym's Guitars in Brisbane — who reverse engineered his circuit directly from J's touring pedal when it was in for repair. I called in to the shop a few years ago to buy one but Tym told me he'd sold out.

******** Clive was Stage Manager for TV and former Kentish Town Forum SM Brian Concannon ran the venue side of the gig. Clive took care of the live music side of many TV shows and I worked with him on a lot of TV stuff for different channels in different venues and studios around London. I'll have to have a think about which stories I can tell from those years.

©️ Mark Vickers July 2022

Do you have Sweet Dreams about re-inventing yourself?

2022-08-22T12:14:37Z

Super 8: Episode 2.

Art-Pop made on state of the art equipment, with pristine production in a top-flight studio and at least 24 record tracks to play with - how else could you lay down an album as futuristic, or as momentous, as Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) in 1982? Well, in reality, Eurythmics recorded everything themselves, mostly in a large attic, on an 8-track tape machine with some old keyboards, an experimental drum machine and a whole lot of ingenuity. You see Dave Stewart had been paying attention in Germany the previous year, when Conny Plank of Kraftwerk and Neu! renown was producing Eurythmics’ debut album In The Garden — with considerable input from Holger Czukay of that other great Krautrock band Can. Lennox & Stewart had worked with Conny Plank before, with their previous band The Tourists, who recorded their self titled debut album at his studio in 1979. Whilst recording In The Garden both Czukay and Plank encouraged Stewart to ‘bend the rules’ of accepted studio practice and be more experimental with recording techniques. But then Eurythmics was always intended to be more than just a pop band. Right from the start Lennox & Stewart had described their new venture as a multi-media art experiment. In 2018 Lennox remarked on where their priorities lay when they started their project: “ In the Garden is an unorthodox, experimental record, which could easily be described as avant garde. We were always trying to push boundaries and explore new approaches to creating sounds and musical styles. The only challenging part of not having commercial success, was how to survive long enough to record another album, as we were pretty strapped for cash in those days ” (Super Deluxe Edition, 6th July 2018). Struggling artists they were, but thanks to a sympathetic bank manager they got a loan of £5000 to set up their own home studio. And while they didn't describe themselves merely as a pop band, they went on to produce a perfect pop song.

“Man machine, power lin e”

Other important contributors to that first Eurythmics record included Karlheinz Stockhausen’s son Markus, Blondie drummer Clem Burke and Czukay’s Can cohort Jaki Liebezeit — surely the best surname for a drummer ever?* Dave Stewart had this to say of the experience: " Conny and his partner Holger took me aside one day to show me what they were doing - all these weird, obscure experiments… and these were forty year-old men! They were like kids with paint pots and a blank canvas, they could do anything. " This impetus to creative joy was manifested on Eurythmics’ next album in a truly creative approach to sound design. While they had experimented with electronica for In The Garden , it was a record still very much rooted in ’70s song writing. For their second album as a duo Lennox and Stewart would make a more radical statement. It hasn't even got a verse. That incredible title track, a single that swept around the world like a disco tsunami, includes such state-of-the-art digital synthesizers as tuned milk bottles and an old ‘60s Farfisa Compact organ put through a spring reverb. And the recorder? When I started researching this article, I read that it was all done on a Tascam 58-8, to analogue 8-track ½” tape, with a final mix down to a Revox B77. We like to record to ½” 8-track analogue tape as well, here at New Cut Studios, and our recorder of choice for tracking is an Otari MX5050 machine.

Reading around a bit, it seems TEAC’s 58-8 didn’t come out until 1983 and 'Sweet Dreams…' was completed in 1982. The TEAC 80-8 would seem to be the most likely Tascam Series candidate for the Eurythmics to have used for tracking. And it was a tape machine very much on a par with the Otari MX5050 that was the subject of Episode 1 — though I have read that the Otari has the edge when it comes to recording drums because of it’s tight low-end response. We have used our MX5050 for tracking drums many times and the results have been superb, especially when put through our Shadow Hills GAMA 8 mic pre. The very first tape recorder to come out of the humble TEAC shop near Tokyo bay was the TD-102 — it was pretty much a smaller (and more to the point cheaper) copy of the Ampex 300 we also talked about in Episode 1. So while the Tascam 58-8 did not arrive in time to record Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) , the Tascam 80-8 had already become a popular writing tool in the Seventies. Groups such as The Eagles, The Doobie Brothers, Boston and Kansas, all endorsed it in the pages of the the music gear mags of the time. If your band had the money to buy more than one machine for home use, it was a great way for musicians to write & record, share tapes and contribute to demos. By 1979 the TEAC Corporation of America were advertising the Series 80-8 as “ the most popular 8-track multichannel recorder in the world ”. I wonder if some of that popularity was down to the truly phenomenal success of a little movie by a guy called George Lucas. Because in 1978 TEAC had already advertised in the trade press that the Series 80 “ was used in the production of Star Wars ’ special sound effects—lasers, light sabres, starships and the voices of C3PO and R2D2 ”.

‘Somebody Told Me’

Popular mythology asserts that in creating the voice of R2-D2, sound design pioneer Ben Burtt used the Oberheim OB-1 monophonic synthesiser and we also have an original 1978 OB-1 here at New Cut Studios (see photo at the end of this article). Legend even has it that Obi-Wan Kenobi’s name is a homophonic derivation from OB-1, but since Star Wars hit cinemas in May 1977 and the OB-1 wasn’t released until ’78 it seems unlikely that either of these attributions are correct. Its probably an urban myth, maybe someone spotted the Club Obi Wan sign on the nightclub awning at the start of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom , and took the idea a little too far. Perhaps the new Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi series will reveal something of the Jedi master’s teenage years as padawan to Raymond Scott at Manhattan Research. Oft repeated with more authority, however, is Burtt’s application of an ARP 2600 to vocode his own voice in the creation of R2-D2’s expressive characterisation. I can’t find any info online about what gear was used to record the somewhat flanged & delayed voice of C-3PO, but their endearing, squabbling relationship was initially tracked on a Series 80-8. Moving forward a few years to 1982, the OB-1 was often identified as a prominent instrument on the song ‘Sweet Dreams…’ but that may be another muddled anecdote.

Dave Stewart once said that the synth top-line was partly played on the OB-1’s polyphonic big brother, the OB-X which Oberheim debuted in 1979. On that occasion he said the main riff was comprised of that part played by Annie Lennox on top of a part sequenced on an SH-101 from a prototype drum computer called the Movement Drum System. Unless you believe it was more prosaic: like an SH-09 run from a CSQ-100. Unfortunately we can’t rely on Stewart himself for a definitive list of ‘what synths, used where’ on their devastating disco floor-filler. In the years immediately following Eurythmics breakthrough he probably wasn’t all that keen on having his unique arrangement aped and as the years went by he appears to have compounded early disinformation with unreliable recollection. Either way the debate on keyboard forums continues to be contested to this day. Did they use a Juno 6 or a Juno 60? They definitely had a Juno 60 by the time they were upstairs in the church because it appears in some B&W photos from about 1984. There are endless opinions out there, believe me. What sounds exactly like a slightly detuned 2-oscillator OB-X patch to some, sounds just like a Juno 6 with the chorus on to other keyboard experts. Anecdotal references have been made to Dave Stewart borrowing various Oberheims, Rolands & Prophets from The London Rock Shop — which was a small music store situated on Chalk Farm Road, near The Roundhouse and very close to the Eurythmics first studio. The most useful source I found about the making of this ground breaking banger is the July 2018 Sound On Sound ‘Classic Tracks’ article, which is fairly comprehensive and to a good journalistic standard, and I refer you to that. But there are many inconsistencies in Stewarts’ contribution to this article compared to previous accounts. Whether or not Stewart used an OB-X or OB-1 on ‘Sweet Dreams’, he certainly acquired a rhythm component from Oberheim, adding the superb DMX to his arsenal sometime during their move to a bigger studio in 1983.

The very earliest Eurythmics endeavours in electronica came from a very basic set-up indeed. In 1980 while The Tourists were imploding as a band on tour, or so the story goes, Dave Stewart was holed up in a cheap hotel, messing around with a Wasp in Wagga Wagga, NSW. While his life as one of The Tourists was nearing it’s end, his life as a professional tourist would soon go supernova. Once he got back from down-under he started running that little Electronic Dream Plant mono-synth with EDP’s Spider sequencer into a TEAC 144 Portastudio — the original compact cassette, home multi-tracker**. Stewart soon added a Roland TR-606 Drumatix to his portable studio and some of these early experiments ended up on Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) . The EDP Wasp was first offered for sale in 1978 the same year as the OB-1, but for a lot less money and Dave Stewart allegedly bought his from Rod Argent’s Keyboards. It was a cool sounding little instrument and it was one of the compact noise makers that helped democratise synthesis in the post punk electro boom — but it was definitely a budget synth and it’s conductive “keyboard” was prone to false triggering. In some ways however, it was quite advanced: as an early digital hybrid, it’s analogue filtering & envelopes coupled with two digital oscillators made it’s tuning very stable compared to most Seventies synths. For most of the recordings he used it on, Dave Stewart actually mic’d it’s small built-in, 4” x 2” oval speaker — though he may have sometimes combined that with it’s line-out.

Stewart has said that his favourite synth at the time (and the one he kept going back to) was the Roland SH-09. And as already mentioned Eurythmics soon added an even more popular, working class mono synth from Roland — the classic SH-101. Their modest 606 beat box was also supplemented with the far more flamboyant Movement Systems Drum Computer. Built in Bridgewater, Somerset, it was not a cheap bit of kit when it was released in 1983 with a list price of £2000. I mean, it was two fifths of Eurythmics’ entire studio budget. Stewart actually bought one of the prototypes in ’82, driving down to get the thing and sleeping on the floor of one of the guys from Movement Computer Systems while it was being built. The MCS Mk.I that Stewart bought came with a separate TV monitor, but the later Mk.II came housed in a bright orange case that looked like a home business machine complete with cathode ray tube. The Movement combined analog synthesised and 8-bit sampled percussion sets, but true to form Eurythmics used it in unorthodox ways to trigger all kinds of sound generators to create true dance floor devastation for 'Sweet Dreams'. It was also used as a much discussed prop in the striking video that added to the song’s impact on pop culture in the early Eighties. The MCS was run from the sync track on the TEAC 80-8 (you have to remember that only 7 tracks on the Tascam were used for audio) and recorded straight to the Revox on mix-down.

As mentioned earlier, Kosmische Kommandant Konrad Plank had previously produced the first albums by The Tourists in 1979 and Eurythmics in 1981. Known simply as Conny’s Studio, Plank set up in 1974 just east of Bonn and Cologne in Neunkirchen (isn’t that German for Nine Churches? what is it with studios and churches?). The facility was centred around a 56 channel desk that he built himself along with Peter Lang and Michael Zähl. Before long it was a legend of note to have "recorded in Conny's Studio by Conny Plank”, or something similar on the back of your record. The sleeve notes to the Eurythmics’ debut say it was “ Recorded at Conny's studio, Cologne between February 81 & June 81 ”. In The Garden was engineered by Dave Hutchins, who Plank had lured away from the old Island Studios in 1977 with the help of Brian Eno — another playdate regular at Conny’s kindergarten. Built by Chris Blackwell at the end of the ’60s in a 17th century church at the corner of Basing Street & Lancaster Road, Island Studios played an amazing part in the history of popular music. In 1973 Island Records moved their offices out of the building (but retained ownership), when it got renamed Basing Street Studios under Muff Winwood, and then in 1980 it became Sarm West under Trevor Horn. Before being converted to a recording studio in 1969, the building was yet another former church, that had been used by Madame Tussauds as a workshop and store room for dummies, after being deconsecrated. It had been desecrated by even more dummies by the time the recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was made there in 1984. By that time Dave Stewart was building his own studio in another church in North London. Here’s a history of the Island studios made for BBC Radio 4 .

But when they started making their second album Eurythmics would have none of the luxuries afforded by studios like these. They started to record Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) on the attic floor of an old warehouse, where they were living at the time, above a picture framing business in Chalk Farm, North London. With the five grand bank loan, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart set to building a basic studio on the top floor in what could be described as a dingy arrowhead of an attic. The only reason there is a grand piano on that album is that the guy who ran his business out of the floor underneath theirs was a keen pianist and liked to practice at work between making picture frames. Supposedly he gave them permission to run long cables down there after business hours and plug in a pair of Beyer M201s (the only mics Eurythmics owned at the time). Foldback for the piano session was very rudimentary apparently, as was illumination: all the parts were recorded by torchlight. Their V-shaped live room was the control room — was their living room — with no acoustic treatment at all. All their audio was routing through an old Soundcraft Series ii desk, hardly up to the minute or up to speed. And their outboard didn’t exactly motor: aside from the stereo spring reverb already mentioned their only other artificial atmosphere came from a Roland RE-201 Space Echo. Possibly the only outside input the duo had in setting up their attic and starting to record was from former Selector bass player Adam Williams. Continuing the Two Tone tint, the only other musician I found mentioned as a contributor was some time Specials trumpeter Dick Cuthell.

‘Reality Effect’

Most of the technology they had was pretty lo-fi: we’ve already mentioned the ’60s Farfisa Combo Compact organ and water-filling milk bottles to pitch is about as home-made as you can get. The Oberheim was obviously a sophisticated bit of kit, but was already 3 years old in 1982, at a time when the acceleration of synth evolution was stratospheric. Limited resources were only one reason for their inventive approach to sound design. As well as the aforementioned milk bottles, for the song ‘This Is The House’ they whipped a clothesline against a wooden door to simulate a Simmons Claptrap. A chef’s grunts were recorded and used for the rhythm track of ‘Love Is A Stranger’. Train brakes squealing, mixed in with slide guitar, create a voice in ‘The City Never Sleeps’. “ I really wanted to play something at the beginning of ‘Jennifer’, where the sound of the sea comes in. I wound up banging these two funny sticks from a picture frame ” ( Keyboard , December 1984, p.52, cover story ‘Dave Stewart: On Eurythmics’). Experimenting with found sound and studio electronics was not a casual caprice for The Eurythmics but a fully developed approach inspired by mischievous mentors. In the July 2018 SOS Stewart describes the efforts he would go to for the sound he wanted: “ For handclap sounds we would just get something like an open hi‑hat from the drum computer and then stand around the mic and clap and send those into a [Electro‑Harmonix] Big Muff fuzzbox pedal, with the least amount of fuzz possible. Then I’d mix it with the original recorded sound to try and create a clap that sounded a bit white noise‑y. ” We have several Big Muff pedals at New Cut Studios, but I think the next episode of our 8-Track blog will be the best place to talk about them in more detail.

Actually not all of the song ‘Sweet Dreams…’ was recorded in the Chalk Farm attic. There you go, if we’re going to talk about obstacles to creativity, why not throw losing your studio into the mix? It was still 1982 and their second album wasn’t finished when they lost the space above the picture framers — along with the grand piano. They soon found a new home thanks to Trumpton and Captain Pugwash animators Bob Bura and John Hardwick, who owned a church in Crouch End built in 1855 by a dodgy Christian sect called the Agapemonites. The two film makers used most of the ground floor of the church as their studio — and initially Hardwick & Bura let Eurythmics use the ground floor cloakroom rent free — before asking them to move into a bigger space, which their new Landlords even helped to build. Stewart would later buy the building off them in 1984 and The Church Studios would take it’s place in recording history (including hosting Bob Dylan), before David Grey bought it in 2004 and in 2013 the studio was bought by Adele producer Paul Epworth. My old mate, the mastering engineer Marc-Dieter Einstmann worked there as engineer & tape op in the late ‘80s with Depeche Mode, by which time it was already becoming one of the worlds famous studios.

“Their A&R man said, 'I don't hear a single’ ”

Issued in June 1982 as the second single from an album that still had the working title Invisible Hands ***, ‘The Walk’ was one of those songs where Stewart had transferred some of its parts directly from the TEAC Portastudio onto the Tascam eight‑track tape. “ You only had seven tracks,” he says, “‘cause track eight had timecode. ‘The Walk’ has got me playing the bass line on a Roland SH‑101, and then there’s all these vocals and a trumpet solo by Dick Cuthell who was playing with the Specials. It has a lot of things going on, on seven tracks. It’s got about 36 things... you would need a 48‑track really. But you had to sort of decide and bounce them on the spot… So now we had a very basic thing — Tascam eight‑track, a Bel noise reduction unit which I used to use compress Annie’s vocals by switching it in and out on the vocal track. Then a Roland Space Echo and a Klark Teknik [DN50] spring reverb which we kind of dismantled and did all sort of experiments with, and a second‑hand Soundcraft desk. ” ( Sound On Sound July 2018). Most of their gear was second hand, both the Series ii desk and the B.E.L. BC-3, looked like they could have come out of the Radiophonic Workshop’s Room 11 at BBC Maida Vale. After releasing ‘Love Is A Stranger’ as the second single to little notice in November, on the 21st January 1983 ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’ was released as a single. Stewart said that their label RCA didn’t think the song was strong enough. It entered the UK chart at #63 in February, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Eurythmics didn’t hang around however, ten months later they released their third album Touch, recorded entirely at their new base in the Crouch End church. I found two great B&W photos of this set-up online, taken I believe after they moved to larger rooms upstairs from the cloak room. By the time these pictures were taken they had a lot more than an 8-track to play with. In the left hand corner of both photos you can see the main recorder labelled merely as “New Soundcraft 24-track”. I’m pretty sure that its a Soundcraft Magnetics 760 2” machine (c.1980) which in turn was later superseded by an Otari MTR-90 II 2″ 24-track. In fact Eurythmics also bought an Otari MTR-12 1/4″ 2-track as their stereo mastering recorder. In the background is a Soundcraft Series ii in it’s 16-into-8 configuration (c.1975); which must have been that first desk from the 5 grand loan to set up above the picture framers. Because of it’s quality and price point the Series ii was a very common desk to match with Otari and Tascam recorders in Europe at the time. There are several more pieces of outboard in evidence in these pictures than were available in the original Chalk Farm attic rooms. Among other units there is what looks like an LC-6 Compressor from Furman and the Space Echo now has an RE-501 Chorus Echo sitting on top of it. Stewart was still using a B.E.L. Electronics BC-3-8T 8-track noise reduction rack: not much use with the 760 24-track you might think, but apparently Stewart mainly used this compander unit as a compressor for Lennox’s vocals. A compander circuit is often used to compress a source for recording to tape and then expand it again on playback; it is thus commonly used to reduce tape hiss in proprietary systems like Dolby and dbx noise reduction.

808 Statements

Only a few things are tagged in the pictures, one of them being “Dave’s famous ghetto blaster”, but clearly labelled are both the Roland SH-09 & Juno 60 that had expanded their synthesiser arsenal at this time. There is also what initially looked to me like a smaller version of the legendary 808 drum machine sitting on top of a 2-U multi-effect rack above the SH-09. Some image googling established that rather than being a TR-808 Rhythm Composer, it is actually a Roland CSQ-100 Digital Sequencer. I found a quote in the December 1983 issue of Modern Recording & Music where Stewart said “ I bought a Roland SH-09 synthesizer with a CSQ-100 digital sequencer… ”. An online search for the CSQ turned up an interview with Dave Stewart in the December ’84 issue of America’s Keyboard magazine that yielded some more info: “ I like the SH-09” he says, “I’ve had it with me on hundreds of jobs; it’s like Old Faithful. And it’s this particular one I love. I’ve used another SH-09 when mine was broken, and it wasn’t the same. I put everything in the same position, and it sounded completely different to my ears. You can get these great little wood block sounds, and that steel drum sound on ‘Right by Your Side’. I used it on the beginning of ‘This is The House’ too, playing bongo sounds. ” ( Keyboard , December 1984, p.50, cover story ‘Dave Stewart: On Eurythmics’.)

But that multi-effects unit that’s sitting underneath the CSQ wasn’t designed as a piece of studio outboard at all. Unless I’m very much mistaken, it is an Ibanez UE-400 multi effects processor, which debuted in 1980 and it was very much designed for guitarists — which you can usually tell from the 5 button foot-switch strip that it came with. Unfortunately both photos cut off at the bottom just before most of the various effects pedals come into view — though I’m pretty sure I can see the corner of a Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble (I own one and keep it at New Cut Studios). The UE-400 had a sister model, the UE-405 which had a different set of sounds so the knob pattern was slightly different. The colour scheme of these units changed from black, to grey & beige at some point. While still in it’s blackface version the Distortion effect was swapped out for an Overdrive; around the same time the stencilling changed from yellow to white. Dave Stewart was of course a skilled guitarist and his UE-400 is clearly black in the photos, but it’s impossible to tell with the resolution of these old images whether it is the Distortion or the Overdrive version. The footswitch brick changed over time as well. The button style of what we’d now call the floor controller is usually the most obvious way to tell the age of the UE-400 units. The first models had the small ‘square button’ Q-1 FET switch of the 1980 Compact series pedals (think TS-808 Tube Screamers), which changed for the larger ridged-cover switches of the 1982 line of effects (think TS-9 Tube Screamers).

And right there is the source of a certain amount of urban myth. It is often claimed that the mark 2 UE-400s have the classic TS-808 Overdrive Pro inside. Indeed the Mk.4 foot switch got a new label and proudly boasted the words Tube Screamer, though I think the 2U fascia still said Overdrive. People who’ve had a good poke under the bonnet however have a more complicated tale to tell. Part of the myth is down to the fact that old broken UE-racks are a great source for harvesting JRC4558D chips — which are the op-amps the 8 series and earliest 9 series Tube Screamers were built around. The first Distortion version UE-400 had 11 of these much-mythologised op-amps in the various effect circuits. Interestingly for all that, none of the 4558s are utilised in the distortion itself, which used two Toshiba TA7136P chips — the same op-amps that were also used in the first edition Boss DS-1. So a broken original Distortion 400 may also be a good source of chips for the preferred, original spec Distortion 1. However, the Overdrive version blackface UE-400 Mk.2 had all Panasonic AN6552 op-amps and must have been designed so, because the PCB is printed for them. I don’t know what chips the 9 series styled 400s used, they might be different again. But whatever their chipset, the UE overdrive circuits were certainly similar architecture to the Tube Screamer lineage that Maxon gave birth to with the wide box, grass green, Ibanez OD-855 Overdrive II. The preceding Ibanez OD-850 orange OD and the first green ODII in narrow boxes were more Big Muff flavoured fuzzes****.

The UE-400 effects were laid out as Compressor, Phaser, Overdrive, Chorus/Flanger (later Stereo), but they could be patched in any order with the Insta-Patch feature which also applied to the effects loop for any other pedals you were using. Each panel of the control face had a 5-way rotary switch which had to be set to a different number, or the Insta-Patch error LED lit up and you’d get no output. The UE-405 model effects were laid out as: Compressor/Limiter, Stereo Chorus, Parametric Equalizer, Analogue Delay. The 5-way floor switch for the UE racks was connected by a multicore cable, but it was prone to damaged pins on it’s 8-pin block connector. The range also included the more compact self contained Ibanez UE-300 & 305 3-effect floorboards and there were also Maxon branded versions of all the models*****. Given it’s position in the photo sandwiched between the SH-09 and the CSQ-100, it’s likely that this Ibanez rack wasn’t used for guitar at all. Stewart’s resourceful approach to popular music went far beyond his attachment to the electric guitar.

‘Wrap It Up’

Dave Stewart went on to become one of the in-demand producers of the ‘80s & ‘90s. If you want proof of his genius as a hitmaker go listen to something like ‘You Little Thief’ by Feargal Sharkey. When The Tourists split up it might have been the end of everybody’s career, but Lennox & Stewart had worked with people for whom making music was a fun activity as well as creative expression. And as their careers have shown, that can be quite a productive approach. The ingenuity they brought to mixing found sounds with cutting edge technology produced one of the defining pop songs of the 20th century, and they did it on 8-track tape. There aren’t that many instruments on the title track and what they do is in some ways quite minimal. Such simplicity belies it’s genius. So much of the power of ‘Sweet Dreams’ is shaped by the space in the song, both musically and lyrically. It is magnified by the audience’s imagination, just as all great art should be. And so much of that space is shaped by the musical decisions made by Lennox & Stewart recording, indeed composing, to 8-track tape with limited resources and unbridled creativity. “ The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging ”, as Quincy Jones is supposed to have said. Here’s something Stewart himself said about his approach to the act of recording:

“ One of the secrets to my ability to collaborate with so many other talents is that I take all the pressure away… when I come along and say, ‘Well, you know, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like it. Nobody will ever hear it. We’ll just throw it away, burn it. It doesn’t make a difference,’ suddenly it’s a whole new world. There is no pressure, and you’re allowed to make mistakes, and you know everything is fine. You don’t have to think everything is precious. When you’re relaxed, great things happen, and you can capture something truly amazing. And this creates momentum, because you use that energy and it leads to more ideas and inspiration. People get excited and it becomes fun. And when you’re having fun making music, it’s infectious, for yourself and everyone around you. And it’s also much nicer for your family when you, eventually, get home. ” - Dave Stewart, Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This: A Life In Music (New American Library; 2016).

* Liebezeit, translating quite literally as Lovetime in German, was an inordinately appropriate name for a drummer who’s robotic time-keeping led to him being dubbed “the human metronome”. Maybe his ‘motorik’ beat was a result of him being the original Man Machine of Gotterdammerock. But of course Jaki Liebezeit wasn’t his real name. When he was born, on the 26th of May 1938, in Ostrau, Mittelsachsen about 50km west of Dresden, he was christened Hans Liebezeit. “Sugar Kane?”, “l changed it from Sugar Kowalczyk.” Incidentally, Clem Burke would go on to play drums with Eurythmics on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1981 and during their first UK tour in February and March of 1983.

** You know, if you had the talent then you could do a lot with just a TEAC 144 ‘Sound Cookee’, an Echoplex and a couple of 57s. It’s pretty much all Bruce Springsteen used to make the album Nebraska . Don Felder has said that the 4-track Portastudio on which he wrote the basis of ‘Hotel California’ was a Tascam Series 144. In an interview with Tom Robinson for Record Mirror in July 1985 Dave Stewart was pictured with a Tascam Series 244, which wasn’t released until 1982, so maybe he upgraded his original Portastudio to the superior model later.

*** The track ‘Invisible Hands’ was dropped from the album as well as from the title. Presumably the delightful promise of the phrase “sweet dreams are made of this” and the sheer power of the song made the title of the second album inevitable.

**** Maxon brought out two pedals in 1974 that were basically 4-transistor Big Muffs with a smoother, flatter, tone control in the circuit: the Maxon OD-801 D&S Distortion Sustainer and the original Ibanez OD-850 Overdrive. Even though the Maxon did an 801 D&S that looked remarkably like the 808 Tube Screamer it was one of these Muff copies. It is a circuit design Ibanez would return to in the ‘90s with the Sound Tank series SF5 60’SFUZZ and later FZ5. Even more recently They revisited their original Muff mimesis, bringing out a mini chassis 850 Fuzz in orange.

***** I’ve only ever messed around with one of these Ibanez racks once, when a guitarist I was looking after got hold of one sometime in the Noughties. One time Gary Numan guitarist Steve “Bomber” Harris was playing with Archive at the time and he brought a grey/beige UE into Terminal Studios during rehearsals. It was a fantastic sounding unit and I’ve wanted one ever since, preferably an overdrive 400, though I think Bomber’s was a UE-405.

©️Mark Vickers June 2022

Need an injection of Bleach?

2022-08-07T17:35:34Z

Super 8: What’s so great about 8-track?

As the industry standard, 8-track recording was a relatively short lived phenomenon, probably no more than ten years as the industry standard, during the big league studio era. But for such a short lived professional format, it has captured some ground breaking musical works — and some of them long after it was retired by the major studios as a regular working medium. It’s hard to believe that people would still use technology that old in the 21st century, but hey, The White Stripes won a Grammy with it.

“In his octopus’s garden… ”

Multitrack recording, and indeed specifically 8-track recording, came about largely through the vision of one man — one guitarist actually, who throughout his life was quite an inventive chap. In 1953, or so Les Paul maintained, he had a daydream in which it appeared to him that stacking several record and playback heads of a tape machine on top of each other — and using wider tape — would give you the ability to record multiple isolated instruments, either simultaneously or separately. He’d already kind of invented multi-track recording by modifying a domestic stereo tape deck to allow independent 2-track recording as early as 1949. As with all origin stories there are conflicting narratives, but it would appear that Ampex had also been thinking along similar lines when the erstwhile Lester Polsfuss approached them with his multi-track tape concept. Once alignment and synchronisation issues had been resolved, a tape recorder with eight discrete tracks was finally patented in 1955. By 1957 the very first Ampex 5258 Sel-Sync machines running one-inch tape were in production - and Les Paul was first in line to get one.

The second Sel-Sync 8-track to come off the line went to Tom Dowd at Atlantic Records, where I believe Bobby Darin’s ‘Splish Splash’ was the first hit to be recorded on it (although Dowd has said that the very first session was with Laverne Baker in February 1958). When he became a recording engineer after WWII Dowd was still bound to secrecy regarding his previous job as a physicist. When the Manhattan Project was still actually based in Manhattan he’d been a cyclotron engineer at Pupin Hall and later went on to work at Los Alamos, NM. Drafted into the army with a nominal rank of sergeant at the age of 18 his research contribution to the first atom bomb was far in advance of any theory that Columbia University would teach him in his intended nuclear physics degree, and so secret that it could not be submitted for matriculation. So he abandoned academia and joined the music business instead. He went on to become perhaps the greatest recording engineer of the 1960s and ’70s. He once said that “ having worked with such sophisticated electronic equipment and being musically sensitive, recording was child’s play ” ( Mix magazine, January 1999). I’ve said it before, but you know, sometimes it really is rocket science.

The 5258 tape deck was orthodox enough: almost every professional recorder in the post war years was based on the Magnetophon K1 that BASF & AEG had built back in 1935 for Adolf Hitler*. However the separate signal handling for each channel required some pretty deep equipment racks and you needed pretty deep pockets to afford them as well. At the time the Ampex Sel-Sync cost $10K: that’s over $100K in today’s money. Les Paul called his new machine ‘The Octopus’ when he had it installed in his House Of Sound studio at Mahwah, NJ. The audio engineer who installed it for him was a skilled electronics designer by the name of David Sarser. Sarser was also an able concert violinist, but sadly he would give up this other string to his bow five years later when his Stradivarius was stolen in what turned into a crazy and enduring real-life mystery**.

Funky town

It took a decade for the rest of the music biz to catch up with Les Paul and Ampex - by 1968 most of the major studios had moved up to 8-track reel-to-reel machines - by which time there were already some 16-track studios. For a long time 3-track tape machines had been the standard in many top studios and then by the early ’60s, 4-track machines were the acme. Although during those years a young Frank Zappa, ever at the cutting edge of music, was pushing the envelope out at Pal Recording in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, with a 5-track ½” tape recorder custom built by Paul Buff. All the same, technology was accelerating and by the mid 1970s most recording studios had already installed 16-track recorders and 24-track 2” reel-to-reel was the standard to aim for. The first 24-track 2” tape machine was actually built by Jeep Harned of Music Center Incorporated in 1968, at the same time EMI Abbey Road was only just converting to 8-track (more of which in Episode 4). Recording pioneers TTG Studios in Hollywood commissioned the MCI 24-track, having already been the first studio in the world to have a 16-track machine which they had developed themselves***.

Both the TTG 16- and the 24-track recorders were based on Ampex 300 machines. Despite having come on the scene all the way back in 1949 the Ampex Model 300 decks became a favourite tape transport on which to build improved recorders. The 300 deck, like its forerunner the 200A was an American copy of the German Magnetophon, just as EMI’s BTR machine was in the UK. Jeep Harned later recounted that TTG’s chief engineer Tom Hidley called him up at home and asked him if there was anything stopping them from building a 24-track tape recorder. Jeep said why not, and built 24 of the solid state custom tape channels he’d already become known for; and called Lipps, Inc. in Santa Monica, CA, to specify details like the coil inductance and gap lengths required for the new head configuration. The reaction from established tape giants Ampex and 3M was a mad panic but it still took some time to develop their own 24-track recorders. And most studios, outside California anyway, would keep running 16-track for a few years yet. Multi-track magicians Queen didn’t make an album on 24-track until A Night At The Opera in 1975.

In the narrow window in history when 8-track was the acme of recording technology, there were only a few classic albums recorded with it. However, in later years there were some significant, ground-breaking albums recorded to 8-track analogue tape — albums that were both innovative and genre defining. And some of that innovation is, in part, down to the imagination needed to achieve superb results with limited channels. We still like to use 8-track tape recording here at New Cut Studios, and while we don’t have one of those original “selective synchronous” Ampex machines we do have a recorder with it’s own place in the history books. It was made by Otari and without it the Seattle music scene in the late 1980s might have sounded very different.

Need an injection of Bleach? (Super 8: Episode 1).

In Seattle’s MoPOP museum there is a rather ordinary looking tape machine. Granted, it is a professional 8-track recorder, and not just a domestic reel-to-reel stereo deck — but it doesn’t look like anything special. In fact it would need to go through some serious product development to get this rough diamond into a consumer showroom. It is however the machine on which Nirvana recorded their first album. That’s right, Bleach was laid down over about 30 hours at a cost of $606.17 on this modest 8-track recorder. It is the Otari MX-5050 ½” tape machine from Jack Endino’s Reciprocal Recording studio in Seattle. Those 30 hours were spread over a period between December ’88 & January ’89 rather than one concerted undertaking, but that still has to be the work of a well rehearsed band and an experienced engineer. That is if you want to get anything decent tracked — never mind the precursor to an album that would knock Michael Jackson off the Billboard No.1 and sell over 30 million copies.

Bleach may have been eclipsed by it’s sequel thirty years ago, but superb songs like ‘School’, ‘Love Buzz’ and ‘About A Girl’ still sound great to this day. I still have my copy on snot-green vinyl and it’s still my favourite Nirvana opus. Don’t get me wrong, I ended up playing Nevermind a lot when that came out, and I enjoyed it — but at first it sounded like a dilution to my ears, it felt a little tame. There was more than a whiff of a contrived approach; where Bleach had felt spontaneous, even ingenuous. For me Nevermind lacked the pure, visceral ignition of their debut record. Bleach still sounds fresh and immediate to this day, and the way it was made is a big part of the communion it creates with the listener. It was made on a very mundane machine, but you know what? This tape recorder would have been significant even without Nirvana, because this utilitarian crucible was the conduit for a lot of other great music too. That same Otari tape deck, in the hands of Jack Endino recorded the cream of the Seattle crop — almost all the early recordings by Soundgarden, Mudhoney, TAD, Screaming Trees and Green River were made on this 8-track tape deck at Reciprocal Recording.

We like to record to ½” 8-track analogue tape here at New Cut Studios as well - and our recorder of choice for tracking is the exact same model tape machine: the Otari MX-5050 8SHD. Here’s a picture of it below, in the New Cut control room; great songs like ‘Negative Creep’, ‘Mr. Moustache’ and ‘Blew’ were all put down on a tape recorder identical to ours. Looking at the serial number stamped into the plaque on the back, our machine was made in 1977. At that time the Otari company were relatively new to the field of magnetic tape recording; the people behind it however certainly were not.

Masayuki Hosoda had founded the Otari Electric Co. Ltd. in Japan in 1964, after spending ten years as an engineer working for TEAC. By 1974 he was setting up a subsidiary Otari Corporation in San Carlos, CA, with Mitsuo Takekawa a one time director of Shibaden, Hitachi Group’s video tape division. In May 1975 an advert from the Californian office in the US trades, announced that the “ Entirely new for 1975 MX-7300 and MX-5050 have all the professional features and performance of the more expensive recorders, yet sell at a sensible price. ” The copy was probably written by Brian Trankle, who’d spent 17 years at Ampex before becoming the marketing manager for Otari’s US branch. Otari were keen to point out that their product was aimed at the affordable end of the market: but what really sold the MX models was the spreading word from users of the new tape machines that the audio quality, from input to record, was excellent. It was a standard in fidelity which Otari would maintain. In the ‘90s when everyone was going digital Otari were making new 24- and 32-track MTR-900 machines and titling their adverts “ In an age of disk and digital, why buy analog? ” and giving you very good reasons for doing so. At the same time they certainly were far being anti-digital Luddites. As well as maintaining standards in analogue recording, Otari were the proud sponsors and licensees of RADAR — the very first 24-track digital hard disk recorder.

By the time Bleach was made at the end of the 1980s, very few professional music studios were using 8-track tape, even if they had the machines still lying around. But in the wider media industries there was a continued demand for top quality reliable tape machines, both in smaller chassis and tape capacities. TV and radio stations across the world still had a demand for compact, reliable tape machines, as did film studios, video production companies and universities, so when Otari released the MX-5050B in 1978 it was marketed at exactly these businesses. As mentioned, the first 5050 Series deck had come out in 1975: just how enduring this demand was, is amply illustrated by the fact that Otari was still releasing new marques of the 5050 right up to the MK.IV B.III in 1997. And because of that, MK.IV 5050s are the youngest analogue R-T-R tape decks around. In 2012 the US branch of the company had 5 units still in stock, and the Japanese corporation was still offering to build them to spec.

Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

The MX-5050 was built in full-track mono, half-track, 4-track and 8-track configurations. It’s industrial styling does not make for an elegant attire, but it’s unadorned appearance is fitting for it’s intended role: that of a reliable workhorse. Indeed, by the early ’80s Otari were advertising it as ’The New Workhorse’. It was designed to be run for hours on end, in radio and TV stations that operated at all hours of the day and night. It was intended to be worked long & hard, maintained routinely and repaired when necessary. A machine more likely in fact to need maintenance or repair after sitting idle than in continual use and to that end it was a direct drive deck. It’s three direct drive motors contributed to a tape transport which was mechanically very reliable (if not perhaps to the same calibre as that of a Nagra or a Lyrec). In fact the only belt drive in the MK.I machine was for the counter — and that disappeared when the mechanical tape counter was replaced with digital versions in the later marques.

You have to remember that nobody on the planet could have predicted what would happen to Nevermind when it was released in September 1991. Despite it breaking into the UK Top 40 in it’s first couple of weeks, back on home territory it took until October 12th for it to limp into the Billboard 200 chart. But then, three months later, once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ had become a massive hit, the album was knocking Jacko off the Number 1 spot. Despite the success of Nevermind , or perhaps even because of it, when it came time to make their third album proper, the band members talked about going back to the raw energy of Bleach . There had been the inevitable jibes of major label sell-out when they signed up with David Geffen for their sophomore outing. The thing is though, the worst sell-out accusations came from Kurt Cobain himself. David Hepworth wrote of “ Lennon’s position as simultaneously the leader of the Beatles and also their most prominent detractor ”, well Kurt Cobain adopted the same equivocacy for Nirvana ( Uncommon People , p.259; Hepworth, Black Swan, 2017).

Nine months after the release of Nevermind , at a June 30th gig in Stockholm, Cobain spoke to Everett True about the possibility of Steve Albini producing the next album. Now, that prediction would come true, but in the same breath he also speculated about recording with Jack Endino again. What Kurt actually proposed was working with both producers separately and compiling Nirvana’s third album proper from both approaches. The opening lines of the interview (published as ‘Nirvana: Crucified By Success?’ in Melody Maker on July 25, 1992) are these:

‘ "We're going into the studio as soon as we get back to Seattle," says Kurt. "What I’d like to do is to go into Reciprocal with Jack Endino and rent exactly the same equipment as was there when we recorded Bleach . We record the songs with Jack on an 8-track, record them somewhere else on a 24-track with Steve Albini, and then pick the best."

So you’re aiming for a rawer sound on the next album?
"Definitely less produced," says Chris.

"As long as it doesn’t sound like Nevermind ," adds Kurt." ’

“Something in the way…”

Of course DGC Records would have something to say about that when the third album was eventually delivered. Kurt may have been messing with their heads with its title, because as well as meaning literally “in the womb”, In Utero is used in the medical sense of “not yet delivered”. Or maybe first time fatherhood may have been messing with his own head. Thankfully his first child had been born without incident (despite her parents’ narcotic dependencies), in August, less than a month after that Melody Maker interview. When the waters finally broke on In Utero Geffen’s people weren’t keen on a natural nativity at home, demanding all the bells and whistles of an expensive institution and the album’s gestation almost ended in a still-birth. Perhaps postpartum depression was inevitable for the parents. Despite having his name dropped frequently by Cobain in the press, it had taken a while for anyone to formally engage Steve Albini in the role of midwife. But, after several late night phone confabs full of vague speculation — with someone who Albini wasn’t even certain was Cobain — he finally got hired for the job. And then, in pretty much every detail that Albini predicted in his now-famous ‘strategy letter’ to the band, the label started to interfere with the album they tried to make together. “ 1993 came and went without notice. Besides finishing a record in which we are quite proud of, yet getting shit from people claiming ‘commercial suicide’ before it’s release. ” ( Kurt Cobain Journals , p.280, Penguin, 2002).

Anyway, the take-away from the ‘Crucified By Success?’ inte rview for me is that, far from seeing Bleach as a freshman work they had progressed beyond, Nirvana wanted to recover something at the heart of the band’s identity that they had found recording to 8-track at Reciprocal. Kurt even states that he wants to use “exactly the same equipment”. Not long after that interview, in October 1992, Nirvana had indeed returned to Seattle and to Reciprocal Recording, and they recorded a bunch of predominantly instrumental demos with Jack Endino****. Then a short time after the new Reciprocal sessions, in February of ’93, they went to work with Steve Albini at Pachyderm Recording, a residential studio in Cannon Falls, MN. Pachyderm was set up in 1988, tracking to Studer tape machines through a 1978 Neve 8068 Mk. II console that came from Jimi Hendrix’s Greenwich Village Xanadu: Electric Lady Studios. In that ‘mission statement’ letter alluded to earlier, Albini says “ Oh yeah, and it’s the same Neve console AC⚡︎DC’s Back In Black album was recorded and mixed on. ” I guess in itself that was a sort of progression from the Neve 8028 that Nevermind went through at Sound City but Albini was only half right about this. The truth is that Back In Black was tracked through an MCI 500 desk at Compass Point, the studio built by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell in Nassau, before overdubbing and mixing were done at Electric Lady through the 8068. Around 1976 Blackwell had kitted out Island’s Basing Street Studios in London with two MCI JH-500 series consoles as well. I assume the JH stood for Jeep Harned, that’s right we’re talking about Music Center Inc. again. The layout & signal flow of the MCI 500 would later inspire Sold State Logic’s 4000 design. When Trevor Horn took over and started ZTT in 1983, Basing St. became Sarm Studios and was fitted out with an SSL 4000*****. I’ll touch on Basing Street a little more in Episode 2 of this blog. But hey, even the legendary Criteria C console was replaced with an SSL in 1978.

Albums like Hotel California were a big advert for MCI of course, recorded as it was at Criteria in Miami, FL, home to a thousand hit records. But really the console in Criteria Studio C was a custom build by Jeep Harned rather than a production line JH-500 you could buy ‘off the shelf’. The 500 series desks had a great sound and extended headroom, partly to allow for the advent of digital recording. For all that, after a few years they started to have extensive issues with cold solder joints. Being in-line desks each channel strip was a complicated set of circuits and the JH-500 modules had more than a thousand components. This problem was so pervasive that many studios simply replaced their consoles, rather than face reflowing so many joints. And this has affected their reputation in the vintage desk market. I’ve also read that a lot of MCI desks had poor power distribution & transformers. It was common for many of the production run 4, 5, and 6 hundred series consoles to need these upgrading, among other modifications, even from new. Nevertheless, let it be said that a customised MCI 500 that has been well maintained or restored will be a good sounding desk.

Grover ‘Jeep’ Harned’s introduction to the recording industry came around 1959 when he offered to completely rebuild the poor installation that had been Criteria’s initial construction as a modest one room studio the previous year. After a few nomadic years he’d settled in Florida, with a young family and gone into the growing home stereo trade. As a young man he’d been a US Army Electronics Instructor during the Korean War and then a seismograph prospector in the oil industry. He had more success with pro audio custom build commissions than sales commissions from the domestic variety. In 1965 Harned changed the name of his company, and his former Hi-Fi store Music Center Inc. become a pro audio custom manufacturer called MCI Inc. Aside from the technical input of Jeep Harned, Criteria benefitted from the expertise of another great name. Tom Dowd moved to Miami in 1967 and in 1970 began a relationship that gained Criteria the soubriquet Atlantic Studios South. It was the dawn of a golden era in record making: you only need look to the huge number of hit records that were made at Criteria. “ Well, Jeep had altered or customized every bit of Mack Emerman’s equipment, and brought the Ampexes up to snuff. He didn’t have an MCI tape machine yet. He was still updating Ampexes. And the console was modified by Jeep, whatever the species of it was. Or it might have been the first version that MCI built. I know I did Eat a Peach and 'Layla' on that MCI console. ” (Tom Dowd, Interview with Blair Jackson in Mix magazine, 11/1/99).

The Neve at Pachyderm may have been a deciding factor for Nirvana: Steve Albini had used a 32 channel 8068 Mk.I at Q Division studios in Boston in December 1987 for Surfer Rosa . Long before hiring him to make In Utero Kurt Cobain had already proclaimed in several interviews that Albini had produced his two favourite albums: Surfer Rosa by Pixies and Pod by The Breeders. Actually there may have been a more basic instinct involved in Cobain’s allegiances. Because the only other person involved in both those albums was Kim Deal. In Jim DeRogatis’ collected writings Courtney Love is quoted as saying of Kim Deal: “ She’s very charming and sexy. She doesn’t change her clothes a lot, but she’s still sexy. She’s the only girl that Kurt ever admitted having a crush on. ” (from ‘Courtney Unplugged’, in Request , August 1995. Milk It!, p.47; Da Capo, 2003.) Kurt frequently admired Kim in interviews, but it was always her talent he praised. In the Melody Maker for August 29 ’92 he was quoted as saying “ The main reason I like [The Breeders] is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song, and Kim wrote it. ” Pixies’ breakthrough hit from Surfer Rosa featured Deal on lead vocals but was credited as a co-write with Black Francis - that’s not to say it wasn’t Kim’s song, she certainly wrote the lyrics. Of course Pixies’ quiet/loud/quiet/loud ‘atmospheric structure’ was a style that Kurt employed to great effect.

“Polly wants a cracker”

Kurt Cobain hadn’t been the only artist to remark Steve Albini’s work on Pixies’ debut album. Polly Harvey also cited both that record and again Pod but also Tweez , the Albini-produced 1987 debut album from Kentucky band Slint. The former Big Black and Rapeman frontman had recently formed his latest band Shellac when she sought him out to produce her 1993 sophomore album Rid Of Me ******. In fact it was that recently finished PJ Harvey project, recorded in December ’92, that Albini sent to Nirvana as an example of what he could make Pachyderm Studios sound like, if they were to choose him to produce their third album. And let’s face it, if someone sent you Rid Of Me as an example of anything at all, well you’d pay attention. I guess I’m biased though, I spent much of 2016-17 on the road with Polly and it was one of the best tours I’ve ever done. Surfer Rosa stands up for itself in the pantheon of Indie albums, but Pod probably isn’t anywhere near as well known as The Breeders’ second album. Last Splash with it’s chart storming single 'Cannonball' (and the accompanying video that was Kim Gordon’s first shot as a promo director) helped them cross over into the mainstream.

Check it out though, Pod is a great piece of work. That 1992 Melody Maker article about ‘Ten Records That Changed My Life’ marks one of the first occasions for Kurt speaking about Pod and picking out ‘Doe’ (like a chicken in the bread pan?) as a particular favourite. I love ‘Doe’ and played it a lot on The Maccabees tour bus through June 2015 in the USA when we supported Mumford & Sons because our American Tour Manager’s name was Doe Phillips. But the standout track on Pod for me is the cover of ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’. Deal’s initial scepticism at Ivo Watts-Russell's suggestion of a Beatles cover evaporated once she’d listened to it carefully. The amount of sexual innuendo in the song made it a perfect fit with the tracks she was already laying down. In the Encyclopedia of Popular Music Larkin says of The Breeders’ version that it “ achieves a friction that the original only hints at ” (Colin Larkin, 2011). Given that The Beatles original was variously censored on both sides of the Atlantic and actually banned by the BBC, that’s really saying something.

Stitched together on 8-track tape from 3 disparate song ideas, that had been written across 2 different continents, over 7 separate months in 1968, the version of ‘Happiness…’ that appeared on The White Album was cobbled together from 2 different versions, jumping around between 6 different time signatures in 4 different keys. According to Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Chronicle (p.300), on Tuesday 24 September 1968 takes 46 to 70 of the rhythm track were laid down and then the first section of take 53 and the second half of take 65’s one inch tape were cut & spliced together. I have read in several articles, that ‘Happiness…’ was variously cited by all four Beatles at one time or another as their favourite song on the White Album. The song was written as a kind of history of early Rock N’ Roll styles with all the credit going to John Lennon — though he took lyrical suggestions from several people. That he should later be gunned down so violently in a society awash with guns is an irony that has been commented on often. At http://www.beatlesebooks.com/warm-gun I found this quote attributed to Paul McCartney: “ I was thinking the other day how poignant it was that John, who was shot in such tragic circumstances, should have written this song. ” And then, printed at the top of p.226 in my huge copy of 2000’s Anthology book I found that George Harrison once quipped: “ If everyone who had a gun just shot themselves, there wouldn’t be a problem. ” Maybe that’s what Kurt thought too. In one of his note books he wrote “ Recycle, Vote, Question or Blow Your Head off. Sue me. ” ( Kurt Cobain Journals , Penguin, 2002). Whether his demise was suicide or not, it certainly left a legacy that was commercial. I read a statistic that more than a million other people have been killed by guns in the USA since John Lennon. Now in the summer of 2022 death by firearm is once more in the headlines, America’s incidence of mass shootings seems to have reached critical again.

“She’s not a girl who misses much…”

Drums are the foundation of Rock N’ Roll but they’re not always uppermost in people's thoughts. For Nirvana’s third album they would be at the front of everyone’s mind. In his 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana Michael Azerrad wrote, “ … Kurt was particularly after the drum sound he had heard on two Albini projects — the Pixies’ epochal 1988 album Surfer Rosa and the Breeders’ excellent 1990 album Pod . It’s a natural, powerful sound produced with canny microphone placement rather than phony sounding effects boxes. It reminds Kurt of Aerosmith’s 1976 Rocks album ” (Azerrad, p.313)******. For the most part In Utero would be recorded live with a little overdubbing - much as Rid Of Me and Surfer Rosa had also been laid down. Albini spoke recently of Nirvana’s percussive purpose in an online interview with Daniel S: “Like, they wanted a big booming ambient drum sound, so I made use of the ambient sound of the room much in a very similar manner as I did with the Pixies.”

In an interview with Lewis Largent on 120 Minutes for MTV on June 20th 1993 (which I managed to find again on YouTube), Polly Harvey said this of working with Steve Albini: “He’s the only person I know that can record a drum kit and it sounds like you’re stood in front of a drum kit. It doesn’t sound like it’s gone through a recording process or that it’s coming out of speakers. It’s just, you can feel the sound that he records and um, that is why I wanted to work with him, 'cause all I ever wanted is for us to be recorded and to sound like we do when we’re playing together in a room”. She then went on to praise Albini’s skill in mic placement. Harvey wasn’t the only person praising Albini’s “canny microphone placement” as documented by Azerrad: it was one aspect of the In Utero process that Cobain specifically raved about in several periodicals after the album was finally “ Recorded by Steve Albini ”. Albini in turn, meanwhile, raved about drummer placement. “ ‘Probably the easiest guy to deal with of them all was Dave Grohl’, Albini says. ‘For one, he’s an excellent drummer, so there’s never any worry whether he’s going to be able to play. His playing was rock solid and probably the highlight of my appreciation of the band was watching Dave play the drums. He’s also a very pleasant, very goofy guy to be around.’ ” (Azerrad, p.316.) Coincidently, it was Albini who had played a pivotal role in placing a drummer with The Breeders.

The Breeders give birth to themselves, the legend says, when Kim Deal & Tanya Donelly decide to start a Disco outfit at a 1988 Sugercubes gig in a Boston club. After the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa tour that year, on which the support act was label- & stable-mates Throwing Muses, the respective seconds-in-command of those two bands decide they need to form another outfit if they’re going to get their own songs heard. The initial concept of the band is for a divergent Disco outfit. Lacking the funk (in Donelly’s recounting) to cover ‘Tell Me Something Good’ with any authority, they fall back on the genres they know and record a demo that’s “a little bit Country… a little bit Rock N’ Roll”. They record that demo with Boston violinist/vocalist Carrie Bradley (who would also guest on Pod ), a male bass player and three different male drummers. In order to convene an all girl line up — Deal’s concept for “The Bangles from Hell” — they go out and recruit a Brit, Josephine Wiggs as their bass player, and start auditioning drummers. Wiggs, a childhood cellist, supported Pixies in Europe as a member of The Perfect Disaster in 1988 — at which time she proves her worth to Deal in a variety of roles, including getaway driver. They finally settle on Shannon Doughton to sit behind the kit. She is Steve Albini’s recommendation and at just 19 years old brings a confidence that belies her age. She plays hard & fast and Steve Albini considers her drum sound a fundamental element in the band’s character. Coincidentally when I first started writing this article in May 2021 I was driving through a village called Doughton several times a week. Because of Covid 19, I was making ends meet by delivering plumbing supplies in and around the South-West of Britain, instead of gearing up for the festival season. Doughton intercedes between the main road and Prince Charles’ Highgrove House estate in Gloucestershire, almost like a disguise, or a front.

About A Girl

And just such a beard was Shannon Doughton. The Breeders had really recruited another Britt for their rhythm section: because Shannon Doughton was in reality a young man by the name of Britt Walford from Louisville, KY. Perhaps that’s why she was banished to another room in this clip from Snub TV in February 1990. It’s only the real girls who get close to the camera. Britt played for local Punk outfit Squirrel Bait in the mid ‘80s, before going on to spearhead the Post-Rock vanguard in Slint. In early ’87 Slint supported Big Black in Louisville which led to Steve Albini producing their first album Tweez after Walford and fellow former Squirrel Baiter Brian McMahon both moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern University. After hanging out with Albini while he was recording the Pixies, Britt “ended up living with Steve. Well, basically crashing on his couch for like 6 months.” Britt grew up playing in Louisville bands like Languid And Flaccid, and Maurice from the age of just 11 and by the age of 18 was an accomplished pianist. He went on to play bass, drums and guitar in Palace Brothers with Will Oldham and it was Bonnie Prince Billie in fact who took the now iconic B&W cover photo for Slint’s groundbreaking second album Spiderland . (This time Oldham was behind the camera, having appeared as the mystery crash helmeted driver of the Saab 900 in the cover photo for Tweez .) Unfortunately once that finely crafted second album was finished, so was the band and they split. It’s influence however was far from finished, not by a long chalk. It’s one of those records that truly deserves the epithet “seminal”.

Slint’s second album was not produced by Steve Albini, but in a prescient review in Melody Maker when Spiderland was released, he predicted “ In 10 years it will be a landmark and you’ll have to scramble to buy a copy then. Beat the rush. ” Albini was under-selling it. The cinematic breadth of Spiderland and the calm assurance of it's delivery would make it a touchstone album for the entire Post-Rock genre. When a reconstituted Slint toured their influential 1991 album around European festivals in 2014 I went with them as backline tech. I got on well with Britt and we had some great conversations that we followed up via email at the end of that run. I asked Britt about his time as a female drummer and his first exciting trip to the UK at the age of 19. He told me that initially the new “all female” foursome practiced and wrote at Fairfield House, Josephine Wiggs’ parents’ home in Biggleswade, about 50 miles north of London. It was from this dilapidated, 14 bedroom, Grade II listed, pile of bricks that Josephine’s environmental activist father finally brought down Concorde. Britt told me they then got stuck into proper rehearsals in Camden Town before heading to Palladium, a residential studio in Edinburgh, to record Pod with Steve Albini in January of 1990. That’s Britt you hear at the end of ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ asking “Josephine, do you think you’re going bald?”

Breadcrumb Trail

Britt Walford would go on to many other bands and projects (as would Brian McMahon & guitarist David Pajo) and he would return to collaborate with Kim Deal on numerous occasions. Watch him serving alongside Kim & Kelley Deal in the marvellous video to 2014’s ‘Biker Gone’. But the only other record that Britt made with The Breeders per se was the 1992 four song EP Safari on which he used the nom de guerre Mike Hunt. Assuming it was a joke about his lack of a vagina, I mentioned it to him in an email and he found it “hilarious” that I genuinely went to school with a guy called Mike Hunt. The next time Slint toured Europe I couldn’t do it: mostly I was on the road with Suede again, but I told them I’d catch up with them somewhere, since half the Suede team wanted guest-lists for Slint’s London gig. I’d spotted a poster for upcoming Slint shows, round the corner from the rehearsal studio where I was working with Chrissie Hynde and sent them all a phone picture of it to get the guest-list ball rolling********. In another coincidence, when I was conceiving this blog, Rolling Stone magazine published this in depth interview about the legacy of Spiderland which is both fascinating and informative: rollingstone.com . I don’t know that Kurt Cobain ever listened to Spiderland , but the first two minutes of In Utero ’s run-out song ‘Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip’ certainly sounds very Slint; though by the end Cobain’s delivery of the line “City of Stars” reminds me of Steven Jesse Bernstein’s Sub Pop recording of ’No No Man’.

There is still a recording studio in the narrow, triangular wooden building at the junction of Leary Way and 6th Avenue on the edge of Seattle’s Fremont neighbourhood, though it is no longer known as Reciprocal Recording. These days it’s called the Hall of Justice and it still has tape machines, including 8-tracks, but no Otari. Their main recorder these days is a Studer A80 24-track machine, but they say on their website that they also installed a Tascam 48 and a Tascam 80-8 “by request”. I’ll talk about the Tascm 80-8 in part two of this Super 8 blog. Both these TEAC Tascams are half-inch 8-track tape machines like the MX-5050 that once worked there before it was enshrined in the Experience Music Project/MoPOP museum. Presumably they get a lot of enquiries from people who want to record the way Nirvana did back in the day. And, if Kurt could go and make one last Nirvana album now, I think he’d want to do it at Reciprocal with Jack Endino. Though he wouldn’t be able, in his own words, to “ rent exactly the same equipment as was there when we recorded Bleach ” .

The history of Jack Endino recording Bleach on 8-track at Reciprocal is obviously still an inspiration for young bands recording today — and not just because of Nirvana. Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff and all their early singles — as well as Soundgarden’s Screaming Life , God’s Balls by TAD, Dry As A Bone by Green River, Screaming Trees’ Buzz Factory , Mark Lanegan’s first two solo albums, L7, Hot Hot Heat, et al were recorded there too. I’m not sure it was done at Reciprocal Recording but Endino also recorded and produced Afghan Whigs’ Up In It . Otari weren’t making an idle boast in their 1981 MX-5050B advert when they suggested “ … the time you spend to acquaint yourself with the “B” just might mean the difference between spending your money on a machine that will do for now — or deciding to make the investment in a basic creative tool that will pay you back handsomely in the years to come. ” It certainly paid back Jack Endino handsomely — in terms of his legacy as a recording engineer at least. If you’re looking to get a great sounding record why not spend some time at New Cut Studios and "acquaint yourself with the" Bleach machine. Here's a great in-depth interview with Jack Endino, Kim Thayil & Krist Novoselic that Rick Beato just posted about Reciprocal Recording and the Seattle scene.

I believe that Kurt Cobain always wanted to get back to the pure artistic statement Nirvana made with Bleach - the raw power they captured on the Otari MX 8-track machine. In another coincidence, the MX-5050 we have at New Cut Studios started out life as a 2-track, but was converted to 8-track with advice & parts from one of Steve Albini’s technicians at Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, IL. And then when we were installing our Neotek Essence recording console a few years ago, we ended up buying 5 male EDAC connectors from Electrical Audio, to terminate the multi’s coming in & out of the desk to the patchbays. Having bought them online we didn’t realise the EDACs had come from Albini until we were looking at the receipt. Of course Steve Albini put customised Neotek desks in both of his main control rooms at Electrical Audio Studios. In terms of analogue recording, both the Otari MX and Neotek Essence here at New Cut are almost the last machines of their type, the analogue apex of the technological parabola — before digital audio and computer based recording eventually advanced enough in quality to take over from analogue pathways to tape as the industry standard. But people just don’t seem to want to let go of tape — even when using DAWs. And if you come to New Cut to record you don’t have to choose: our vintage gear is plumbed into the same network as Pro Tools Ultimate. You may have noticed our slogan here & there — “An analogue mind in a digital world”. We’re not championing our antiquated attitudes in the face of progress, we’re advertising our traditional skillset as applied to the cutting edge. But since we started this story with him, let’s sign off with another observation from ‘the Wizard of Waukesha’:

“ What these software guys don't get is that we ourselves are bundles of electrical energy,” Les said. “What happens in a studio is an exchange of energy between musicians and singers. Tape is seamless. It captures the humanity of what's taking place without changing it. Tape is a true historically-accurate record of those moments in time that would never happen the same way again. ” - 'An Evening With Les Paul at His Legendary House of Sound' by John Hanti, with Steven Acker.

* It wasn’t only Operation Paperclip & NASA that benefitted from the plundering of Nazi technology by the joint US/UK T-Forces. Thanks to Captain Jack Mullin and Bing Crosby, tape recording became the biggest commercial advance in how humans made music in centuries. Yeah Bing Crosby, I’m serious, look it up. It was also Bing Crosby who gave Les Paul his first Ampex 200A reel-to-reel in 1945. In fact the post war recording boom sadly owes an awful lot to German fascism. Hitler’s populist mesmerism was a cult of personality that also pushed the technology of microphone construction to a whole new standard. Lester Bangs felt the Nazi’s biggest contribution to the 20th century was methamphetamine: “ … the Reich never died, it just reincarnated in American archetypes… ” (‘Kraftwerkfeature’, Creem , September 1975. Compiled in Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung , p.155; Heinemann, 1988).

** On August the 16th 1962 David Sarser’s violin was stolen from his New York studio and he never played professionally again. He said later “ I have no desire to play any other instrument. It became part of me, and I became part of it ” ('Lost and found: stolen instruments.' Carla Shapreau, September 8, 2015). Sarser’s reaction might seem extreme, but the instrument he’d lost was known as the Lamoureux-Zimbalist, made in Cremona in 1735 by Antonio Stradivari, just two years before the master died at the age of 93. The violin was so named for two of it’s previous owners. It had been one of three Stradivari instruments owned by the C19th French violinist & conductor Charles Lamoureux. Immediiately prior to Sarser’s custody the violin was owned by Efrem Zimbalist who also owned three Stradivari, as well as a Guarneri and a Guadagnini. David Sarser played his Strad under the baton of Arturo Toscanini throughout the 1950s with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, until one day it just disappeared. In 2015 the FBI re-opened the case; well we are talking about a Cremona violin here, an instrument worth millions. There was a very thorough article in the Wall Street Journal recounting the convoluted case of how the instrument was taken to Japan, it’s disputed ownership, and how it ended up advertised on the dark web by a Norwegian drug dealer in 2018. There’s a movie script in there somewhere.

*** TTG took their name from an Israeli guerrilla unit derived from both the Jewish Brigade and the Haganah in the post war chaos of the late ‘40s. The acronym stood for Tilhas Tizi Gesheften — a portmanteau phrase of arabic and yiddish words that roughly mean Kiss My Ass Enterprises (though there’s also the German sense of geschäft as a euphemism for defecation, as in doing one’s business. Tom Hidley’s partner in the studio, Ami Hadani was an experienced engineer, but he was also supposedly an IDF reservist who would disappear for long periods when the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the ‘60s & ‘70s broke into open warfare. Hidley & Hadani met at A&R Studios in NYC in the ‘50s and Hidley went on to design & build all the Californian Record Plant rooms.

**** This wasn’t their first return visit. Nirvana had already gone back to Reciprocal in July 1990 to record the superb single ‘Sliver’ - using TAD’s gear during a break in recording (I still remember the first time that tune dropped down the Student Union Indie night at Keele University, and the sheer joy of leaping around the room to it - probably sandwiched between ‘Son Of Mustang Ford’ and ‘Freak Scene’).

***** Electric Lady actually retro-fitted a completely re-capped Neve 8078 in 2011; it’s old 8068 is no longer at Pachyderm Recording, but now resides in Studio A of the Power Station New England in Waterford, CT. According to Vintage King Audio who refurbished both of these Neve consoles, the In Utero 8068 was also installed at different times in both The Record Plant and Organica Recording. We don’t have any gear at New Cut actually built by Rupert Neve, but we do have a Nekotronics SSL 4000 bus compressor clone.

****** The only time I saw Albini play with Shellac was at an All Tomorrow’s Parties weekend in Minehead, coincidentally curated by The Breeders. I was working stage crew for the 2009 festival, looking after the rental backline from Snowball's. I particularly enjoyed Kelley Deal’s knitting workshop in the Crazy Horse Saloon that year.

******* Indeed we can see evidence of this in Kurt’s own hand, in his notebooks as published in Kurt Cobain Journals (Penguin, 2002). On page 271 under the heading ‘Top 50 by Nirvana’, the first 3 albums Kurt lists are Raw Power Stooges, Surfer Rosa Pixies and Pod Breeders. There are no numbers or rankings in this list, but that order still seems significant in terms of what was uppermost his mind. Incidentally Aerosmith’s Rocks comes in 23rd near the top of the second column, but coming in 16th further down the first column is PJ Harvey’s debut album Dry .

********The remarkable David Pajo, a guy I got to know a little on that Spiderland tour was also in London as a young man in 1991. He told me how thoroughly delighted he was to see the poster photo I sent and how it took him right back to graffito-ing the toilet of a Taco Bell in London with the phrase " slint is a band from louisville kentucky. " I had an instance of revelation and in an almost visible flash of light I remember reading it in that same toilet. He said he thought it was the only Taco Bell in the UK and I told him it was in Piccadilly Circus and that I used to go there a lot at that time for crispy tacos and to load up on sachets of hot sauce. The convolutions of coincidence I untangled researching this piece made me spend far too long looking for other connections and it ended up as a 4-part series. I know that sounds daunting but if you enjoyed this piece, I promise there’s better stuff to come.

©️Mark Vickers May 2022

Airline Jet Set…

2022-01-25T16:51:53Z

… resonating resin.

Whilst researching the The White Stripes’ Elephant album for a blog about 8-track recording, I got somewhat distracted looking into the rig Jack White was using at the time. In the blog I talk about the arch-top Kay guitar that he used to record ' Seven Nation Army ', but the guitar he used in the hypnotic video for the same song — and which was used to record most of Elephant — was his red, two pickup, Res-O-Glas Airline made by the Valco company*. The visual impact of that promo film on the guitar world was such that retro revivalists Eastwood brought out a copy of that instrument. At one time known as the Jetsons model, this Res-O-Glas Airline later came to be known as the JB Hutto guitar — for the bluesman who was the earliest name player to pick one up and be seen to do so on record covers. Coincidentally, while I was researching Airline Jetsons for the Elephant blog, I had one sat in my lap.

The Airline Near My Fingers

I mean… yes I chose to look over this repro while researching vintage Airlines… but it’s still seems like synchronicity that I have an Airline Jetson for repair right now, just when I was looking into the guitars Jack White played on Elephant . This guitar is the white 2 pup Jetsons/Hutto that belongs to Kurt from Bristol Psych-Rock wizards Raptor and it needs a fret mill amongst other things. Having made basic adjustments to truss rod, bridge height and saddle length I think it’s going to play nicely, once I sort the frets out and fine tune the set-up**. Of course the striking thing about this guitar is the way it looks. It’s the styling that first catches the eye. The body shape is all angular lines and triangular horns complimented by a flaring, asymmetric head stock. It is Populuxe ornament applied to the guitar and when Valco introduced the style in 1964 it looked like nothing else with strings on. It was spikey, space-age and state-of-the-art. Now Gibson may have been the first to start making guitars with pointy protuberances in 1958 — but even more than the shape, it was the Jetson’s construction that was cutting edge.

Dupont’s early experiments in resin-set glass fibres in 1936 produced a material that was strong, stable and extremely versatile. By the 1960s woven glass fibre sheets, sculpted and set in polymer resin, was the new material for a host of products: from boat hulls to car bodies to furniture. But it looks like Valco were the first company to make guitars from it, going into production in 1961 — five years earlier than Ovation’s bowl-back acoustic designs. I should also mention the British Fenton-Weil Fibratone guitar which can possibly be dated as early as 1964, the same year the Jetsons/Hutto model debuted. Actually Valco’s earliest experiments with stringed instruments made of ‘fiberglas’ (as they called it), started in the 1950s with a small bodied upright bass design which they sold to Ampeg. The earliest Valco Res-O-Glas bodied guitars were more orthodox in shape than the Jetson. Supro Belmonts, Martiniques and Dual Tones; National Town & Country models: all these reproduced more traditional body shapes already common to National & Supro Val-Trol wooden guitars. The National R-O-G models that came to be known as the ‘Map’ guitars were much curvier than the Jetson, but no less inventive in their shapes. These Val-Pro Westwood, Newport and Glenwood models were increasingly unorthodox with their Streamline Moderne shapes and Art Deco flourishes. I’ll talk about the Eastwood take on the Map guitars a little later.

Valco of course are most famous for their Supro and National brands and it was under these names that Res-O-Glas instruments first appeared. The R-O-G Airlines were made by Valco for Montgomery Ward (an American department store/catalogue brand), who also commissioned their Airline branded guitars & amps from Harmony, Kay & Danelectro, just as Sears did under the Silvertone banner***. In recent years Airline, National and Supro guitars & amps have all been revived with reissues by modern companies. Back in the ‘50s & ‘60s, Supros were generally better quality than their entry level Airline cousins. National guitars were the premier line, acknowledging the Valco company’s roots in the National Dobro Corporation, home of the Dopyera brothers metal Reso-phonic guitars. There was a “ Glas hollow body guitar ” t o suit every pocket: the Supro Holiday & Sahara models were single pickup, budget instruments but with cutting edge, Res-O-Glas construction. So initially the body shapes of R-O-G guitars developed from Valco’s previous lines, whatever their branding. The Jetsons guitar however only seems to have flown under one flag, and in one catalogue it is described as “ Designed exclusively for and sold only by Wards. ”

I’m not sure that the ‘Jetsons’ name for the guitar JB Hutto would subsequently adopt was an official monicker anyway. In early catalogues Jack White’s Airline was described simply as “ Cherry Red Fiberglas® Dual Cutaway ”, and priced at $99.95. But the first run of The Jetsons cartoon on TV from September 1962 to March ’63, prior to the debut of the model, must have prompted the tag. I guess the association was inevitable, given the influence of ‘mid-century modern’ design common to both. The Airline guitar and the Jetsons cartoon were both influenced by Atomic Age looks and Space Race styling — as well as the Googie architecture that borrowed from Californian car culture and which was such a feature of the animation style in Hanna-Barbera’s futuristic Flintstones follow-up. The new lines and styles that Valco experimented with when they landed on the idea of fibreglass construction were certainly innovative: and if there’s one thing the history of guitar making regularly throws up it’s the story of cutting edge design being way ahead of it’s time and not being taken up by musicians until many years later. Gibson abandoned their Les Paul Model in 1961, don’t forget.

Highway 61 Revisited

In any style revival there will always be the wilderness years between cutting-edge cool and retro resurrection, and apart from Rory Gallagher using one briefly in the Eighties these guitars pretty much remained in obscurity between JB Hutto’s prominent use in the Sixties and Jack White championing them again in the Noughties. Gallagher covered JB Hutto’s 'Too Much Alcohol' sometime in the mid Seventies and his Airline Hutto was a later model (possibly a ’65) with a Fender style six-a-side headstock and a toggle pup selector rather than the earlier lever switch. After Hutto, Gallagher & White the most famous musician associated with this stylish instrument is of course Polly Harvey. The PJ Harvey JB Hutto is a white 3 pup Airline with factory Bigsby and it is the only other really high profile Jetsons Airline in popular music. Titled only as the " Professional “Vibrato” Triple Pickup model " in one Montgomery Ward mail-order book at the time for $249.95, in another catalogue it is described as “ Our Finest Guitar - Fiberglas ”. Eastwood have of course done a Bigsby equipped copy of the 3-pup Jetson as well. Here’s a film of Polly using her original Res-O-Glas 3 pup Hutto on ' The Last Living Rose '.

Polly didn’t play guitar much during her Hope Six Demolition Tour, apart from the early mixed media shows we did at the Royal Festival Hall in early October 2015, for the book launch of The Hollow Of The Hand . Throughout her 2016-17 tour I did look after a black Eastwood Map DLX baritone guitar for Alessandro Stefana. With a 27” scale length and a horseshoe Bigsby tail, this Eastwood Map baritone wasn’t the most stable tuning guitar, despite stringing it with fairly heavy gauge .013 - .072 Ernie Balls. Asso usually only played the Map guitar on Down By The Water — though it may have got rolled out for Highway 61 Revisited occasionally during encores. I’m pretty sure there was more than one track it was used on, I don’t quite remember which though. The selector switch was always flipped forward to the neck pickup. This wasn’t a bad sound, but the bridge pup was pretty mushy for a lower register instrument and almost unusable. The high output Alnico Hot-10 humbuckers Eastwood fit to these baritones are no match for the original single coils in terms of clarity and definition. This Eastwood Map guitar has a very similar appearance to one of Robert Smith’s favourite guitars in the 1980s. Of course Wabbit was playing a Res-O-Glas National Val-Pro 88 Newport with The Cure and the Eastwood DLX, like all their copies of these cult classics, has a chambered wooden body.

Supro fast fibre

As I said, the big innovation when these guitars arrived on the scene wasn’t just the shape of the bodies, but the moulded glass fibre and resin from which they were made. The first R-O-G body was possibly made as early as 1959 with production models available from 1961, initially in the Supro name and then under the National brand. Valco had experimented with wooden bodies clad in ‘mother-of-toilet-seat’ pearlescent plastic for both Spanish and Hawaiian steel guitars under their Supro and Oahu brands. But the Res-O-Glas guitars took plastics into structural applications. Their bodies were put together from front & back fibreglass resin ‘clam shells’. Not that there was any kind of bivalve hinge: the halves were screwed together from the rear, usually with 5 fixings. The seam was disguised by a contrasting coloured, vinyl gasket which formed channels for both shell edges allowing the back to be easily replaced after accessing the innards. This ‘rubber band’, as it is still often called (it’s not rubber and it’s certainly not very elastic), wrapped around the entire edge of the two-part body. While the reissue versions of these guitars are advertised as chambered mahogany bodies, it looks like repro regents Eastwood have started to put a cosmetic ‘rubber band’ around their wooden body Airlines in recent years. Valco fibreglass body shells were supported by wooden centre struts to which the neck was bolted (and to which the pups were also mounted) and 4 or 5 foam & wood blocks spaced around the edges to which the back shell was screwed (some models had a screw into the centre strut near the tail).

You can clearly see that both Polly and Jack White play original Airlines from the ’60s — the lack of a truss rod cover on the head is an obvious identifier. Which isn’t due to heel access truss rods in the original models — these guitars had no adjustable truss. Instead the neck was constructed from a cast magnesium-aluminium alloy girder shaped much like a square lap-steel neck, which was then clad in wood and a lot of glue. And they’d been making these predominantly metal necks for quite some time. In the late ‘40s, as far as I can tell, the Valco Mfg. Co. announced their new National “Stylist” Spanish guitar neck on National brand instruments. National bought in bodies from Gibson and put their own metal core Stylist necks onto both J45 flat top and archtop bodies. The lack of a fine quality woodshop at Valco’s factory may have been another factor in their development of fibreglass bodies. The Stylist necks were billed as “ An exclusive feature of NATIONAL Spanish Guitars… NO BOW - NO WARP - NO TWIST ”, and as well as the Gibson quality guitars they were also bolted onto cheaper bodies sourced from another Chicago brand, the Kay Musical Instrument Company. And that's because Gibson, Kay and National shared the same parent company in Chicago Musical Instruments at this time. There was an adjustment for neck tilt at the back of the heel under a plastic plate, which was frequently misunderstood as a fixing bolt — leading to neck warping and the ruining of many Valco guitars by their owners who overtightened this bolt or adjusted it without loosening the other fasteners. When the Res-O-Glas guitars came along they still had a 24¾" scale, mahogany clad, magnesium bar called the “ Kord King - The slender neck with the satin action. ” These necks also had a tilt adjustment screw at the rear, and just like the later Fender 3-bolt necks, the fixing bolts need to be loosened before the tilt can be properly adjusted. Valco further described the Kord King thus: “ String tension will not bow, twist, or warp this exclusive neck. It is slim, straight and comfortable. The featherweight core is of modern aircraft metal. This neck improves tone, has no heel, and is fully guaranteed. ”

They’re gonna rip it off

The recent reissue models by Eastwood all have wooden necks, with headstock accessed truss rods tooled for the 4mm allen key that seems to fit the several Eastwood guitars I’ve worked on. There are other give-aways in appearance between the Valcos and the Eastwoods. Another easy identifier for original Jetsons is that they all featured a zero fret, clearly absent on the Eastwood version. The modern metal switch plate has greater contrasting colours than the Valcos. The original R-O-G Jetsons had the pickguard raised on pillar spacers (a common feature on some Valco models), where the Eastwoods are flat to the body. The Eastwoods have a T-O-M style bridge — where a carved rosewood, compensated saddle, bridge set on thumb-wheels was typical of the early Hutto Airlines and many other Valco instruments. But this was later replaced by the more austere curved metal bar common to Kay solid body instruments, and the Bigsby equipped Huttos often came with a fully adjustable bridge with what look like roller saddles.

Going back to Kurt’s Jetson Airline here in my hands: it is an Eastwood 59 2P model, Made In Korea with " vintage voiced single coils " that look like chrome cover humbuckers. This single/twin coil pup confusion is no new thing. The original Valco Vista-Tone single coils designed by Ralph Keller from the early ‘50s had wide rectangular metal covers. Gibson even had to make reference to these earlier design pickups in that famous Patent they Applied For — because while not all of those old Valco pups had visible poles, some had a single line of offset pole screws — the magnets were to the side of the lone coil, a design which Gretsch seemed to copy with their HiLoTron in 1958 (the pickup which replaced the Dynasonic: which was just Gretsch’s name for the DeArmond Fidelatone, made by Rowe Industries, another great Chicago firm). The Vista-Tone pups have a 1952 patent and appeared on Supro models as early as 1953. Some of Ralph Keller’s pups had a line of exposed pole screws down the middle, some had none on show (or one screw right in the middle), but most had six pole screws down one side. It is these visible pole screw pups, which Seth Lover’s 1957 PAF for Gibson seemed to mimic, which most often feature on the Jetson models. Height adjustment for the Vista-Tone pups was by the two outside pole screws. You can always spot that original Valcos with Vista-Tones have pup rings with no screws though them, (unlike the modern HB style pup rings on the Eastwoods). On Kurt's guitar the bridge pup has been swapped for a black bobbin Gibson style pup, presumably for a higher output. The reproduction “Vistatone” pups in the modern Supro company’s Americana range are apparently very accurate reconstructions of Keller’s killer single-coils, and some of them carry the geometric Art Deco decals of early National models.

The Eastwood Jetson’s neck has a longer 25½” scale length and as mentioned earlier has that modern truss rod. Unlike newer models, Kurt’s Korean Airline does not have an Eastwood logo on the truss rod cover; and it’s four neck bolts are set in an asymmetric pattern — where on current versions they now make a more symmetrical parallelogram. Kluson style 3-on-a-plate tuners by Wilkinson replicate the originals, but have decidedly green tulip/keystone buttons — where the old ones were either the wider tulip type (sometimes called ‘butterfly keys’ in Supro advertising) or simple oval buttons in white. The higher quality National R-O-G guitars often had Grover kidney buttons in either nickel or gold plate. Looking on the Eastwood website it appears that the current white option of Kurt’s 2P guitar now has a more vintage looking tortoiseshell pickguard with white pinstripe (as opposed to the three ply B/W/B on the one I’m holding right now). A kind of German carve, front and back of the mahogany body, replicates the contouring of the original moulded fibreglass. And Kurt’s Korean Jetson was not made with the purely decorative black band around the edge of the body — currently described by Eastwood as a ‘ rubber body binding ’.

Eastwood Rides Again

You wouldn’t confuse this oriental Jetson for an occidental original: at 8lb this wooden Airline weighs a bit more than a Res-O-Glas guitar and balances differently. And that despite having an almost hollow body. With the pups taken out it looks to me like this Eastwood guitar body is solid wood (though I’m not saying it’s a one-piece) that has been largely routed out to more than half it’s depth. Then a thin plywood top has been glued onto the front: surely it’s ply because at only 5mm (3/16”) a solid wood sheet would be too weak. Access for the individual tone & volume pots (mounted on the bass side of the strings with small knobs in typical Valco fashion) could only be through the pup holes and I imagine the harness was installed through them in typical semi-acoustic manner. This construction is almost certainly an economic decision for speed of assembly. If I was going to use a thin wooden sheet onto a hollow routed body I would do it the Rickenbacker way and put the sheet on the back — the technique Roger Rossmeisl brought from building Rickenbackers (German carve or no) to his 1968 chambered Telecaster Thinline design. And I have always felt that the Rickenbacker Combo 600 from 1954 was an influence on the body shape of Valco instruments like the Belmont & Martinique*****. There is a long association between the various Valco, National, Dobro and Rickenbacker companies that goes back through the Dopyera brothers to electric guitar pup progenitor George Beauchamp. Indeed it is a story as litigious and as full of dispute as any family history and is an interesting part of guitar history too.

Making the Jetson-Hutto shape body out of wood is no new thing though — not all Jetsons were Res-O-Glas. I’ve seen originals with the typical Valco 2-bolt neck on wooden bodies in this shape, in both red and sunburst finishes. Both had parallel pickguards, in the Supro Town & Country style, in both single and twin pup configurations. Of course Valco started out making wooden bodies under both Supro and National name tags before they came up with the Res-O-Glas concept. I’ve always put the Res-O-Glas name down to marketing speak for the resin & glass fibre body shells, but given Valco’s National heritage in their Reso-Phonic resonator cone instruments, I think there might be more to the name. Because these instruments sound way better than a plastic guitar has any right to. And I think the neck design was as much about resonance as rigidity. Surely the fibre glass body and centre blocks have little use as sound boards and tone generators, but the metal mass of the magnesium core almost makes the neck resonate like a tuning fork. The neck bolts from the back of the heel actually go right into the magnesium girder at the neck’s core. On the R-O-G guitars there are usually 3 bolts: two for fixing and one for tilt adjustment.

They even made a Res-O-Glas body with a Reso-Phonic cone called the Folkstar which was the Supro model S444 which also, I believe, had an Airline version. Most people who’ve played them are disparaging about the resonater cone coupled to a fibreglass body compared to say a wood bodied Dobro******. Again, Eastwood have made a “Tone Chambered Mahogany” body version of the Folkstar and added a magnetic mini humbucker at the neck in tandem with a piezo pickup in the bridge. Several original Valco models also had a pickup built into the bridge; it wasn’t however, as many people believe, a standard piezo-electric pressure sensor. Valco called it the Bridge-Tone pup and it was actually a magnetic transducer device. “ The ‘Bridge-Tone’ unit is the first electronic unit to accurately reproduce the concise musical ‘string-tone’ characteristics of the arch-top guitar ”, they proudly boasted: I presume they meant on a solid body guitar. The Bridge-Tone pickup was also called the Silver-Sound pup on some National models, which alternately named their under-string pups as Vista-Power units.

There is a popular misconception that these old Res-O-Glass guitars were cheap plastic crap when they came out — mass-produced from inferior materials to be cookie cutter imitations of quality wooden instruments. That’s certainly the way I remember them being perceived in the ‘80s. But while Airline models were at a budget price point compared to mid-range Supros, in 1965 the price list for R-O-G National models started at $192.50 for a single pup and went up to $450.00 for three pups & a Bigsby like Polly’s guitar. For comparison a ’65 Fender Esquire was $164.00 and a Jaguar cost $443.00. A 1965 Supro Holiday Res-O-Glas body with single pup listed for $139.50 but still cost more than a Fender Musicmaster at a $126 price point. And the materials used were certainly not cheap for the manufacturer. Valco thought they were onto a winner with fibreglass: they saw a way to streamline production and supply an improved product. Aren’t those the kind of corporate concepts that get a company really juiced?

Valco saw glass fibre construction primarily as a way to improve the durability of the finish. Because the resin held the colour it permeated right through the material and could not be scratched or worn off. And it would not crack & check due to the expansion & contraction of wood with seasonal and climatic changes. One Montgomery-Ward catalogue claimed it was an “ everlasting finish ”. Mind you, just a couple of lines later they also falsely claimed the PJ Harvey Hutto had an “ Adjustable neck rod ”. In the same catalogue Wards claimed that the PJ Hutto Professional “Vibrato” Triple Pickup model’s “ Special White fiber glas body with black trim will not crack. ” In an advert for their ‘ New Glas Construction ’ Studio 66 model Valco defined it thus: “ RES-O-GLAS — Polyester resins embedded with threads of pure gleaming glass provide a new climatically immune miracle material of the space age — super durable — classically beautiful — functionally perfect. ” Plus the body shells popped out of the moulds fully formed, you didn’t need to put a German carve around the top (and the back) with a router. The fibreglass clam shell bodies did not need to be carved or shaped in any way; they did not need to be primed & painted & polished: all of this saved time and labour. When Valco re-tooled the factory for large scale R-O-G production in 1961, their expectation was that it would reduce costs by up to 40%. But it was a huge miscalculation. Despite fewer production stages requiring fewer skills, the cost of investment and materials crippled them. When Valco stopped making Res-O-Glas guitars it was because the technique was too expensive with little profit margin compared to wooden bodies. For a while some late Sixties models were made as hybrids with a chambered wooden back and a ‘fibreglas’ top.

Valco’s Res-O-Glas revolution in guitar construction lasted about a decade and the Jetson/Hutto guitars were only made for about four years; it was almost a passing fad at the time. These innovative instruments quickly became unfashionable and unwanted. They languished in obscurity for decades, but these guitars have been prized by some very discerning artists over the years for their unique properties. They are instruments with Futurist finesse & anachronous antiquity all bundled up in bygone beauty. Some American commercial design from this era is called Raygun Gothic, and I think that term suits the Airline aesthetic perfectly. The Eastwood copies may have different sonic & physical properties, but they certainly capture the glamour and the grace of the original designs. And let’s face it, for many people that’s a big factor in their appeal. You can watch Kurt giving his Eastwood Jetson (she's called Missy White by the way) a good work out in this short live set at their Bristol album launch, put together from audience phone footage. And for anyone who’s read my blog A Sticker for Discipline — Kurt’s Jetson has RAPTOR taped across the back: upside down, of course.

* The guitar used to record the opening track of the album was an archtop Kay K6533 with a single ‘cheese-grater’ neck pickup. The Kay was put through a Whammy to create the bassline and a Big Muff for the fuzz-sustain slide parts; before coming out of the speakers of two different amps into two different microphones. I’ll be discussing the recording of this song in greater detail in a forthcoming article.

** A variety of jobs needed to be done on Kurt’s guitar: The lever switch was too high and was bent over because it was in just the right place to get whacked by heavier strumming; the top nut slots were uneven and needed cutting to match the fingerboard radius and the nut needed to be dressed down a bit; some deep grooves had to be filed out of the first few frets and the rest of the frets levelled & crowned; and there were some gouges in the back of the headstock that needed a bit of a touch up. Kurt was kind enough to email me about it recently so I’m going to claim it as a testimonial: “ I’ve been using it on some new recordings these last couple of weeks and I’m blown away with all the work you’ve done man. I can’t believe there was ever dents in some of those frets, they look brand new and it plays better than ever. Thank you so much again for looking at her. ” Kurt Fletcher, January 3rd 2022.

*** Valco and Gibson built guitars such as Supro Belmonts and Epiphone Coronets (and some amp models) were also made with the Dwight brand for the Sonny Shields Music store in St. Louis, MO. Valco and Gibson were both CMI subsidiaries out of Kalamazoo, IL, at the time, as were Kay and Harmony. Incidentally, Valco bought the Kay Musical Instrument Company in 1967, just a year before Valco themselves went out of business.

**** Of course Rory was a keen student of the blues and is also famous for playing a 1954 Supro Dual Tone in the ‘80s. It took a while for the ‘cool’ people to catch on.

***** 1954 was also the year that Roger Rossmeisl moved from Gibson to Rickenbacker, before moving on to Fender in 1962.

****** I have a Dobro Hound Dog here at New Cut Studios that I picked up cheap in a pawn shop in Seattle, WA. It didn’t project as well as John Parish’s bell-metal body National, which we played it together with at the time, but I’d be interested to compare it with an R-O-G Folkstar. Again my Dobro is a modern remake, this time under Epiphone’s auspices. It’s the round neck Deluxe version with flame maple veneer body, tea strainer sound holes and that hourglass fantail string anchor that was used on so many National and Supro models.

Post script:

In the latest issue of Total Guitar White talks about the Jetson t hus: “ When I was in The White Stripes, Jack Oblivian [Memphis-born guitarist and garage rock cult hero] sold me that Airline for 250 bucks. I don’t think I saw another one for five years . ” ( Total G uitar issue 358, p.51; June 2022 ). It's a good article and contains a picture of an Airline that’s had some of it’s gut’s ripped out. I found a youTube clip of The Stripes from November 2005 that’s obviously filmed in Maida Vale Studio 3, and White is playing a red Jetson (on Blue Orchid ) that looks to be the same one. The neck pickup and individual pots have all been removed, leaving just the bridge pup, switch and master volume. The switch plate has gone as well so maybe it’s also been disconnected or left in as a kill switch. And although that volume knob is still there by the jack, it might be bypassed anyway. Going by the pickguard and bridge, it’s probably the same guitar he bought from Oblivian.

©️Mark Vickers December 2021

English Seville War…

2021-09-21T15:00:48Z

… getting the juice from Orange.

Soldier Of Orange

In the war for the hearts & minds (& wallets) of guitarists the battle has always been fought on two fronts, since both sound & vision need to be appealing for anyone with a creative bent. Few brands have done as much to stand out with their visual appeal as the Orange Music Electronic Co. Ltd. When Rhett Shull put out a video on the legendary British amplifier marque last September he concentrated on two Orange models: the OR120 and AD30 amp heads. The former representing those classic ‘hundred watters’ that appeared at the end of the ‘60s (which were soon re-rated at 120 watts in the early ‘70s), before being revived in the re-issue amps of the 1990s; and the latter being the Vox-with-grunt sound of their fin de siecle AD30 design. The OTR120 and the Twin Channel variant of the AD30 just so happen to be the two models of Orange amp heads that we keep at New Cut Studios as well. I’ll include a link to Rhett’s excellent little film later, but for now here’s a run-down of these two great sounding amps and their place in Orange history.

Although Rhet goes into what defines the classic Orange sound later in the piece, he kicks things off with what is probably many people’s idea of the modern Orange Sound. The AD30H is a 30w amp head, GZ34 rectified, running 4 x EL84 power valves in a similar way to the original 1959 twin channel Vox AC30/4 circuit, but with no Vib-Trem option. Actually even more like an AC30 is the Orange AD30R combo, paired as it is with 2 x 12” Celestions. The AD30R however is only a single channel amp and, unlike the signature Vox circuit, it also has a reverb tank as indicated by the R suffix. The other version of this amp is the AD30TC Twin Channel combo. Where the two channel AD30 differs most from a three Vox AC30 is perhaps in having only one input (Hi & Lo jacks) but two complete sets of controls for each channel — allowing both a clean and driven sound at the kick of the footswitch. Our AD30HTC here at New Cut is certainly a great sounding amp and I presume the suffix stands for ‘Head Twin Channel’. The single channel AD30 head and the reverb combo (as well as the AD15 1 x 10” combo) were all introduced in 1998, with the Twin Channel AD30 head & combo both coming along in 2001. Looking at the serial number of our AD30HTC, this particular Vox-in-a-Lox-coloured-box was put together in July 2006.

'Tangerine'

Jimmy Page played original Orange Matamps back in the day before getting his custom OR200s; but when he returned to the Orange fold at the end of the century he did so with the AD30 heads, initially the single channel and then the AD3 0 Twin Channel li ke the one at New Cut. When the long-dreamed-of Led Zeppelin reunion finally happened, an Orange spokesman remarked: “ Jimmy Page essentially took care of our entire 2007 marketing campaign in a single night. ” The accepted story of Orange amps on stage with Led Zep in the ‘70s, is that Page only ever used them for his theremin. But if that’s the case why were Orange his go-to guitar amps in the new Millennium? Of course Pagey is cagey about his amps and his tones — and has always been. And he’s aways been a magician, with Mr Crowley’s help… all he had to say was Supro and the price of vintage 1690T Coronados went through the roof. It also turned into a tidy money spinner when handbuilt repro versions of his modified 1690 went on sale — the 2x10"s were swapped for a single 12" and the 5V4G rectifier for a GZ34. However, there are tales of him using only a Tweed Champ with his dragon Telecaster to record most of the first two albums. Along with a persistent rumour that whatever the stack-line on back of the stage, back in the Led Zep day, it was only ever a Champ offstage with a couple of mics that actually got sent to the PA.

Comparisons between the Orange AD30 and Vox AC30 began as soon as the AD went on sale, and this was surely intentional. The similarity in name and circuit type had to be a marketing move right from the off. A little later I’ll include a link to a bit of footage of an AD30 and an AC30 used side by side on stage to great effect at the hands of PJ Harvey. The interest in Vox’s classic combo in the ‘90s was possibly higher that it had been in 30 years (partly due no doubt to the really solid, Marshall-built AC30TBX which came out in 1993 — now there’s a blog in waiting), but also because of all the other Vox-A-Likes being used by a variety of ‘cool’ new artists back then. Amps like the acclaimed Matchless C30 got a lot of attention, Laney jumped on the bandwagon with their very Voxy VC30 and even the Crate Club 30 got close to the sound. This has led to the AD30 mistakenly being called a Class A amp (even on dedicated Orange websites) just as the AC30 is often wrongly described. Class A circuits are always low wattage amps by virtue of their simplicity: by definition they are single ended designs, i.e. they have only one output valve or “power tube”. You’re not going to get much more than ten watts out of an EL84 in any single-ended configuration. But a pair of 84s in a Class A/B circuit can yield about 50% more wattage (yeah, that’s right, an AC15 is not true Class A either). So a quartet of 84s can get you around 30 watts of push-pull output. The Vox AC30 is a Class A/B design, biased hotter than than most other fixed bias Class A/B amps, close to the voltages of a Class A circuit*. It doesn’t help that even the Orange website claims that “ Every retro, Class A tone you need is right here, thanks to four EL84s, a GZ34 (5AR4) valve rectifier and a pair of 2-stage channels, each providing a different flavour of no-nonsense Orange tone. ” It is another triumph of marketing spin, the AD30 is not Class A, it is a Class A/B circuit similar to the AC30 that inspired it**.

"…Got my spine, I’ve got my Orange Crush."

The Orange OTR meanwhile, introduced in 1997, was an update of the ‘90s reissue OR120 Overdrive model, and was developed by Orange’s then new design chief Adrian Emsley in consultation with Noel Gallagher. It was another re-launch for the Orange marque as ’97 was the year in which the brand was put back in the hands of it’s founder Cliff Cooper. The OTR that we have at New Cut is on long term loan from top roadie & chef Jef Streatfield. The OTR is a very different beast from the various AD30 models. You don’t get any of the Voxy squishyness of a tube rectifier with the OTR: the schematic for this amp clearly shows four diodes in the classic diamond configuration of the full-wave bridge rectifier instead of a GZ34. The OTR was the last of the old style amp heads (it also came out as a 2 x 12” combo) before Orange started making the “Classic Brit” AD30 range of amps at the turn of the Millennium. A set of four EL34s produce a much bigger output wattage than the 4 x 84s in the AD30: it is nominally rated at 120w RMS, though I don’t know what kind of THD they allow. But the Orange tradition of putting 120 in the model numbers of their EL34 quad amps can’t be ignored I guess.

The development of the Orange sound from the huge, clean output of the first Matamps, to the Overdrive model in the early ‘70s began with an investigation into why other brands of British amp appeared to be louder than Orange. Orange originator Cliff Cooper, amp designer Mat Mathias and a team of famous consultants were most put out to discover that whilst a prominent market-leading British amp was only putting out 96 watts RMS by their measurements, it sounded far louder than their OR amps that were clearly measuring 120 watts RMS output. Orange were already naming their 4 x EL34 amps the OR120 model by this time, with variations on that designation appearing over the years. After consulting a Harley Street ear doctor to resolve the discrepancy in auditory volume, Orange started to introduce more distortion to their circuit for more “perceived loudness” — with the tone stack and phase inverter receiving the most modifications. This new circuit developed into the first “Pics-Only” heads which had richer harmonic distortion and more sustain. They had a characteristic mid-frequency saturation and were fatter, warmer sounding amps. The text-free faceplate on these models with idiosyncratic pictograms labelling the controls also added to Orange’s very individual brand identity.

Shapes Of Things

Officially named the ”Graphic Valve Amplifier" this amp was designed by John James in 1971, and nicknamed the "Pics-Only" simply because there was no text on the face plate but only stylised symbols to identify the control knobs. The Cooper-Mathias partnership had dissolved due to the small Huddersfield operation failing to meet demand. The name Matamp was dropped and the simple white faceplate with clear wording became both more ornate and colourful, and the “Voice Of The World” crest appeared as well. It made the amps less industrial looking and added a little zest to their styling. The old Orange Matamps had their tone stack post preamp, but James’ Graphic amp introduced a Baxandale EQ at the front before the first gain stage and the phase inverter. Peter Baxandale who worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment was another of those WWII boffins who advanced audio technology enormously. The phase inverter itself was changed from the Matamp implemented ‘concertina’ PI which was DC coupled, to a capacitor coupled design that would drive the output valves harder for more crunch. The first Pics-Only Graphics went into production in 1972. Early Pics-Onlys are known as Plexis for their reverse printed perspex backplate, which in later iterations was metal. Pics-Only amps are often found with the model number GRO120. The Graphic 120 added text to it’s iconic heiroglyphs in 1973 for easier interpretation, and these are often called the “Pics&Text” amps. Twenty years later when Gibson bought the rights to the Orange name, they went back to Matamp in Huddersfield to build their amps. Mat Mathias was sadly unable to help, having passed away in 1989, but Matamp would build modern versions of the Overdrive and Graphics models, both in 80w and 120w heads (there was also a Super Bass 120 head, but I don’t know how much the circuit differed from the “guitar” models). The Pics-Only cosmetics were later revived with the OR50H in 2008 which itself was then reissued in 2012.

Matamp of course made the original amps for the Orange shop in 1968, but after Mat Mathias died the Matamp brand was then taken over by Jeff Lewis in 1992. So, that mid ‘90s OR120 model had actually been built by Matamp in the UK under the direction of Gibson from 1993-97***. Noel Gallagher started playing one of the Gibson era Overdrive ORs, through a PPC412 box, around 1995 when Oasis were making their second album. When Cliff Cooper got control of the brand back from Gibson, Gallagher was by far the most prominent Orange user, and so they asked him what kind of amp he would commission. And the OTR, an update on the ’70s Overdrive head, was the result. In the late ’70s, market demands had led Orange to add a master volume circuit to the OR120 and label these models with the Overdrive name on the front panel. You can get an early OR120 to produce marvellous overdriven tone at high volume, but the Overdrive model’s MV control allowed this tone to be reproduced at lower levels of course. But there’s slightly more to the ‘90s OTR than that. To counter the consequent compromise in tone that many players lament in the master volume equipped amplifiers, this new Orange Overdrive circuit introduced a lot more overdrive and snarly, midrange push to the OTR tone and added a little more high end clarity.

This was how Orange described it: " This amplifier is the Overdrive 120 4 x EL34 enhanced by eighteen modifications. Introduced in 1997, OTR stands for Oscillatory Transition Return. The OTR 80 is the 2 x EL34 version. The very early models featured the letters OTR on the front panel in a much larger font. Sound modifications suggested by Noel Gallagher gave the Overdrive more sparkle, and they formed the basis of the new OTR. ” Emsley remembered Galagher’s contribution to the design thus: “ We talked through what he would like in order to improve his sound. Oasis were on tour with U2 at the time and using Orange combos, and I remember Noel just said ‘I want more crunch out of them’. As a result we made some changes to the Overdrive circuit which included modifications to the phase inverter and preamp. We also added a stand-by switch which replaced the output socket on the back. Sound modifications suggested by Noel Gallagher gave the Overdrive more sparkle, and they formed the basis of the new OTR amplifier (Oscillatory Transition Return). ” ****

Ocelot Training Régime

Nobody seems to to have a good explanation for the name ‘Oscillatory Transition Return’, unless it’s meant to be a reference to ‘oscillatory transients’. Maybe the grid wires were too long in some designs of the OTR output circuits and the capacitance between screen & grid had to be tamed. Maybe the grid stopper resistors had to be upped in value. EL34 and 84 valves usually need bigger grid stoppers than 6L6 and 6V6 tubes because they are more susceptible to oscillation. Maybe Orange just felt the name reflected their return to older models and the transition of the brand back to the Cliff Cooper camp. The Orange name had certainly been ‘oscillating’ between several different owners for 30 years. Maybe it was just a random letter added to the classic OR designation. After pondering this for months I have decided it is a nonsense phrase that sounds like it means something but intimates more than it illustrates. I now think it stands for Over The Rainbow — we’re not in Kansas anymore kids. Anyway, the slight revisions made to the classic Orange Overdrive circuit to give Oasis’ a more pithy Orange tone, clearly make the OTR a direct scion of the lineage. It’s not so very different from a Pics Only amp with a few resistor values changed in the phase inverter and for the output grid stoppers. The back panel of the OTR at New Cut Studios has the original “MODEL OR” print above “SERIAL No.” on the back as part of it’s silk screen, and then in black felt marker, “120” for the model and below it the serial number. But then almost every Orange amp head since 1971 would seem to share the “model number” OR120. I have also seen pictures of ’77-’79 Overdrive heads that have the model number OR120M on the back plate and in 1979 they introduced a version called the Overdrive Series Two with OR112M printed on the back.

So the look of the New Cut OTR120 harks back to the 1973 OR120 — having as it does both glyphs and words above the controls. And most of these labels are familiar enough descriptions of the amplifier’s knobs. Except for F.A.C. anyway. If OTR is esoteric then FAC proves to be even more arcane and I don’t know if Orange ever defined it. Later descriptions of the FAC knob (attached to a rotary switch of course rather than a potentiometer) range from Frequency Attenuation Circuit to Frequency Analysis Control, to Freakin' Awesome Control and most people have Fuck All Clue as to it’s action. Musicians, I say this to you now: if ever the controls on a bit of kit baffle or confound you, just mess around with them and use your ears. Whatever it’s abbreviation the FAC is simply a varitone switch, like you might find on an old Gibson guitar. It is basically a high pass R/C filter where the signal goes through one capacitor before being sent through a series of up to five more caps via the rotary switch. So in the counter clockwise position the signal only passes through the initial capacitor before hitting a resistor to ground. This position allows the most bass through the circuit. All the way clockwise and it passes through all six caps getting increasingly toppy with each click to the right. But also the signal’s gain is reduced for some frequencies: because the FAC is a high pass filter, varying capacitance through a 100K resistor but also through the 220K grid resistor of the next gain stage, the signal is amplified differently depending on it’s harmonic content*****. The FAC is a versatile tone control and gets some varied characteristics that with a bit of fiddling with the rest of the knobs can emulate other classic British amp inflections. Try playing with how much bass is determined by the FAC and how much with the Bass pot, you’ll be surprised at how differently the frequencies are cut or boosted by the different controls. Introducing more bass with the pot will also dial in more mids, for example.

Orange messed around with their front panel labelling quite a lot, for instance mid Seventies Overdrives often had the Presence control labelled H.F. Drive (high frequency). On a lot of Graphic amps the Bass and Treble pots were sometimes identified with bass & treble clefs, with the knobs further marked with Hz & kHz respectively. On some models, including our OTR, the bass clef was printed partially back to front. Although many guitarists have said they don’t have quite the same “feel”, most agree the sound of our OTR is pretty close to a ’70s Overdrive. Looking inside it is very much like a ’70s Overdrive — but the phase inverter is more like a later Pics-Only amp, and the presence circuit is missing an inductor. As you can see in the pictures on this page we also have an Orange PPC 412-C, 240w 16Ω 4x12" cab — and it works great for the AD30 HTC it came with, but it’s quartet of modern Celestion Vintage 30s don’t really suit the OTR. The ’70s cabs had Celestion’s original G12H Green- and Cream-backs. It would be interesting to reload the cab with modern G12H speakers or even try out something like 75w Eminence Wizards.

"Tangerine trees and marmalade skies. "

So how did the story of Orange blossom in the first place? In 1968 Clifford Cooper opened his psychedelic studio and music shop at number 3 New Compton Road, between Carnaby Street and Tin Pan Alley. The recording studio was in the basement, so he decided to use the existing shop-front for retail. It was London’s first ever shop dedicated to used musical equipment, which came about basically because Cooper had trouble establishing supply links from manufacturers. He ended up selling his own band’s equipment just to keep the shop and studio open. On the first day he sold his own Vox amps and cabs. Because none of the suppliers or amplifier makers would grant Cooper a dealership to begin with, the Orange shop decided to commission their own range of amps. In those days manufacturers like Selmer and Vox had their own retail outlets nearby on Denmark Street & Charring Cross Road, so Cliff Cooper’s approach was pretty much the reverse business model. He did manage to establish the shop as a retail dealership for some brands and was soon importing guitars from the likes of Gibson and Fender ******.

There are plenty of versions of the Orange origin online if you want to do your own research, but basically Cliff Cooper understood enough about electronics to get a guy called Mat Mathias to develop his existing smaller guitar amps into a 100 watt guitar head with variations for bass and PA. And thus the first white-face Orange Matamp head was born, apparently using a pair of KT88s to put out 100 watts. By 1970 several Orange Matamp models were developed by the official partnership of Cooper Mathias Ltd.: there was a 200w bass tailored head with twice the number of KT88s, the OR100 guitar head became the now standard EL34 quartet, with an EL34 pair driving the ORST50 “student model”. Although the white face Orange Matamp OR200 (powered by a quartet of KT88s again) was used to great effect by Jimmy Page and Peter Green, supposedly only 200 of them were made, beginning in 1969. It was an interesting modular design with separate preamp and power amp chassis. Different preamps tailored to bass or organ for example could then be put into a cabinet with a standard “flat response” power amp — this output stage “flat amp” was based on a circuit from the GEC handbook. The massive Partridge transformers in these 200w behemoths were too heavy for Mathias’ aluminium chassis, buckling the frames of the amps that went out on that 1969 Fleetwood Mac US Tour, so new pressed steel boxes had to be made.

Mat Mathias had founded a company called RadioCraft after the end of WWII initially as a radio repair shop in Huddersfield. In the early Sixties the electric guitar boom created a huge demand for gear, so Mathias was experimenting with amplifier circuits in collaboration with his friend Tony Emerson. Emerson had a valve HiFi design which they modified for instrument use, developing 20w and 30w guitar amps, and coining the name Matamp in 1962 from M at A nd T ony AMP lifiers. “ Mathias — the amps designer — had a large bump on his forehead which we all reckoned was the extra bit of brain that God had given him in order to design the Matamp. He worked for the British army in WW2 way back in the 40s and had designed his stuff then for Army use and had kept the blue-prints till the 60s when the demand for guitar amps blossomed. Strange to think that Mr Hitler and his antics influenced rock technology! ” (Martin Turner, Wishbone Ash, 25 Dec 2005). Yeah, the Second World War moved technology on apace, and popular music benefitted a whole lot more than people realise. One story has it that Mathias was himself born in Germany and left for England in 1939.

The Orange marque will always be associated with Peter Green, and not only for the truly golden tones he drew out of them. I have read a quote that Green’s response to queries from Cooper and Mathias as to the kind of tone he was after elicited the following response: "I want it to sound sweet, but not like treacle. Like honey." It was an opportunity Cooper seized to supply all the amplification requirements for an upcoming Fleetwood Mac US tour that really kicked off the Orange amp story. The earliest designs were great for bass but were too clean and flat for guitar and didn’t give anywhere near enough of the sustain their customers were looking for at the end of the ‘60s. Throughout 1969 the impromptu think tank of Peter Green, Paul Kossoff and Marc Bolan, who all hung out at the Orange store, consulted on characteristics they wanted in the tone for Mathias to implement. Wishbone Ash, Free, and Led Zeppelin would become the first bands to follow Fleetwood Mac’s lead. Stevie Wonder, a man with an ear for good sounds, you could say, was another collaborator in the original Orange era and either contributed to the shaping of the Orange sound or simply endorsed it depending on whose accounts you read. Even Black Sabbath went Orange with a full backline of amps for an early filmed performance.

Back In Black.

When the early Orange branded Matamps were first built, late in 1968, Orange really was the new black. After all, every other British amp at the time was wrapped in black vinyl. There were no other gaudy, new model amps around at the time, certainly in the UK. Even Selmer, a brand with a colourful tradition, had gone black by this point, having hunted imitation silver crocodiles to extinction in the Essex Marshes south of their factory in Braintree. The last Selmer Silver Croc-skin vinyl amps came out in 1965. Fender had gone black in ’65 as well — and would not reissue their 'Tweed' linen, or Brown & Blonde Tolex coverings for many years to come. Most new American amps were black by the late ’60s, apart from the funky padded pleats of shiny metallic vinyl that the Ross company clad their excellent solid-state Kustom amps in.

Of course in the modern era of Orange amps, they can be all kinds of colours, Green for Peter, Black for Polly — some of the early 70’s Tour Range Matamps were black but had a huge badge saying “White” on the front. These were made for the White Sound music shop in Sunderland, owned by one Bill White who also owned the Rock City store in Newcastle. Orange style amps in a rainbow of colours from the US Electric Amp brand confuse the history of Orange and Matamp even further. When I worked for PJ Harvey and we were looking at amplifier options for touring an album campaign around the world for the next 17 months, me and Buddy her long time roadie & fixer, went through equipment that Polly had in a lock-up down in Dorset. Polly’s Orange gear in the lock-up was one of the early black Orange rigs. During the early 2000s she used an orange-Orange head & 2x12 cab in parallel with her mid ‘60s Grey-panel Vox AC30. However she wasn’t enamoured of the lurid look on stage, and I was told that she was the first client for whom Orange had agreed to cover their amps in black. For the Hope Six Demolition tour we ended up using four Vox AC30s on stage including Pol’s Grey-panel. We actually carried six AC30s, as well as a Fender LTD ’59 Bassman, an original Ampeg V4B half stack, a first issue Fender Blues~DeVille, and a Music Man 210 Sixty-five . It was my 1977 Music Man 210 Sixty-five that was rented from New Cut for the tour; and I bought the two Fenders and a Marshall AC30/6 TBX off the tour production for New Cut Studios in 2018. Here’s a pretty damn groovy example of what Pol can do with an Orange and a Vox in sweet conjunction , when the Wessex Girl Played Essex V Festival -- of course the Firebird VII helps.

Mind the Oranges Marlon.

Can you believe that was her first single release, 12 years before that V Festival appearance? Some online equipment lists have Pol using a Retro 50 but I’m pretty sure it was always an AD30. I can’t remember what model the black one was because we left it in the lock-up and didn’t use it at all when I worked with her. I don’t know how many times the band played The Orange Monkey during that year & a half run, almost every show I imagine; it seems a shame that we didn’t use an Orange amp for any of them. Certainly the head in the 2003 V Festival footage is an AD30H and there are photos of her with AD30s from other festivals around the globe that year. The Retro 50 Head introduced in 2002 was a master volume version of the Pics Only circuit, additionally it was the first of Orange’s "Custom Shop" labelled amps, which I believe were also hand wired. Early in 2014 Orange did a run of Rockerverbs and Thunderverbs in White Levant vinyl covering with gold piping and some matching white PPC212 & PPC412 cabs. There was also a ltd. edish in “blood orange” vinyl. Blood oranges, or sanguinella , were first cultivated in Sicily in the 15th century, perhaps that’s why Coppola used the spilling of oranges to symbolise the spilling of blood in the Godfather movies. (My eldest daughter is in her first year of film school at the University of Westminster, so we watched the first film of the trilogy a few weeks ago, which reminded me of that.)

I started this blog inspired by a great look at Orange tones in a video by Rhett Shull. Shull is an interesting vlogger who’s done some great articles, but he’s also a fine musician with a good ear and in this piece he pulls some Peter Green phrasing out of the bag when playing through some OR heads, and makes a pretty good fist of it. I don’t mean to damn him with slight praise; to my taste there have been very few guitarists with the touch and the sweetness that Peter Green had in his youth. “But not treacle. Like honey”. Check out the superb Fleetwood Mac Live At The BBC album for some of the best British blues ever recorded. I have to mention Danny Kirwan here as well, Fleetwood Mac cohort from about ’68 to ’72, and a remarkable player for one so young. So here’s that Rhet Shull video in which he talks about the AD30 & OR120 heads (even though he gets a bit mixed up about AD30s coming out of Gibson's stewardship of the brand); and where he also get’s to try out three awesome Orange heads owned by another interesting YouTuber, Rick Beato.

The ’90s revival of Orange produced a line of great sounding, reliable amps, with better wire dressing, voltage regulation and consistency of tone. The PCBs weren’t as heavy duty as the ’70s amps, and neither were the transformers, but the modern circuit boards are still pretty good quality and the irons are as good as those in most modern amps. Orange amps have a sound of their own, whether you want the big ’70s grunt of our OTR or the squishy ‘60s bloom of our AD30, New Cut Studios can offer you truly great guitar tones.

* Okay, lets get this straight right now, Class A amplification does not mean “top class, grade A, the absolute best”. When will copywriters, and musicians for that matter, get it through their skulls that saying Class A is like saying “most basic”? It is merely the first and simplest form in a classification of amplifiers that progresses through consecutive letter designations — like when we talk about Class D high wattage bass amps. There are several classes of amplifier in this series, indeed the Class E model was first described in a doctoral thesis in 1964. On paper a Class D amp is pretty much 100% efficient: compare that to Class A designs which will never exceed 25% efficiency (unless it is inductor or transformer coupled at the output). In a Class A design the output valve is always lit, using more current but for less output. That’s what “single-ended” means, by the way, one output valve — just like a Tweed Champ. The letter classification is there to distinguish between increasingly complex circuit architectures. A particular Class A amplifier is not superior to any individual class A/B amplifier — any superiority between models would depend on their relative design, components and manufacture. The Eurotubes website has this to say about the Orange/Vox comparison:
“ The AD15 and AD30's are push-pull cathode biased amps which are biased up where a true class A amp would be, thus the claim in being class A. So now that we have gone past this, it does not detract from the sound quality. Orange amps have always had their own sound and the AD series is no exception. We are often asked to describe their tone by customers and while we hate getting the question ‘what amp should I buy?’, we do try to answer in generic terms and the AD15's and 30's do have a Brit thing going on but are not high centred like the VOX AC's are. The AD's are thicker with more mid range and low end girth. They do have a nice chime in the high end but not as pronounced as the VOX amps. ”

** Class A/B designs are a way of using the better efficiency of Class B amps while minimising the unmusical crossover distortion that can occur between push and pull Class B output stages. The design of the tone stack and the type of output biasing will do more to colour the tone of a guitar amp than whether it is Class A or A/B. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a Class B guitar amp, though I have read that Leo Fender designed the Music Man 112RP Sixty-five to run 4 x 6L6 tubes in pure Class B operation — but with little noticeable crossover distortion. Crossover distortion in Class B amps is usually due to increased odd harmonics, particularly 3rd order harmonics, and these odd harmonics are often buzzy and harsh next to the input signal (despite being valve generated). They are also increasingly audible against the pure tones as the signal decays — where we might usually expect a sound to get less abrasive as it fades away. These 112RP combos run 6L6s into ceramic speakers unlike the older MM designs pushing Alnico speakers with EL34s. The 122RP was also only single channel unlike most Music Man amps with their twin channel Fender heritage, but it had two effects loops — both high and low impedance. It also had a built in Phasor (sic) circuit.

*** At some point the building of Orange amps moved over to Trace Eliot, some PCBs in late ‘90s Orange amps are reportedly printed with the Trace Eliot brand and some AD30 amps have a Trace Eliot Q.C. sticker on the PCB. The manufacturing then moved away from the Trace Eliot factory sometime in 2002. Coincidentally Gibson bought Trace Eliot in 1998 after they dropped Orange, I guess the business connections were there between all three brands, and I believe there had been some transfer of employees between the companies. The Gibson “Goldtone” range of amps were restyled versions of Trace Elliot’s mid ‘90s valve amps. The Gibson “Goldtone” GA-15 was identical to the Trace Elliot Velocette, apart from cosmetics (the GA-30RVS was a Vellocette Twin). The best of these TE Gibsons was probably the Super “Goldtone” GA-30RV which paired a 12” Vintage 30 with a 10” Vintage 10 (60w G10 Celestion), driven by a very Voxy quartet of EL84s just like the AD30. We were given two Gibson Super “Goldtone” 60w 2 x 12” combos to tour with Archive when they came out. They looked pretty cool and really retro, black & gold styling with what looked like gold metal Victorian radiator grills over the speakers and the top vents. The GA-60s were twin channel A/B master volume amps with spring reverb tanks. They also weighed a ton, well maybe only 100 pounds or so, but they were really heavy amps, with a heavy look and a heavy tone. The pair or pentode sockets for the power amp were labelled for EL34/6CA7, 6L6/5881 and KT88/6550, and so very sensibly had the legend Output valves !Please ensure these are biased correctly! printed above this. A task which was easily accomplished with three probe test points and a pair of trim pots on the back panel. The seven dual triode sockets were labelled for ECC83/12AX7/7025 for Preamp 1, Preamp 2, Preamp 2 again, Reverb Return and Phase Splitter; and marked ECC81/12AT7/6201 for Effects Loop and Reverb Drive. A recent visit (April '22) to Gibson Headquarters in Fitzrovia revealed that they have pretty much a full set of Goldtone amps set up on their showcase stage down in the basement.

**** When Paul Weller supported Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds at Bristol Downs Festival in August 2018, I noticed there weren’t any Orange amps on stage anymore. In fact when I first walked on stage I thought Noel had gone back to basics, in the nicest possible way, using a pair of LTD Tweed Bassman reissues, but it turned out they were for Jem Archer’s use. Noel had a pair of HiWatt 2 x 12” combos, presumably 21st century re-issues but I couldn’t get a really close look. The HiWatts were stacked on top of each other right next to a full stack draped in a Man City flag. I didn’t get a look behind the flag but it could have been a Vox AC50 tower. The HiWatts may have been the reissue of the SA 212 which was the combo variant of the DR 504 50w head. Sometime around 2007 I was chatting to my mate Jim Dare about what amps he would play with Brett Anderson as we rehearsed for a tour at the original Terminal Studios in Bermondsey. AC30? Bluesbreaker? Both were there in our armoury to wield courtesy of the the Suede storage cages (we went with the Marshall in the end). He mentioned he had a ’70s HiWatt at home that he was using as a coffee table — face down with a plywood board on top of it. I naturally WTFed at him and he shoulder-shrugged a musician’s response that it was broken. I told him he was using the Tonal Grail as a plant pot, so he brought it into Terminal Studios for appraisal. It was an SA 212 made in 1974 (if I remember right), with a pair of purple-back Fanes and when I opened it up, there was that glorious, neat wiring harness I always marvel at when I look inside a HyLight era amp. Partridge transformers, Mullard ECC83s & mustard caps, it was fantastic. Indeed Dave Reeves worked for Mullard for a while (and Marconi as well) and just like that other great amp builder Pete Traynor, he had a repair workshop at one time in the mid ’60s above a music retailers (Plato Music in Kingston-upon-Thames). The power switch was broken on Jim’s HiWatt, so a new toggle was installed, and a pair of new EL34s replaced the worn out power tubes. And that was it, all it needed, we fired her up and she was magnificent. Every now and then I’ve sounded Jim out about selling it to me but he wouldn’t let it go. I wish I’d been unscrupulous and told him I’d buy his coffee table. (I met up with Jim for the first time in ages today - 11/3/22 - at Factory Studios setting up rehearsals for The Editors. He couldn't sell me his HiWatt because an American collector gave him 5 grand for it during lock down.)

***** Grid stoppers also affect a valve’s input capacitance and this itself creates a low-pass (R/C) filter. Roll-off for this filter will be 6dB per octave as decreed by this formula: f=1/(2 π x R x C) — so more HF will be rolled off by increasing the value of the grid stopper resistor. If you increase the value of the grid stopper you also need to think about decreasing the value of the grid leak resistor which is effectively in series with the stopper resistor. But decreasing the grid leak resistor value will attenuate the signal more, because you’re changing the impedance bridging between the driver and the output valve.

****** Sometime in the early autumn of 1970, a certain Eric Clapton bought an Olympic White Stratocaster at the Orange shop. It was a somewhat uncommon left-hand model and he’d purchased it as a present for Jimi Hendrix. On the evening of the 17th of September he intended to hook up with Hendrix and give him the lefty Strat. They didn’t manage to get together however, and sometime early the following morning Jimi died. In Clapton’s own words it went like this: “ The night that he died I was supposed to meet him at the Lyceum to see Sly Stone play, and I brought with me a left-handed Stratocaster. I just found it, I think I bought it at Orange Music. I’d never seen one before and I was gonna give it to him… He was in a box over there and I was in a box over here. I could see him but I couldn’t… we never got together. The next day, whack! He was gone. And I was left with that left-handed Stratocaster. ” Just over a year later, Eric Clapton was supposedly one of the last people to see Duane Allman alive before he climbed on his motorbike, and again he was one of the last people to play on stage with Stevie Ray Vaughan before SRV stepped onto that fated helicopter, 20 years, almost to the month after Hendrix left the planet.

©️ Mark Vickers 18th April 2021.

A sticker for discipline...

2021-04-18T17:23:45Z

… The guitar as sandwich board.

When Woody Guthrie emblazoned the legend “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar in 1942 he may not have been the first musician to write on his axe but he certainly became history’s pre-eminent guitar graf-writer. Whether anybody in the audience at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go was aware of that heritage, when Rage Against The Machine took to the stage fifty years later, probably isn’t all that important. I’m sure it had no bearing on the impact that early RATM gig had on the audience. But whilst the band’s pivotal performance that night in 1992 was certainly momentous, there was also a provocative non-aural message that the punters couldn’t ignore. Because prior to soundcheck Tom Morello had scrawled the words “Arm The Homeless” in big letters on the front of his guitar. As philanthropy it might seem a conceit, but as social commentary it was nothing less than incendiary.

It’s possible that musical instruments have always been decorated, either by their makers or by their players. Stringed instruments surviving from the very earliest civilisations are often ornately adorned with carving and inlays. And there’s evidence that instruments were given names from early history, much as weapons often were, whether those weapons of music were taken up in arms in the name of freedom or otherwise. But who, I wonder, was the first person to inscribe a written message to spectators on their instrument, and what were they trying to say? Could it have been as trite as an insult? “Yo Mesopotamians, you suck!” You would hope it was something more positive and inspiring than that. So before you reach for the rattle cans, and start spraying “This Machine Arms The Homeless” on your dad’s ’62 White Falcon, consider this. If you’re going to make a declaration with the look of your instrument the only real caveat is make sure that what your saying is worth saying. I mean, can there be any more powerful statement than a pink guitar with a portrait of Hello Kitty? Just keep it real — and I’m not suggesting you carve 4 REAL into it with a razor blade — though as we’ll see, some musicians have felt the need to scratch their words deep into the timber.

In the popular era of 6 string slingers, most of the earliest writing done on guitars happened at the manufacturing stage. Country & Western musicians were notorious for decorating their guitars, a tradition Gretsch upheld in a rather kitsch way throughout the 1950s with varying degrees of ‘the cowboy treatment’. And of course a lot of early Western artists had their names put prominently on their guitars. Maybe it was a way to identify yourself to the drunks all the way back at the bar, peering up at yet another rhinestone cowboy in a ten gallon hat. Many, like south paw Tex Fletcher, would have their name inlaid right up the neck — something C.F. Martin & Co. later did in tribute with two custom made guitars for Fletcher fan Bob Dylan. The guitar as billboard with mother-of-pearl letters — and the bigger the letter, the better — an early way of advertising your brand. Perhaps the first singer to have this done was Jimmie Rogers, whose custom-ordered 1927 Martin 000-45 had his name along the fingerboard in MOP inlay. And it wasn’t the only writing on his guitar, it also had the word “Thanks” written on the back. The word was written upside down so he could flash his appreciation to his audience, a tradition that his friend and acolyte Ernest Tubb maintained for forty years after Rogers’ widow loaned him that same guitar. Now that’s a long term loan. I knew a guitarist who would flash the back of his instrument at women he liked the look of in the audience, however the message on his guitar was a little more personal and referred to the size of a different instrument in his possession. Like they say, it pays to advertise, you’ve just got to be shameless about it. Joe Strummer sprayed a big, white question mark on the back of his famous black Telecaster. I don’t know how often he flashed the audience with it, nor what that quizzical symbol might have meant. I’d like to hope he was trying to encourage Cartesian doubt. But then as we’ll see later, for such an outspoken spokesman-of-a-generation, Strummer was less than transparent with his guitar sloganeering. Along with a Martin 00-18 in the Country Music Hall Of Fame, Jimmie Rogers’ custom 000-45 is his best documented guitar and supposedly his favourite. During his career Rogers was known as “The Singing Brakeman” and also as “The Blue Yodeller”. These days, in the light of his legacy, he is usually just appended with the simple epithet “The Father Of Country Music”. His Martin 000-45 now sits framed in an antique bank safe, behind glass in Rogers’ own museum, where you can see a note pasted inside the sound hole th at says: " To Jimmie Rodgers, America’s Blue Yodeller, with all good wishes — C. Fredrick Martin III July 27, 1928. "

Labelled With Love

And then sometimes the message in the guitar is not on display at all. Joan Baez discovered someone had once pasted a missive inside her Martin when she sent her 1929 0-45 back to the factory (the same guitar that Dylan played at Newport in ’64). It wasn’t the nicest note ever conveyed by guitar but she took it in good humour: " An amusing story about that guitar is that when it went in to be fixed in 1996, the repairman took it apart and found a scroll inside which said, 'Too bad you're a communist'. It must have been done by a repairman years ago who disputed my politics. When the 0-45 was replicated for a 1997 edition, a backwards label bearing the same slogan was adhered to the inside of the soundboard so that it could be read with an inspection mirror. ” A run of 59 signature models by Martin was released in ’98 with that political slur replicated in every one. Baez describes a label, but I have seen a photo of a Martin under construction where the same message is stamped into the heel block, under the fingerboard support without being mirrored, and accompanied by the signatures of Dick Boak & Dale Eckhart. Martins are beautiful guitars but people do love to write on them. ‘The Queen of Rockabilly’ Wanda Jackson, a woman who really rocked out, and long before the birth of the Riot Grrrl, painted her name on her 1950 D-18, along with two five-point stars which she further decorated in rhinestones. Indeed, stars are a feature of personal decoration that seem to crop up with regularity on guitars, maybe that’s just the inevitable aspiration of most musicians.

Stickers and labels have been pasted inside the bodies of stringed instruments for centuries, usually as maker’s marks, but it took a man on a mission to start pasting them on the outside. In 1942 Woody Guthrie wrote a song called Talking Hitler’s Head Off Blues . While some might say that writing this song was the direct trigger for his famous guitar slogan, similar stickers were already being pasted to war work machinery in US factories. Some writers have tried to make out that this version of events diminishes Guthrie’s act. Surely anyone can see that the genius of appropriating one of those stickers from a war production factory and applying it to his guitar — with the consequent association in the observer’s mind — is a greater act of propaganda than deciding to awkwardly misrepresent a musical instrument as a machine. In it’s first incarnation Woody’s slogan looked like a hand penned sticky label stuck to a Gibson, perhaps an L-00 model — though he later made it a more permanent statement in huge blue painted letters on a 00-18 Martin. Guthrie was obviously pleased with the slogan as he appears to have done it to his guitars again & again. There are pictures of him with Cisco Houston from around 1944 in which both singers are playing what look to be “banner headstock” Southern Jumbos. Gibson weren’t afraid to put “Only a Gibson is good enough” in a banner scroll on the heads of their machines in the war years, hence the soubriquet. In that photo Woody’s guitar has a much larger banner pasted above the sound hole and his now famous mechanised threat looks more like a large, printed ‘bumper sticker’. Perhaps this is one of many that rolled off a press to decorate production lines in Detroit or Willow Run, MI. It’s almost harder to find a picture of Guthrie with a guitar that isn’t proclaimed as a socialist weapon — it was obviously a statement he felt very strongly about.

Because that’s at the heart of what we’re talking about here folks. It’s easy to mock sensitive, artistic types, but they are often more emotionally attuned to the zeitgeist. People like Woody felt very strongly about what was happening around the world as the violence of the 1930s really ramped up. While the rest of the planet was trying not to think about the horrific atrocities in Nanking and Guernica, some people had a terrible foreboding of how far into the depths of Hell human beings might descend in the immediate future. In Guthrie’s song You Better Get Ready the Devil appears to him in a dream and promises him that if Woody pulls on his fighting pants and drives out the fascists “I’ll never raise Hell on Earth no more.” And until the fascists were driven out of all the territories they’d invaded, well, most people really had no idea of the kind of Hell-On-Earth they had created. Human vivisection, as perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese as well as the Nazis; the processing of human remains for profit; enforced famine; mass murder of civilians, in the millions; the torture of children. Guthrie really wasn’t joking when he had the Devil say this:

" He read off Adolf Hitler’s name
And said 'Old Hell just ain’t the same,
Compared with the fascists, brother I’m tame!' ”

Much has been said about Guthrie’s politics in his formative years, especially given his conservative father’s alleged membership of the KKK. But Woody Guthrie learnt a lot about the roots of American music and in so doing he learnt a lot about the roots of American racism. These days there always seems to be somebody who’s keen to claim that Guthrie wasn’t as ‘woke’ as a modern, educated liberal. Sometimes it’s like they’re trying to say that if he couldn’t be completely unprejudiced & nondiscriminatory by modern standards then everything he stood for is invalid. By the time Woody became a serious musician he was steeped in American roots music of every colour, and he had done so by playing with musicians of colour. He learnt some of his Folk stylings from the Piedmont Blues* he learnt playing with musicians like Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry. Terry and McGhee, who also played a lot of Jump Blues together in the Forties, would both become frequent collaborators of Guthrie, as would an interesting ex-con by the name of Huddie Ledbetter. In fact Lead Belly played with Guthrie many times, in a variety of groups and would sometimes bring Woody onto his radio show. Woody Guthrie’s Folk “super-groups” of the 1940s were largely inter-racial. This is not the behaviour of a committed racist. Nor is it a very good way to promulgate segregation. The Headline Singers, for example was made up of two black men and two white: Lead Belly, Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie. The group was formed in the Fall of 1942 and christened after Woody was advised by one producer to “quit trying to sing the news headlines”. The Union Boys were a similar band that Guthrie contributed to, made up as it was of the Afro-American musicians Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry again, and the hugely influential Josh White, along with whiteys Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and Tom Glazer. Yeah, that Woody Guthrie was no better than a slave owning, baby lynching, SS oven operator, I tell ya.

Dear Landlord

Woody Guthrie also sang about injustice on the home front, a crusade he took up with great fervour once it became clear in the immediate post war years that banishing the overt fascists wasn’t going to banish racism or poverty. War machines the world over were being scrapped, but while everybody else was beating their swords into plowshares, Woody refused to decommission his guitars. Interviewed in the 2012 movie Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation , Pete Seeger said “After the war was over, he kept the sign on and we said, ‘Woody, Hitler’s dead, why don’t you take the sign off?’ He says, ‘Well this Fascism comes along whenever the rich people get the generals to do what they want…’ ”. Woody could see that fascism had spread far beyond the imagination of Mussolini. Frederick C. Trump was a rich person and in 1950 Woody became his tenant at a property in Brooklyn. Until, that is, Woody realised there was a colour bar on black people occupying the development, so of course he wrote a song about it:

“I suppose Old Man Trump knows
Just how much Racial Hate he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed That color line
Here at his Eighteen hundred family project… ”

The Department Of Justice eventually settled with the Trump Organisation over racial discrimination in their property lets in 1975, and both sides claimed victory: which gives you an idea of just how little was achieved by that particular round of litigation, beyond massive law firm profits. Frederick Christ Trump, son of Bavarian immigrant Friedrich Trumpf (or possibly Drumpf) would become famous during his lifetime as a hugely successful East Coast property developer and frequently investigated war profiteer. After his lifetime however, his fame hangs more on the career of one of his sons, who managed to bankrupt the family business, become a reality TV star and even the 45th POTUS — an office he managed to defile to such a degree he made Reagan and Bush Jr. look statesman-like. Fred Christ Trump was described by his own granddaughter (clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump), in her 2020 book as a high-functioning sociopath. Fred’s father Friedrich was a Bavarian draft dodger, illegal emigré and Yukon brothel owner who had come to the USA in 1885. Friedrich started the family real estate business, that would later grow fat on public money, during the Klondike Goldrush. After the Goldrush, Friedrich returned to Bavaria a rich man, but Bavaria didn’t want him — or his money. He was formally exiled and after his return to America in 1905 his son Fred C was born in the Bronx. After keeping a low profile like many German Americans during WWI (both Fred and Donald since tried to claim that he was a Swede), Friedrich became one of the first victims in North America of the Spanish Flu pandemic and died on May 30th 1918; son Fred died of pneumonia in 1999; grandson Donald proved more resistant to respiratory disease and managed to recover from Covid in 2020.

Placard Goose

When Tom Morello played with Prophets Of Rage in 2017 the ‘Arm The Homeless’ guitar wore a message on the back covering it’s usual inverted hippopotamus. A message that was, you guessed it, written upside down so that it could be flashed at the crowd. In large black letters on a white rectangle that covered the entire rear of the body, it said “Fuck Trump”. As much as Morello probably agreed with Woody Guthrie on the issue of colour bars in residential property development, it was of course a remark directed at Fred’s son Donald. When Morello posted a picture of him flashing that message to the 45th President in 2017, it got plenty of reactions on Twitter including the glib jibe " Another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert. ” Presumably from someone so enamoured of the Donald that like his hero he gets busy with the rhetoric with no regard whatsoever for any kind of objective truth. It’s not like Tom Morello (political ingenue that he is) had been raging against the machine for a quarter of a century or anything. Morello couldn’t resist this superb riposte: " One does not have to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University to recognise the unethical and inhumane nature of this administration but well, I happen to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University so I can confirm that for you. "

A late ‘40s Martin 0-17 is one of Steve Earle’s favourite guitars, or so he told the godfather of guitar repair Dan Erlewine in an instalment of Guitar Talk in the July 2009 edition of Vintage Guitar magazine. While it’s unlikely that he would ever scrawl anything on it’s antique mahogany he did have another Martin scribbled on when he came up with a pithy epithet for a guitar that got relic’d for a TV show. For the 2010 series Treme , set in New Orleans, LA, after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Earle needed a prop for his character ‘Harley’. In Offbeat magazine in July 2010 Earle laughed: “ That’s a brand new Martin guitar that we fucked up to look like that. The water stains are duck sauce from Suzy’s Chinese on Bleeker Street. We antiqued it and then painted ‘This Machine Floats’ on top, which was my idea at the last minute. ” Earle had visited New Orleans in 2006 in Katrina’s aftermath for a Future of Music Coalition activism retreat, and the first Musicians Bringing Musicians Home benefit concert, with non other than Tom Morello.

Bob Dylan’s first Martin was, similarly, a 1949 00-17 that he got hold of in Minneapolis in 1959. This of course was the notorious period in his development when the electric “Judas” outraged Rock N’ Roll fans by going acoustic. As Dylan himself recounts in Chronicles , he got the Martin acoustic by trading in his electric guitar. C.F. Martin & Co.’s own Dick Boak has said Dylan was “ no doubt inspired by the small bodied 00 sized Martin guitars that Woody Guthrie played. Woody Guthrie often played the small 00-17s, 00-18s, 0-17s. Woody would often call (for a new guitar) and after a month or two he would give the guitar to a young musician and get another one. ” I wonder if one of those hand-me-down Martins had ended up in a shop in Minneapolis by 1959? As Dylan describes it, the ten year old mahogany guitar definitely had a certain something, though he reckons he got into the guitar before he got into Guthrie (but then in the following quote he also misremembers the exact model). We can’t be certain what electric guitar Dylan traded but it may have been a catalogue classic. In an interview with Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone from June 21st 1984, Dylan said that his first electric was “ a Silvertone guitar from Sears ”**. A few paragraphs later he said “ I sorta got into folk music. Rock & roll was pretty much finished. And I traded my stuff for a Martin that they don’t sell anymore, an 00-18, maybe, and it was brown. The first acoustic guitar I had. A great guitar. And then, either in Minneapolis or St. Paul, I heard Woody Guthrie, that was it, it was all over. ” Not twenty lines later in that same interview Dylan also mentions The Clash: “ Yeah, I met them back in 1977, 1978. In England. I think they’re great. In fact I think they’re greater now than they were… It’s interesting. It took two guitar players to replace Mick. ”

Unwriting the future

Another influential “protest singer” who used his guitars as a message board was a certain John Graham Mellor. In 1976 he stencilled the mission statement NOISE with a white rattle can on the upper bout of a Telecaster that had already been sprayed black. Noise — it’s as good a rallying cry at the birth of English Punk as any. Mellor was most definitely a Guthrie fan and politically simpatico. In fact, it was only around the time he bought that Telecaster in 1975, that he stopped going by the nickname ‘Woody’ and took the stage name Joe Strummer. He also put down his Gretsch White Falcon and picked up a more workmanlike axe to swing. The guitar that would become so iconic it got a Shepard Fairey worked, Fender Artist Series model in 2007, started life as a 1966 Sunburst with rosewood fingerboard. In the year that guitar was made, the 14 year old Johnny Mellor spent his time between boarding school in Yorkshire, England and visiting his parents in Africa — and listening to Little Richard, The Beach Boys and local Malawian music along the way. The story goes that Strummer got the £120 he paid for the guitar in ’75 by marrying a South African woman who wanted British citizenship. He said he wanted the Telecaster because fellow pub rocker Wilko Johnson wielded his black Tele like a weapon. A year later the Sunburst, including the white pickguard, was over-sprayed with grey primer and a black top coat in a car body shop and the ‘Noise’ stencil was added. Strummer was also keen on Jamaican music and early in it’s life the lower horn had a Rastafarian tricolour of red, yellow & green electrical tape wrapped around it. Around 1974 Woody Mellor had been a regular punter at a Saturday night reggae club down Newport Docks, South Wales, called the Silver Sands. By the end of 1976 another notorious, esoteric message had been stuck to the black Tele, an instruction that has been the cause of endless speculation ever since: Ignore Alien Orders.

A square silver sticker with a blue line box bordering three words in red, one above the other. An imperative, a caveat, an order that itself should be ignored? And is it just that — a joke about the redundancy of it’s tautology? Why has it caused so much discussion over the years, and just where does the sticker come from? Outer space or inner visions? Was it just a hidden message that appeared in Grateful Dead packaging? There’s been as much speculation about the origins of that sticker as there has about it’s meaning. After a fair bit of digging around online I found an origin story for the slogan from somebody called Rockets that dates back to the spring of 1970:

“ Ted looked up, smiling, said ‘Hey, Rockets, look at this!’ He held out a beautifully-machined, very colorful, thick metal plate that read, ‘IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS’ and continued, ‘Last weekend I dropped some righteous White Lightning and tripped in the hills above Berkeley. Here I am, whipped outta' my mind and really digging the walk in the woods, across those bright green open meadows, when I bumped into a barbed-wire fence, blocking my way. Really brought me down, and then I saw a metal sign, just the size of this one, (the one he was showing me) that said, Government Property. Do Not Trespass! Blew my mind, I mean, we are the people who make up the government, and I say to myself, I give you permission to enter, and I crawled under the fence. Right then the words just came to me. What I heard in my head, plain as day, was, IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS. When it's finished, I'm going back up there and mount this sign right next to the No Trespassing sign. What'dya' think?’ ‘Right on!’ I replied. ”

I watched Jim Jarmusch’s movie Mystery Train during the first Covid lock-down, for the first time in decades. In Mystery Train Joe Strummer’s character ‘Johnny’ shoots a liquor store night clerk played by the comedian Rockets Redglare. Rockets was born a congenital junkie as Michael Morra in New York, NY, into a mob connected family of rag-trade jazz fanatics. He was most notorious for selling the Dilaudid that did for Sid and would sometimes tell people it was actually him who did for Nancy too. Somehow I don’t think this story comes from the same Rockets however. There was an origin story from another on-line source that differs slightly in some details, but which attributes the stickers to the same bay area artists, and furthermore explains how they got to Strummer: “ Ted and his friends pasted up a press-type master and made a photo silkscreen. He printed them in several color combinations; red on yellow, red and blue on white, and red and blue on silver, and gave them to his musician friends (some quite successful) to be passed on and posted all over the world. That’s how Joe Strummer got one of the silver ones on his guitar and made the phrase semi-famous. I still see Ted in the East Bay. My family was friends with Jon Sagen, a music promoter who knew Bob and Ted when they created the stickers in Berkeley. He helped distribute them to musicians around the world. ”

The origin of the slogan in reaction against a government sign is significant in itself. Because it’s a message that appealed to those who take delight in subverting both official signage and commercial advertising. By the time Strummer got hold of the sticker it’s message had already been adopted by others. In the late ‘70s the slogan Ignore Alien Orders was painted on signs around Cleveland, OH, as part of a campaign of urban art and graffiti by the Regional Art Terrorists, who once famously decorated the entire Detroit-Superior Bridge with pink and silver mylar streamers. Not so much a select cadre as a collective formed from assorted groups of artists and students, the RATs perpetrated all kinds of semiotic propaganda which often involved modifying billboards and erecting fake signs. Their use of détournement in this way was surely directly influenced by the Situationists — a post-war European group also fond of the printed sticker as an instant way to communicate dissent. The Situationist International in particular was as much a political movement as it was artistic. Détournement as an artistic weapon would later become one of the most crucial artistic influences on punk rock, but also the direct antecedent of the Culture Jamming and Subvertising crusades of the 1980s and ‘90s. Any band worth it’s salt in the late eighties had a T-shirt logo that ripped off a famous trade mark and it went all the way back to that hippy favourite, the Ford logo ‘Fuck’ T-shirt.

Situationism was a movement born of Lettrism and sired by Dada; both Surrealism and the post war Avant-Garde were clearly evident in it’s heritage. Lettrism, the movement it grew out of, had already played games with the literal as well as the literate: it was a ‘new poetry’ that transcended the word and wallowed in the sound of language. It was forward-looking too, a truly multimedia art-form. And it was an art movement that was fundamentally rooted in the comprehension of satire. The Lettrist International understood that ridicule and parody are the sharpest blades to pierce the thick skins of powerful sociopaths. On the surface Lettrism may appear to have been frivolous at times, but in 1946 it was a direct response to the absurdity of a world that had allowed itself to wallow in a decade of chaos and carnage at the hands of a gang of German psychos. The origins of the Letterist International splinter group are also tied in with a printed sticker — their “If you Believe you have Genius… ” recruitment campaign of 1955. It was an artistic technique that the Scottish outsider artist, humourist and songwriting genius Ivor Cutler would later adopt with great success. I always wanted to put an Ivor Cutler sticker on one of my acoustic guitars, if I could have got hold of one. It would have to be the one that said FRESH AIR MACHINE. Although he did have another sticker that said Amplification Is The Curse Of Civilization that would work well on a folk box.

Blonde Rock 'n' Roll

Even when Strummer’s message was completely transparent, however, far too many people took it the wrong way. Joe also owned a rosewood neck Blonde Esquire, which he decorated variously over the years, but it’s best known for the message “1st May — take a holiday”. The ghost of this slogan, looking like faded felt marker could still be read in places when the guitar appeared in the recent City Of London Museum Clash exhibition. Whilst this “1st” is very clear in early pictures of the guitar, you can see in later images that it got worn away at the top. It got blurred by forearm wear, particularly the superscripted “st” ordinal indicator — leading to the misreading “I may take a holiday”. This is a myth that is still circulated today — despite JH Tomkins writing in the December 17th 2012 issue of Spin : “ In the spring of 1980 some friends and I followed the band from city to city, hoping to convince the guys to play a revolutionary May Day benefit. Although Strummer eventually passed, he heard us out, was never less than courteous, and taped “On the first of May Take a holiday” to his guitar for a 1981 appearance on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow talk show. ” Watching that program back on grainy VT on YouTube, the guitar used looks like it is one of his other Telecasters, the one with the aluminium pick-guard and natural finish. Like Wanda Jackson’s D-18 it also had two five-point stars on it: the Clash “Take A Gamble” & “Give It A Spin” yellow & purple star stickers. Around 1980 this Tele had been quite a dangerous instrument, by all accounts, when it was also stickered for 240 volts and had radioactive warning symbols on it. (When The Jam played 'Pretty Green' and 'Funeral Pyre' on Snyder's Tomorrow show on May 27th that same year, Paul Weller used a Jetglo 330 Rickenbacker with large £ and P stickers on it, but we'll come back to Weller's decorated 330s later.)

In the Tomorrow show Clash footage it looks like there’s a white strip with black print across the bottom of the pick guard. So it’s possible that the first time he used that “On the first May…” message it was a newsprint clipping, or cut from some literature from Tomkins — which he then made into a more permanent statement on the Esquire. In the USA of course you can’t go celebrating International Workers Day on the 1st May with the rest of the world, you have to celebrate that peculiarly American holiday Labour Day, at the end of the summer when the holidays are over and capitalism gets all it’s labour back under the yoke. I guess it’s because May Day has too many links to labour unions and socialism around the world. Of course in earlier centuries the Beltane feast and the Queen of the May were symbolic of more than just economic productivity. On the 23rd December 2016 Tom Morello tweeted “ Today is the anniversary of the passing of Joe Strummer, my principle inspiration for being a rebel rocker. ” He attached a great black & white image of Strummer with the “Take A Holiday” Blonde Esquire which I’ve borrowed for the gallery above.

Another punk rocker who famously stickered the front of his guitar with a provocative slogan was Lead Belly fan Kurt Cobain. His black 1991 MIJ, HSS Fender Strat bore a white bumper sticker with black lettering which opined “Vandalism: beautiful as a rock in a cop’s face”. It’s a provocative and brutal statement. But perhaps we need to think of it as entirely amoral — at least until the abstract cop in question is determined to be a public protector or a tyrant’s thug. I have met some tolerant peacekeepers around the world. But I’ve also been mugged by the police***. It all depends where you are in the world — but maybe also when you are in time. Personally, I have always found New York’s Finest to be friendly and confidant sentinels of the streets — and yet back in 1927 they arrested poor old Fred Trump — dressed in full Ku Klux Klan coverings at the time — for marching in protest against the NYPD and its alleged Roman Catholic bias. The “Vandalism…” sticker on Cobain’s Strat also stated, in smaller letters underneath, “Courtesy Of The Feederz Office Of Anti-public Relations”. The Feederz were an anarchic punk band from Arizona well known for their Situationist approach to music and art, and the sticker originally came with the band’s 1986 album Teachers In Space (the album title a rather cruel joke about that year’s Challenger disaster).

Cobain played the black Strat throughout 1991, including famously at that year’s Reading festival on 23rd of August exactly a month before their second album was released. The album did rather well, I think we can use the phrase ‘game-changer’ without risk of hyperbole. By the time 1992 got going, on the 11th of January actually, Nevermind would even knock Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the Billboard no.1 spot. Nirvana were 6th on the bill at Reading in 1991, a year later they headlined. Another notable appearance of Cobain’s black Strat was at the Paramount in Seattle, WA a month or so after the album’s release. As with all Kurt’s guitars the black Strat had a hard life and as the Nevermind tour steam-rollered on it went through several necks, including a Fender MIJ, a Kramer and even a Fernandez, before getting smashed at a show in Paris in the spring of ’92. It lay in pieces after his death, until it was rebuilt by roadie Earnie Bailey and displayed at Seattle’s Experience Music Project (now the MoPOP Museum). I saw Nirvana on the Nevermind tour at Manchester Academy in December 1991 (records show it was Wednesday the 4th) and I remember Kurt playing his humbuckered sunburst Jaguar — and also playing Krist Novoselic’s natural finish Ripper bass during the encore. I don’t remember him playing the black Strat though. Cobain’s lefty Jag is possibly his most iconic guitar but, according to Earnie, it started out as the primary spare guitar to the Vandalism Strat, so maybe the Strat was out of action at the Manchester gig.

Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead...****

Kurt Cobain was yet another owner of one of those acoustic guitars from Nazareth, PA, that is famous beyond it’s pedigree. On November 18th 1993, less than 5 months before his death, Nirvana made their much lauded appearance on MTV Unplugged in New York. A few weeks before the performance Cobain got together with William Burroughs to record The “Priest” They Called Him . Burroughs said of the meeting in retrospect “ It wasn't an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.” In June 2020 the 1959 Martin D-18E, with DeArmond pickups that Cobain used for Unplugged , and in particular the searing cover of Lead Belly’s 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night?' sold for $6,010,000 breaking all auction records for guitars and rock memorabilia*****. It overtook the auction record for a guitar of $3,975,000 set the previous year — which happened to be another black Strat, owned by one David Gilmour. When I toured with Moby on his 1996 Animal Rights tour he was playing almost the negative of Cobain’s Strat — it had a white body and was right handed, but it too was a factory HSS Japanese Fender. It was also covered in stickers: it had an orange sticker with wording in blue about photographic exposure that may have been some sort of political pun, and three or four of his own orange-on-black Animal Rights stickers across it. Those two words separated by his name in much smaller letters repeated 7 times like a ticker-tape and one of his sigils at either end. Both a vegan protest and self promotion worthy of Tex Fletcher I guess.

For about half of that tour we were supporting Soundgarden. Their stage-right guitar tech who was looking after Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell, and who was incredibly accommodating towards me, was the self-same Earnie Bailey who put Kurt's strat back together; however I was the one who had to put fix Moby's smashed guitar. I remember shopping for tools with Earnie in Clas Ohlson in the centre of Oslo. I bought some rather nice large wooden cam clamps there, in order to glue Moby’s guitar back together again, as a couple of days earlier he’d smashed it on stage, à la Cobain. Actually I think it may have been his back up ‘strat’ that he trashed: an Ibanez Roadstar II that he’d had since his teens. I’ve just googled it and found that actual guitar listed on Reverb for £776.77. It’s described as having “ a long crack in the neck finish down the center ” which I believe was actually through to the truss rod channel, not just the finish. But I can attest that the body was also in three separate pieces and spent three days lying in a tour bus bunk while drying some quality aliphatic resin glue, that I’d also got from my trip to Clas Ohlson with Earnie. Mr Bailey has some good points to make about joining the Backline dept. or what’s known in The Biz as The Country Club: “ Before working as a professional technician, I believed they were these ninja masters of guitar repair and electrical knowledge. After I took the job, I soon discovered that most guitar techs were friends of bands who knew how to live on the road and change strings, and that several of the technicians that I had read about, did no repair work. Only a small subset had advanced level skills, and were willing to leave home and the workshop to practice their craft with limited tools on the road. ”

Ziggy raid guitar

Sometimes on tour you don’t get much time to try and effect guitar repairs on the run. I toured with Paloma Faith for nearly five years (June 2009 to March 2014), over her first three albums and had the pleasure to look after the marvellous Seye Adelekan for a good part of it. At one point Gibson loaned Seye a Steve Jones signature model Les Paul. It looked fantastic, all tobacco yellow and faded pin-up cowgirls — except it had it’s headstock hanging off. The re-issue Lester had fallen off a stand and despite a period correct neck volute the head had snapped. Some careful cleaning, a judicious application of the same resin based wood glue, and some careful clamping and bungee application sorted it out — even though it all had to be done ad hoc on my folding guitar bench in the old Music Bank Studio B. Since we were starting a tour I didn’t have time to try and restore the finish properly, but it didn’t look too bad and was a lot stronger afterwards. Of course that original '74 Custom with it’s pin-up girl decals is one of Pop history’s more famous stickered guitars, which is why there was a factory-issue doppelgänger for us to play with. Gibson issued the LP Custom in Alpine White for the first time in 1974 to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the classic black version.

And of course everyone knows that Steve Jones put the stickers on there to disguise it’s identity, having stolen it from Mick Ronson when Ziggy & The Spiders played Hammersmith. Except that’s just another Sex Pistols myth that won’t go away, despite being frequently debunked. Because the original white Custom (wherever it went, Jones has sold several of them) has an even older punk pedigree than Jukebox Jonesy’s stewardship. The funny thing of course is that he invented a heritage for this guitar when it already had a pedigree that would become iconic anyway. Jones claims he added some pinup decals but the guitar already had some applied by the guitar’s previous owner and punk pioneer Syl Sylvain, an erstwhile White Falcon strummer himself. The cowgirl & guitar decal is already on there in some photos of Syl but the girl sat on a platter is at a very different angle to some pictures of Jones. Maybe he had to replace it when the Bigsby came off, but also Jones has claimed to have sold more than one version of the guitar. Sylvain's use of the guitar is clearly documented in some appearances by The New York Dolls and there’s at least one image online of Sylvain playing a white Custom with twin black bobbins, no pickguard, (what look like) exactly the same pin-up decals and a Bigsby. In that photo it also looks like it had two gold and two black bell knobs for volume & tone controls respectively — much like Mick Ronson’s stripped top black Lester Custom, of course — "hakuna matata" folks. The following was said in interview with Alan DiPerna in the August ’96 edition of Guitar World :

" Malcolm was managing the Dolls for a while," Jones explains. "And when he finished managing them, he brought this guitar back to England with him. I guess they owed him money or something and gave it to him as payment. It had a Bigsby bar, but I took it off because the thing kept going out of tune." Then there are the peeling, vintage Forties girlie stickers that give the instrument its tacky je ne sais quoi . "There were a couple on there when I got the guitar off Syl," Steve says. "A couple of them came off when I had this guitar coated, and I put a couple of others on. "

In Sylvain’s own words it went like this: “ We had no money again and half of us were junkies. Just before the band broke up, Malcolm, who I’d met through my interest in the rag business, became our personal manager. He was a friend and a big fan of the Dolls, and Malcolm and his girlfriend owned a clothes shop called SEX on Kings Road in London. He said that if I gave him my white Les Paul Custom — it sounded so beautiful; it was a 73 or 74 with P-90 pickups and it had a sticker of a pin-up girl on it, which I did with a lot of my guitars - he would mail me back a plane ticket and build a new band around me in England. "

Presumably Syl meant to say PAFs — but meaning in actuality, Patent No. T-Top humbuckers. There are still other people around the world who will insist that Jones stole the guitar from Paul McCartney, Brian Ferry and even Stevie Wonder. So Stevie Jones may have added some stickers to “his guitar" but what about slogans? The only written statement he appears to have made on his equipment was to scrawl ‘Sex Pistols’ and ‘Guitar Hero’ across the grill-cloth of his Silverface Twin Reverb. Maybe I should do that to my 1977 Twin Reverb that lives here at New Cut Studios — none more Punk, hey? Except that my ’77 has been modded slightly to be more ’60s. Again, there are various legends that Jones stole that Fender Twin from Bowie at the Hammy-O, or Bob Marley at The Rainbow, or even from The Glitter Band. What is certain is that he stole the slogan at least, from The New York Dolls’ other six-string-slinger Johnny Thunders, who had written “Guitar Hero” on several pieces of the Heartbreaker's gear during the ’76 Anarchy In The UK tour (which also featured The Clash, as well as The Damned). Maybe the Twin originally belonged to Thunders and Jones just wrote Sex Pistols on it and gave him some smack. Continuing the western sticker theme Thunders used a double cut, TV yellow Les Paul Junior on that tour with a decal of a cowboy on a bucking bronco. Punk irony or no, guitars were still getting "the cowboy treatment".

A working class hero is something to be...

At the start of this article I suggested it was a bad idea to scratch or carve a message into your guitar. I mean it’s not going to do much for it’s re-sale value is it? Well of course that depends on who you are. A fairly unremarkable 1974 Fireglo Rickenbacker 330 sold at Christies in July 2008 for £10,000 despite some ragged scratches, which clearly said “I Am Nobody”, that had been carved into the upper horn. On May 19th 1977, fresh off the back of supporting The Clash on the White Riot Tour, The Jam made their Top Of The Pops debut. It was six days before Paul Weller’s 19th birthday. Paul had been out on Denmark Street and bought several Rickenbackers with the advance they’d just been payed by Polydor. One of them was that Fireglo 330, serial no. NG4292. As the band ripped through ' In The City' , the Rickenbacker gleamed — it was immaculate. But by the time they came back to TOTP again on 3rd of November to perform ' This Is The Modern World' , the Ricky was scratched up. The Jam had started their first US tour at, coincidentally, the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles, CA on the 8th & 9th October 1977. They then played The Rat in Boston, MA, on the 10th & 13th before heading to the CBGB Theatre for the 15th & 16th.

By the time they got to New York, NY, the 330 was sporting a sticker that said ‘Gill Price’ and two rather ugly battle scars. Photos of Weller from one of the two gigs they played at CBGB’s show a big scratch in the Fireglo finish down to the bare wood. It looked like a shallow, mirrored tick, starting from the guitar’s waist, that then takes a 120º turn into the upper horn. other photos show a very similar scratch below the cats-eye sound hole suggesting a definite (or even deliberate) scrape against something with two sharp protuberances. When we can finally do some shows again I must ask Paul how it happened. As I write this paragraph (26/9/20) we should have been playing Bogarts in Cincinnati, OH tonight. When The Jam played Top Of The Pops again at the start of November the scar had become a cue for Weller to carve the self-effacing phrase. A statement of existential angst perhaps, or maybe a more complex reference. A working class hero is something to be but Paul Weller, it seems to me, is someone who has tried to fanfare the Common Man despite possessing an uncommon gift. When he makes you a cup of tea or asks what you want ordering from the Ripley Curry Garden he is Paul. When he holds a field full of people enraptured because they feel like he is telling each and every one of them that You Do Something To Me he is Weller. He’s a damn sight more than nobody in my eyes: he paid me, and the rest of his crew, several grand when we couldn’t tour last year.

“Take a drink in the Whiskey,
Move on to the Rainbow” — On Sunset , Paul Weller, 2020.

Heading back to Sunset Strip, and back to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go on December 14th 1992 (a mere fifteen years after The Jam’s LA debut) and a Franken-strat guitar that wasn’t really consummated until it was scrawled on. There have been plenty of accounts of how Morello’s custom built guitar was initially put together and later adapted by him over the years; it’s origins in 1986 with Performance Guitar USA in Los Angeles, CA, and the various evolutions that have left almost nothing but the body original. Morello has said variously: “ As for my other change to the look of the guitar, this was in the early days of Rage Against The Machine. We were set to play at the Whiskey and just before going over to soundcheck I scrawled 'Arm The Homeless' on the guitar. I liked the juxtaposition of that kind of provocative and militant Situationist slogan with those four smiling hippopotamuses all facing in one direction.” and “I decided to take a Magic Marker and thought of the phrase, kind of echoing the provocateur artistry of the Paris commune in the back of my mind,” Morello said. “In the city of Los Angeles, where you have Bentleys and Rolls-Royces driving by these homeless tent cities, it just felt like a fine, provocative artistic statement. ” It s hould be noted that the Hippo on the back is painted upside down so that it can be flashed at the audience, (except when obscured by words to the wise). Never underestimate a hippopotamus, they are deadly creatures. Back in that hotbed of Situationist provocation, the great state of Ohio, one year after the debut of the ‘Arm The Homeless’ slogan, and with Rage... by now a household name, an interesting outrage occurred.

Columbus, OH is the second biggest city by population in the Midwest after Chicago, IL and the state capital. In the first week of December 1993 the city’s newspapers & TV companies started to get press releases about a new charity and it’s Christmas appeal to provide more than just food and shelter to the city’s most vulnerable people. “ The Arm the Homeless Coalition will be collecting donations to provide firearms for the homeless of Columbus…” The communiqué went on to state that “Funds are to be used to provide arms, ammunition and firearm safety training for homeless individuals who pass the coalition's rigorous screening. Homeless are selected for the program on the basis of need, mental and emotional stability, and potential value to society at large. ” The media reaction was quick and querulous. Various Ohio newspapers and the Charitable Solicitations Board were up in arms, if you’ll pardon the pun. The Coalition’s spokesman Jack Kilmer’s response, in an interview with the Associated Press, was “ Who more needs to exercise their constitutional right to have a weapon for protection? ” noting that there were already homeless charities to deal with shelter, food, and jobs, but none that trained the homeless to protect themselves. The media furore finally died down when the Coalition was exposed as a hoax by some Ohio State University students.

There has always been an element of precise, controlled aggression in Tom Morello’s guitar playing, music that is as focused and as incisive as the verbal messages in his various musical projects. But there have always been visual slogans as well. For Tom Morello a guitar is most definitely a political placard as well as an instrument. In a transcript from an interview with Q104.3 in New York Morello said “ Woody Guthrie’s, uh, famous mantra that he had on his guitar: 'This machine kills fascists' was clearly inspirational to me - and I've scrawled different stuff on my guitars… ”. Back in 2008 he performed Woody Guthrie’s anthem This Land Is Your Land as his acoustic alter ego The Nightwatchman. For that project he uses an Ibanez "Galvador" nylon string acoustic with the black Sharpie’d message “Whatever It Takes” (oh, and yet another one of those five-point stars) decorating it. I found a quote from Morello on Equipboard.com where he talks about his use of a classically strung guitar: " That ended up being the Galvador, which turned out to have a really beautiful sound. Much of The Nightwatchman catalogue was composed, from that point forward, on the Galvador, because it did have a pickup – you could plug it in anywhere. I went on a tour in 2003 with Billy Bragg and Steve Earle, and with the Galvador I could be a professional performer (laughs). So it's the 'Whatever It Takes' guitar. " ******

The Nightwatchman also plays a black Gibson J-45 that has “Black Spartacus” in white block letters around the upper curves of the body. Behind the bridge it has a ‘coat of arms’ to represent his heritage made up of elements of the Kenyan, Italian and US flags with a hammer & sickle. But Tom Morello has two more black guitars that should be mentioned. One notable weapon in his armoury is yet another black Strat, this one with a bound-body, that has “Soul Power” scrawled in big silvery white letters across the top of the body — a guitar he used mainly with super-group Audioslave. But his other famous guitar and his main guitar for drop-D tunings for many years (usually played on the neck pup incidentally) has always been a battered looking, black Telecaster with a scabby white guard, covered in bits of sellotape with various stickers all over it. Morello got this 1982 Fender in a swap for a Marshall head from his room mate, the late Scott Tracy. The main message this guitar proclaims in faded paint is “Sendero Luminoso” the name of the Peruvian Communist group more notorious to us pinches cabrones by the name Shining Path. It also has a sticker that says ‘I.W.W. One Big Union’ in support of the Industrial Workers of the World. Another of the things taped to this guitar is a black & white image of protestors with the placard “Go Home, Honestly We Hate You” — not a message to the audience we hope. But more than anything, of course, this guitar looks like Joe Strummer’s black Tele.

Recently in the February 2021 issue of Uncut magazine Tom Morello said: “ I love using the guitar as a canvas for additional sloganeering but it all goes back to Woody emphasising that these are not just songs to sing and dance to, there’s serious business at hand with three chords and the truth. ” It looks like people will be stickering and writing on guitars for years to come, but what they’ll be saying in the coming decades may be more shocking than anything we’ve seen so far. Time to shoe-horn in a few actual quotes here, I think.

“ The folk singer’s commitment to these instruments was ideological - moral even. They were the honest tools of those in service of a righteous cause. Woody Guthrie famously emblazoned his guitar with the slogan THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, thus beginning a long tradition of using the guitar as a political statement - a tradition that would come to include both Jimi Hendrix and Guthrie’s fervent admirer Bob Dylan. ” — Play It Loud , Brad Tolinski & Alan Di Perna.

“Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Lead Belly too
An’ to all the good people that travelled with you” — Song To Woody , Bob Dylan (1962).

“I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.” — Woody Guthrie.

“ No, among the rock and roll generations, Guthrie’s truest heir may be Clash vocalist and songwriter Joe Strummer. Ironically, while Strummer briefly adopted the name “Woody” in his earliest days as a performer, he never cultivated identification between himself and Guthrie, and he dropped the name years before becoming even remotely well known, much less famous. During his peak years of fame, few Clash fans knew that Joe Strummer had once been “Woody Mellor”. Neither was a true Marxist or Communist, of course; Guthrie famously tossed off the line “left wing, right wing, chicken wing - it’s all the same to me”. They were artists first and political theorists second, but both could be called truthfully “fellow travellers. ” — Punk Rock Warlord: the Life and Work of Joe Strummer by Barry J. Faulk & Brady Harrison.

I was once Joe Strummer’s fellow traveller in Australia, in January of 2000 during the Big Day Out travelling festival. I was outside the hotel waiting for a shuttle to site, and didn’t dare intrude on him as he was with his young family, but when we got on the van he introduced himself and was as down-to-earth and friendly as you would hope. During that tour I got to see him play a volcanic set with The Mescaleros featuring a lot of Clash songs at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne. I blagged in, as I knew a couple of the crew well — my mate Andy Boo was doing backline and old-school noise-boy Justin Grearly was running righteous FOH. I’d already toured with Martin Slattery around ’96 when he played keyboards with Black Grape. Strummer’s drummer on that Australian run was Steve ”Smiley” Barnard, after Pablo Cook and Ged Lynch had vacated the drum throne. I had looked after Ged on Black Grape (and would tour with him again on Goldfrapp) — and I later toured with Smiley for several years when he played for Archive. Pablo, as well as being a rhythmic genius, was a right character who was ubiquitous on the London scene at the turn of the Millennium. I can’t remember just how many different artists I saw him play with back in the day. I woke up on his sofa once, somewhere in Camden Town I think — we were much the worse for wear and his daughter made us breakfast. She was so much more domestically capable then he was, despite being only about ten years old.

A little under two years after that Big Day Out tour, my missus and I left our flat in Notting Hill and legged it up Westbourne Grove to Paddington Station, heading west to visit family for Christmas. As we ran into the station concourse off Eastbourne Terrace the Evening Standard news stand said ‘ Clash Legend Dies ’. My heart sank. I remember doing a TV show with Aimee Man ( Later With Jools I think) from whom I got a plectrum that said “Elvis died for your sins”. Now whilst I won’t say anything against The King, I don’t know how far I could believe in his redemptive powers (any more than I would in those of Frederick Christ Trump). In Jarmusch’s marvelous Mystery Train , Johnny “Woody” Mellor, billed as Joe Strummer, plays a character called Johnny — but everybody else in the movie calls him Elvis. Maybe Joe died for all our sins: Strummero Redemptor is a saint I’ll go marching in with. I just went and found that Daphne Blue plectrum with gold “Elvis Died Fer Yer Sins” legend. At the exact moment I took it out of the zippy, ' Should I Stay Or Should I Go?' came on the radio. Try and tell me that’s not a nudge from the Universe Herself, I dare you.

* Piedmont Blues was on the wane as the USA came out of WWII, in terms of record sales anyway, but the Piedmont style would become a big influence in the American folk music revival in the ‘50s & ‘60s, and thereby come back into pop. It took it’s name not from the original Piedmont region in the great lakes of northern Italy (one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been), but from that part of the Piedmont plateau, stretching from Richmond, VA, to Atlanta, GA. The style came about when Delta blues coming up from Mississippi met with ragtime and string band styles that had already spread all the way down the east coast, and crashed into both early country music and the more urbane popular song off the metropolitan radio stations. Piedmont Blues refers mainly to a guitar finger-style, marked by a syncopated thumb bass ostinato that uses earlier parlour guitar & banjo techniques to mimic ragtime piano rhythms. The previously mentioned Josh White, a ferocious performer & guitar player, as well as a great songwriter, often used Piedmont stylings. In it’s heyday, between about 1925 and 1945, Piedmont Blues sold a lot of records for artists like Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake and Buddy Moss. Bob Dylan is alleged to have composed the decidedly Piedmontese Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right after meeting the singer/guitarist Etta Baker on his 21st birthday (May 24th, 1962). Baker was from North Carolina, home to what is usually acknowledged to be the most ‘authentic’ Piedmont Blues style.

** Going by some early photographs, it’s possible Dylan’s (first) electric was a Silvertone Aristocrat 642 archtop with Gibson P13 style ridged pole pickup, made by Harmony in Chicago, IL. We have a lovely Harmony H82G Rebel here at New Cut Studios made in the spring of 1969. It’s a green-burst semi-acoustic with two “moustache grill”, DeArmond gold-foil pups with quite a Rickenbacker vibe about it’s feel but more of an ES295 tone.

*** Or "fined" at gunpoint, if that’s how you want to look at such tourist taxes. It was in Odessa, around 1999 during a Red Snapper tour. We were stopped for the heinous crime of walking two blocks between a bar and our hotel after drinking 2 whole pints of beer. Two furry hatted, camouflage clad men with AK-47s got out of a Police Lada and told us we were drunk. By Russian standards that was hilarious, since we’d only had a couple of beers. Yes I know Ukraine had been independent for nearly a decade by that point, but most of the people I met over the age of 30 were scared of the future and were highly vocal in their desire for the return of Soviet rule. Right, in the light of recent events I feel I have to qualify that remark. Not only were such people the older generation but they were also the kind of people who would interupt us to proffer their opinions about 'the West'. The two cops were very different in their attitudes. The old guy with the sidearm and grey Stalin moustache who did all the talking was clearly practiced in turning over tourists. The young guy with the AK-47 was obviously uncomfortable with what was going on and wouldn't look us in the eye. You also have to bear in mind that in 1999 Ukraine was much closer to the shadow of the USSR than the chance to join NATO or the EU.

**** … to quote Robbie Robertson, who often played a customised copper coloured Strat with black pickguard and white pickup covers and which can be seen to advantage in the The Last Waltz. Dave Gilmour’s black Strat, again with black guard and white pup covers, is so famous it got it’s own biographical coffee table book. Only the two single coil pups of Cobain’s black Strat were white, not the humbucker, but with it’s black pickguard it was very reminiscent of both Gilmour’s and Robertson’s iconic axes.

***** Just before launching into ' Where Did you Sleep Last Night? ' Cobain announces that their closing song was written by his favourite performer and after some prompting from Novoselic, wryly mentions that “This guy representing the Lead Belly estate wants to sell me Lead Belly’s guitar for five hundred thousand dollars”. I’m sure he would have been amused to know the guitar in his hands would sell for twelve times that amount.

****** Many modern Ibanez Spanish guitars have a label inside that looks like it says Galvador Ibanez in gothic lettering. I am pretty sure the 'G' has been miscopied in the Far East from an S — with a very small modification to the middle of the left hand side of this initial letter. I can see how it reads now, but a gothic G does not look likes this. In Spanish "Galvador" is meaningless, whereas Salvador not only means Saviour but is also an extremely common christian name. The clincher is that parent company Hoshino Gakki began importing classical guitars from Salvador Ibáñez é Hijos from Valencia around 1929. But in 1933 the Ibanez & Sons family luthiers was bought out by rival makers Telesforo Julve, so in 1935 Hoshino started to make their own guitars in Japan using the name “Ibanez Salvador”. In Japan, as in many countries, the family name usually comes first. After the 1945 destruction of their factory they eventually started making Ibanez guitars again in 1957, just in time for the Rock N' Roll boom, little knowing how big a part they would play in the history of the electric guitar.

©️ Mark Vickers 12th December 2020.

Offset Upsets...

2021-04-17T13:59:27Z

... putting the hex on Surf Metal ceramics.

So, here’s a couple of guitars, from different clients, that we had in recently for a variety of jobs; both with fret damage that needed filing out and re-crowning. It struck me that beneath their classic curves both of these guitars were quite savage beasts. Both have high output humbuckers in the bridge position of the kind favoured by Metal musicians — a Bare Knuckle Aftermath and a Seymour Duncan Invader. I know, they both sound like you’d have to order them from Lovehoney don’t they? They're definitely not Surf guitars anymore. But then again, a few years ago there was a flurry of recognition in online communities that quite a lot of Heavy Metal guitar stylings might actually have come from Surf Music. All you had to do was turn the reverb way down and the distortion way up. And for all the humour that was got out of it, there was more than a grain of truth. After all, guitarists that grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s would often have learnt licks from guitar bands of the ’60s. I’m going to discuss these guitars at greater length in this post, but here's an article from guitarworld.com that drew some of those parallels with some fun video links to back it up.

Clearly, if you clean up all the distortion from classic metal riffs and soak it in reverb you get some seriously surf stylings. Tubular dude. Here’s an earlier source for that stylistic stereotyping with some amusing artistic juxtapositions that appeared on YouTube . Did anybody spot the original version of our sunburst Squier Jagmaster playing Slayer at 2:50? It’s all starting to come together…

First in the shop was this Squier MIC Jagmaster sporting a Seymour Duncan SH-8B Invader. The single-ply black pick guard is a custom job and is finished to a high standard. When I had the ‘guard off to fix the jack connection I saw that the body had a factory swimming pool rout through the middle, which gives no clues as to the original pup configuration. I don’t believe this model was ever sold in a single pup format so I imagine it was customised by the owner. I believe it’s from the early 2000s and is pretty much a cheaper copy of the rather excellent CIJ Vista Jagmaster model. Both these far-east variants came with twin humbuckers, from what I can find online, but it would be easy to go Strat with the electrics in these scooped out bodies, or even 3 HBs. I don’t believe Seymour Duncan make an Invader with Fender string spacing so this pup is a little narrow for this guitar, both for the saddles and the pick guard rout. The guitar needed a lot of work to get the frets levelled and re-crowned, the jack socket needed re-soldering and someone had installed a set of cheap “roller” saddles on the Strat style trem that didn’t roll very well. Not only that but they were too long to allow for good intonation. And they were too wide to fit the bridge plate, causing splayed string spacing. Not only that, they were too rigid, in combination with being overlong, to allow for a low action because they were left floating up in the air once the grub screws were backed out past a certain point. All in all a real botched job. A new set of smaller, generic saddles sorted out all these issues and the Jagmaster was set up nicely — once the many high spots had been filed down across all the frets, of course. It now plays like a dream, but maybe that’s because I have small hands. It’s an inch and a half shorter than most Fenders of course, being more Jag than ‘master, and that means nothing is a stretch to play on this neck.

The Fender MIM Blacktop Jazzmaster had some nasty cuts from 3rd string impact into it’s 4th fret and flat spots absolutely all over the neck that looked like the frets were hammered in but never crowned. This guitar also arrived with a Mustang style bridge, which to my mind is always the first thing to do with any traditional Fender Offset that you intend on playing properly. Caveat emptor however, as there are a lot of variations in Mustang style bridges out there these days. The bridge this guitar came with had two main issues. The saddles were too narrow for a start (in complete contrast to the last guitar) causing lateral movement because they did not butt up against each other as they would in an original Mustang. An even bigger problem was the diameter of the saddles — at least the middle four anyway. Being a modern Blacktop this JM has a 9.5” radius fingerboard; the bridge it came with meanwhile was a vintage radius at 7.25”. Mastery hardware is excellent and I’ve used it many times, but for a lot less money and a more traditional look, my favourite bridge for any Offset is the Staytrem. Excellent materials, properly engineered, machined & finished to a high standard and with several improvements to the original design — the most important selling point is they make them in both 7¼ & 9½ radii! The owner was happy to order one and also wanted me to install new pickups: the previously mentioned Bare Knuckle Aftermath in the bridge of course and a very nice Fender Wide Range copy in a Jazzmaster pup cover. This neck pup sounds great and is from the hands of a really good maker. Marc Ransley at Mojo Pickups in Halifax is a bespoke pickup maker who really knows how to wind a bobbin. I have used several of his pups in builds and have come across them in a few great guitars. I also swapped the black witch hats and switch tip for white ones which the client was very pleased with, and I think works well with the pups he’d chosen. For a full discussion of the range of aftermarket hardware options when it comes to the “surf guitars” check out my earlier Offset Lowdown blog.

But it’s the high output pups in the bridge positions that we’re interested in here. The Aftermath bridge unit that I put into the Jazzmaster, handmade in Falmouth, Cornwall uses three ceramic magnets (Aftermath neck units are alnico 5) and the pole pieces in both bobbins are all screws, which in this particular version are all allen heads. The bobbins are “symmetrically wound” according to Bare Knuckle — I presume that means for output impedance. I believe Bare Knuckle scatter wind most of their bobbins by hand and I imagine there are quite a lot of winds on these particular bobbins. Four conductor output for your switching pleasure comes as standard. The pickup voicing would seem to be ideally tailored to metal and BK-in-the-CK claim the Aftermath “ tracks fast riffing extremely accurately, mids are focused and intense for ultimate punch no matter how dense the mix or how low the tuning, and highs are precise and articulate ”.

The Invader meanwhile is also a ceramic pup — indeed like the Aftermath it has three magnets, although as far as I’m aware it has been around a lot longer. And again, it also has 12 hex-head screw poles — in this case big dome head “metal oxide” bolts, as SD describe them. I don’t think with pole pieces this big, and with magnets this pokey you’re going to notice much difference in relative string volume by staggering the heights of these poles, but I may be wrong. It’s possible that there is an advantage to be had from an improved volume balance string to string. And that goes for the Aftermath as well, though it’s poles are a bit more conventional, like a '70s DiMarzio. Like the Bare Knuckle, the Seymour Duncan comes with four core cable for coil tapping and series/parallel options. SD advertise the Invader as being wax potted and I believe that BK pot their pups as standard, unless requested not to by the client for a custom build. Seymour Duncan pups are made in Santa Barbara, CA, though I believe most of their models are machine wound.

I’m intrigued by several things about these bridge position irons. Do the build similarities between these two pups mean that the Aftermath is BK’s version of the SD classic? Are the magnets fitted to cover a pair of strings each in order to define three distinct tonal registers? Much more likely that they run the length of the bobbins, right? Are the big pole heads of the Invader just for show? Maybe next time either of these units come through the shop I’ll risk stripping them down, taking some gut-shots and recording some comparisons. There is a sonic reason for the large pole piece caps on the Invader detailed on Seymour Duncan’s website. Both of these pickups are naturally bright due to their ceramic magnets and SD claim for the SH-8 that “ By using those unique hex caps, the highs are softened, leaving you with a lot of low-end power and enough cut in the highs, thus creating the huge tonal ‘thump’ the Invader provides. If you were to use a regular set of pole pieces in the Invader you’d end up with a pickup about as hot but with less power in the lows: the tonal spectrum would shift from the lower mids to the higher mids. ”

©️ Mark Vickers 11th March 2021.

Kicking pedals…

2020-09-12T17:26:27Z

… and casting Pearls before sine waves.

When you’re trying to fatten up those drum sounds, a useful trick is to apply some subtle overdrive to the tracks, either on individual instruments or across the whole set. But be careful with that distortion, you’re looking to embiggen those beats and get more impact with tasteful crunch — fizzy mush just doesn’t work well with the percussive elements of your mix. Haunting mids in the rack tom resonances and transparent colour in the tone palette, that’s what you’re after. Aren’t you? Now there are plenty of plug-ins out there that will help you to emulate flattering FET boosting or vintage valve compressor soft clipping, but have you thought about how we used to do it? These days of course all you have to do is select your Carmine app on your pocket device and set up a chain that goes something like Krupa-Supraphonic-Starclassic-Sabian-Klon ; then make it play ' When The Levee Loops ' and you’re done! But back in the day we knew that when it came to drum distortion it was best to do it at source. That way you got interactive drive and organic grunt from playing the effect. Plugging your tom-toms direct into a Tube Screamer gave you all the midrange fatness you could wish for. And of course if you were going to use discrete effects it was better to look to the units actually made by drum manufacturers and optimised for percussive sound. Pearl, Gretsch, Yamaha, all the big beat builders made renowned effects pedals specifically for drums — most particularly, varieties of overdrives.

There are also some rare devices out there and some of the best drum pedals are lost to the mists of time. How about the Slingerland Rolling Thunder that Philthy Animal Taylor famously used on the Bomber album? Or that rarest of beasts the Sonor Tonreich — I bet even pedal aficionado Josh Scott of JHS Pedals doesn’t have one of those. Compared with guitarists, bassists or even keyboardists, effects pedals were never as popular with drummists. After all, they usually have a much bigger expense than most musicians do when starting out, just to afford the basic instruments. Effects pedals designed for drums were rare and sales were low, so inevitably some of the older drum stomp boxes are difficult to find. I have heard people say that the Tonreich is actually a mythical beast, that was stillborn in the development phase and buried in an unmarked enclosure. Well, more of that later…

Dirt For Drums

There’s a bit of a fashion these days for putting real drums through effects pedals, but as I’d like to illustrate in this article, it’s far from being a new thing. Of course it’s no secret that drums have nearly always been processed, at least from the earliest days of recording popular music anyway. Echo & reverberation, gating & compression: as soon as these techniques for processing audio signals were developed engineers applied them to drum tracks and started to work out ways of using them that soon became standard tricks of the trade. Easier of course to put a drum machine through a pedal, than a full acoustic drum set. By the time our core was getting hard and industrial in the early Eighties we were putting an Oberheim DMX through an original ProCo RAT to make our pretty hate machines. But I reckon people don’t realise how deep the connection between drums and effects pedals really goes. The Pearl OD-05, designed in 1981, is a great overdrive pedal not dissimilar to a Tube Screamer (and with twice the complement of JRC4558 chips), but with the addition of a rather nifty parametric equalizer inserted before the clipping stage. This feature was of course an absolute necessity on a pedal designed for drums. Now, this EQ was almost identical to the midrange control on Lab Series L5 amplifiers* and allowed 15db of cut or boost over a range of 100Hz - 4KHz. It is an exceptionally tunable tone control for an overdrive pedal. Actually Maxon later introduced a mid boost control on the Ibanez ST-9 Super Tube Screamer in 1984. “Urgh — crank up the mids”, to catchphrase Connor4Real. Like, without the cut feature of a true parametric control? Just in case you felt your Tube Screamer needed more mid-range. Okay, I’ll just leave it there.

Since being founded the Pearl Musical Instrument Company have largely concentrated on making excellent quality drums and percussion, and though their electronic output is more limited (we’ll talk about the Syncussion a little later), they made some real lost gems in the 1980s that are only starting to be searched out now. Pearl first tried their hand at pedals in the early Seventies under the brand name Vorg, though the pedals were also labeled with "The Pearl Musical Instrument Co." The Vorg Model F-502 Warp Sound was famously used, not by a drummer, but by a starship commander in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I'm joking of course, everybody knows it was the F-501 phaser in Star Trek . Seriously though, the Vorg Warp Sound is notable for being used by Irish-American experimental guitarist Kevin ‘Bloody’ Shields***. The Vorg range also included the F-501 Phase Shifter, F-503 Graphic Equalizer and a model F-504 Flanger that was twice the size of the other pedals and also had the supplementary title Analog Delay Effect. Pearl later restyled these pedals cosmetically — well anyway, around 1977 the beige and taupe boxes got painted black and the Pearl logo replaced the Vorg badge. The black versions are known as the 600 series (F-602, F-601, F603 & F-604 respectively), but they also added another double-wide stomp in the F-605 Electro Echo which had the secondary name Analog Delay. And indeed it was a superb bucket-brigade delay utilising the Mitsubishi MN3005 chip for 4096-stage long delay, but with it’s input & output level selectors for matching to keyboards, this pedal was much more like a synthesiser module. And, the F-605 Electro Echo was also a Chorus pedal that resembled the legendary Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble. Both effects could be engaged separately or in unison by a 3-way slide switch labelled Delay, Chorus, Duplex. Come down to New Cut Studios and try out our original Boss CE-1 if you’ve never experienced a real Chorus Ensemble. However the impact of the Boss Compacts, also released in 1977, made units like the Pearl 600 series look antiquated, and so...

At the start of the 1980s Pearl brought out the much more compact Sound Spice pedals, which included the OD-05 - though, as we’ll see later they kept the double-width pedal concept as well (including a CE-22 Chorus Ensemble). These more modern looking floor ‘effectors’ were developed and made for Pearl by a company called KLM, much in the same way that Ibanez used the Nisshin Onpa company, with it’s Maxon brand, to develop their pedals. It was remarkably lateral thinking for a Japanese drum manufacturer to commission a Dutch airline to do their pedal designs. The pedals designed by KLM were certainly influenced by existing devices from Boss, Ibanez and others, but they also sought to innovate and improve on the standard models that the market had thrown up already. The Pearl OC-07 Octave was just about the best tracking analogue octave pedal ever made, it was far superior to Boss’ OC-2 (Ace from Skunk Anansie was a longtime user of the OC-07). In fact, not until 2005 when digital devices like the original, full-size POG came along, could the OC-07 be beaten by anything smaller than a 3U rack from Eventide. If you’re lucky enough to own both the OD-05 and OC-07 (which we do here at New Cut Studios) you can chain them on drums for some fantastic thickening.

Another great ’80s Over Drive from a drum department was the Yamaha OD-10M II, from their SDS range which was introduced in 1986. Construction was sturdy and they had control knobs set well below the level of the foot-switch to protect them from those leaden-footed drummers unlikely to look before they stomp. We have an OD-10M II at New Cut as well if you’d like to come down and try it out. It’s a really great, full sounding overdrive and it stays pretty flat and transparent across the range — with none of the mid-hump flattery that a Tube Screamer could give your toms, so if you’re crazy enough to use it on guitar make sure you’ve got articulate pickups and a good amp. Looking through Yamaha catalogues of the time I can see why the SDS pedals worked so well in use with their EPS electronic drums. The sample based PTX8 brain had 8 individual jack outputs in addition to it’s main stereo pair, making addition of the effects pedals a breeze compared to plugging in real drums. The advantage of using the PTX8 at the heart of a Yamaha D8 rig was that unlike their PMC1 it wasn’t just a trigger module but a tone generator as well. Each of the 8 trigger inputs had it’s own separate sound source based on 12-bit companded PCM wave memory synthesis. But we’re running ahead of ourselves here. We’ll look at the development of drum machines and trigger-pad systems a little later. For now suffice to say that drum electronics go back quite a way - and drum machines even further, as far back as the 13th century in fact. No no, thirteenth… Yes… We’ll get to that as well. I know I joked about putting a guitar through this Yamaha Overdrive, but I’ve actually tried it and it does work remarkably well. It has a full, well rounded sound with thickness and character, without being woolly, mushy or harsh. It is fairly flat across the range with both warmth and clarity even at high drive level. So why isn’t it as famous as a Tube Screamer? Because of it’s terrible name/slash/number? (Too many slashes? taking the piss?). Or because it was designed for drums? Or perhaps because in the Eighties everybody wanted that radio friendly mid-boost on their guitars as much as they did on their drums.

Talking of dated drive sounds, the very first dedicated drum dirt pedal was of course the Gretsch Controfuzz, and it had quite a unique design. Introduced, I believe, around 1971 it put dual LM748 op-amp distortion into the hands of drummers, or rather, it put it at their feet. “Contro” for control presumably, rather than “contra” to imply a bass register, though it did have good low end facility. The unique feature that the Controfuzz had at the time was it’s blend circuit which allowed you to introduce more or less dirt in parallel to the clean signal with the Distort knob. The only other pot was labelled Boost and was the output level control for the mixed signal. To be clear, the Distort control alters neither the gain, nor the clipping amount, of the distorted signal. The circuit is set at maximum distortion and this control actually governs how much of that distortion is taken away from the mix to clean signal. This allows a setting where playing harder pushes more of the clean signal in the mix above the distortion, but with no signal the clean & dirty sides of the audio cancel each other out. It is almost a gated sound with a hard crisp attack that decays with an increasingly fuzzy tail. How can anyone imagine that this wasn’t designed for drums? Of course this character to the device means that it doesn’t work well across the whole drum set. The best implementation back in the 70s was to use several Contros through that early pedal loop switcher the Maestro Multiplier MM-1, allowing you to put individual drums in the set through it’s own Controfuzz. If you couldn’t manage such a complex (at least for the ‘70s) drum electronics set up you could always move to the larger 18v version of the pedal that was the Gretsch Expandafuzz. This pedal combined the Controfuzz with their 3 band Expandatone equaliser. With 3 separate footswitches (in addition to Fuzz) to engage Bass, Mid-range & Treble controls independently in any combination — whether the fuzz was engaged or not — this was a pretty useful pedal to put across the whole kit. Especially when you discovered that the 3 EQ bands worked on whatever audio was going through the pedal, clean and distorted, or whatever other effects were chained with it.

That early Seventies line of Gretsch effects also included the Tremofect, the Freq Faze and the Tone Divider. The appearance & construction of the tremolo and the two fuzz pedals are consistent and clearly part of the same product range. (This also included the Expander-G amplifier with a 5-way footswitch that accessed it’s compliment of onboard effects, including the Controfuzz with Expandatone, Tremofect, and a reverb). Despite the fact that some people have put late ’60s dates to units listed with online sales sites, these pedals have all the hallmarks of early ’70s manufacture. Looking up the Expandafuzz patent # 3,719,782 online I found it was filed in 1971 and granted in 1973 which fits very well with the parts and fabrication. Produced under the Baldwin ownership years, these effects share some details with Maestro units. Could these USA made pedals have been manufactured by Maestro? Certainly the Italian musical electronics firm Jen were an OEM for the Gretsch brand, just around the same time they were making the Vox V800 series pedals, or certainly soon afterwards. Jen made the Playboy series of effects for the Gretsch brand, the line including the HF Modulator, the Dynamics Sustainer, the Harmon Booster and the Jumbo Fuzz. Most of the Playboy pedals were housed in the same sand-cast enclosures they had used for the classic Vox version of the Tone Bender and it’s twin the Jen Fuzz, but instead of rotary pots, all featured a control panel set into the top with three sliders. We have a late ’60s Jen Fuzz Tone Bender at New Cut, though it’s not really a drum pedal. There was also a V846 Vox style wah “made exclusively for” Gretsch’s Playboy range by Jen.

Other Drum Stomps

Of course not all effects pedals that were designed for drums were fuzz boxes. There was the Tama Tank Compander, for example, which pretty much did what it said on the tin. It was a compressor/expander, gate and digital reverb ‘tank’ in one box. Rather than a compander’s common usage in noise reduction (or for digital audio data compression as in the PTX8 discussed above), the Tama pedal was all about sound augmentation and it gave you those big ’80s drum sounds at the kick of a button. Instant Phil Collins - if you had the chops, it had the chips. The audio was converted to digital at the input and the resulting PCM signal could then be processed through a quality chipset which was pretty much the best DSP available when it was released in 1988. The stereo outs were even on balanced jacks for running straight into the board if you were short on DIs. There were plenty of studio rack units at the time that could do similar stuff, but no one had put all of this into one box, let alone a floor unit. The Tank Comp had a large enclosure by ’80s standards (partly due to it having 8 knobs), but it was really no bigger than many of the bulkier ’70s effect pedals.

Talking of drum pedals with specifications ahead of the curve, the Mapex DDE2000 Drum Echo, was a digital delay unit for drums made in Taiwan in the 1980s. Internally it was remarkably similar to the Aria DD-X20 delay pedal (another pedal from the ‘80s that we have at New Cut Studios). Between it’s 2 second maximum delay length and it’s hold feature the DD-X20 was the first proper looper pedal that you could play over. It had three different latch and hold settings selectable by a rotary switch. The Mapex version came in a much larger box with a couple of extra features. Externally it looked a lot like the earlier Pearl F-605 Electro Echo analogue device, maybe there were a bunch of these chassis left over after Pearl condensed their effects into the compact Sound Spice range. The DDE2000’s five knobs turned two rotary switches that gave settings for Range and Hold, and three potentiometers that gave you control over Time, Feedback & Level. The only real difference in the controls between the Mapex 2000 and Aria X20 are the order of the controls on the box. The Mapex’s pots were in reverse order to the Aria and the two switch knobs came before them, instead of on the bottom row. The Range/mS switch (the Aria Range control was labelled msec) had settings labelled 3-15, 16-80, 80-400 and 400-2000. The Hold switch positions were marked as Hold Off, Delay Off-Hold, Delay On-Hold, and Latch (Off, D.Off <—> Hold, D.On <—> Hold and Latched on the Aria). The DDE2000 had stereo output jacks like Tama’s Tank Compander, but also had an input for a 4-way remote foot switch for the latch/hold modes so that the drummer could place it next to his kick or hat pedals. Just like the Aria delay it had a Boss type, tip negative, DC socket. I bought my DD-X20 in the mid ’80s and seem to remember that it would eat up batteries, so the Mapex variant was no doubt equally power hungry.

Rhythmatics

I said that we’d take a look at Pearl’s foray into rhythm electronica and so… Pearl got involved with electronic drums in 1979 with the fantastic Syncussion SY-1. The Pearl Syncussion is one of the great drum machines of the era, whose reputation only really grew significantly in later years. This analogue synth console had two separate inputs that could be triggered by anything with a CV or trigger out, including other drum machines. It was sold with a pair of bongo like drum shells with transducers inside, a 12v DC PSU and a rather flimsy plastic case for the brain, like that for a Hohner Melodica. Even though it was only notably used at the time for some terrible disco clichés, it could really produce some great sounds with a much deeper bass response than a TR-808. So much so that revamped versions of the SY-1 were brought out by both PsyCo X and The Human Comparator in kit form a few years ago. But Pearl also produced percussive electronics and developed their own drum pads as well. When they brought out their DRX-1 in 1985 it was pretty much a copy of the Simmons SDS5: with hexagonal pads, rack mount brain and hardware. It did however manage to sound significantly better than it’s Simmons antecedent. Not that the Simmons kit was the first of it’s kind by any means. The first rubber trigger-pad, electronic drum kit was actually built in 1970 by The Moody Blues’ drummer Graeme Edge with the help of Sussex University electronics professor Brian Groves. It was followed by the first commercial electronic kit in 1976’s Pollard Syndrum before the iconic, hexagonal Simmons SDS5 arrived in 1981.

“Drummers, what a pain in the arse they are, I mean if they didn’t already have a van for their oversize instruments that could also transport the whole band, they wouldn’t get employed at all would they? You’d be better off with a robot, and safer too, even a killer robot.” Variations on this theme are remarks usually born of frustration, but they are some times heartfelt. I mean, everybody tried to get rid of their drummer in the ‘80s didn’t they? And thanks to technology they could. But let’s ignore all the drummer jokes for the moment, I think we need to give our rhythmic friends credit where credit is due. The skill and dedication needed to become a good drummer is rare and valued. Which is why when you find a good drummer, trying to schedule rehearsal is a nightmare, because they are usually found playing in several bands. We’ve all heard the results of what happened in the seventies when the attempt was made to make drums sound like they were played by Hal 9000. Even Steely Dan (a band who stole everybody's drummers) did it on 1980’s Gaucho — and they had their pick from Porcaro, Purdie and Gadd. At the same time that Roger Linn was bringing his LM-1 to market (which was the first commercially available sample based drum machine), another Roger had been building the same thing — but with a far higher spec and at much greater expense. Legendary studio engineer and long time Dan cohort ‘The Immortal’ Roger Nichols, began his recording career tracking and bouncing his classmate Frank Zappa on a domestic reel-to-reel deck. In 1968 he quit the San Onofre nuclear plant (a job that his degree in Nuclear Physics from Oregon State had led him to) in order to run his own recording facility at Quantum Studios in Torrance, CA.

By the time Donald Fagen was asking him to apply his computer skills to achieving the perfect rhythm track for Hey Nineteen Nichols had designed and built an exceptional drum machine. Like Linn’s drum it was an 8-bit sample based rhythm computer, but with state-of-the-art memory and a much better handle than LM-1. They called it Wendel, and in order to achieve metronomic precision but with groove and swing (“the right amount of layback” in Nichols’ words), Wendel used multi-samples with different velocities and emphases. Nichols revealed that instead of a single hi-hat sample, for example, Wendel could draw on 16 different ones in order to vary his inflections. Interviewed by Brian Sweet for his 1994 book Steely Dan: Reelin’ In The Years , Nichols described it thus: “ The first Wendel would have been twenty grand. It takes a lot of memory to have a higher sample rate, which gives you an 80kHz frequency response - today’s consumer units have only 20kHz. Just one snare beat takes 48k of memory. One crash cymbal takes $12,000 worth. We just used the brute force method so we could get it done. The new improved Wendel has a megabyte of memory, 32 megabyte hard disc, higher sample rates and it’s 16-bit. ” Wendel II was used on much of Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly .

This parallel development of the sampling drum machine by the two Rogers almost parallels that of the earliest electro-mechanical rhythm machines. The drum machine was first mass-produced by Wurlitzer with their Sideman model in 1959, but that utter genius of early electronic music, Raymond Scott had also been working on his Rhythm Synthesizer, an electric percussionist which he finished in 1960. In naming his creations Scott showed all the humour and personality later displayed by Roger Nichols & Steely Dan, when he introduced the world to Bandito The Bongo Artist. But there had been other creations and private commissions prior to these mechanical marvels. Harry Chamberlin had finished his tape-loop-playing Rhythmate electronic drum machine and brought it to the marketplace in 1957. Chamberlin was already the inventor of the first sampler instrument in the tape-playing keyboard that bore his name — an instrument that was more famously copied in the UK as the Mellotron. But even before WWII we’d been given artificial, electrically generated beats when Léon Theremin built his complex and ground breaking device, the Rhythmicon in collaboration with Henry Cowell in about 1931 (just when the Ro-Pat-In Company brought out the first proper electric guitar, soon to be better known as the Rickenbacker Frying Pan). Of course Theremin would become more famous for another electronic instrument that you didn’t actually touch. Incredible isn’t it, that a mechanised drummer should have been made at so early a date? Of course long before we harnessed elastic-trickery people were generating complex movement with springs and gears - and the first programmable drum machine was described by Arab inventor Al Jazari in The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices all the way back in 1206. We don’t know when the first drumming automaton was actually built, but it was certainly conceived by the beginning of the 13th century****.

Pearl Jam Not Squirrel Jam

Electronic sounds and big beats have always gone hand in hand. Back in 1981 when Pearl initially released the Sound Spice series there were five compact pedals: CO-04 Compressor, PH-03 Phaser, OC-07 Octave, CH-02 Chorus and OD-05 Overdrive; and three larger dual switch units: PH-44 Phaser, the AD-33 Analogue Delay and the the CE-22 Chorus Ensemble, which was an even more direct homage to the legendary Boss CE-1 than their old F-605. Pearl later added the DS-06 Distortion, AD-08 Analogue Delay, GE-09 Graphic EQ and then later still, the SU-19 Noise Suppressor, and also another rare-as-rocking-horse-shit drum pedal legend: the TH-20 Thriller. Yes indeed, the TH-20 Thriller “frequency exciter” was even rarer than it’s cousin the Boss SP-1 Spectrum, and equally beloved of keyboard players (crazy, I mean it’s so obviously a drum pedal). However the TH-20 had far greater user control than the SP-1. The Spectrum was a single, wide-band parametric EQ with two knobs. The Balance knob on the SP-1 set where you wanted the peak of your frequency curve to be boosted, within a range from 500Hz to 5kHz set by the Spectrum knob. The Balance knob on the Thriller meanwhile, was a wet/dry mix control - the other three knobs being marked as Frequency (from 600Hz to 7kHz), Colour and Multipeak. Rarity breeds myth and rumour has it at that the TH-20 was developed in consultation with the Porcaro brothers (two thirds of them anyway) while they were both sessioning on an album that went on to sell quite well by a former member of The Jackson 5. It’s further claimed that Pearl even stole the album’s name for the new pedal. And talking of intellectual theft, it may also have been another Pearl pedal with a feature stolen from the Moog designed Lab series amps. Because the TH-20’s Multipeak control is remarkably similar to the Gibson L-5 guitar amplifier’s Multifilter (patented by Bob Moog himself), a 6-way EQ filter boost for 1kHz, 1.37kHz, 1.9kHz, 2.63kHz, 3.63kHz & 5kHz, that was then mixed with the clean signal. I’ll say it again, “Uh, crank up the mids”. Whatever it’s plagiarisms might have been, Pearl’s 1984 Thriller was a very useful tone shaper that, as mentioned, was also taken up by keyboard players as well as drummers. A natural progression I guess if the story’s true that it was trialled by both Jeff and Steve P.

Technology moves apace and by the Nineties the use of drum effects pedals had been largely superseded by the digital sampler technology that Rogers Nichols & Linn had been experimenting with a decade earlier. But there were plenty of drummers still stomping on boxes. Of course for crunching up sampled drums you really had to use the Akai UniBass UB1 which added a harmoniser to it’s distortion circuit. If you were using an MPC60 from the off in 1988, it’s likely you would also have been crunching up it’s outputs with something or other in pedal form, so Akai decided to bring out a range of pedals they could package with their Music Production Centre. The UB1 was an octaver, adding one above, but you could also add a 5th above or a 4th below at the flick of a switch. Basically it was the old trick of chaining Pearl’s Over Drive with their Octaver. But of course the remarkable flexibility that was intrinsic to the runaway success of Roger Linn’s 16 pad baby (the MPC was the big brand reboot of his LinnDrum MidiStudio concept), meant that using proprietary effects pedals was not the way to get the most unique and individual sounds. Why process sounds after you sampled them when you could get the effected sound you wanted into the sampler and then always play it the same?

I mentioned a pedal by Slingerland earlier, with a certain Motorhead pedigree: but it was actually no more than a re-badged Ludwig unit. About the only effects pedal by Ludwig that anyone usually remembers was the Ringo-Lator, a very average sounding, though very early, ring modulator that might have passed entirely unnoticed had it not received an endorsement through the offices of Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises. The circuit in the aforementioned Rolling Thunder first appeared as the Ludwig Thunderbird in about 1970. It was an octave fuzz effect, nothing new there you might say, even for ’70. But what made it special of course, and the reason it is so beloved of Sludge and Doom guitarists these days (stick one through an old Laney AOR amp and you’re there), was Ludwig’s request to the circuit designer to make it shift an octave down, rather than the usual octave up. William F. Ludwig, like many early American instrument makers, and like many a son of Chicago, was also the son of German immigrants. The story goes that Ludwig played against a certain Thomas Mills in a competition of some sort and was deeply impressed by the volume and projection of Mill's novel, metal shell snare drum, bought from a company in Germany (that would soon take the now familiar name of Sonor). Apparently Ludwig pestered Mills to borrow the metal snare so he could copy it. William, along with his brother Theobald Ludwig, were sales agents for the Leedy Drum Co. through the shop they’d founded in Chicago in 1909. However William failed to persuade the otherwise innovative Ulysses G Leedy that metal was a suitable drum shell material. So Villi & Teo set up the Ludwig & Ludwig Drum Company to make them for themselves. Ludwig drums made significant advances (despite the First World War and Theobald unfortunately being claimed by the Great Flu Pandemic), and in 1920 the Ludwig Black Beauty was born.

The Tin Drum

By the end of the Roaring Twenties however, both the Leedy and Ludwig drum companies were bought up by C G Conn and moved to Elkhart, IN. Though initially kept as two separate product lines the Leedy & Ludwig Drum Co. would be amalgamated in 1951, and then bought back by William F. Ludwig four years later with the help of Bud Slingerland. Before buying back the name in 1955 Ludwig had been producing his drums under the name WFL since 1930. But Ludwig’s reputation as a percussion innovator actually began with the first decent drum pedal. We're talking a bass drum beater pedal here, rather than an effects pedal. You see it was only in the late Victorian era that musicians had begun to play a “set” made up of more than one drum, and to start using as many parts of their bodies as possible with which to hit them. Before the funky drummer came along you had to have a dozen guys (marching up and down in uniforms to make Sgt. Pepper jealous), with one piece of percussion apiece — like John Phillip Sousa did. So the development of a mechanical device that could transfer energy through a drummers feet, but still keep good time, was quite revolutionary. And indeed that 1909 design of Ludwig’s was their attempt to significantly improve on the functionality of an innovative prototype, probably the world’s first ever kick pedal, made in 1900 back in Germany by, yet again, Sonor.

Sonor’s heritage as a percussion manufacturer goes back to 1875, initially as Trommel-Fabrik of Weissenfels, until they trademarked the Sonor name in 1907. That history, as we’ve seen, includes the invention of the metal shell snare drum - one of which Sousa’s favourite drummer Tom Mills supposedly bought while on tour in Europe in 1900 and brought back to America. Made from a hammered brass shell with welded seam and also metal hoops, it was 6.5” deep and 13” in diameter. And thus the Heavy Metal genre was born. Sonor still make an aluminium shell Parade Snare named for company founder Johannes Link — a design that has been in continuous production since 1942, though perhaps we better gloss over just who was marching to those Parade Snares back in the 1940s. Go read Günter Grass instead. After WWII Sonor found themselves in the Russsian sector — Weissenfels, being just a few kilometres WSW of Leipzig. So they upped-sticks and in 1950 built a new facility in Westphalia.

So where exactly did the Tonreich myth begin? Well in some ways it goes all the way back to the ‘50s with the experimental compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen and in particular, his ground breaking opus Kontakte . The Sonor Tonreich was more than a mere micro amp (it was certainly in a much bigger housing that MXR’s M-133 unit), it was actually built around a series of 6 JFET pre-amps into Darlington pair transistors. In addition it had finely tunable low pass filters, dialed in with both rotary switch and potentiometer and it ran off a 24vDC supply. It was designed to emulate some of the sounds wrung out of a much more complex unit that Stockhausen had used and abused at the WDR Electronic Music Studio in Cologne as early as 1958. The Rohde & Schwarz UBM Tunable Indicating Amplifier was a valve amplifier with several bandpass filters, that was really a piece of test equipment used mainly in telecom and broadcast applications and which could handle signals as high as 650kHz, but more significantly, as low as 17Hz. The Tonreich generated great synthy sounds that could go exceptionally low, indeed into the subsonic range and it’s claimed that Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür was a consultant during it’s development. Sonor set up a small workshop to hand-build the Tonreich but it was an expensive project and little thought went into marketing before it went into production. It was a diversification that Sonor were ill prepared for and production numbers were low - with a manufacturing run lasting less than 6 months. Had these pedals been farmed out to Schaller in the Japanese OEM model (Schaller's early ‘70s tremolo pedal is still a bench mark, we have one of those at New Cut too), the Tonreich might have had a longer life span and been better known to this day.

I think enough has been said to prove our point here. When you're looking for edgy urban grit and biting crispiness, those haunting mids and heavy low end whumps, you need to reach for the drum pedals. So remember — when your Krupaphonic-Starclassabian-Klone-JunkyThrummer profile won’t cut it, you need to get busy with the dirt box. If you’ve got this far without shouting at the screen well done! I must apologise for the tone of this blog, as well as the sense of humour and the various blind alleys and garden paths I’ve led you up. You see it’s the kind of joke roadies love - until they realise there’s a good idea spoken in jest.

“It’s such a fine line between stupid and…”

“And clever.”

“It’s just that little turn about.”

Indeed, that Spinal Tap subtle twist, the fine line between genius and cretin, that we in live music seem to walk with regularity. Those of you out there who know your stuff, or are old enough, will have cottoned on pretty quick to the jokes. I tried to slip in “embiggen” pretty early on to drop the hint and followed it up with a pretty bad joke at Carmine Appice’s expense — both of which I sincerely apologise for. And please note that any tub thumping has been for comic effect. There’s a huge amount of fiction in this piece of writing, but if it inspires you to do a little digging around you’ll find that most of the more surprising facts are, well, just that. Also I’m frequently shocked by the appalling amount of lazy journalism and wholesale text theft that goes on in online music related articles, so maybe someone will repeat some of this crap verbatim without further research — always entertaining.

When I started out in this business, if anyone had suggested putting distortion on drums it would have been met with the kind of ridicule reserved for doing Heavy Metal in Dobly. Back in the late Eighties we would joke that a poor guitar solo could be disguised with pedals, but that a poor drum solo had to do it with strobe lights. But as Hip Hop matured and its influence spread massively in studio production, fattening up drum loops from old vinyl or new drum machines became quite the art. By the nineties we were crunching up loops and beats before doing anything else with them. And if you want to see what can be done with a pedal these days check out the JHS Colour Box. In fact here’s a look at what can be done with the Version 2, which has nearly all the flexibility of the 500 Series rack version in a pedal chassis. So while this blog started out as a piss take — here’s a pedal being used on every instrument in the mix, and particularly on the drums.

I know, I’ve been ignoring drummers in my choices for blog subjects so far. Mainly because I’m not really an expert on things rhythm, I’m a guitar guy. Perhaps that’s why I took such a jokey approach with this one (though it also seemed to develop a comic mind of it’s own). I can set up a kit pretty fast and make it comfortable — and tuning it properly, changing heads, fixing hardware, all not a problem — but don’t ask me to play it. I set up a hire kit for drummer David Cola for some shows with Nicole Scherzinger at the end of last year. He flew into the UK, came to the studio, sat down at the kit… and then barely moved a thing. He was as surprised as I was about that — it became a talking point anyway. I think he changed the angle on the SPDS and raised it slightly. Check out David’s YouTube channel and his website to see what an incredibly versatile musician this young Berklee graduate is. I’ve looked after some pretty great drummers in my time as a roadie actually. Keith LeBlanc, Rich Thair, Tom Skinner, Paul Cook, Darrin Mooney, Frank Tontoh, Carlos Hercules, Cherisse Osei, Ged Lynch, Robin Goodridge, Pete Howard, Steve ‘Smiley’ Barnard, Sam ‘Blue’ Agard, and Eric ‘Boots’ Greene, to name but a few who were great as players, performers or just people.

* Lab Series amps were a solid state range designed for Gibson in 1977 by Moog — both Norlin companies at the time. The Gibson L5 has been favoured by BB King and Joe Bonamassa amongst others. Yes, you heard right, "solid state", "blues legends", same sentence. They had a warm creamy tone with loads of punch which like many of the early SS boxes comes from clever use of discrete components like Field Effect & Darlington transistors as well as Op-amps to mimic the architecture & time constants of their valve predecessors. Alan Holdsworth, Ty Tabor and Ronnie Montrose were also notable users of the L5. However the Moog Gibsons are not to be confused with the Lab Series 2 amps made by Garnet In Winnipeg, MB, which are very different beasts.

** In 1946, initially manufacturing music stands, before they started to make drums in 1950 as Pearl Industry Ltd.

*** I never worked with My Bloody Valentine but I looked after Kevin and Mani when I covered stage-left with Primal Scream on a couple of tours. Amongst the crew he was always known as Kevin-Bloody-Shields or sometimes Bagpuss. If I remember right, Kevin was using three amps and a pedal board the size of Berkshire. He had a Wah Wah that had more mini toggle switches on it than I have ever seen on any pedal ever. It looked like a robot hedgehog.

**** I know I’ve raised the bullshit bar pretty high in this parody of a blog, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

A big Acoustic tower...

2020-07-05T22:59:27Z

... low end theories.

Listen - it is the night of July the 5th 1969, at The Marquee Club on London’s Wardour Street, and house regulars Kippington Lodge are on stage. Earlier that evening at around 17:30, and about a mile away in Hyde Park, the Rolling Stones had decided to murder hundreds of white butterflies, live in front of a festival crowd. Maybe it is some sort of retaliation against Nature for the sudden death of Brian Jones two days earlier. That same night at the Marquee, perhaps in an attempt to prolong the blood feud and wreak revenge on the rock community, the Universe decides it is going to murder the Kippington’s bass player.

“ I had one hand on my bass strings and the other reaching for the mic… but as soon as I grasped the mic, a circuit was created and I was in big trouble. According to witnesses, I leapt about four feet in the air and was flung across the stage where I crashed into the amps and lay writhing on the floor, unable to let go of either my bass or the mic. ” And so recounts New Wave supremo & all-round pop genius Nick Lowe in the excellent biography Cruel To Be Kind by Will Birch. Popular music would have been much the poorer had Lowe not survived that shocking event as the ’60s drew to an end. By the end of the next decade he would be the most happening record producer in the country, and Johnny Cash’s son-in-law to boot. Aside from his solo work and the records he made as a member of Rockpile with Dave Edmunds, he produced the first UK punk rock single, 'New Rose' by The Damned; the seminal album New Boots And Panties for Ian Dury & The Blockheads; and Elvis Costello’s first five albums. I read Birch’s biography recently and couldn’t get the idea out of my head that this electrifying event at The Marquee in 1969 might have been Nick’s inspiration for the opening lines of 'So It Goes' - his first solo single recorded around 7 years later:

“I remember the night the kid cut off his right arm, in a bid to save a bit of power

He got fifty thousand watts, in a big acoustic tower.”

Thankfully Lowe didn’t need to cut off his right arm - the mic stand was kicked out of its convulsive grip* - assuming that the right-handed Lowe had his left hand welded to the neck of his EB-3 bass. Now there’s a little bit of hyperbole being tossed around here. Lowe’s amp would not have had a power consumption anywhere near 50kW - and certainly not an output rating that high, even measured peak-to-peak! Mind you, by the end of the sixties there were some pretty monstrous bass rigs being produced. And just what does he mean by “a big acoustic tower” anyway - surely even 0.5W would make the structure electric? Well I’ve always supposed it to be “Acoustic tower” with a capital A, assuming the lyric to be a nod to those monolithic high wattage bass amp stacks made by the Acoustic Control Corporation. The rigs they built for Woodstock, as the legend goes. Indeed the transatlantic arms race for bigger louder amps in the 1960s was all about filling stadia and reaching festival audiences. If you can’t fill out the sound you can’t fill out the seats and promoters at the end of the ’60s were fixated upon the economies of scale that made big shows so profitable. But for some reason musicians were keen for people to hear what they were doing. By 1969 those scouse rascals The Beatles had already given up trying to play live and this was entirely due to the woeful paucity of power in the amplification of the time. When the Stones played Hyde Park on the 5th of July the Fab Four had already performed their last ever live gig on the roof of Apple Corps just five months earlier. Indeed three years before that, after their Candlestick Park gig on 29th August 1966 to end their US run, they had declared that they would never tour again. The Stones however would go on to tour for a few years yet. If only they’d carried on for a couple of years the Mop Tops might have been persuaded it was still worth doing. Because amps were getting louder, and bigger.

Introduced in 1967 the Acoustic 360 tower (commanding views in all directions?) was a solid state bass stack with all discrete components, built around mainly silicon transistors**. But the Model 360 Bass head had no power output stage - it contained just the solid state pre-amp with tone stack - well, it also had a rotary switch “Variamp” tone control, a fuzz circuit and even an “electronic tuning fork”. The matching 361 cabinet housed not only the speakers but also a 200 watt power amp. Audio output in the large “W bin” cabinet was handled by a single, rear firing, Cerwin Vega L-187 special design 18” speaker, in a folded horn construction - not unlike Altec Lansing’s “Voice of the Theatre” bass reflex cabinet designs for cinemas in the 1950s. The choice application of these various amplifier design elements was to good purpose and the sound quality of these ACC rigs was soon causing a stir. Despite their transistorised circuit there was no harshness in the treble range and they were exceptionally articulate in the low end. But more than anything the 360 series was loud. The folded horn cab was extremely efficient and, get this Stonehenge fans, you could connect up to four 361 cabs to one 360 pre-amp head unit. And the 361 powered cabs also had a speaker output with high-pass filter to feed a passive extension cabinet.

The ACC company had been founded by Steve Marks and his father Robert in 1965 in a shotgun shack on Sunset Boulevard, before moving on to Van Nuys, CA, where the company was incorporated. Following on from ACC’s first guitar amp, the Model 260 head & 261 cab - which gave Acoustic their first big push when Robbie Krieger of The Doors started using it - the 360 was designed specifically as a bass amp, largely by a guy called by Russ Allee. Early adopters of the new Acoustic tower were John Paul Jones, Larry Graham and John McVie, which certainly speaks for their sound quality, but they weren’t exactly flying out the door. It might have had something to do with the price tag: the 360/361 set cost $1250 when it was released, that’s nearly $10k in modern money. No wonder Jaco Pastorius would sleep on the beach while his bandmates motel-ed up, in order to save up for one. Jaco is of course the man most famously associated with “the big Acoustic tower”. And while you can talk about the type of epoxy he used to fill the empty fret slots and seal the fingerboard of his ’62 Jazz Bass or the way his right hand would dance over different pups, there is one further thing we can say about his tone. He would have had a hell of a job trying to get it with any other amp rig in 1971.

There was a panel on the back of the 361 cab where a mains power cable went in, with a rotary connection power switch, an orange indicator lamp, an input jack and a 5A fuse holder. This back plate of the 361 cab proclaimed in one column of white lettering “600 Watts, 120 Volts and 60 Cycles”. And then underneath that the same column of three ratings was repeated but with the output revised to 200 Watts. I don’t imagine anyone familiar with amp power ratings would be able to make sense of these numbers or how they might equate to each other. However in one of their early brochures for the “Model 361-Bass Amplifier”, Acoustic opened the specifications with “440 Watts Peak, 200 Watts RMS” - a ratio that sounds more like it. By the time they brought out the Model 371 the brochure claimed “730 Watts Peak, 365 Watts RMS” back to confusing numbers again, RMS ratings are never exactly half of peak-to-peak, so should we blame the marketing department? Maybe that’s the real reason Jaco Pastorius didn’t like the 371, it lied to him. Whatever the reason, he refused to convert to the 370 after trialing it for Acoustic and stuck to his favoured 360. He did however like the Acoustic 320 when it came out around 1978, but still used it in conjunction with the 360 preamp. The 370 was matched with the 301 passive cab which had the same 18” folded horn design as the powered 361. But while the 361 had a module with the driver that bolted into the middle of the cab, the 301 cab had an integral chamber for the driver accessed by a rear plate; though on later models this could only be accessed through the front grill. The 370 could sound a bit nasal in the mid range and some versions had a volume jump in the first half of it’s range, oh and it’s Bright switch was most definitely bright.

John Deacon of Queen was a famous 370 user, and not always on a “pretty cabinet”, let alone a 301. He would stack them on Peaveys, Sunns and Sound Cities. Not surprisingly for a man with a First Class Honours degree in Electronics, Deacon would happily mix up valve and solid state gear to get his tone. Early on he used an HH Electronics IC/100 as well as an Orange OR-120 with 4x12” (we have a 1990s, 120w Orange OTR here at New Cut Studios). As their audiences increased in size (remember Rock in Rio folks), he moved to 3 stacks of Acoustic 371 and a pair of HiWatt 201s on top of a pair of Sound City 4x12” Gauss speaker boxes. Oh, and another 371 tower over on stage left just in case he wandered over to AC30-land. Later on Deacon would use Sunn and SWR rigs as well. Quite how it was all connected I’m not sure - he may have started out with his signal split between separate solid state & valve rigs. In the studio he would mix DI with mics on both a 4x12” and an Acoustic 301, but I can’t be certain how he drove them.

Jaco Pastorius famously continued to use 360 pre-amp heads throughout his career even after moving to the 320 head and 4x15” Acoustic 408 cabs. Interestingly the only other amp he is known to have approved was made by Amplified Music Products. In 1985 Pastorius visited Hartke Systems in Bloomfield, NJ, and was so impressed by AMP’s Model BH-420 that he ordered one. The AMP serial #1166 shipped to Jaco in May ’85, but it was only much later that he learned that it had been designed by Russ Allee - the same man who had designed the Acoustic 360. After the AMP company folded the BH-420 was restyled as the Gibson Model GB440 which later morphed into an independently built 440 copy, the Thunderfunk by Bob Gunnison, aka Dave Funk, who had bought up all the unused GB440 parts.

So can we say that Acoustic instigated a solid state revolution in the low end world? Well Acoustic’s 360 was hardly the first transistor bass amp. Back in 1962 Vox had brought out the T.60, which was also the first amp they designed specifically for bass players. Prior to this Vox had only offered their bass tone modified AC15 and AC30 combos. Indeed the T.60 may be the very first transistor bass amplifier. It has been claimed that the Kay Vanguard was the first solid state guitar amp of any kind, but if that’s true it was only first by a very short nose, as it also came out in 1962. The development of a new solid state power amp design came from Les Hills who had worked on Vox’s Continental organ. The T.60 was a germanium transistor amp head that put out about 35 watts RMS and was originally paired with a 2 x 15” cabinet. It was hardly a tower of power, with a speaker box just three feet high and rising another half a foot with the head on top. In 1963 this was followed by the 50w Foundation Bass rig consisting of an AC50 valve head into a 1 x 18” cab. Both bass cabinet designs were closed back for better low end response, unlike the open-back AC bass combos. The T.60 cab was then changed to a 1x15” with 1x12” formation and had a simple capacitor crossover; which in turn became the AC100 2x15” cab in 1964 (but was often referred to as the T.100). It was rated to handle an AC100 head - which is what Paul McCartney drove it with eight days a week for the next couple of years. Vox had stepped up to the plate alright, but a 100W bass rig was hardly going to hit it out of Candlestick Park. But before we move on, let us remark on the fact that Vox made a 100 watt valve head in the year before Marshall were persuaded to do so by The Who. As the Beatles became bigger than Jesus their need for volume was greater than other bands. No other “popular beat combo” was playing baseball stadia in 1964.

If the Acoustic 360/1 put out 200 watts RMS, and you could have four stacks of it in one system, was it the loudest bass amp around when it came out? Well, you might compare that to the 300 watts RMS put out by the all valve SVT — but then remember that Ampeg didn’t release the SVT until 1969. Ampeg have always been associated with bass, and I mean always, because they were there at the very start of bass amplification. It all started with the Michaels-Hull Electronic Labs’ double bass amp system. The first ever “Bassamp” and double-bass pickup appeared around 1946 which they followed with their 770 system. The pickup was fitted to a modified spike for an upright double-bass and this “amplified peg” was advertised in 1947 as “ The New model 770 Bassamp with Ampeg pickup - The answer to the bass man’s prayer ”. The company name soon changed and in 1948 the The Ampeg Bassamp Company’s 800 models were released. The same brochure for the Model 770 advertised the specs as 18 watts “usable” from a 6L6 output pair. The first stage was 3 x 6SN7 and the rec was a 5U4. You know, the first Fender amps and their K&F precursors variously used the same tubes. This new amplified bass sound came out through a 12” GE speaker - and through a rather fetching bass clef cabinet front grill. Of course Rickenbacker were already making wireless style amplifiers with valves for their revolutionary electric guitar pickup, but although they would become famous for their bass guitars they hadn’t yet built a dedicated bass amp.

But getting back to 1969 and the year that Ampeg released it’s new bass guitar rig: a massive 95lb (40Kg) head containing no less than 14 valves (and it wasn’t even valve rectified), stacked on top of a cabinet as tall as a short singer and with 8 — that’s right 8 — ten inch speakers! No wonder it was called the Super Vacuum Tube amp, and you know, it went on to be quite a successful model. Ampeg reckoned it could pump 300 watts into a 2 or 4 ohm load. These towering new cabs were loaded with CTS speakers with a declared total power handling of 240 Watts, so Ampeg tried to sell you on the idea of buying two cabs if you thought you were going to really crank the amp. Sixteen speakers totalling 480 watts power handling would more than cope of course. Those early “flat-back” 8x10 cabs are sought after for their sound in a way that the later higher rated SVT-810 cabs are not. A lot of old timers reckon that an original cab was quite capable of handling the SVT at high levels and that we can’t be certain that the original CTS speakers were only 30W since their specs have never been published. Indeed the Eminence speakers put into the first “towel bar” Magnavox era 810 cab were rated at 70W - and they were supposedly based closely on the original CTS unit. Even if the CTS units were only rated at 40W then eight of them could handle a 300W head. And anyway, many of the the old “flat back” cabs can still be found with their original speakers since they rarely blew out. And here's another thing, the significantly better low end response of the original cabs means that their power handling is more efficient and they have a wide, smooth frequency response. So did the Ampeg marketing dept. under-sell the original cab in order to try and double sales? As the years passed the changing companies that controlled Ampeg kept putting in sturdier speakers so that a single cab was given a higher and higher wattage rating, but not really any better power handling, especially if you were playing below the 41.2Hz of a low E string. It wasn’t just the speakers that made earlier 810s sound good though, the construction was also a big factor. As the years went by the cabinet construction quality went down the toilet.***

So that night at The Marquee, I don’t know what amp Nick Lowe was using as a bass rig “in a bid to save a bit of power” but I doubt it was a big Acoustic 361 tower, and it probably wasn’t louder than 100 watts and almost certainly no louder than 200. And while I think that the SVT was formally revealed at the Chicago Namm of June ’69, it was still in development in July. Down the road at the great Hyde Park butterfly massacre there were no Ampegs on stage either. All the amps were either WEMs for the PA or HiWatts for the various guitars. Bill Wyman’s bass rig was driven by 200w HiWatt DR 201 heads as well as Dave Reeves slave amps. In amongst the WEM columns you can see the various HiWatt rigs that Keith Richards and Mick Taylor were also using. One of the great anecdotes of the SVT story was that the Stones turned up in America to start their 1969 tour in November and somebody blew up all their amps with the wrong voltage. Whatever the truth of the matter The Rolling Stones took Ampeg’s prototype SVTs on the road for their first big US tour in three years. It was a run across the pond that would become truly legendary. In 1966 the Beatles had made their own decision to never tour America again, but the Stones had been banned since '66 by US authorities. The SVT was used for all guitar & bass amplification for the entire '69 US Tour (the V4 wasn't finished yet) and Ampeg’s Rich Mandella went with them to keep them running. The V series amps expanded in 1970 and though the Ampeg V4B head only put out 100 watts it’s a great sounding bass amp. (Actually, on PJ Harvey’s Hope Six Demolition tour of 2016-17 we used John Parish’s V4B and matching 4x12 mainly for the Mellotron and only on a couple of songs for bass guitar.)

Sunn Musical Equipment Company’s Orion amps were built in 1968 with more than a nod to Acoustic. To quote an advert from the trades at the time it featured “ application of a modular concept, built in buzz tone, solid cabinetry, versatility of sound reproduction and JBL D15S speakers. The Orion control amp drives a 175-watt RMS power amp mounted in the bass (sic) of the speaker enclosure. If additional power is required, a PMI (175 watt power module) can be added to the initial Orion PMI to develop a total power output of 350 watts RMS. Another PMI can be added for 525 watts and so on to infinity. " Now that really smells like marketing bullshit! As with the Acoustic 360 driving 4 x 361 concept - you’re getting a louder rig with more coverage by having 4 x 200W amps, but that’s certainly not the same thing as one 800W amp! The Who used the Orions in ’68 in the US. But then Entwistle & Townsend between them used just about every monster amp that was made as soon as they could get their hands on it.

At the start of the ‘70s Simms-Watts brought out their A.P.200 Super (for “All Purpose” 200W). Twin channels labelled Normal and Brilliant, each with 2 inputs that could be linked with a slider switch, and controls for Presence & Master Volume. It had an ultra linear power transformer (like the Silverface Fenders of the time) that could provide a plate voltage of over 670v to it's quartet of KT88 tubes. It was also very similar in design to the KT88 loaded 200W (nominal) Marshall Major, though tonally it sounds much more in the realm of a HiWatt DR 201 (also powering 4 x KT88). David Simms had a music shop on Ealing Road called Music Bargain Centre (“I wish I could be like David Simms” as my Guv'nor almost used to sing) about 200 yards down the road from Jim Marshall’s! There he was joined in 1968 by Richard Watts, who designed the circuits, and soon after Jim Marshall’s son Terry. Terry was famously the T in JTM but had fallen out with his old man, who promptly started labelling his amps JMP instead. Actually the A.P.200 has a much better layout than the Marshall Major, particularly the positioning of that huge output transformer. This and the excellent screening between pre-amp & power stages, much like some Matamps, gives it a much quieter noise floor than the Major. Simms-Watts cabs of the time were usually loaded just like HiWatts with the cast frame Fanes, but sometimes with RCFs. But best of all they had bright red faceplates that often had big exploding cartoon speech bubbles which said things like POW! and SUPER.

Talking of Matamps and HiWatts some people have claimed that Matamp could squeeze 300 watts out of a quartet of KT88s; and what about the DR 405 - Did Dave Reeves really get 400w RMS out of six 88s? So how many watts could a Simms-Watts chuck when a Simms-Watts chucked full watts? Quite simply I don’t know, but the A.P.200 had enormous output transformers (their are claims that some were Partridge built, like HiWatts) which handled the bottom end really well and gave clarity and openness to the tone. This huge iron, coupling four KT88s to Fane speakers could, it’s claimed, put out over 240W quite easily. Could that be 240 end-over-end watts? I apologise for the terrible set-up for this gag, but I can’t get the idea out of my head that Pete Overend Watts, late-great bassist for Mott The Hoople should have played a Simms-Watts. I would love to know if he ever did - by and large he was usually seen with SVTs but guess Watt - there are also pics of him with a big Acoustic tower.

I can’t talk about all of the big rig bass amps of the era here, but I have to mention the Traynor solid state 250w Mono Block-B. If Nick Lowe didn’t know about it in ’76 when 'So It Goes ' was released, he soon would. Because it’s the amp that Bruce Thomas used on the first four Elvis Costello & The Attractions albums between ’77 and ’81 (though not Costello’s solo debut My Aim Is True ), all of which Lowe produced. In August 2013 Bruce Thomas posted this on his web site:

“ Great amps, but there were quite a few variations on them so the Mono Block B was, as you say, quite rare… The other amp I really like were the old Acoustic 360s — though I don’t know if you’d even be able to find one these days. ”

Pete Traynor the Canadian amp pioneer of Yorkville Sound, and a bass player himself, did more than most to develop bass amp design. He may have started out by copying Leo’s Tweed Bassman in the magnificent Traynor YBA-1 back in 1963, but by the turn of the ’70s he was dreaming about something big, and his pet project would be solid state to boot. Back in 1967 when the ACC 360/1 came out Pete was still squeezing more and more juice out of tubes. That same year he produced the powerful YBA-3 Custom Special, and to handle it he paired it with a new cabinet design. The huge YC-810 was rated to handle 250w at 4Ω, but there’s a clue in the name that was not such an obvious indicator in 1967. That’s right, everybody thinks Ampeg invented the 8 x 10” speaker cab for the SVT, but Pete Traynor had already done it two years earlier. The fan cooled YBA-3 used four 6CA7 valves (EL34 variant) to output 130 watts RMS sine wave into 4 ohms. Traynor power ratings were for non clipped signals allowing plenty of headroom and I’ve heard it could comfortably put out well over 200 watts flat out. I would be interested to know if anybody ever had the chance to compare a YBA-3 with a 361.

By 1968 Traynor decided that to up the ante significantly on this amp would require eight 6CA7 output valves which seemed ridiculous. Ampeg’s SVT (and the 8x10 cab they’d only just worked out) initially had six 6146B power tubes (superseded after the first year with 6550s). So Pete took a lateral step and crammed four 6KG6A valves (or EL509, used for vertical hold in television screens at the time) into the same chassis and called it the YBA-3A. It came out in 1969 like the SVT, but had already been prototyped in '68. These TV tubes look a bit like like overgrown preamp tubes with metal nipples, but in the power stage they allowed the monstrous YBA-3A Super Custom Special to put out over 400 Watts RMS (or so it’s claimed in Mike Holman’s Yorkville Sound History 1963 to 1991 published Feb 20, 2002). Even HiWatt’s DR 405 couldn’t actually reach 400W, despite it’s model number. When I wrote this article I had no idea just how big an influence on the SVT Pete Traynor was.****.

Traynor obviously felt he’d gone as far as he could with valve technology and, as mentioned above, he spent considerable time developing his solid state bass amp design. Pete’s pet project was finally released in 1973 as the Mono Block-B. Actually, the stylish chassis designed by Glen Moffatt did the rounds of the trade shows in 1972 as an empty box while Pete refined his design. It had massive, heat sinking, aluminium end cheeks into which the the six transistors of the power amp stage were mounted. This amp head’s cosmetics really looked to the future and the design as a whole influenced bass amp manufacture for the next twenty years. After surviving Traynor’s legendary second-story drop test the amp had a reinforcing plate, almost a quarter inch thick, added to support it’s large power transformer. When it came out in 1973 The Mono Block-B (perhaps the B stood for Bearvertone, an early suggestion for the amp’s nomenclature) put out 325w sine wave with no clipping into a 2 ohm load - all night long, without overheating. To handle that load Traynor took a leaf out of Acoustic’s book and turned to Cerwin Vegas to push the air.

By the time Nick Lowe gave his nod to Acoustic Control Corporation in 1976, if such it was, there were a host of colossal amp rigs for bassists to choose from. Not only that, but the fad among the more adventurous bass players for using large stereo power amps had led to dedicated bass guitar amps along the same lines. Andy Hefley of Great American Sound built a set of four 2,500 watt RMS amps (2 for stage and 2 for backup), weighing 250lb each, for Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. These Precision Innovative Electronics Model M87 Wideband Power Amplifiers were souped up versions of the GAS Godzilla solid state behemoths Hefley was already making. Bass players are spoilt for choice these days for high powered amps thanks to the Class D revolution. For example the Bugera BTX3600 Bass Amp Head is called The Nuke and they reckon it’ll do you 2 x 1800W in stereo or biamped mode, or 3600W bridged. If that’s true it’s an atomic bomb of a rig alright. So Lowe singing about fifty thousand watts is exaggeration, of course, even by todays standards - but you could get close to fift een thousand though. How about a Lab Gruppen FP14000 touring PA amp… 7000w per channel into 2ohms! You could probably bridge them, and as the website says, it’s “ Built to Handle Extreme Low-Frequency Loads Effortlessly ”.

Well there have been all kinds of big numbers thrown around here and comparing anything by numbers isn’t always a particularly productive exercise. Perceived loudness can often bear no relation to output wattage and be much more dependant on audio coupling, speaker efficiency, bandwidth sensitivity and crossovers. And it’s a whole can of worms when comparing manufacturer’s claims through the years, some will measure continuous, some momentary, some will only allow for 1% Total Harmonic Distortion, some will push it to 10% in their ratings. Basically, the bigger the company, the more likely it’s got a marketing department that will try and fudge the figures and make out that their product has bigger balls than the next guy’s. There are always a lot of factors to consider including environmental ones. You might be concerned about how hot your trousers look to that woman in the front row, but is that SVT-2 overheating? Your speakers might be rated to handle 100W each at 80Hz, but if you suddenly thump your cab with a 25Hz bowel-basher with everything turned up to eleven you’re probably going to pop some voice coils. We had to stop supplying our Ampeg 4x10 for rehearsals at New Cut Studios (don't worry, we give you an Ashdown ABM-410T now) because every now & then somebody would put a modern 600W+ amp through it with all the knobs still set for their last gig. Bang. And then Fart Fart Fart. And then “Here - your bass cab sounds shit.” And another new set of four Eminence 10”s. And so it goes.

The novel Slaughterhouse-Five was published on the 31st of March 1969, just 3 months before Lowe’s shocking brush with death at The Marquee. The title & refrain of Lowe’s 1976 single is a phrase that occurs over a hundred times in Kurt Vonnegut’s searing masterpiece. Pretty much each time a character dies the phrase is recited as a litany. The refrain “And so it goes” may only be sung a mere 24 times in Nick Lowe’s song, but can we infer from this that each verse describes the circumstances leading up to a fatality? I’m probably reading too much into it. I studied the Old English West Saxon dialect at university for a single term many years ago. So in a nod to both Slaughterhouse-Five and Beowulf , the first ever piece of English Literature and a tale that Vonnegut stole a trick from:

Listen — we of the flight-case, road warriors back in the days,

Heard the glory of the rock stars, in their deeds on stage.

And what happened to the Acoustic Control Corporation? Well, they continued into the 1970s. The 450 series for instance, made between ’73 & ’77 were 170 watt 4 ohm heads with a 5 band graphic, a feature that had migrated from the 370 head and went on to the twin channel Model 320. They also tried their hand at valve amps with the 160, 164, 165 Models. But then ACC folded in 1983 and either morphed into, or was taken over by, True Tone Audio manufacturing PA amps. In 2007 the name was revived as Acoustic Amplification, again making bass amps and in 2011 a new company set up as Acoustic USA making reissues of their classic models. And what was the first thing they remade? They got Russ Allee in to redesign the 360/1 big Acoustic tower of course.

So I was going to talk a bit about electrical safety and the risk of electrocution but I’m going to leave that for another day. It’s not the sort of thing that should be rushed, especially with anecdotal wisdom to impart.

* Let it be noted that his life was saved at the hands of the band’s organist & keyboard player, or rather, at his feet. “ People were naturally reluctant to prise my hands off the metal until finally Bob Andrews aimed a kick at the mic-stand, which did the trick. However, not realising he’d been successful he launched a follow-up kick, which missed his target but booted me in the chest so hard that - as they told me at the hospital later - he’d started everything back up again and probably saved my bacon. ” - Nick Lowe in Cruel To Be Kind.

** I found several online histories that pronounced a germanium tranny core for Acoustic amps. But looking at the ACC service manual, the various solid state devices in the 360 pre-amp were as follows: just 1 x germanium 2N1306, but 4 x silicon 2N2926, 8 x silicon 2N3391, 1 x silicon 2N4851, 1 x silicon RCA 40408 and 1 x silicon Motorola MPS A09, oh and a Varo VS148 full wave bridge rectifier. And I couldn't find any germanium in the power stage. The 361 power amp circuit used the following: 1 x silicon 2N3391, 3 x silicon 2N4248, 1 x silicon RCA 40408, 1 x silicon RCA 40409, 1 x silicon RCA 40410, 8 x silicon RCA 40411, 1 x silicon 60085, 4 x IN914 silicon diodes, 2 x MR2361 dual diodes and an MPO 12 HBB or JBD full wave bridge rectifier which I can’t find out anything about. The 360 Variamp tone switch was nothing new, Gibson had been putting a similar tone switch on guitars for a while, but if you’re interested the values were as follows: 2.2μf, 0.47μf, 0.1μf, 0.027μf and a 1.5H choke.

*** Sometime near the end of the last millennium whilst working with Asian Dub Foundation, my old mate Joe Devlin and I decided we were going to do something about the state of the two rather ragged Ampeg 810E cabs we were touring (usually without flight cases to cut down on freight costs, hence the state they were in). Re-covering them wasn’t going to last very long if they were going to keep travelling as they had done, even if we could track down a supply for the “black nubby” vinyl Ampeg used from 1980 onwards. So we stripped the ripped vinyl away and painted them with several coats of black Hammerite. I know, I know - but it was a cheap practical solution that could be implemented swiftly. The older, more ragged cabinet and the better sounding of the two, (hence it’s more frequent use when we would rely on foreign rentals as the spare cabinet) was made of nicely jointed pine plywood. The newer box was a nasty, glued together chipboard - requiring a lot more prep before it could be painted. All big amp manufacturers seem to do this. They'll start off making a particular model in a nice quality plywood with a properly mounted baffle, and then a year later they're making boxes out of compressed pig shit and pencil shavings, amalgamated by some kind of poisonous epoxy that releases a gas that kills all living creatures for a 12 mile radius for the next 300 years.

**** Footnote, June 2023.

I’ve just found a fantastic history of Dan Armstrong’s contributions to music electronics. The following fascinating observations seem to support some of my own opinions in the preceding article. This account provides a convincing argument for the influences of other bass guitar amps focused through the lens of a true innovator’s sharp mind. As well as putting a link in to a site that might move I have copied the following from danarmstrong.org .

“ Hank, from California, writes in stating ‘I was there when Dan came up with the idea for the SVT. One day Mr. Bob Rufkahr, Sales Manager for Ampeg and later Vice President of Marketing, approached Dan as they wanted to market an amplifier that would compete against the Acoustic 361- which was a powered cabinet with an 18" Cerwin Vega loudspeaker inside, rear mounted with a folded horn. Dan knew of Peter Traynor's work up in Canada and suggested that Ampeg build something similar to one of their bass amps, most notably like the Traynor YBA-3 Custom Super Special bass amp.’

So the word was given, and once again Dan was asked to help. This time to design an amplifier that could compete in this market. Eventually Dan came up with the circuit design for what would become the Ampeg SVT (Super Valve Technology) amplifier and, according to Hank, ‘obviously changed the course of bass playing for the world... and perhaps Dan's greatest contribution of all - and in doing so, he single-handedly handed Ampeg the position they are in today. Despite all this, he never received any credit or compensation for the SVT concept’.

According to the book Ampeg: The Story Behind The Sound by Gregg Hopkins & Bill Moore, accounts of the V series amplifiers somewhat differ, stating in their book ‘other Ampeg designers remember it as a more collaborative effort. Danny, Rich Mandella, Roger Cox and I developed the V series of amplification’ recalled Bob Rufkahr in that book. But like Hank, Steve Constantelos, a former Ampeg engineer remembered Dan - and stated ‘I knew Dan well - he was a very nice man and a designing genius. Ampeg's chief engineer Bill Hughes and I worked closely, day and night designing the SVT and V series amps but a lot of this was built around Dan's designs.’ With all the differing opinions of past engineers and management at Ampeg - it begs the question.... what's the truth?

In the end, it's hard not to be impressed with the logic of Jimmy Ryan - then the store manager for Dan Armstrong Guitars who stated ‘During the late sixties, Ampeg was losing ground to Fender, Marshall, Traynor and other amp makers where they once led the industry. They wanted to remain relevant, but their current stable of underpowered B-15s and Reverberockets proved useless for big stage productions despite their popularity in studios. Dan Armstrong loved Traynors, and in an offer to help Ampeg survive, urged them to create a similar, more attractive line of amps. He gave them very specific ideas - Traynor-inspired configurations - 4x12 speaker cabinets for guitars and 8x10 cabinets for bass.

He suggested high-wattage power amps with lightening transient response for chunky guitars and punchy bass, and smoother, better-sounding eq curves that would help guitars and basses cut through the noise. Over several months they experimented with circuit designs, amp to cabinet configurations, colors, front panel look etc. and when all agreed on the ultimate schematics, production kicked in and out came the SVT line… with Dan’s name nowhere to be found on the final product. Technically, he was a consultant, not an official member of the design team, but still… not a mention for all his work? I don’t know if Dan ever protested, but his bitter disappointment was no secret.’ ”

For more about Pete Traynor and his part in the history of amplification have a read of this: Fitness Traynor

Music from big, Pink…

2020-06-07T14:05:33Z

… Moons, Floyds & sausages

Back on the 7th of April there was a Pink Super Moon, the biggest, or rather closest, we will have this year. In some cultures it is considered an indicator of the end of days; and while it might be a bit superstitious to worry about an approaching apocalypse based on the Moon’s natural cycle, it was certainly a harbinger of a world transformed in ways we couldn’t imagine at the start of 2020. As Nick Drake sang in the Autumn of 1971, “And none of you stand so tall, Pink moon gonna get you all”.

When I first started listening to Nick Drake (and at first I couldn’t stop) he’d been dead for over a decade, and while he wasn’t quite a lost genius, he was an esoteric pleasure. Indeed he was talked of by those who had heard him as the British Robert Johnson: a tragic troubadour whose dark genius was not entirely natural, who left behind a small but perfect oeuvre. In my late teens as I was then, I found his songs compelling, and matchless. Then his legacy really started to be acknowledged in the ‘90s (when his work finally got released on CD) and with this reassessment his third & final album eventually came to be considered the magnum opus. Drake’s last record is an artist baring his soul, paring his art to the bone, staring into the dark night at a pink moon. It is deceptive in it’s simplicity and it is devastating in it’s complexity.

So when we received this testimonial from a recent recording client I was both moved and delighted:

“I traveled to Bristol last November to perform a show at the Tobacco Factory. By chance I met Scot Mckenzie of New Cut Studios. We ended up spending a lot of time together, talking about classic folk and rock albums from the late 60s and early 70s, and recording several of my songs at the studio. I can't say enough about the experience. Scot has the best vintage analog recording gear and amazing intuition for recording acoustic sessions. If you are interested in making an album like Nick Drake's Pink Moon ... Scot is the engineer and New Cut is the place to do it. I've been so amazed by the experience that I am planning to go back as soon as possible to record more. I can't recommend Scot and New Cut Studios highly enough!!!”

~ Buck Curran

High praise indeed, but perhaps we’ve inherited a little magic from the man who actually produced and recorded Pink Moon . You see the last person to own and use the Neotek Essence recording console we use at New Cut Studios was that very same album’s celebrated engineer - John Wood.

A solid approach

Sometime in the middle of 1965 John Wood and Geoff Frost opened an 8-track studio called Sound Techniques in a former dairy at 46a Old Church Street in Chelsea, West London. Nick Drake’s first session there was in 1968 when he recorded his first album Five Leaves Left while still a student at Cambridge. The album’s producer, in the traditional A&R sense, was Joe Boyd, who booked the studio and the musicians, but it was John Wood who was responsible for the record’s sound, right up to the finished product. Boyd and Wood had developed a good relationship and many regular clients of Sound Techniques were signed to Boyd’s production & publishing company Witchseason. Artists on his roster who recorded there include The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Vashti Bunyan, and of course John Martyn. Martyn’s landmark album Solid Air , with it’s phenomenal titular tribute to his friend Nick Drake, was recorded over a couple of weeks at the end of 1972, a few months after Pink Moon was released. Two years later, with Drake’s death from an overdose of anti-depressants, it would become an elegy. John Martyn's best selling album was recorded at Island’s Basing Street studios and Sound Techniques, and co-produced by John Wood with Martyn himself. Wood had produced Martyn’s previous album Bless The Weather at Joe Boyd’s request, using Fairport’s Richard Thompson and Danny Thompson from Pentangle on the sessions.

Joe Boyd was a Harvard graduate who started his career as an assistant producer at Elektra and first came to England tour managing artists like Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In 1965 as one of the noise-boys working the PA at Newport when Dylan electrified folk, Joe was there when they ignored orders from the axe-wielding Pete Seeger to turn it down. By 1966 Boyd had opened the cradle of the psychedelic movement in the UK, the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road, and was producing & recording for bands like Soft Machine. As 1967 got going he took a band by the name of Pink Floyd into Sound Techniques to record ' Arnold Layne' — three days later they signed to EMI and it was released as their first single. The Floyd went on to do rather well at making & releasing records. Frustrated that Elektra were ignoring his recommendations to sign bands like Pink Floyd and The Move, Boyd set sail on his own and set up Witchseason. In his entertaining autobiography White Bicycles Boyd said his company name came from the Donovan lyric: “Beatniks are out to make it rich, Oh no, must be the season of the witch.” Most of Boyd’s artists were released and distributed on Chris Blackwell’s Island Records and most were recorded by John Wood. During his 11 year tenure Sound Techniques recorded The Who, The Yardbirds and Elton John among others, as well as a host of artists in the folk-rock scene like Sandy Denny, Richard & Linda Thompson, Jethro Tull, John Cale, Gerry Rafferty, Cat Stevens and Focus.

Twin Thompsons, double Daves

Five Leaves Left had been arranged with various instrumentation to supplement Drake’s voice & guitar, including strings, and occasionally a little piano & flute. Richard Thompson and Danny Thompson both contributed to Drake's debut, the former playing electric guitar on the opener and the latter supplying bass on about half the tracks. Drake’s second album Bryter Layter was more elaborate with a mainstream, pop sensibility and a proper rhythm section in Fairport Convention’s Dave Mattacks & Dave Pegg. There was brass as well as strings this time, again a single song with electric guitar from Richard Thompson — and a host of different instruments played by John Cale, who was producing an album for Joe Boyd with Nico at the time. Recording duties were once again assigned to John Wood at Sound Techniques with Boyd at the helm. The second album got better notices than his first, but Nick Drake was not happy with how slick and polished the results were. At the start of the ’70s Joe Boyd was working back in the US, as a producer at Warner Bros. with Stanley Kubrick on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange . He may still have been available to contribute when Pink Moon was recorded, but Drake had already determined to do things differently. He wanted to do a very stripped down session with John Wood as the only collaborator over just two nights, October 30th-31st 1971 at Sound Techniques. Aside from a small piano part in the album’s opening title track, Drake used only acoustic guitars and voice through the rest of the album. Wood later said " He was very determined to make this very stark, bare record ” but also that “ it felt like there was a kind of urgency about it ”. Nick Drake was already suffering from clinical depression and his downward spiral would end in his death three years later, aged just twenty-six.

Pink Moon is a truly seminal work that went unnoticed on it’s release in February 1972 (indeed it almost went unreleased — legend has it Drake left the master tapes at Island's office reception in a carrier bag), but is now a regular high scorer on those ubiquitous bucket list “greatest ever albums“ litanies that eminent publications like to decree. So to receive such a glowing commendation from another great guitarist really touched us. Buck Curran is not only a painter, singer-songwriter, record producer but also a guitar builder. After working at Ramblin’ Conrad’s guitar shop in Norfolk, VA, in the ‘90s he went on to work for acclaimed luthier Dana Bourgeois for 7 years in Lewiston, ME. While living in Maine he recorded 5 albums as half of the duo Arborea. Originally from Ohio Buck now lives in Bergamo, Italy and his music can be found just about any way you care to consume it. His new album No Love Is Sorrow has just been released and there was an excellent article on him in Premier Guitar a couple of months ago..

When Geoff Frost & John Wood set up Sound Techniques in 1965 their studio also had a workshop where they not only built most of their own recording equipment but also recording consoles for other studios. Considering they built desks for places like the Music Centre and Trident Studios (who would later become famous themselves for producing legendary consoles), our choice for New Cut Studios of the very desk that John had used seemed like a good decision. You can see John using the New Cut console in this excellent article in Sound On Sound .

In the sleeve notes to the “Remastered And Expanded” edition of John Martyn’s Solid Air in 2000 John Wood reminisced thus:

“ It would be hard to overestimate the contribution of Danny Thompson to Solid Air , and his performance on the title track (' Sausages' as he and John used to refer to it) is some of the greatest bass playing I ever recorded. The rapport between John and Danny on this album precipitated their legendary live concert appearances. ”

As to John Wood’s contribution to popular music, Danny Thompson’s recollections of playing bass in tribute to Nick Drake in 1972 bear repetition:

“ I think ' Solid Air' was the first one we did. From the top, live, none of this dropping in. I was really tearing the backside out of it! We were totally free; all the musicians were. There was nobody sitting there saying, “No, no, no, not like that, more like this.” We didn’t have all that. It was very trusting. John Wood was a beautiful engineer. ”

"You've been walking your line... "

I never got to meet John Wood, we bought his desk through Larking’s List, but I did get to work with Joe Boyd. Joe produced and recorded with Kate & Anna McGarrigle in the ‘90s and after Kate’s death in 2010 he produced a memorial show to Kate at the Royal Festival Hall on 12 June 2010, as part of the Meltdown Festival, curated that year by none other than Richard Thompson. We did rehearsals at the late, great Terminal Studios in Lamb Walk in Deptford — which was one of our inspirations to build New Cut. I had toured with Kate’s daughter Martha Wainwright and her band in 2005-06, and on some shows when we supported her brother Rufus. Watching from stage right as Emmylou Harris performed Kate’s poignant ' I Eat Dinner ' with Rufus Wainwright was a breathtaking experience. Kate McGarrigle’s friend, and the author of The English Patient Michael Ondaatje, who gave a beautiful elegy at Meltdown, was kind enough to sign my copy of his Coming Through Slaughter which I’d had in my day bag for some time. It is a remarkable novel that bears repeated reading — when I finished eking it out for the first time I started at the beginning again. Ondaatje’s portrait of New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden is a story of musical genius and descent into madness. It is a work every bit as enduring and unflinching as Pink Moon and I urge you to seek it out.

Fitness Traynor…

2020-05-07T15:40:20Z

… get in the ring with Thumper’s amps.

I knew nothing about Traynor amps before I bought one, except that it sounded incredible. It was a Traynor YBA-1 Bass Master, and though it didn’t look like much the noise that came out of it was truly phenomenal*. I have never heard an amp that startled me as much as this amp did the first time I heard it. So I did a little research and almost immediately discovered a lot of people calling it “the poor man’s Plexi”. Indeed most of the posts and blogs I found about the YBA-1 were discussions of the best ways in which they could be modded to be close to Marshall JTM specs. But then I found this comment on a forum and, as well as making me laugh, it made me look a little deeper into the history of Pete Traynor and how he became an amp mas ter: “ I’m going to start buying up old Plexis and mod them to YBA-1 specs. ” Because I agree with that guy, this amp ha s got something special that I don’t want to mess with. It’s not a poor-man’s-Plexi, it’s a Traynor, with it’s own character and great personality. I found it even more irritating as I kept coming across people who claimed that Traynor merely copied Marshall — because the more research I did, the more information I found that showed that this just wasn’t true.

There’s a story that goes something like this: It is NAMM week, or one of those big junkets for the gear manufacturers, and whilst business is being done, dinner is also being eaten. It’s about socialising of course but more than anything else it’s about talking shop. There are some bigwigs from Ampeg at the high table. The delegates from Elkhart, IN are in high spirits and good humour (in the early 1970s, after they were bought out by Magnavox, Ampeg head office was just south of Kalamazoo, MI). Also at the table is a delegate from Yorkville Sound in Toronto, ON, one Peter Traynor, or perhaps he’s seated at another table nearby. One of the Ampeg board cracks a joke about the rumour going round concerning Pete’s unorthodox test regimen:

“So you throw them out the window, Pete, is that right?”

“Yes we do. You mean you don’t?”

Or something like that, anyway; it’s not verbatim, but the anecdote has been oft repeated. Because that’s exactly what Pete Traynor would do. Pete’s original workshop was in a backroom at Toronto’s Long & McQuade music store, but in 1964, a year after Yorkville Sound was incorporated, it was moved to a room above the store. Any time he designed a new prototype or significantly re-engineered an existing model the final test was to throw it from the second story window (that is, the first floor for us europeans) into the parking lot. The flying amp would be retrieved, the shattered valves shaken out, a new set of tubes would be put in and it would be run up on the bench. Now that’s about as roadproof as you can make ‘em. But as we’ll see, that’s just one of the reasons original Traynor amps are about as tough as any piece of gear ever toured. In 1965 Yorkville Sound moved into the second story of an old industrial building on Dundas Street East. By the middle of 1967 they had outgrown this building and moved a few blocks down Dundas St. E. from number 431 to number 744, down by the river, where they occupied not only the second floor but a large part of the ground floor as well. But by the summer of ’73 Yorkville Sound had moved into a single story factory unit in Scarborough and they had to get a vibrating shaker table to emulate a hard life on the road and put the new amps through their paces. The Bass Master we have at New Cut Studios was made there in April of 1975, about a year before Pete Traynor retired from Yorkville, and may have been tested on the shaker. But you never know — he might have thrown it out the window for good measure.**

The Long & McQuade music store began life in 1957 when trumpet player & bassist Jack Long teamed up with drummer Jack McQuade and opened premises at 803 Yonge Street in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood. As well as retailing instruments they soon developed a market renting out equipment — particularly amplifiers and speaker cabinets to bands who found themselves playing bigger rooms. And there were a lot of venues along the very long Yonge Street. Their increasing stock of hire amps were doing great business but were not always treated well by the customers. It’s very easy to blow a piggy-back valve head if you’ve only ever used small combo amps and know nothing about sudden loss of output impedance when the speakers are disconnected. Around 1962 Jack & Jack were approached by a TV & radio repairman who wanted to hire a backroom at the store to service the affluent, neighbouring Rosedale district. Part of the deal was that he would also service an ever growing mound of damaged rental amps & speakers. Backline wasn’t really the guy’s field however and so the mountain grew. And grew — and before long the TV/radio man gave up on the musical equipment altogether and moved on. Pete Traynor was a young musician who played in local bands, including several with his friend Robbie Robertson who would go on to great things. His father was an electrical engineer and for some time Pete had been fixing amps and guitars for his friends. Pete was in his early 20s in ’63 when he offered to fix the backlog of broken gear at Long & McQuade. To everyone’s amazement he cleared the backlog of repairs in no time at all. You could say a pair of Jacks had come up trumps.

The way Pete told the story to the Toronto Star in 2011: “ One night at closing time I went to Long & McQuade’s to get some strings for a friend, and I heard their repair man had quit, leaving behind 126 amps that needed fixing. I said I’d take a look, so they left me with the keys and I worked through the night. At nine the next morning, when people started arriving for work, every one of those amps was in working order. That’s when they took me on as their amp repair guy. ” It’s quite some claim but whatever his work-rate really was, Traynor was hired: initially on piecework terms, he was quickly taken on full time. Very soon after starting at the L&M store Pete was asked if he could build a mobile PA system. There was a distinct shortage in the city so Pete took an idea from a 1930s RCA design and started building column speaker cabinets and amplifiers. Before long Pete also started to think about how much easier the rental stock of instrument amps would be to repair with a few design modifications. He was already repairing amps with the cheapest, good quality components he could source and modding where necessary away from stock designs. It was a small step from there to building an instrument amplifier of his own. Long & McQuade’s hire stock was always at full capacity and Pete worked out he could make a good quality amp head and still turn a small profit. Furthermore he decided he was going to make them super rugged — near impossible to blow expensive components like output transformers like he was always having to replace in the hire gear from other manufacturers. Jack Long agreed to back Pete’s own money with a larger investment if Pete would make an initial batch rather than just one amp. And so what did he decide to make? Pete played a little guitar but he mostly gigged as a bass player. There was only one choice really — I mean, what amp did Jim Marshall copy? What amp did Randall Smith decide to hot-rod and cram into the first tiny Princeton Boogie cabinet? The Fender 5F6-A Bassman circuit of course. But Pete’s amps had some definite upgrades, including huge power transformers and filter caps, massive output transformers to handle the low frequencies properly, as well as an extra, sacrificial small transformer to cope with impedance mismatches. That “poor man’s Plexi” moniker has led some people to claim that Traynor copied the Marshall JTM 45. And there’s another reason why that nickname irks. When the first six Traynor Dyna-Bass 40 watt amps (40w sine-wave RMS, 8 Ohms, 5%THD) came off the bench in October 1963 there were no proper Marshall Plexis to copy.

Ken Bran, Dudley Craven and Ken Underwood, so legend has it, discussed the idea of making a guitar amp in a Wimpy Bar in Ealing late one Friday night sometime in 1962 after their weekly Greenford amateur radio club meeting. Craven & Underwood had been EMI apprentices and Bran was a former Pan Am Airways engineer who had been employed by Marshall to service broken Selmer & Vox amps which Jim sold in his shop. I think we see a pattern emerging here. Craven’s associate Dick Findlay was a technical advisor and Underwood certainly got involved in building the first amps, but it was Bran and Craven who implemented most of the minor design modifications they made to the input and output stages of the Bassman circuit. It’s worth mentioning here that owners of Dyna-Bass amps have noted that they are almost stock 5F6-A architecture with barely a change in component values. There weren’t many Fender Tweed amps in London in 1963, trade restrictions had only recently been lifted and they were expensive to import. And by '63 very few new Fender amps were still Tweed models, probably only the Harvard and the Champ. But I’m willing to bet there were plenty of Tweed amps in Toronto in the early sixties.

The Marshall engineers made six prototypes, the last of which apparently nailed the new sound they were looking for. No doubt the input of guitarists like Big Jim Sullivan, Brian Poole and the young Pete Townshend — all big proponents of a British Bassman variant — were factored into the tone they aimed for. Official Marshall history has it that the No.6 prototype was first demonstrated in the shop in September 1962, and that they immediately took orders for 23 new amps. Underwood however claims that a band was put together to first demo the amp one Sunday night at The Ealing Club. Incidentally the drummer for that gig was Marshall shop Saturday boy and future Jimi Hendrix Experience sticksman Mitch Mitchell. Underwood also claims that one of the songs played at that gig was The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There — which wasn’t released until March 22nd 1963. Whatever the date of it's debut, the first production Marshall JTM 45 MK II “coffin badge” amps were certainly on the market in 1963, but with demand for these hand built models being so high, I’d be surprised if any had made it as far as Toronto by October of that year when Pete built his first run of 6 Dyna-Bass heads. Aside from this, the first plexi-glass control panel Marshalls (hence the Plexi nickname) weren’t made until 1965. It’s kind of like the argument over who discovered calculus. If Jim Marshall is Sir Isaac Newton then Pete Traynor is Gottfried Leibniz — but let us not forget, Leo Fender is Descartes, Fermat & Pascal all rolled into one.

In The Soul Of Tone Tom Wheeler quotes an interview with (then recently retired) Peavey rep Mike Borer: “ I was manager at Jim Marshall’s music store when he began building his amps. Before then I worked in a music store in London called the Lew Davies Shop, which was owned by Selmer. “ While he was working at Lew Davies*** the shop bought a Tweed Bassman from an American serviceman who was returning to the States, which Borer then sold on to Adam Faith’s bassist. Borer later bought it back off the same guy, for his own use playing with Cliff Bennet & The Rebel Rousers. “ The Bassman was such a great-sounding amp that Jim asked to borrow it” continued Borer. “I brought it into work. Ken Bran drew up the [Marshall] schematic from it across the street in the old smaller, original store. “ Jim Marshall opened his first shop at 76 Uxbridge Road, Hanwell in West London on the 7th July 1962 (according to the Marshall website) and then a second larger shop over the road at number 97 as well. The 5F6-A Bassman is ostensibly a 45 Watt amp. But the various output transformers in the earliest Marshalls, made by Elstone or Reading Windings (usually RS branded) were only rated at 30w. As the JTM 45 model developed the OTs were improved with 40w and 50w components from companies like Drake in 1965, and later from Dagnall as well. The first Marshalls used military surplus, rugged 5881 output valves instead of 6L6s but the supply soon started to dwindle. By 1964 it was easier to source KT66s instead of 5881s, upping the output from 40w to 45w and bringing more bite & distortion. By 1966 the new 50w Marshall Plexis moved to EL34s, although this was probably because KT66s were in turn becoming more expensive and harder to source. By comparison Traynors were measured at 40w in their earliest incarnations, but as we’ll see this was a low estimate and they were loud for a variety of reasons. Anyway, enough of Marshall amp history: as with the Bluesbreaker combo origin story, it’s difficult to separate the myth from the pith.

There was another Fender inspired amp named the Bassmaster released in 1963, judging by their first catalogue appearance. These British amp heads were made by Selmer and while they may have started off as 30w amps as early as 1962 (initially clad in the elegant Blue-Grey livery and later in the iconic silver Croc-Skin) by the end of ’63 they were 50w EL34 monsters — and long before Marshall settled on that formula. And again, people often mistakenly call them Plexi knock-offs. The Selmer Bassmaster changed it’s name to the better known Treble N’ Bass model in 1964 just as Traynor were changing their name from Dyna-Bass to Bass Master. I wonder if there’s a connection? Again, as with the Traynors, having large output transformers made for a tight, rounded bottom end with no flub or mush. I believe the Selmer Bassmaster was modelled on the tube rectified, 6G6 circuit Brownface Bassman heads that Fender brought out in 1960. Which is another reason why they are Fender tributes and certainly not Marshall clones. With the channels jumpered these Selmers are raging beasts. It was a Mark III 100w Tn’B that Lemmy used before he got his ’76 “Murder One” Super Bass. We have a nice early ‘70s Selmer Tn’B SV Compact 50R combo at New Cut Studios with it’s original pair of 12” Rola Celestions in it. It makes a great clean amp and is a superb pedal platform, but it’s over-under, double-barrel Greenbacks are also fantastic for filling up the stage of a small venue.

In 1964 the Traynor Dyna-Bass Amp (of which the first run with brass serial number plates from 0001 — 0024 may be the only ones in existence****) was rebadged as the Bass Master Amp and the legend on it’s rear plate changed from “Bass Amp” to the model number “YBA-1”. However even the earliest Dyna-Bass models had the inscription YBA-1 TUBE LAYOUT on a hand written valve chart in the bottom of the cabinet. I guess it was always the Yorkville Bass Amp mark 1, after all. After making about a thousand Bass Masters Traynor moved over to solid state rectifiers from 5AR4 valves; and around about the same time, to 6CA7 output tubes from the original spec 7027A valves. The 6CA7 is similar to a 6L6 but with different pinouts and was invented by Sylvania as America’s answer to Mullard’s 1949 EL34 design, but with a different internal construction (GEC in West London in turn developed their KT77 as an improved 6CA7 substitute). EL34s generally have a more pronounced midrange compared to the other two designs which have more bottom end power and open sounding high harmonics. So again, like Selmer (though I don’t know if there was any influence there) Traynor moved to an EL34 type output valve before Marshall. It may be pure coincidence rather than a nod to Pete Traynor, but when Leo Fender started making amps again with the first Music Man Sixty-five series in 1974 he didn’t go back to the 6L6s his old amps were famous for — he used 6CA7s.

Over it’s lifetime the YBA-1 went through a few changes to circuit and cosmetics but stayed largely the same in character and tone. By 1966 the cast aluminium script Traynor badge had swivelled from an upward tilt into the horizontal orientation and in ’67 the badge was changed to a plastic version with more angular letters, still horizontal so the letters were tilted. Unfortunately this became known as the “rayno” badge where the letters outside of the mounting pegs would snap off. In 1970 the large block parallelogram badge appeared on the front. In 1969 the front panel name under the mains switch and jewel lamp was lengthened to “Traynor Bass Master Amp” from “Bass Master Amp”. In 1970 it was shortened altogether to just “Bass Master”. Also in 1970 a black & chrome automotive plastic bumper-strip trim appeared around the end cheeks of the cab replacing the chrome steel corners. In 1968 the YBA-1A Bass Master Mark II was introduced. Apart from the extra A on the faceplate only a vent on one end for an internal fan looked different from it’s older sibling. Even heavier transformers meant it weighed about 10 lbs more than the earlier marque. It still only had one pair of 6CA7s but it managed to produce twice the output from a massive plate voltage of over 600 Volts (90 Watts RMS at 4 Ohms). It’s worth mentioning here that Traynor were always extremely conservative with the wattage they published: ratings were for a non-clipped 1kHz sine wave, meaning that the MK.II YBA-1A put out 90w before break-up and well over 100w at full bore. These under values, combined with their huge output transformers, mean that Traynor amps push a lot of air making them sound way louder than we expect them to.

Despite the changes over the Bass Master’s evolution the diode rectified YBA-1 amps do not sound a great deal different from the earlier models. Even the early valve rectified YBA-1s are tighter than early JTMs or Tweed Bassmans. They are tight and articulate all the way down and don’t really sag at all. That squishiness that some tube-rec amps have isn’t really a feature of most YBA-1s, largely because of the over spec’d Hammond transformers. Also, some of the original 1000 Bass Master Amps were converted to diodes by Traynor under service. After all, it’s a more stable circuit that gives more clean headroom efficiently, which is usually more desirable in a bass amp. What we’re talking about here is that valve rectifiers (with their higher internal resistance than diodes) usually compress the guitar signal a little giving a more sustained, mid-boosted timbre. It’s caused by the fluctuation of DC voltage through the valve on the signal’s decay — kind of like the amplitude modulation of a very slow tremolo. Large transient signals, when a player really digs in and plays hard, cause overheating and a consequent voltage drop that then recovers. So a valve rectifier is a saggy thing, but a large part of that is also dependent on the power transformer and the filter caps. This is all about how the power supply can actually affect the voice of an amp.

So, the poor-man’s-Plexi indeed — I’m not here to knock the Marshall heritage, their contribution to Rock n’ Roll is inestimable, but Traynor’s input, much like their output, is hugely underrated. They really are the ugly ducklings of valve amp history. I know what you’re all asking now, do they sound like an original Plexi? I only have our late model YBA-1 to make comparisons. After trawling through as many forums as I could find I have distilled the consensus of those who have actually owned and played the amps they compare down to this: The first valve rectified Dyna-Bass/Bass Masters sound somewhere between a Tweed Bassman and an early “offset” JTM 45. The solid state rectifier YBA-1 is a bit more “Plexi” but mostly like a late “Black Flag” JTM 50 or JMP Lead. While the bigger YBA-1A head sounds more like a Marshall Super Bass but also a lot like a HiWatt DR103. The architecture may be different but many owners of the “100 Watt” Mark II Bass Masters bought them because they already played vintage HiWatts. As to our own comparisons: here at New Cut Studios we have reissue models of both the Fender ’59 Bassman LTD Tweed and Marshall Plexi panel MK II JTM 45; as well as a 1978 Ally panel JMP 50w Mk2. Lead — and they are all very nice amps — but the ’75 Traynor just blows them away.

Want to look inside a ‘70s Bass Master to see what all the fuss is about? Simply remove the four screws from the top and lift the panel. The chassis is laid out in front of you, a long strip of eyelet board runs through the middle allowing all the hand wired components to be tested or replaced without having to remove the chassis. It’s not exactly the same as a 5F6-A component board and despite all the mustard caps it’s not the same as a JTM Plexi but it is the same amp fundamentally. This easy access, point-to-point construction is another reason why they are such favourites for modders. Pete was a repair man and he made his amps repair friendly in ways nobody else ever has. There’s the sacrificial small transformer on the output stage to prevent blowing the main OT, there’s the circuit breaker re-set switch instead of a fuse. Over here are convenient points to meter a ten volt DC drop across a resistor so you can set the bias to the power valves without an oscilloscope, or having to work out plate dissipation with a multi-meter & calculator..

Pete Traynor was a man who thought in terms of solutions, when he introduced his YBA-3 Custom Special bass stack in 1967 it put out 130 Watts RMS (clean at moderate level remember) at 4 Ohms into an 8 x 10” speaker cabinet — the YC-810 "Big B" enclosure, 200 Watts RMS at 4 Ohms. Maybe he just thought that if you stacked two Tweed Bassman cabs you’d get a great sound — but the point is Traynor had that thought 2 years before Ampeg brought out their SVT-810. He was a pioneer of concert audio and Traynor fans from back in the day also claim that he invented the first wedge-shaped floor monitor, before Bill Hanley introduced the idea to Neil Young for Buffalo Springfield. Perhaps that's why Hanley was quoted as saying “ Oh crikey, I don’t know how we came up with them! They were really antique at the time though. They looked like rabbit hutches and that’s what I used to call them. ”

Pete Traynor was born on the 28th of April 1940, I’ve just looked that up online and found his obituary in the Toronto Star newspaper. As I write, today’s date is April 28th 2020. I’m a little shocked by such a big coincidence — that I would just happen to look up his dates on the 80th anniversary of his birth. Especially since I made a start on this article about a fortnight ago. I will try and finish writing this for the 4th anniversary of his passing. When Pete passed away on May 7th 2016 legendary musician Robbie Robertson paid this tribute:

“ Pete Traynor or Thumper as we called him, was an old pal of mine. We played in several bands together: The Rhythm Chords, Robbie and The Robots, Thumper and the Trambones, and the Suedes. He could just as easily build a guitar as play one. He hot-rodded my amps, guitars, or anything he could get his hands on. We ran together, double dated, and tried to stay out of trouble, sometimes unsuccessfully. As I went off to Arkansas to join Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks, Pete went on to become the premier guitar amp maker in Canada. He had an amazing gift for electronics and his amps had a powerful crystal sound. Some years back, they were making a documentary on me and Pete and i met up at my mother's old house in Toronto. He still had that fire in his eye like he needed to figure out what to build next. If David Bowie or Prince need an amp fixed up in heaven, I can tell you they're in good hands now. Thanks Thumper, for all the good times and wonderful memories. Blessings, Robbie ”

But maybe we should leave the last word to Thumper: “ I sort of liked the old days, when there was a bit of mystery about how it all worked, and every guitar player had his own sound and his own secret way of getting that special edge. ”

With great thanks to Mike Holman’s Yorkville Sound History 1963 to 1991 published Feb 20, 2002. It was a very useful source for facts about time & place. Acknowledgements also to The Star newspaper in Toronto for several good articles consulted whilst researching this and the quotes from Traynor himself.

* I purchased our Bass Master (big thanks to Babsy for spotting it) from long-time Killing Joke roadie Dave Simpson who also manages the Heron Music shop in Bristol. It’s a proper Aladdin’s cave and a real institution in the St. George district of the city. It’s also the nearest guitar shop to my house, and to our studio, and I was privileged to tour Europe with Dave and FOH man extraordinaire Johnnie Haskett with the original Killing Joke line-up some years ago.

** There’s another story however that before they got the shaker table the amps were pulled off a forklift at full extension with ropes! It’s like the drop test was a crucial part of the process.

*** I believe I read somewhere that Selmer’s Lew Davies shop specialised in guitars, was near the corner of Denmark Street and that both Jerry Donahue and Paul Kossof worked there. Incidentally around 1964 both Ronnie Lane & Kenney Jones worked at Selmer’s amp factory at Theobalds Road in Holborn when they formed the Small Faces: Ronnie playing bass & guitar in the test department and Kenny on the speaker cab production line.

**** Holman’s Yorkville history reads to me as though the run of 24 amps made before the end of 1963 was over and above the initial batch of 6 prototypes. It further reads as though the transition to YBA-1 Bass Master which happened in 1964 was a cosmetic change that coincided with the using up of all the serial number plates. Does this mean that only 30 Dyna-Bass front panels had been fabricated?

Fuzzy Recollections…

2020-03-27T16:11:29Z

… dishing the dirt on distorted guitar.

Why are there so many fuzz boxes out there? I suppose one might as well ask why there are so many varieties of hot sauce. I’m writing this in Sacramento, whilst on tour, and the range of hot sauces I can buy in this small city is quite dizzying. Everybody likes a little pep, but everyone has different tastes; and people’s tastes change of course, not only from day to day but over their lifetimes. We all had a RAT in 1985 and while some of us still do or have even returned to a clone of it, it’s not what everyone would choose. One person loves the original MOSFET Fulltone Full-Drive, but the next person doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. Most guitarists will get two or three “dirt boxes” that they like for different jobs and some will buy dozens! And this seemingly endless variety is not just a matter of personal taste. We need to consider what comes in front of the pedal, and also what comes after it. Even if two players are using Strats the differences in pickups could be vast. And what about the amps they’re using? A trawl around online forums quickly reveals that guitarists are prone to disagreeing over the merits of fuzz boxes without making any kind of allowances for the vast differences in pickups and amps that each may be using. Thankfully, of course, there are also more informed opinions that acknowledge the importance of those differences as well. Pedal order is yet another factor: the differences that occur in your sound when you swap the order of the effects in your signal chain. It’s not just the ingredients you choose, it’s the order in which you combine and cook them, it’s the different levels of spice you can achieve. Indeed in the early 1980s Pearl, the well known drum manufacturer, put out a range of guitar pedals called the Sound Spice series. They are, by and large, a superb series of effects with their own distinct flavours (we have an OC-07 Octave and two OD-05 Over Drives here at New Cut Studios). Whilst the Pearl Over Drive has a similar topology to a Tube Screamer it has a parametric EQ prior to the clipping stage so that you can move that TS mid hump around or lose it altogether. Maybe I'm labouring the seasoning metaphor, but the point I’m trying to make, is that you have to think of your whole rig as your instrument. After all, Leo Fender originally considered an amp with electric guitar as a discrete instrument in his designs. But then, you don’t always need a guitar amp when you’re recording.

In 1961 Grady Martin plugged his 1956 model Danelectro baritone guitar straight into the desk for his part on Marty Robbins’ country-pop hit ' Don’t Worry ', but there was a fault on the channel’s preamp, perhaps in a transformer, and the recording was wildly distorted. Supposedly Martin didn’t like the results but the producer certainly did and he kept the track. It was a hit and Grady must have changed his mind about fuzzy tones because he then used almost the very same riff on his own instrumental record. That track was actually called ' The Fuzz' and beat Marty Robbins’ record to release. It’s been said that he recorded it through the same dodgy channel. Lucky for him it hadn’t been repaired; well it sometimes takes us a while to get something like that fixed here at New Cut too. But what do you do for that sound when the mic-pre does get fixed? It was this very thought that led the engineer on that ' Don’t Worry ' session, Glen Snoddy, to design what might be the very first guitar pedal. Snoddy has said that the transformer in the faulty valve preamp from the recording console later failed completely. So together with another engineer by the name of Revis Hobbs he worked out a transistor based circuit and put it in a box. I’ve no idea if this prototype was already in the form of a floor mounted foot-switch device, but that's certainly what it became after they took the idea to Gibson and the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone pedal was born. But the Maestro wasn’t the first fuzz-in-a-box. Because a year earlier Al Casey had already used a custom fuzz box in sessions for the Sanford Clark recording ' Go On Home' in 1960 . The record was produced by the great Lee Hazelwood who’d already had a fuzz effect unit built for his studio by a radio station technician he knew. So just where did Hazelwood get the idea from?

The history of guitar distortion is fuzzy in itself and littered with claims and counter-claims as to who did what first, or intentionally, before anyone else ever tried it. But there’s nothing new under the sun. Did Dave Davies really “invent Heavy Metal” by damaging a speaker cone and riffing power chords on The Kinks’ ' You Really Got Me' in 1964? Well actually Link Wray had already done both of those things on ' Rumble' in 1958. I’ve read that the amplifier Wray modified was a 1953 Premier 71. These were made by Multivox, a manufacturing subsidiary of New York-based retailer/wholesaler the Peter Sorkin Music Company. The amp had one central 12" Jensen Field-Coil speaker but with two additional 3" Jensen tweeters in the top corners of the cabinet. Supposedly Link Wray only pierced holes in these 3” cones. Dave Davies’ dirt box was an Elpico AC55 “little green amp” like the one famously owned by Paul McCartney. Davies says he used a razor blade to cut radial slashes in it’s elliptical Celestion cone. Was a 19 year old Ike Turner the teenage father of Rock ’n’ Roll with his 1951 hymn to Oldsmobile’s ' Rocket 88 '? For years it was claimed as the first ever Rock n’ Roll recording and it has what sounds like a deliberately distorted guitar — allegedly due to a speaker cone in a Fender Tweed amp being damaged by a fall from a car into the road in the rain.

But you didn’t need to damage your equipment to get distortion. In 1951 Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist Willie Lee Johnson just cranked up a little amp to play distorted guitar on tracks like ' How Many More Years' . The Blues has always understood how to express emotion through strained voices, whatever the instrument. In recent years Goree Carter’s 1949 record ' Rock Awhile' has trumped ' Rocket 88' as the “genre first” in rock historians’ ears and it too has a distorted guitar, which sounds like an overdriven amp. Anyone who hears this record today cannot but think it was a huge influence on Chuck Berry’s playing style. In 1956 when the Johnny Burnette Trio reworked ' The Train Kept A-Rollin’ ' with a guitar riff it was deliberately distorted during recording (or so the anecdote goes) when Paul Burlison intentionally reproduced an accidental fuzz that had occurred once when a valve worked loose before a gig in Philadelphia (incidentally the clean guitar parts on 'Train… ' were played by Grady Martin so he was no stranger to distorted guitar when the ' Don't Worry' session came around). This may have been one reason why the Yardbirds decided to cover ' The Train Kept A-Rollin’ ' in 1965. Many have claimed that Burlison’s was the first deliberate use of distortion in a recording session but as we’ve seen there were earlier recordings where people made choices about the sound they wanted to hear from the guitar. Indeed Junior Barnard achieved his “low down & dirty” sound by hard picking and overdriving his amp as far back as 1945 — so can we say he was the first guitarist to choose to play with distortion as a tonal decision?

Going back to separate effect devices designed to distort an audio signal: just when did the fuzzbox become a thing we couldn’t do without? The American instrumental band The Ventures got their friend Orville "Red" Rhodes to help them reproduce Grady Martin’s ' The Fuzz' sound. Rhodes was an electronics buff as well as being a session guy and with the fuzzbox he made The Ventures recorded ' 2000 Pound Bee' in 1962. That same year Gibson introduced the Maestro FZ-1, their production model of Snoddy & Hobbs’ germanium tranny design. It is reckoned to be the first commercially produced fuzzbox and there’s a photo of George Harrison with one at the sessions for ' She Loves You' in 1963. I can’t think of a Beatles song where Harrison used a fuzz sound that early on, in fact McCartney’s fuzz bass melody on George’s song ' Think For Yourself ' may have been the first product of the Beatles using the Maestro in 1965. Many people have pointed to Keith Richards’s use of a Maestro on ' Satisfaction' as it’s first really notable use on a hit record. However, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Yardbirds were definitely listening to distorted riffs in 1965. Jeff Beck used a custom-built fuzz pedal (borrowed from a soon to be famous friend) on a recording even earlier than Keef’s seminal riff, which The Yardbirds released on the 4th of June 1965. As Tolinski & Di Perna relate in their excellent history of the electric guitar Play It Loud : “ The fuzzbox that Beck used for the main riff on ' Heart Full Of Soul' was a device lent to him by his close friend Jimmy Page, a custom box designed and built by Roger Mayer, who would go on to create guitar effects devices for Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and many others. Beck’s use of fuzz on ' Heart Full Of Soul' predated Keith Richards’s prominent use of a Gibson FZ-1 fuzzbox on The Rolling Stones’s ' Satisfaction' by a little over a month. It is truly a landmark recording. For the song’s guitar solo, Beck opted to use another early fuzz pedal, a Sola Sound Tone Bender. ” The history of the Tone Bender, the first UK production fuzz pedal introduced in 1965, is a fascinating story in it’s own right. There's a really good video on YouTube by That Pedal Show & JHS Pedals entitled Tone Bender Special With JHS Josh & Anthony Macari. The Jen Fuzz we have at New Cut Studios is a late '60s Vox variant of the Tone Bender. And then, the Dallas Fuzz Face, the Electro Harmonix Big Muff, the Shin-ei Super Fuzz, all followed in quick succession. We suddenly couldn’t do without them it seemed. Silicon transistors replaced germaniums, then FETs followed, which were then superseded by op-amps in their turn. The pedal industry was born.

We’ll probably never know who “invented” distorted guitar, but I would bet that even before George Beauchamp developed a magnetic pickup to amplify guitar strings, some six-string-shooter somewhere used a phonograph pick-up or telephone microphone amplified through a home radio receiver and was either delighted or disappointed with the distorted sound that resulted. So we might be able to push distorted guitar back earlier than the 1932 Rickenbacker Frying Pan pickup. Maybe even as far back as 1921 with the first paper coned speaker. Could it even go back as far as the 1904 invention of the thermionic valve or “vacuum tube” by John Ambrose Fleming? Who knows, but one thing we do know for sure, dirty guitar is here to stay and each generation will find their own flavours to spice things up. So whatever your preference for putting a little pep in your guitar sound, you can be certain at least that you’re following a long and illustrious tradition. I had intended to write a feature about all kinds of distorted guitar, and the development of different signal overdrive and clipping devices, but it’s taken me this long to cover just the origins of fuzz effects. It’s such a huge subject I think it’s going to take a few articles.

Burst in to song...

2019-04-20T15:07:52Z

… how do you 'harness' that voice?

What is it about “The Burst” that is so covetable? Is it the list of great players who’ve employed it over the years? Is it the tone that could be wrung from it’s neck? Is it the look of the thing? That book-matched maple cap, the shape, the balance? Well of course it’s all of these things and more. And none of these characteristics sit in isolation — all of these factors are connected after all. Many guitarists are attracted to the look of a 1959 Les Paul Standard, particularly one with beautiful flame or quilting in the grain. But for the great players who adopted the Les Paul tone in the sixties it had to be about just that: The Tone. And there are a lot of elements to that tone. Let’s get the arguments started then: hands up who thinks the combination of a book-matched maple cap on a mahogany body is the fundamental factor in the sound of a classic LP? Nobody going to jump in with what grade number of Alnico the magnets usually were in PAFs from 1958-60? There are very noticeable tonal qualities that depend upon the grade of aluminium in the tailpiece, the zamak alloy of an original ABR-1 bridge. Perhaps the real experts among you will be stroking your chins and remarking upon the enhanced brilliance and sustain that comes of a long tenon neck joint. And of course some will already be talking about 6/6 Nylon nuts as opposed to bone replacements (anyone going to bring up the anachronistic 4/6 Nylon stock found at Kalamazoo?); or brass saddles versus nylon on LPs compared to ESs and whether or not to wrap the strings around the stopbar*. Now these are all valid factors in the voice of a Paul but can I just point something out? How many of you out there have compared a modern Les Paul to a vintage one? Quite a select group I suspect, but I’m not being rhetorical here. What I really want to ask, is how many of you have compared “Gibson '50s wiring” to “Gibson Modern wiring”? I’ll tell you now — they are very different beasts.

If you’re looking to recreate vintage Les Paul tones then you need to know how the wiring harnesses were different in vintage Gibsons, compared to the standard circuit today. And I'm not just talking about Paper-In-Oil capacitors I’m talking about the truly great guitar voices found by people who started picking up those abandoned, nay orphaned, 1950s Les Paul Standards in the '60s for their expressive timbres. I’m talking about people like Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Danny Kirwan. Not everybody understands why vintage Les Pauls worked the way they did for those guys. These players used the tone and volume controls on their Les Pauls extensively because they could get a huge range of quality tones out of those old guitars — and the reason they could do this was because Gibson wired their guitars differently back then. We’re not just talking about Lesters here, but also early SGs, ES3** guitars and most other early Gibson twin pickup models as well. All this changed sometime in the late '60s when Gibson started to use what’s called “modern wiring” which gives more separation between pickups but limits the range of the controls. Modern wiring is easier for the kids to get their heads around but it makes for somewhat redundant controls. They just don’t really do much and, I feel, compromise the tone when they do. And the end result is that people don’t bother to use the controls on their guitars. They just keep them “dimed” and never bother to do anything subtle or interesting. People often don’t realise that the types of capacitors and potentiometers in a regular, passive treble-bleed tone circuit have little effect on the sound when the knobs are turned all the way up. With the tone knobs set to ten they are pretty much bypassed. For many modern amateur guitarists a Les Paul might as well only have a selector switch between the pickups and the jack socket; perhaps a master volume for the occasional fade, or to move down to a clean sound and back up to overdrive. In fact look at the controls of dual humbucker guitars made in the late '80s — they often had just a three way toggle and a single volume. And for the high-gain pop-metal era it was kind of what people needed, especially if the sound engine was DiMarzio Super Humbuckers through a Mesa Dual Rec.

The way original Les Paul models were wired, until they stopped making them in early 1961 (with the last original black Les Paul Customs), is what’s now known as “50's wiring”. This actually differs radically from modern Gibson wiring — but you wouldn’t think so to look at it. At first glance '50s and Modern Les Paul wiring don’t look much different at all. The capacitors bridge different tabs between the Volume & Tone potentiometers and the latter are grounded from different tabs, but otherwise not much has changed, has it? There are plenty of comparative diagrams and photos of the two types of wiring harness online for you to compare. In the '50s circuit the T pots have the middle tab (lug 2, i.e. the sweeper) bent to ground on the pot casing instead of lug 1. And lug 1 has the cap attached to it — so lug 1 is the hot output to the switch. The volume pots look the same, well except that the capacitors connect to the same tabs as the switch on the V pots (tag 2) in the '50s circuit. In the modern version the caps connect to the same tabs as the pups (tag 3). Can such a slight change in electronic linkage have much effect? ‘How much difference could this possibly make?’, you ask. Well actually, it’s very noticeable indeed. I’ve made up '50s style harnesses and even with Orange Drops rather than Paper-in-Oils they sound really good and very different to the Modern style of wiring.

In the original circuit the volume and tone controls are more interactive. When you roll down the tone knob it will cause a slight volume drop. And rolling down one of the volumes to zero in the middle switch position will cut out both pickups. This however was how guitarists first discovered the toggle switch could create the classic stutter of a kill switch when repeatedly flicked. Another consequence of the older circuit is that the overall output is slightly lower. However I don’t think it really sounds much quieter — probably due to the more open character of the sound with '50s wiring. Some people see these characteristics as negatives — I don’t believe they are, but anyway, there are other positives to the '50s harness that far outweigh them. When you roll down the volume knob you do not hear the same sudden loss of treble that occurs in the modern circuit. As the volume control is being turned down the signal is also bypassing more of the tone pot & cap, so you lose fewer high frequencies to the output. And those high frequencies sound clearer and more rounded — without the fizz you sometimes get from a treble bypass cap & resistor. The classic “treble bypass” addition to the traditional passive tone pot is the usual solution to the treble loss that occurs with modern volume controls. It lets a set range of the highest frequencies through, determined by the values of the resistor and capacitor in parallel, and sometimes that bandwidth won’t have been calculated very carefully for a nice treble tone.

“So hang on a minute,” I hear you say, “the volume controls affect the tone, and the tone controls affect the volume?” Yep, and they do so in a complimentary way that sounds fantastic. The slightly lower overall output of the '50s circuit is compensated by a fuller, more open sound with clearer high frequencies. But the biggest advantage of the '50s circuit is a greater range of real quality tones. And it’s a really easy modification to make — and just as easy to reverse. You can try it in any good budget LP without even buying new parts. I would still recommend getting some good pots and caps if you decide you like it. Even that can be done cheaply; long shaft logarithmic Alpha pots are cheap, well made and have a vintage taper that is very close to the originals used by Gibson. NOS Russian PIOs or even Sprague Orange Drops can be found fairly cheaply and will sound as close to the original tone caps as the expensive repro look-a-like Bumblebees that aren’t always real PIOs and even if they are, they are Russian K-40Y-9s in disguise anyway.

* Wrapper's delight

Wrapping the tailpiece is done for a number of reasons. As far as tuning goes, some people claim it helps with the intonation of a plain 3rd string which often causes problems and can pull sharp (and nobody's comfortable with a sharp pulling G-string). The main reason for wrapping is usually where the strings, when threaded straight through the stopbar, create too steep an angle off the back of the saddles and are bending over the back of the bridge body as well as the saddle. This is a frequent cause of string breakages. I’ve found Tune-O-Matics where there was a deep cut into the bridge body behind the saddle from long time string wear. Even when the string isn’t touching here, a steep break angle can cause string snapping if the saddle has a sharp edge. But this is why the stopbar has studs which can be raised up to make the string break-angle over the bridge much shallower. Many people believe that you get much better sustain and resonance when the stopbar is screwed down tight to the body however, and there would seem to be some truth to this. A much bigger factor in sustain however, is how welll made the various parts of the bridge and tailpiece are and how well they fit together. If the threads aren’t snug or the post holes are too loose then the mechanical transmission of vibration is impeded and the audio coupling suffers. This is why Tonepros can charge so much money. I’ve had good results with Epiphones by upgrading to Gotoh hardware, which is reasonably priced but really well made and designed to fit Epis with no body modification needed.

So, if you clamp the stopbar right down but wrap the strings back up over it, you hopefully have better sustain but you reduce the break angle. A lot of people do it just because their hand feels comfortable like this or they find palm muting easier. Many people say that you get a freer movement of the strings through the saddles which makes them feel looser and easier to bend and I think this is true. It is also believed that the “bridge collapse” syndrome that many original ‘50s bridges are prone to is less likely to occur if the stopbar is wrapped. The original Zamak aluminium alloy of the first ABR-1s has amazing tone but is quite a soft metal and the vintage ones have often bent and sagged in the middle from string pressure. There’s a school of thought that says the lower break angle exerts less pressure (true) and therefore prevents T-O-M collapse. I read somewhere that Gibson originally always wrapped the strings in the factory on the early T-O-M & Stopbar fitted guitars, I’ll see if I can find the quote and I’ll past it below.

Here’s the quote from p.147 of Robb Lawrence's book The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy where he talks about Goldtops and the introduction of the Tune-O-Matic bridge:

" To complete the assembly, the new bridge was used in conjunction with the stop/stud tailpiece — this being generally placed 1 9/16" behind the center of Tune-O-Matic bridge to anchor the strings. Today, many people are unaware that, originally, these items were depicted in the catalogs and shipped normally with the strings over the top of the tailpiece (the way it was designed). This original stringing method is naturally comfortable to rest your hand on at the bridge area. With the studs screwed in deeply for full vibratory string-to-body contact, the guitar's overall sound is enhanced as it was intended. It also helps to prevent the strings from breaking as easily on the sharp metal edges. Furthermore, instead of the tension just pulling on the stud screws laterally, when wrapped around the stop bar, it torques the tension in the body differently (as inherent with the Goldtop's big tone). The original method results in more body resonance and better acoustic tone. "

Magic Mic...

2018-09-09T14:59:49Z

... it'll make you feel like a Neumann.

Any top recording facility anywhere in the world will have at least one Neumann U87 microphone. It is that important a tool for busy studios, and has been since the early '70s. It is, as they amusingly remark on the Funky Junk website, quite probably every studio engineer and record producer’s second favourite vocal mic. Some people when asked for their vote are likely to try and sound cool by mentioning something rare and esoteric. Others will want to impress with their knowledge of (and implied experience with) something unique and expensive. Throw out a poll for “best vocal mic ever” on Facebook and see just how long the debate rages. How many people will weigh in on either side of the great 4038 BBC v RCA 77B radio ribbon rumble? See the U47 versus FET 47 skirmish turn into all-out civil war and drag on through years of attrition, with battles fought over Siemens badged models vs. Telefunkens and guerilla actions by the U48 underground. And marvel at how many people claim their budget condenser is just as good as an AKG C12. The valve argument will always drift back to U67s and there'll always be someone who tries to get us to consider Royers next to vintage ribbons. But if you were to tell any of the budding Spectors who come through your doors that unfortunately you don’t have their favourite rare mic — but you do have a U87 — well they're sure to relax, knowing exactly what it will deliver. You might not have a Coles 4038 to call on (we’ve actually got a pair of them at New Cut Studios) or a U47 with NOS VF14 valve, but you can always rely on a U87 to just sound effortlessly great. And there are good reasons why for many folks a U87 will be their first choice for vocals every time.

Since it made it's debut in the late '60s it has been the large diaphragm condenser mic of choice for hundreds of different instruments on tens of thousands of great recordings. But to many people the U87 simply is the sound of 1970s vocal recordings. And that's because it was hands-down the single most used vocal mic of that era — in popular music anyway. This was largely down to the fact that a U87 would give you exceptional consistency from session to session: unlike many old valve mics which can change their level and character, even over the course of a single day. And I reckon that as the recording periods for albums got longer and longer, and it became standard practice to comp from multiple takes (particularly for lead vocals), that consistency was increasingly valued by engineers and producers.

In 1967 Neumann produced the U87 as a modern update of the U67 for the transistor age and as an improvement on their recent, transformer-less U77. The capsule was almost identical to the earlier K67, with a FET circuit replacing the U67’s onboard valve, a transformer coupled output and three switchable polar pick up patterns. All of these features making it superbly versatile — as well as incredibly reliable. And if you put a U87 through a great mic preamp, while some folk might miss a little high end shimmer, it will come very close to a U67.

It is off-axis sound where a quality mic really outshines a budget mic. This is possibly the most telling comparison you can make when trying cheap mics against expensive ones. Space three U87s, set to omni and centred on the conductor, across the front of an orchestra to emulate the Mercury Living Presence technique that Bob and Wilma Fine developed (using 3 Schoeps M201s). You’ll be surprised by the results. It makes the U87 the perfect mic to record close harmony BVs in a group.

From the Funky Junk website:

“ These 1970s mics (U87P48) can be distinguished from later models because they contain a battery compartment in the body… incorporated a discrete FET amplifier and a minimum of electronics, resulting in a smooth, upfront sound typical of the vocals heard on many 1970s cuts. Plenty of modern mics claim to emulate this sound but none come anywhere close (don’t believe the hype, brothers and sisters – modern knock-offs of classic mics are just that… pale imitations)… The old adage of ‘the original is the best’ is certainly true in this case. There’s a quality to first generation Neumann U87s that sounds effortless, reliable and extremely musical. Neumann changed the electronic design in the late 1970s/early 1980s, doing away with the battery compartment and making minor circuit changes. The result was a marginally quieter mic lacking a little of the warmth of the original. Results are everything, and the classic U87 delivers the highest quality of sound with a minimum of effort and tweaking. The most recent generation, the U87ai, has taken the mic a further step towards economy with an op-amp incorporating four (surface mounted) transistors replacing the FET. These, the current generation, retain the basic characteristics of the large-diaphragm U87 but many regard them as ‘edgier’ and a touch more brittle. ”

The Lowdown on the Offsets Daddy-o…

2018-05-03T20:15:50Z

… an informed guide to Jazzmaster & Jaguar hardware upgrades.

On the work bench in front of me I’ve got a Fender Jazzmaster, Made In Japan, and as I glance down I realise there’s another JM right under my nose. I’m wearing one of my Old Town Music t-shirts with the Jazzmaster print on the front. It’s a great place to visit, if you are ever in Portland, OR, (although I do miss their old shop when it really was in the Old Town: it was more like the funky old caves of vintage gear I haunted in my youth). Looking a little closer at the print on the shirt I decide that it looks like it’s sporting a Mustang bridge rather than its original. Indeed the bridge on this MIJ in front of me is Mustang style, though a little different — more of which later. What better subject for an article, I think, than the many ways in which we’ve had to learn how to make these babies playable and tuning-stable.

I’ve looked after a lot of Fender offsets on tour during the last few years — many of them fine vintage models — so I think I’m well placed to write an article on the various hardware upgrades available. And boy, is there a need for those options. And you know what? There’s a need for this article as well. I’ve heard some really badly informed opinions on Fender Offsets over the years and read some truly terrible advice on various forums. I watched one guy on YouTube from a repair shop who thought the only way to raise the bridge was to stack the posts with washers, I shit you not, and that was only posted in 2014. Maybe that's why you often find a traditional Offset bridge with the saddles adjusted way too high until the intonation screws are interfering with the strings.

“Offset what?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s the name given to any Fender guitar where the narrow waist between the body bouts is offset from (rather than perpendicular to) the centre line. Strats, Teles & Duo-sonics all have symmetrical waistlines. Jazz Basses, Starcasters & Mustangs are offset in the midriff. But most often the term is used when referring to Jazzmasters and Jaguars. They are beautiful and distinctive both in looks and sound, and have been the guitars of choice for some true icons — from the Surf Music era in which they were born to the Alternative and Grunge artists of the '80s & '90s. So let’s get stuck into the real issues with the playability and stability of these lovely, quirky guitars. And then I’ll try and compile a list of the main aftermarket replacements and how they address the various problems at the end of this article.

Lets Go Trippin’

From October of 2015 up to November 2017 I was working for PJ Harvey, and for the 17 months, on & off, that we toured The Hope Six Demolition Project around the world we had 6 Fender Offsets on stage. There were two original 1965 sunburst Jazzmasters (played by John Parish & Alessandro Stefana, both with Tort guards), two Troy Van Leeuwen signature JMs (Alain Johannes), an American Vintage JM (Alessandro again) and a CIJ Jaguar (James Johnston). Actually it was 7 Offsets if you include Mick Harvey’s Jaguar bass. The spare JM for Asso was usually an AV on loan from the kind folks at Fender, depending where in the world we were. Some of these seven guitars had after-market hardware replacements and modifications or were models that were not to vintage spec. Incidentally Polly herself has a gorgeous original Jaguar in Olympic White with matching headstock that I had the pleasure to work with on some earlier shows.

I worked with Suede from 2010-16 and looking after Richard Oakes meant getting to work on a 1966 Jaguar and a 1959 Jazzmaster. The Jazz is fantastic, made during the first 12 months of manufacture with a deep 3-tone sunburst, anodised pick-guard, snarly P90-esque pickups and a slab rosewood fingerboard that is so dark the “clay” dots are practically orange. It’s also pretty solid, never usually any issues, despite still sporting it’s original bridge. I did once, however, have to soak said bridge in naphtha, and then oil, for a few days in order to completely dismantle & reassemble it. Most of the adjustment screws had rusted solid, and the Phillips screw heads & Allen holes were plugged with dead skin smegma — the whole thing was completely seized up making a decent set-up nigh on impossible. But a little TLC was all the old girl needed and it’s a great guitar to this day.

The Jag though has always been a little problematic. It’s a great looker despite some blobbing in the finish that might be touch ups to the paintwork — which was a difficult shade for me to identify, at first I thought it was Teal Green. It looks a little like a really yellowed Lake Placid Blue — which is what it has always been known as in the Suede camp. I always questioned this and when I had to take the the pick-guard off one time (a nicely stained mint green that is a perfect complement) I found that it’s exactly the same shade underneath with no tide line at all. Definitely not an original LPB then. I had to reset the neck after one cargo flight and the date stamp on the heal for ’66 was completely right; also the transition style decal looks totally original over the top of a matching liveried headstock - so I now believe it is actually, mostly original, Ocean Turquoise Metallic. I did a show with Ride in Spain a while ago and Mark Gardener has a lovely ’64 Jag almost exactly the same colour. So I had a quick look around the web which showed up quite a few Ocean Turquoise Jaguars from the mid sixties, as well as a CIJ 1966 reissue model in OTM and an American Vintage Ocean Turq. Those reissues could of course be the influence of John Frusciante’s opening performance in the Under The Bridge video where he appears to be playing a metalic blue-green Jaguar, which was actually more likely his Sherwood Green ’66. So yes, she’s a looker, the Suede Jaguar, but very high maintenance — particularly around the bridge. Both the JM and the Jag had Buzz Stop roller bars (again, I’ll come back to aftermarket hardware later) added in recent years by long term Suede roadie Peter Sissons. I did persuade him eventually though, that the Jaguar should get a Mustang bridge replacement.

Taking it to the Bridge.

The main problem with Jazzmasters and Jaguars for most people has always been the bridge. Like some Telecaster and Fender bass bridges from the late '50s onwards the saddles are made from threaded steel rods. Some of these original bridges have a finer thread on the top two strings — this was an era of wound G strings after all. (Imagine well the Jazzmaster circuit improved the brightness of heavy gauge flatwounds? Yeah and these days people get me to install lower value pots for less treble.) On many, all six saddles have the same narrow thread, unlike the wider grooves of the saddles on my 1969 Harmony H82G Rebel. It is as poor a choice for audio coupling as it is for string seating. The helical grooves are never aligned to the strings, which will therefore always be perched uneasily on a knife edge or two at an acute angle. Even if a string were to seat into one of these threads it would be perverted from it's true course. With such a saddle it is impossible to achieve those ideal conditions where the bottom half of the string is solidly bedded in a good resonant transmission material. There is often no firm seating whatsoever and Jag & Jazz players sometimes find that strings can skate from side to side, and even right off the fretboard. The most obvious fix is to get out the nut files and cut some proper gauged string slots in the saddles. A fine solution if you’re looking at a modern or repro instrument, but a value-degrading act on an original vintage guitar. The saddle height-adjustment grub screws are often loose and also prone to movement — which of course adversely affects action and intonation and can cause buzzing as well.

Buzzes can also occur between the bridge posts and the body thimbles in which they sit. The gentle vibrato action envisaged by Fender prompted them to come up with a design where the bridge posts could pivot toward or away from the neck as the whammy was engaged, the theory being that the bridge would always return to the correct intonation position. Assumption is of course the mother of all cock-ups and if you give a Jazzmaster trem arm a good bit of elbow the tuning will go out, sometimes quite dramatically. The bridge actually pivots on the pointy tips of the two bridge height adjustment screws, which are usually, but not always, quite snug in their threads. What I always advocate doing — and this includes Mustang bridges — is wrapping the bridge posts with PVC electrical tape or sometimes aluminium foil tape until they just slide snuggly into the body thimbles. Then with some decent string lube in the saddle slots (and of course the nut) the whammy will work a lot more smoothly. Incidentally I’ve been using Finish Line Teflon-based dry chain lube for mountain bikes for about twenty years now and wouldn’t use anything else. Wrapping the posts has become such a common mod that you can now buy silicon or nylon cups which do the same job and some after market bridges even ship with them.

One major issue with the original model bridge occurs when the intonation screws are angled up too steeply and start interfering with the strings because the saddles have been adjusted too high on the bridge plate. I have even seen vintage instruments where these have been cut short to counter the problem! This can be solved by lowering the saddles, which of course may require the bridge-height screws in the bridge posts to be raised in compensation. If you're aware of them of course! The heads of the intonation screws are an issue as well. Being centred on the saddles the heads can often interfere with the the strings if these are on the trem side. Both the Staytrem & Mastery bridges offset the screw axis to avoid this problem. Setting the action and intonation on an original Offset bridge is a balancing act. The saddles must be high enough off the bridge plate for the strings to clear the curved rims at the front and back of the bridge. These curved rims are at slightly different heights on some bridges, so it is possible to spin the bridge 180º when necessary to avoid the kind of buzzing and choking that occurs when the strings come in contact with these edges — either on the playing side or off the back. Don’t forget, if you spin a bridge 180º, to reposition the saddles, and if they’ve been slotted for string guages, swap them around. This bridge flipping will not always work and one reason is that some later models have the trem block positioned closer to the bridge with a consequent steeper string break-angle. The cut-away edges of the excellent Mastery bridge are a direct fix for these issues.

The long string area between bridge and trem on original spec Jags & JMs is a feature which many Offset players love. As well as imparting distinct overtones and resonances it can be played to great effect. But of course it does make for a very shallow break-angle to the strings. This is yet another factor in the skating-string problem which has been addressed in all kinds of ways by players and techs over the years, but one popular add-on piece of hardware is the Buzz Stop roller. It’s easy to install, creates a steeper break angle and as the name implies has a roller cylinder similar to that on many Bigsby trems to facilitate whammy mayhem. However it does impair playing behind the bridge, a feature of Fender Offsets that many experimental guitarists have employed of the years. Of course cutting good saddle slots or employing the well grooved Mustang saddles will solve this issue without the need for what is basically an elaborate string tree. I also feel that the Buzzstop interferes with smooth trem operation compared with a well set up Offset with a qualiry after-market bridge.

Mustang's Alley

I will always reccommend someone goes down the Mustang road first. Several Fender Offset models now have Mustang bridges as standard, a trend which began with certain signature models — an indication of how popular a mod it has always been with professional players. I have in my possession a Troy Van Leeuwen signature Jazzmaster that Alain Johannes gifted me when we hit the end of the road in Mexico City. It was his main guitar on the Hope 6 tour until I finished the Telecaster I made for him. Touring with Paul Weller over the last four years I also got to play the signature Jaguars Johnny Marr gave to Paul and to Steve Cradock. These are all very playable guitars, due in large part to the Mustang bridges they ship with. Similar to the Marr Jag, certainly in it’s switching options, is the Fender American Professional Jaguar. Fender lent us one for the PJ Harvey tour but we didn’t use it. Not a patch on the excellent American Vintage JM which they kindly lent us for several of the Hope 6 legs. I will always put a quality Mustang bridge on a Fender Jazz, Jag or Bigsbyed Tele. It is the cheapest option and instantly fixes many issues — depending on the individual guitar. Of course the saddle heights are fixed on a Mustang bridge, and on the originals and repros the string radius is set to vintage Fender standard: seven and a quarter inches. I mentioned early on in this article the bridge on Babsy’s Jazzmaster is “Mustang style”, the one in front of me on the work bench. This one is a very good aftermarket version by Staytrem, and is made with saddles in either vintage 7.25” or modern 9.5” radius and these numbers are engraved on the underside. The saddle intonation screws used to have nylon bushings to counter vibration loosening, the two bridge height pivot screws still do, but the saddles now use tiny circlips. The bridge posts also used to have the option to come with nylon sleeves to snug into the body thimbles so you don’t have to wrap the posts in order to restrict rocking as I’ve previously recommended. They fit 5/16th - 8mm thimbles, but I think the post sleeves are discontinued.

And there are other versions of the Mustang bridge out there. I haven’t had my hands on one but the Blacktop JM has what looks like a hybrid of properly grooved Mustang type barrel saddles, but with twin grub screw height adjustment. Unfortunately some guitarists have complained that the saddles are actually too wide and it causes the strings to become too close to the sides of the fret board on one side and splay out from the whammy string spacing on the other. I have seen Graphtec Mustang saddles for sale but they seem only to be spaced for MIJ/CIJ bridges. Vintage & AVRI models have wider intonation screw spacing meaning there will be gaps between such saddles. Warmoth do a modified Mustang bridge with height screws in the outer four saddles, which allows it to be set to either a vintage 7.25” or modern 9.5” fingerboard radius, and of course to compensate for for any irregularities in neck or frets. I haven’t tried it out, but I will say this, I have never had to worry about the lack of individual saddle adjustment setting up a standard Mustang bridge with a vintage camber fingerboard.

Other bridge designs have been employed on late model Offsets in the past, for example Fender have used their Adjust-o-matic T-O-M style on a few. I had a Squire J Mascis JM in the workshop for a couple of minor repairs a few years ago and it played very nicely after I'd got it’s T-O-M set-up properly, considering it was only a Crafted In China model. James Johnston’s CIJ Jaguar lost a roller saddle from it’s Schaller bridge at the end of 2016 whilst he was thrashing away at it with furious glee (it may have been at the Hong Kong show) — and I know of other players who’ve had the same mishap with those type of bridges. Try as I might, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the stage at the end of the gig. I usually end up dragging magnets around the stage (and off the front of the stage) in those situations. So I fashioned a new saddle made from a sawn-off bolt shaft, filed at both ends to fit the cups in the bridge, and a tiny hex nut that fit its thread (both long term residents of one of my 'box-o-bits' from previous stage fishing trips). I cut a string groove into the edge of the nut with a top-nut cutting file and it did the job perfectly well for a while. Sometimes your only resources are what you have in your toolbox. I searched all the many great music stores in downtown Singapore for a replacement with no luck. After I managed to locate a whole new bridge, Mick Harvey very kindly dropped into Music Swop Shop in Melbourne, VIC to buy us a new one at the start of the Hope Six tour’s Australian leg (the original Bad Seed and Birthday Partisan has a lovely little studio in Melbourne, incidentally, such a great atmosphere).

Some of Fender’s latest Custom Shop offset models have their new RSD-J bridge, I have yet to try one in the field but it looks to have addressed some of the old issues with some tastefully retro styling. The bridge plate is shaped like an F-hole with two brass saddles which look like they can be adjusted with Allen keys for intonation and also, presumably, height. Whether that means they can only be adjusted to one radius I don’t know, but intonation might be a compromise for each set of three strings and of course it will only work for string sets with a plain 3rd. The shape of it reminds me of the “Dogbone” asymmetric bridge plate found on some 1950s guitars like the Multivox Premiers that had Bigsby compensated aluminium bridges.

Jazzmastery

Alessandro Stefana has an amazing 1965 Jazzmaster, it is in very nice condition and has a beautifully flamed maple neck. It is a gorgeous vintage instrument but as a busy musician playing with everyone from PJ Harvey to Ennio Morricone, Asso has had his Jazz fitted not only with a Mastery Bridge but also a Mastery tremolo block and even a Mastery string tree which echoes the shape of the saddle blocks. So, the highly acclaimed and highly priced Mastery unit. The first time I saw one of these babies I was sceptical. Three strings per saddle? Even worse than an original P-Bass or Tele, I thought. And how expensive! But this piece of hardware really works. It’s not difficult to get the intonation correct across all strings — at least it’s hardly more fiddly than most saddle systems. But of course you'd have trouble with a wound third string — that's perhaps the one circumstance where a Mustang bridge will be superior. The most important thing, though is that the Mastery addresses all the problems inherent in original Fender Offset bridges — and more to the point answers them. The strings sit in deep, wide grooves; it is impossible for them to skate sideways across the neck or jump out of position. The rim at the rear of the bridge plate is cut away around the integral intonation screw brackets — of which there are only 4. There are only 4 saddle height screws instead of 12 and these are snug fitting and easy to adjust. The bridge posts fit snugly in the body thimbles. And none of them buzz or rattle! The only negative comments I have read about the Mastery is that the string spacing is slightly narrow, by about 1/16” — perhaps they machined the saddles to the string spacing of a Mustang without accounting for the angling they would require. Mark Gardener’s Jaguar, incidentally, has also had the Mastery bridge added. It is definitely the way to go if you’re a touring pro, or need to tweak your string heights away from standard 7.25” or 9.5” radii. That said, I would always try a quality Mustang bridge with snugged posts before anything else, particularly if the cost of a Mastery was an issue for the client.

And so to the hand vibrato mechanism, which due to Fender’s interchangeable use of the terms on both guitars and amps is commonly, but mistakenly, called tremolo. As I said earlier the Fender Offset vibrato tailpiece was not designed for the '80s Heavy Metal Stuka dives that would come a couple of decades later. Heavy handed use of it and poor understanding of how it should be adjusted has led to a bad press for this swan-like device. And it is elegant, with it’s long curving neck the only thing moving above the surface while the bulk of the mechanism churns away underneath. Elegant and efficient: it’s single spring and "knife-edge" pivot can work superbly when adjusted correctly. The Mastery version on Asso’s beautiful ’65 sunburst was as solid as a rock and always returned to pitch, strung as it was with a set of Beefy Slinkys at .054”-.012”. Fender put a user guide into the cases of these guitars back in the day and it clearly & simply describes how to adjust the trem for optimum performance. This involves just two adjustable parts, above the surface at least.

Good Vibrations...

A quick examination of the tremolo cover plate shows a button which slides between two positions — and just behind it a Phillips screw that appears to do nothing. What it actually does is tighten or loosen the spring when turned clock- or anti-clockwise respectively. The purpose of the button is to engage a locking device that blocks the string plate from tilting back to sharpen the pitch of the strings (though it is still possible to push the arm down and flatten the pitch with this button engaged). The real boon of this system becomes apparent the first time you break a string on an Offset guitar. As long as the trem has been properly set up it works like this: If the lock has been engaged (with the button slid back away from the bridge) when you break a string then nothing will happen! The string anchor plate is blocked from tilting back despite the spring now exerting more force than the suddenly reduced string tension and the guitar will stay in tune. If the button is in the forward position when your string breaks, simply deploy the trem arm down, flick the button back towards the ball ends and let go the arm. The spring can only pull the string plate up against the locking button which has been set with the mechanism floating at correct tuning. However some Fender and Squier JMs & Jags like the Blacktop and Classic Player models do not have this original feature. Indeed neither does the Mastery offset trem block. Many people ignore the lock button anyway and set the spring tension to suit their playing style.

The optimum setting for the spring screw can easily be established as follows. First tune the guitar to pitch, then try moving the button back away from the bridge. If you feel nothing happen then the spring is too loose and the string plate beneath the cover plate is pitched forward too steeply like a Strat trem with loose springs. The spring screw needs to be tightened, i.e. turn the screw clockwise. Were you to break a string in such circumstances then the string plate can jump up to meet the engaged lock button and throw the tuning sharp. With the button forward towards the bridge it will probably drop the pitch even further. If you can’t engage the button at all then the string plate is already tilted too far back, indeed the trem arm will probably look like it’s angled up way too high and of course you’ll need to turn the spring screw anti-clockwise to loosen it. When the spring screw has been set right you should be able to feel the button slide onto the top of the string plate as it is pushed back into the on position. Every time you tweak this spring tension Phillips screw you will need to tweak the tuning as well until the balance is right. If the spring tension is only slightly loose it may cause the string plate to buzz against the lock button. If slightly too tight the button may click the plate down slightly flattening the tuning a little bit. Of course all this depends on the action, relief & intonation being correctly set-up to begin with. And be warned: some vintage Offsets have very strong springs and modern light gauges of strings with plain 3rds won’t be able to exert enough force to get the balance right. Conversely some modern Offsets, particularly form the Far East may have weak springs inadequate to counter a set of heavy strings. In both scenarios it might be impossible to set the lock button correctly.

Babsy’s MIJ Jazzmaster is about to have it’s 3rd tremolo block fitted (he treats ‘em pretty rough) and it’s had some mods that really improve playability that I’d like to talk about. The string plates on the first two blocks it had are both bent away from the mounting plate around the arm holes — which puts the threads out of alignment. I’m transferring the original spring (from its first trem) to this third one and also the excellent Staytrem arm and collet. I added an external-toothed lock washer to the collet since he’d found that it often worked loose. Said collet is nicely machined and seems way stronger than the plates it has previously bent! Unlike the thin-sided collet on James Johnston’s CIJ Jag which had split and torn — to the point where it cut his hand and I cut it down. The Staytrem arm fits the collet snugly and stays where it is put, which also means no lost play due to the arm moving before the trem is properly engaged. A loose swinging trem arm (and the rattle which can come with that) is yet another common complaint of Offset players.

Original Offset Fender trem arms (and American Vintage models) do not have this problem. If you push the arm in hard with the heal of your hand you will hear a clunk when it locates properly. It will then rotate freely but stay in position and not swing loose or fall out. Look at the bent end of the arm and you will see the tooling that facilitates this. There is a machined taper at the end of the rod which then steps back to the original diameter at the tip. It requires a stiff pull to remove the arm when fitted properly, you need to get a firm grip at the base and yank hard. Many people have no idea of this feature and do not press home the arm securely. On overseas & late models which do not have this kind of trem arm, the best (and least destructive) way to secure the arm and prevent loose swing is to wrap a little PTFE plumber’s tape around the end. You can also put the locating end in a vice and give it an ever-so-slight bend by tapping it with a hammer. The Mastery Offset tremolo block has a machine screw and nut fitting underneath, on the collet to set and lock the trem arm or adjust how loose it swings.

If you look at picture 4, you'll see Babsy's three consecutive Offset trems. Notice the three machine screws in a line that attach the pivot plate underneath the assembly. On the left-hand unit the outside screws have been removed and replaced from the underside. On the the middle unit only the right-hand screw has been reversed. This has been done because the strings were rubbing against the domed heads of the screws and causing breakages. In the first case both E strings were affected and in the second only the top E. Some people solder the ball end wraps to counter this (a fix that works for a variety of different hardware anchor issues). Reversing these screws is easier in the long term, though it does require the unit to be partially disassembled. This is a problem that rarely occurs on original '50s & '60s guitars as the domed heads of the machine screws they used back then have flattened tops. I've never tried to file the modern screws flat as they look to be chrome plated. Obviously the middle screw falls between the 3rd & 4th strings causing no problems.

Wipeout

I hope I've been able to bring a little love for a range of instruments that were still considered the ugly ducklings of the Fender family when I was young. These guitars were top of the range when they were introduced, but whilst their early appearances were largely in Surf Music they are equally associated with Alt Rock and Indie bands of the '80s & '90s. For most people in the modern era, when they think of Fender Offsets, the players they are most likely to think of are people like J Mascis, Thurston Moore, Johhny Marr, Lee Ranaldo, Kevin Shields and indeed Kurt Cobain, who came up with his own Fender Offset. Although of course Elvis Costello, Tom Verlaine and Robert Smith had already been flying the Offset flag on the New Wave scene. For many guitarists the elaborate controls on the Offset designs were just as baffling as the hardware. Compared to a Telecaster or even a Strat, when the Jazzmaster came along it's switching, and second set of of pots, was confusing. When the Jaguar added a couple more switches it became downright daunting. For many musicians it was easier to turn the rhythm circuit pots all the way down and use the upper horn lever as a kill switch.

By the 1980s the Fender Offsets were a pretty cheap option if you wanted to play a vintage guitar, and that was largely down to second hand instruments being poorly maintained and sometimes almost unplayable. It's down to players like those mentioned above that the Offset became a desirable instrument again, and thus worthy of a host of improved hardware options. I started out this article with a nod of appreciation to a guita shop and I'm going to end that way as well. If you’re ever in Brisbane, QLD and you’re into surf guitars, or fantastic effects pedals, get yourself down to Tym’s Guitars. He has a great shop, makes lovely Mosrite style guitars (as well as possessing some fine originals), boutique pedals and his own amps. He's something of an expert on Big Muffs and has made limited edition clones of many, including one very unique sounding Big Muff owned by none other than Jazzmaster justice J Mascis. He’s also extremely helpful and friendly.

“Throw out the hardware, let's do it right.”

As promised, here’s a brief rundown of the main hardware options for Fender Offsets and what they do:

Blacktop JM — has what looks like a hybrid of properly grooved Mustang type barrel saddles, but with twin grub screw height adjustment. Height adjustment grub screws are prone to slipping loose. Also, the saddles are actually too wide and it causes the strings to become too close to the sides of the fret board. The strings even 'splay' out from the whammy to the bridge saddles.

Buzz Stop Roller — improves the break angle over the bridge & stops lateral string skating, but significantly reduces the characteristic resonance of the classic Offsets and mars the musician’s ability to play behind the bridge. Attaches (and removes) easily with the front two trem plate screws. Not really necessary on some late models where the trem block has been moved closer to the bridge.

Graphtec Mustang Saddles — which seem to be spaced for MIJ/CIJ bridges. Vintage & AVRI models have wider intonation screw spacing so gaps appear between these saddles.

Mastery Bridge — addresses all of the problems in the original bridge. Rock solid and easy to intonate, with improved sustain as well. They also do a tremolo block and matching string tree.

Mastery Tremolo — entire tremolo block replacement, with engineering upgrades commensurate with it's conception, and maybe even it's price, (now also available in a variety of coloured finishes.)

RSD-J Bridge — only two saddles like a Mastery but with a much more retro style.

Schaller Roller Bridge — a low profile, nicely shaped T-O-M variation. Prone to saddles popping out, but comfortable to play.

Staytrem Bridge for JM/JG — has the same appearance as the original Mustang bridge. Improved and offset intonation screws and bridge height pivot screws that fit the same allen key (provided). Bridge can be supplied with nylon sleeves fitted to the support posts so they are snug in the body thimbles. Available in both 7.25" or 9.5” radii to fit US, Japanese and Squier VM Jaguars, Jazzmasters, Mustangs and any others with a 5/16” or 8mm holes in the thimbles.

Staytrem Tremolo — replacement arm and collet which overcome the problems associated with Offset trem arms (I recommend using a toothed lock washer when installing though.) Stops loose and rattling tremolo arm with hardly any free play. Arm will not swing down when released; rust resistant stainless steel; fits all Jaguars, Jazzmasters, Jaguarillo and Bass VI; external 3/8” & 10mm versions.

Warmoth Modified Mustang Bridge — height screws in the outer four saddles, which presumably allows it to be set to either 7.25” or 9.5” radii.

I'm sure I've missed out some of the after-market parts that are out there, so if there's a replacement part that you're a fan of please get in touch and point me to it. I'd love to know how it works for you and also to what guitar you've fitted it. (Update 2023: I will try and get my hands on a Descendant trem and report on it.) Fender Offsets can be fantastic instruments with distinct and unique characteristics. They can feel and sound amazing, as long as they've been set up properly — so give one a go!

Little Giants...

2017-02-10T16:08:00Z

...on the shoulders of Dwarfs.

In the search for perfect tone it’s sometimes easy to feel that we are merely “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants”. The greats of yesteryear showed us the way when electric guitars were young — and we still want to emulate those timbres. In that fashion many of us have favoured, over the last decade or so, the bespoke low-wattage recording amp. But long before the boutique amp phenomenon, there were tiny terrors of tone that allowed aspiring guitarists to go electric without tormenting the neighbours. Extrapolations of the radio and other home audio amplifiers that guitarists had started to bastardize for themselves, these early British guitar amps would often look like sideboard wireless sets and were constructed in much the same way. The early versions of Charlie Watkins’ Clubman & Westminster amps of the fifties and early sixties are prime examples of these stylish amps. Of course being low output devices these compact combos would start to distort when the volume knob was really cranked; and that tone became an end in itself — one that guitarists in the late sixties tried to replicate on stage with bigger boxes. But those early, entry-level models are exactly what the producer ordered when it comes to fat overdrive in the control room. If you’re after hot tone and creamy distortion in the studio why take hours to audition a bunch of stomp boxes when you can use a small, vintage, valve amp that will respond to your playing more dynamically than any pedal? For my money the most stylish of those student model amps, both in sight and sound, is the Selmer Little Giant; and of the four styles it came in ("Blood & Custard", "Blue & Grey", "Silver Croc-skin" and "Black & Blue"), over the period of it's manufacture between 1958 and 1970, my favourite is the Mk.II “Blue & Grey” livery (from 1961-63). That’s why I bought one; it’s serial number is 5448 and there's a picture of it below. It looks good, but it sounds even better. (We recently added a 1963-65 era Croc-skin Little Giant #14845 to our amplifier armoury as well! 13/3/18)

Of course it sounds oxymoronic at first but the name is apt indeed — this little box simply has a giant voice. If you’re lucky enough to own a Little Giant you’ll be nodding wisely as you read this — just ask Keith Richards. In his autobiography Life , Richards talked about his first dedicated guitar amp thus: " I was always soldering and rewiring behind the amp — a Little Giant amp the size of a radio. I was one of the first to get an amp. We were all using tape recorders before that. Dick Taylor used to plug into his sister's Bush record player. My first amp was a radio; I just took that apart. My mother was pissed off. The radio's not working because I've got it apart and I'm plugging, zzzz, just trying to get a sound. In that respect good training for later on — honing your sound, matching guitars to amps. "

Surely Keef was winding us up with talk of Dick plugging into Bush, but when it came to winding up the volume, choices were definitely limited for budding rock stars at the dawn of the 60s. Rory Gallagher is reported to have said " I had a Selmer Little Giant 4-watt amplifier, too, which I would really love to have now for a practice amp. ”* Indeed, in an interview from the February 1985 issue of Guitarist magazine Rory stated “ My very first guitar was a Rosetti Solid Seven — I think it was Italian** — they made the Lucky Seven as well. It was pretty good. I used a Selmer Little Giant amp, but I got rid of it because it was distorting! If I had it now I’d be delighted! ” Gallagher and Richards certainly weren’t the only advocates of Selmer’s tiny titan who genuinely relished it’s rich distortion — it’s fantastic harmonic overtones when pushed to the limit. In an interview with Robin Trower first featured in the April 1974 issue of Guitar Player , he spoke about his Little Giant and how he tried to continue using it as a performance tool on stage (you can find the interview in full at effectrode.com): “ It’s difficult to pin down when I started to get into distortion, but it was definitely before my Procol Harum days. I used to play through a Selmer Little Giant valve amp which had one tiny speaker in it, and I ran a jack lead off the speaker points into a small Fender. That way, I got some of the hardness above it from the Fender and all my distortion sort of smoothness from overloading the Selmer. But, unfortunately, when it came to playing bigger places needing a bigger sound, I tried running the Selmer through a Marshall, and it didn’t work. When you start to wind up the wick a bit it used to start whistling; therefore, I had to break down and start all over again to get the sound I liked. But on songs like Repent Walpurgis (the last track on September 1967’s eponymous debut album Procol Harum ), that’s the Little Giant with the Fender, and I used my Chet Atkins solid-body. ” There were probably many other famous musicians whose heartbeats & backbeats first quickened to the electric thrill of this classic compact combo. When recounting the purchase of his first Fender Jazz Bass in his autobiography The Living Years Mike Rutherford wrote “ I also ended up with a Selmer Little Giant amp — impressive name, teeny little thing… Even to me the sound seemed loud — beautifully loud. ” ***

So what Selmer sorcery was summoning these sacred sounds? Well, nothing out of the ordinary for the time, really. With AC/DC rectification being handled by an EZ80 and the signal ramped up through single ECC83 & EL84 pre-amp & power stages, that were finally pushed into the air by a single six inch Elac speaker, this all-valve baby-box Selmer was very similar to it’s contemporary, the Vox AC-2 (later renamed the AC-4, presumably to imply the wattage). It weighed about 4.3 kg or 9 lb 7½ oz (9.471 lb) in a box that was 15.4 x 10.2 x 5.5 inches, or 390 x 260 x 140 mm, small. The Vintage Hofner website rather succinctly describes the SLG like this: “ Could easily be mistaken for a little radio, producing a mighty 4 watts (or 8 watts US, where they used peak output rating) via it's ECC83 (1), EL84 (1) and EZ80 (1) valves and tiny speaker. Size 15½" x 5½" x 9", front-mounted control panel with 2 knobs (volume, tone) and a pilot light. All for 11 guineas (a guinea being one pound and one shilling, it had stopped being legal tender decades earlier but it was still considered "posh" to quote prices in guineas). ” By the time my #5448 was in the shops the price had gone up to 12 guineas but it was still a lot easier to get hold of in 1962 Britain than a Fender Champ.

But why not come down to New Cut Studios with your favourite guitar and hear for yourself? And if you think you’re going to need 25% more power than a Little Giant, well then we have a dynamite little 5w amp: our 1965 Blackface Fender Vibro~Champ. TOO LOUD? We also have one of Zachary Vex’s tiny half-watt tube amps — check out this giant little raunch rocket. The Zvex Nano Head can quite happily drive any of our 4x12” cabinets and is powered by two JAN 6021W military spec valves — Philips ECG’s USA made “Joint Army Navy” special quality version of the ECC70. These sub-miniature dual triode tubes were designed to withstand the extreme conditions they would encounter in the guidance systems of ballistic missiles. You see, sometimes it is rocket science.

* Rory Gallagher actually used a Ross Fame Series Model 10 Tube Blaster as a dressing room amp. It was a solid state, 25w 1x8" combo, with an overdrive circuit switchable from the front panel or via a footswitch jack on the rear panel. This "Tube Blaster" switch engages a built-in distortion based on JRC4558 op-amp chips. Sound familiar? Surely the company from Chanute, KS famous for the much cloned "Grey Compressor" pedal wouldn't copy an overdrive circuit from Ibanez? Well, whilst they don't have any tubes to scream in their power stage, these little amps sound so great we got four of 'em! Of course the reason they sound great is that Bud Ross' company also built the highly acclaimed solid state Kustom amps in the '60s & '70s.

** Rosetti were of course an English company established in the 1920s but the Solid 7 was built for them by the Dutch company Egmond. If you’ve seen pictures of Paul McCartney playing his in Hamburg you’ll know it looks something like a Yamaha SG with a trapeze tailpiece and a Supro headstock — although Egmond built several variants with this name.

*** Rutherford was a real champion of British gear with his long term use of Shergold guitars & basses, but he also continued to use small British made amps throughout a long and successful career with Genesis and Mike & The Mechanics, owning no fewer than seven Sessionette:75 1x12" combos! We have a very fine original 1984 Axess-Session model of this little 75 watt "British Boogie" here at New Cut and it's our benchmark for solid state amps.

When I'm Sixty-five...

2016-09-11T15:46:51Z

... Leo Fender, he was the music man.

It could be argued that 65 was a significant number for Leo Fender; after all, it was in 1965, on the 5th of January, that he sold the Fender Electric Instrument Company Inc. to CBS for 13 million dollars (along with his associate Fender companies). Perhaps that’s why he chose the name 'Sixty-five' for his next series of amplifiers. But then in 1974, when the Music Man company produced that first line of 65 watt amps, Leo Fender also happened to be 65 years old. The output wattage might not have been the only reason for their Sixty-five monicker.

The Music Man story started in 1971 when Forrest White and Tom Walker started a company called Tri-Sonix, Inc. Walker had been a sales rep at Fender and White had been with the company since 1954. By 1966 he'd had enough of CBS's changes and left, but during White's time at Fender, Leo had named a student range of amps and instruments after him and later made him Vice President. The Tri-Sonix firm became Musitek, Inc. in 1973 but Leo, who'd financed the initial partnership, decided that if he was going to get involved officially then a new name was in order and so early in 1974 the company adopted the alliterative name we now know so well. In 1975 the ten-year non-competition clause that CBS had put into their contract with Leo expired and he came out of the shadows to be officially voted president of Music Man by the board.

Leo Fender started making amps with Doc Kaufman back in 1945; by the time CBS bought Fender, Leo’s amps had taken 20 years to reach their zenith in the Blackface range that are still acclaimed today. It should come as no surprise that the first Music Man amps were the next evolution of that renowned marque. The Sixty-five series of amps were designed by Leo Fender and Tom Walker as a hybrid of the now world-famous valve amps Leo was known for with the new, rapidly developing, semiconductor technology. Solid-state devices were, by the early 1970s, far more complex than mere diodes and transitors. There were new, tiny operational amplifiers built into integrated circuits (which would become the basis of the next generation of 'fuzz boxes' in a whole raft of different overdrive & distortion pedals). The new range of Music Man guitar amps used op-amp IC chips in circuits that embodied typical Fender pre-amp architecture & time constants, to drive a push-pull, valve power amp. These early Music Man amps used metal-can ICs (rather than the more familiar Dual In-line Chips), which were socketed to allow for easy trouble shooting and maintenance.

Unlike most Fender amps, built on a 6L6 or similar tube power stage, the new amps used the 6CA7, or EL34 valves, more famously used by companies like Marshall and HiWatt. The clean tones were huge and bright with natural valve distortion when the power stage was pushed hard, an effect which could be replicated at lower volumes by the cunning dual mode selectable from the power switch. On the "Low" power setting the plate voltage was dropped by half but all four output valves were still in operation, giving a wonderful rich, harmonic overdrive at lower levels. This is a far more effective way of choking the power of an amp and retaining complex tone than the more common practice of achieving such attenuation by only employing half the power tubes*.

There was no mistaking the heritage of these new compact combos. Cosmetically they more than resembled the pre-CBS Fender models: two separate pre-amp channels, each with dual jack inputs, controlled by silver-capped black 'witch hat' knobs, on black face plates, above a silver grill cloth and all wrapped up in a black tolex covered pine cabinet. As befitting the next generation of Blackface amps the Sixty-fives had lush spring reverb and rich tremolo on channel two. However these Music Man tremolos can often confuse players used to Leo's older Fender circuits — you can't just dial in the numbers you'd usually aim for. That's because they had a double feature whereby the second half of the Intensity pot was wired to simulate a rotary speaker. Dial it up past 5 and the effect went from tremolo to Leslie. The Speed control also had a much wider sweep than it's Fender forebears**. This made for a much more versatile effect but required a lighter touch than the old Black- and Brownface circuits. The Sixty-five amps also had a "deep" rocker switch, for colouring the tone (much like the Blackface Bassman, but on the second channel) alongside the traditional Fender "bright" switch; and, again like the Blackface Bassman, they were solid state rectified.

And on top of everything else they were even made in Fullerton, CA. Imagine the excitement generated in 1974 by the rumour that Leo Fender was making amps again! The stable of Music Man amps soon expanded, getting larger, louder and more complex. They were rich, full and above all loud — and the range of artists who adopted them was wide — Nile Rodgers, Joe Strummer, Mark Knopfler & Eric Clapton, to name but a few. They were also built like the proverbial tank and their reliability on the road became legendary. Now 21st century players are starting to recognise just how great those early Music Man amps are and prices are steadily rising as a result.

Here at New Cut Studios we have a 210 Sixty-five made around 1977***. It has two fantastic horseshoe alnico 10” speakers made by Eminence (not by Jensen as some people claim). It’s one of the loudest, most brilliant combos we’ve ever heard — come down and try it out! The reverb and tremolo sound great, though a lot darker than those of our '77 Silverface Twin (yeah okay, those ultralinear MV Twins are crazy loud, but ours has been modded down to a more Blackface 85w). If you’re not after that huge clean sound it also takes overdrive and distortion pedals exceptionally well. And we have some great overdrive pedals at New Cut that you can use too — including an '80s Pearl OD-05, a Terry Audio White Rabbit, a Dr.No More Gary, a Fulltone OCD, Subdecay Liquid Sunshine — as well as some original '60s & '70s fuzz boxes. If you don’t want to use pedals for grit then put the 210 Sixty-five on the half power setting and it breaks up nicely earlier in the volume range.

Mind you, if you want to record some guitar with a lovely little, controllable amp that saturates beautifully at low volume into gorgeous harmonic distortion… we also have one of Leo’s Blackface Vibro~Champs as well. The valve generated tremolo of this tiny tone monster, when switched in, is phenomenal: deep and visceral. So if you’re after that perfect surf, rockabilly or psych-rock pulse there’s another reason to come and try out our Vibro~Champ too. And the year our Champ was made? Well, according to the valve chart in the back, it was '65.

* The Boogie MK.I is a classic example of this approach (though Mesa would experiment with different low-power switch circuits over the years), and the 2/4 output tube switch can still be found in use today in amps like the Orange TH30 which has Full and Half options on it's standby switch that takes two of it's EL84s out of the power amp stage.

** From the original 1974 Music Man catalogue:

" INTENSITY

The tremolo intensity control provides a double function. At settings from zero to five, modulation varies from zero to 100% respectively. At settings above five, a second modulation pulse is added giving a Doppler effect that simulates a rotating speaker.
SPEED

The speed control determines the rate at which tremolo occurs. It is an extremely wide range control and produces some unusual effects. "

*** Going by the newest pot code I can find inside, though most of the pot codes are earlier, so it could be a repair. The banner picture for this blog was taken inside our 210 Sixty-five . Component dates are pretty much the only way you can date Music Man amps, I can't find a resource anywhere that decodes the serial numbers.