A
study of Jimi Hendrix's musical gear is a journey through bizarre
stories and revealing history, identifying the sound effects that
Hendrix used, and pinpointing when he first used them, defines the
birth of a theatrical industry, much less the gear of a noted rock
legend. So begins our strange musical odyssey into the guitarist's
amps, axes, and effects. Featuring narration from effects innovator
Roger Mayer, roadie Eric Barrett, and even the sublime Hendrix himself.
Michael Fairchild
is the writer and consultant for the official Hendrix production
company, Are You Experienced?, Ltd., and is the author of booklet notes
for the Hendrix albums: ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?, AXIS:
BOLD AS LOVE, ELECTRIC LADYLAND, :BLUES,
STAGES, LIFELINES, ISLE
OF WIGHT, WOODSTOCK, and
more. He also programmed the song selection and wrote notes for CORNERSTONES,
the highest-selling posthumous Hendrix album. Finally, Michael was the
Contributing Editor and consultant for HENDRIX: CHEROKEE
MIST-THE LOST WHITINGS and author of the book's Introduction.
-
Pete Prown - Guitar Shop Editor, autumn 1994
JIMI'S VOODOO RIG
by Michael Fairchild
Plugging In
"I really like my old Marshall tube amps," once
said the guitarist, "because when it's working properly, there's
nothing can be it, nothing in the whole world. It looks like two
refrigerators hooked together." The Jimi Hendrix Experience formed in
England in 1966, blasting music through amps of unprecedented size and
power. It was a sight we might call The Original Vision of '66 - the
scene of Jimi chained to his refrigerators. Like the ancient apes
confronting the monolith in Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi epic, 2001:
A Space Odyssey, rock audiences of the '60s cowered in awe
before Hendrix's dramatic stacks. With these amps, and the rest of his
rig, Jimi veritably introduced fire to cave people. Only King Kong
plugged into U.N.-building-sized speakers could have made a louder
noise, or so it seemed.
We imagined these Marshalls as giant transistor
radios, with conductor Hendrix waiving his Strat antenna-baton out in
front of this system. Jimi could receive and transmit extraterrestrial
frequencies via Celestion speakers - he even used to say on stage that
his music was made by "playin' the radio."
.
"Oh transistor feeder can you hear me thank you?
The time has come for us to be on the watch.
To know the sent, to recognize.
To stand in visualize, stand in realize…" - Jimi
The Original Vision of Hendrix stands as the
eternal guitar archetype. Every electric guitar idea to follow in its
wake is in some way derivative. "You'd think I'd found the lost chord!"
Jimi once declared. "We play loud to create a certain effect to make it
all as physical as possible. Everything is electrified nowadays. So
therefore, the belief comes in through the electricity to the people.
On stage I use two Marshalls and two Sound City 100-watt amplifiers.
And I find that this combination provides the sound I require coupled
with reliability. We have to change the valves every week due to loss
of power. Each amplifier has four 4-inch times 12-inch speaker
cabinets. It's true were one of the loudest groups around. It can be a
fault to be too loud. In fact, we do play softly as well. Do you hear a
whole lot of feedback in The Wind Cries Mary?
You've got to have dynamics. You find all kinds of people there. You
find a lot of straight people, so therefore we play twice is lower,
just to see where they're really at, and they dig
it, the louder the better. [Critics] are just not getting into the fact
that it does make you drunk, if you let it just take you away."
Fuzz Face & Octavia
The late Frank Zappa once described how "Jimi's
orgasmic grunts, tortured squeals, lascivious moans, electronic
disasters, and innumerable other audio curiosities are delivered to the
sense mechanisms of the audience at an extremely high decibel level in
a live performance environment, it is impossible to merely
listen to what the Hendrix group does - it
eats you alive." And in truth, Hendrix's
audiences were spellbound. No one knew
how the "guitar wizard" made such mysterious sounds. No one, that is,
except for
Zappa and a few other guitar freaks. In a
June '68 Hendrix spread in Life magazine,
Zappa informed those who wanted to
sound like Jimi to "buy a Fender
Stratocaster, an Arbiter Fuzz Face, a Vox
Wah-Wah, and four Marshall amplifiers."
It was through this article that the world
first learned about the Fuzz Face.
A year later Hendrix roadie Eric Barrett
revealed to Hit Parader that Jimi's
"favorite fuzz box is made by Arbiter in
England, and the wah-wah pedal is made
by Vox. They run through both amplifiers
and when he presses any one of those it
acts like a preamp and boosts the power
tremendously. That's how he gets really
high feedback...When he wants feedback
he turns the guitar up and presses down
on the wah-wah pedal and the fuzz." In
the summer of '66, Mike Bloomfield saw
Jimi using a Maestro fuzzbox in New
York's Greenwich Village. During this
period Jimi also said that he played
through "two raggedy fuzzboxes made by
one of the Fugs. I started using feedback
first of all in the Village. I used a Fender
amp and an old extension loud speaker. It
made the weirdest sounds. I fooled with
it, and what I'm doing now is the fruits of
my fooling around."
Jimi in Nov. '66
- Fuzz Face on floor,
earliest pic of him with it
Fuzz Face on
floor in foreground
white coil cords plugged into it.
It was the first Hendrix expedition
deep into darkest England in 1966 when
civilization first "discovered" the sound of
Marshall amps and Arbiter Fuzz Faces.
The earliest photos of Jimi with a Fuzz
Face date from the second week of November 1966 when the JHE appeared
at the "Big Apple" club. Since fuzz wasn't used during Jimi's recording
sessions from November 2, 1966 (Stone Free) and
earlier, it is probable that the Big Apple gigs in Munich, Germany
(between November 8 and 11, 1966) were Jimi's first "Fuzz Face
dates" (see pic at left). And since his expressive potential was so
"expanded" when he finally plugged into the new unit, it's
likely that he (and the audience) got so carried
away by the new fuzz sounds screaming from the amps in
Munich that this is what drove fans
to pull him off stage. Jimi's guitar neck broke from the fall and he
reacted by smashing the guitar to pieces on stage for the first time,
to the hysteria of Big Apple fans.
Similarly, such novel excitement may also account for the acutely
inspired Love Or Confusion recording session, the
first session with Fuzz Face, a couple of weeks later, on November 24,
1966, when Jimi was just 23 years old.
Revolutionary/Evolutionary Breakthrough In Fuzz
Sounds
The next sonic breakthough for Hendrix occurred in January 1967 when he met Roger Mayer. "The secret of my sound,"
revealed Jimi, "is largely the electronics genius of our tame boffin, who is known to us as Roger The Valve. He's an electronics man working in a government department. He probably would lose his
job if it were known he was working with a pop group. But he's very much a part of
our organization now, he comes up with a lot of ideas. He's making something he
calls the 'heavenly sound.' It sounds like all the heavens opening up. We're mostly
workin' with the high-octaves scene though. He's made me a fantastic fuzztone. Actually, it's more of a
sustain than a fuzz. A gadget called the Octavia, it comes through a whole octave higher so
that when I'm playing high notes it sometimes sounds like a whistle or a flute."
Octavia - floor
pedal stomp box
"By that time," recalls Roger Mayer
today, "Jimi had an Octavia and several of
my fuzzboxes and boosters. I had different fuzzboxes, another type of
distortion
box that I built originally for Jimmy Page
and people like that, and we let Jimi use
those. It's a smoother sound, basically, it
sort of sings more, that Love Or
Confusion sound. We had some other
fuzzboxes too that were in identical castings to the Octavia and then
we started
playing around with some of the Fuzz
Faces and finding out which ones were
good.
"We had another distortion circuit that
was used that was not of the Fuzz Face
configuration. You've got to realize that at
that time I didn't have a casting, so we
could put our electronics into the actual
round Fuzz Face casting. If you see a
round Fuzz Face on the floor, if you don't
open it up and look inside, you don't know
what circuitry is inside it, do you? Because
there were quite a few Fuzz Face castings
lying around that didn't work, so we took
advantage of the outer casing. It's the
same thing with the actual Fuzz Face circuit configuration - this is
what I tried to
tamper with.
"You've got to realize, out of all the
Fuzz Faces made, there weren't very
many that really sounded great, and so
obviously you've got to spend a bit of time
working on them. Arbiter also tended to
change around that period ('66'67),
because they started using different transistors and silicone
transistors, so the
boxes weren't consistent. The first series
of them used the Germanium transistors,
which was similar sounding to the
Maestro Fuzz. Then the company went to
a silicone one, which gave it a much
harsher sound. But to get the smoother
sound, Jimi used some of my Germanium
type fuzz boxes. And then also we had the
Germanium version of the Fuzz Face as
well. You can actually tune up the Fuzz
Face if you know what you're doing. For
specific songs you can give it a specific
sound. You can actually alter the tone of it
completely, which is what I used to specialize in. The way the sound
decays is the
most important thing; if it decays incorrectly it would sound horrible.
There's
distortion and then there is distortion,
you see, and we wanted to add harmonics
in a mathematical way so that the overall
effect is musical. It's easy to just get fuzz
and square off the signal; the real secret
comes in knowing how to use the actual
transistors 'not quite correctly.' Then I
started going on the Experience gigs and
supplying them with the Octavias, and
this and that. Because what used to happen was we used to get so much
stuff
ripped off the stage. I mean, Jimi could
have all this equipment stolen in one
night! We just made them for him personally."
On floor: Wah-Wah, Octavia,
Fuzz Face, UniVibe
Since Mayer's Octavias were custom built and not
easily replaced, Jimi rarely
used them on stage. He did, however, go
through a brief "Octavia phase" in concert. It began a few minutes past
midnight
on Jan. 1, 1970 when A Band Of Gypsys
jammed on Who Knows? The Octavia
box used can be seen with Jimi's sound effects chain which appears in
the fore-ground of Joe Sia's "crotch-shot" photo
from Fillmore East (see pic at right). Jimi presides like a
special effects alchemist over a full array
of mutated signals. But the last known
time that he used Octavia on stage for a song was
during Voodoo Child at a May 2, 1970
show in Madison, WI. As for his innovative
gadgets, Mayer explains, "I never had any
involvement with the management. The
financial situation was so loose. I said to
Jimi, 'I don't mind helping you out with
the boxes.' I mean if he took me out to
dinner or to a club, you know, that's
enough. I mean, he paid for the parts and
in some of the interviews he was very free
[giving credit]. He said, 'You gotta talk to
Roger, he's the inspiration behind some
of the sounds.' That was it, financially."
In 1974 the Fuzz Face was withdrawn
from the market, however, the Dunlop
company reissued the original "Classic
Germanium" Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face in
1993, making them available to musicians
again.
UNIVIBE
All of Jimi's original sound effects are
now back on the market, except for the
UniVibe, which went out of production in
the '70s. When Record Mirror interview
Hendrix in March 1969, journalist Valerie
Mabbs reported, "Before I left, Jimi
demonstrated a new piece of Vox equipment...a specially designed box
that creates weirder and more wonderful sounds
than have been heard from a guitar
before - even from Jimi Hendrix!" The
UniVibe was developed by the Uni-Vox
company of Long Island, and Jimi may
have owned an early version with the
word "Vox" on it in the spring of '69.
UniVibe on floor,
next to shoe
- Tinker St. Cinema, Woodstock, NY
However, the earliest recording of Jimi
using a UniVibe dates from an August 10,
1969 jam session at the Tinker Street
Cinema in Woodstock, New York (see pic at right). At every
concert and session that followed
Woodstock, Jimi used the UniVibe. The
unit was manufactured in New York by
Merson Musical Products. In 1971 a company representative told Melody
Maker,
"We enjoyed a close relationship with
Jimi, and our engineering staff developed
a great deal of electronic gear for him. The
UniVibe is a device which simulates a
rotating speaker sound with a wide band
variable speed control. It was initially
designed for use with electric organs, but
was found to be quite adaptable for guitar...
"We gave a UniVibe to Jimi and he featured it
prominently," said the Merson rep, "We also gave him one of our
UniDrives, which he had started to use
before his tragic death." Little is known
about the UniDrive, other than that it
sold for $49.50 ($60 less than a UniVibe),
and that Jimi received one in mid-1970.
Also, in an early-'70s issue of Melody
Maker, Jimmy Page is pictured with a
UniDrive. Going by its name, however, it
might be safe to assume it was some sort
of distortion unit.
In any case, Roger Mayer confirms that
he modified some of Jimi's UniVibes.
"Basically I just used to tune them up.
When you get them working right they
really sound very musical." A similar
effect to the UniVibe is today marketed by
Mayer in rack-mounted format.
Univibe chordal intro, vibrato bar, then piercing wah-wah treble at 1:44
Mayer also markets his array of Octavias, fuzz
effects, and wah-wahs through a company in Charlotte, NC. Among
these effects are wah-wah pedals
modified the way Jimi's pedals were for
his Axis: Bold As Love album. In 1967
Mayer installed a small two-way selector
switch on the side of Jimi's pedal. The
switch could be set for normal wah-wah
sound, or set to produce a thinner effect
which Jimi called the "Chinese wah."
The Wah-Wah Arrives
Earliest Pic of
Jimi & Wah-Wah
Aug. 18, 1967,
Hollywood Bowl
The first known photos of Hendrix
using a wah-wah date from an Aug. 15,
1967 gig in Ann Arbor. Almost all subsequent shots of the pedal reveal
that he
preferred the Vox wah-wah manufactured
by Jennings Musical Industries Ltd. of
Kent, England. "The first record I heard
with the wah-wah was Tales Of Brave
Ulysses [released June, 1967 as flip-side
of the Strange Brew single by Cream]," noted Jimi.
"It's a very groovy sound. But on Are You
Experienced? [released May, 1967], on the
track I Don't Live Today [recorded Feb.
20, '67] there's a guitar takin' solo on it
and it's wah-wah-like. But we used a hand wah-wah then, which sounds
very
good. We were doin' it with hand then. So
then Vox and this other company in the
States, in California, they made this
[foot-pedal] scene. We released a record about
two or three days after Cream came out
with one. It was coincidental because we
didn't know anything about their record
and they didn't know anything about
ours."
Jimi Opens for
Monkees - July 1967
What may have happened is that
Eric Clapton played Cream's recording of
Tales Of Brave Ulysses for Jimi in early
May, 1967, just a "few days" before I
Don't Live Today was released on the
Are You Experienced? album. This
scenario implies that
Clapton recorded with the foot pedal
before Jimi did. Pinpointing Jimi's first
pedal-wah'd note is a quest befitting
Sherlock Holmes. There are three theories
as to when Jimi first used the
wah-wah foot pedal: the Monkees Theory,
the EXP Theory, and the Jayne Mansfield
Theory.
"I had used wah-wah," said Frank
Zappa in a 1977 interview with Guitar
Player magazine, "during We're
Only In It
For The Money in '67, and that was just
before I met Hendrix. He came over and
sat in with us at the Garrick Theater that
night and was using all this stuff we had
on stage." Jimi met with the Mothers in
New York on June 13, while en route to
Monterey, and again on July 7 during sessions for Burning Of
The Midnight
Lamp.
The Monkees Theory claims that
Zappa introduced Jimi to the wah-wah on
July 7 and Jimi then took the device into
the studio that night and recorded wah-wah overdubs to Burning
Of The
Midnight Lamp just hours before he
joined the Monkees tour.
But the
Monkees Theory is refuted by Hendrix
bassist Noel Redding, who says, "Jimi got
interested in a wah-wah pedal in London.
That was at Jenning's Box on Charing
Cross Road."
(Before Monterey?)
"I think so, yeah, because in London, on Charing
Cross Road, that's where all the guitar
shops were. I used to go and hang out in
guitar shops when I had nothing else to
do. And this one guy found out I was playing with the Experience and he
said, 'We
got this new thing,' which in those days
was called a Crybaby Pedal, so he said
'bring himself in.' So I got 'himself' into
the shop. Jimi tried it out and they gave it
to him, which in those days was unheard
of."
By Noel's account, Jimi had already
used a wah pedal when he encountered
the Mothers in New York on June 13. Two
weeks later the JHE arrived at an L.A. studio to begin recording Stars
That Play
With Laughing Sam's Dice. It is from this
June 28 session that we hear what is probably the first Hendrix wah-wah
tapes,
recorded as movie starlet Jayne Mansfield
was killed in a car crash near Biloxi. (Two months earlier, she
attended a JHE gig,
and in 1965 Jimi and Jayne actually
recorded a song called Suey together.)
Suey - Sung by Jayne Mansfield
The Jayne Mansfield Theory maintains
that Jimi's L.A. '67 sessions were the first
with foot wah. From these sessions survives an early instrumental
outtake of
Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's
Dice. In fact, if you listen to the intro section of that
tune it has a Dick Dale L.A.
surf music twang to it. Dice was probably composed
on the West Coast too. Jimi
once said, "'Freak-out' was old California
lingo for humping in the back seat of a car
(laughs)." And the L.A. outtake version of
STP/LSD contains a "freak out" solo
section of Fuzz Face/wah-wah combined.
This is probably the earliest known
recordings of such freaky sound (on the take of STP/LSD
that was released on record, Jimi
didn't use fuzz and wah simultaneously).
STP/LSD - Wah-Wah Comes In At 0:36
But Noel's claim that Hendrix had a
wah-wah prior to Monterey also supports
the EXP Theory: On May 5, 1967 Jimi
recorded EXP. A wah-wah was used
through a Fuzz Face to get squeals on this
cut, but we can't be certain that the wah-wah effects weren't
overdubbed tracks
added-on months later. However, if it's
true that Clapton played a tape of Tales Of
Brave Ulysses for Jimi in early May, "just a
few days" before I Don't Live Today
came out on LP (May 12), then it would
seem likely that Jimi then took the pedal
into the studio on May 5 and called his first
wah-wah experiment EXP (posssibly EXP
is an abbreviation of
"Experiment", rather than "Experience").
As with the Octavia, Jimi may have initially
decided to confine the wah-wah
pedal to studio recording and not risk
having it ripped off at gigs. This would
explain why the pedal isn't present in
photos of Jimi during May and June 1967.
No wah-wah can be seen on stage at
Monterey, so the first crowds to hear Jimi
use it on stage probably did so in July (maybe Jimi's July 1st gig with
the Strawberry
Alarmclock in Santa Barbara - what a bizarre bill!).
As already noted, the earliest photos of
Jimi's pedal date from mid-August (see pic above). Also,
from July and August come recordings
which reveal insights into his early attitude about the wah-wah. As
heard on July
'67 sessions with R&B singer Curtis
Knight, Jimi initially did not mix Fuzz
Face and wah-wah together simultaneously. His
guitar for Hush Now (and Burning of the
Midnight
Lamp) features clean Strat tones fed
through a wah-wah. No fuzz distortion is
heard.
Early Wah-Wah Sounds on Hush Now July 1967
(Video Scenes 8mm From Sweden May 1967)
When Jimi first got the wah-wah
and switched it on while the Fuzz Face
was on, shrill shrieks pierced the amps.
He must've been startled and then clicked the
wah off quick. If the EXP Theory is correct, Jimi
may have initially regarded the
wah/fuzz simultaneous combination as useful only for a
one-off gimmick track like EXP. At first,
he probably didn't realize he could use
the wah-wah to further subdue and control those wild Fuzz Face squeals
heard on EXP.
Live F/X
Saville Theatre-
Aug. 27, 1967
Jimi seems to have determined early
that, at least on stage, fuzz and wah effects
were incompatible for simultaneous use together.
Anyone who stepped on a wah-wah
hooked up to a Fuzz Face would bristle at
the din and avoid repeating it. Two
months went by before Jimi spontaneously learned how to control the
fuzz shrieks
with his wah pedal, and that moment when
he finally crossed over into electronic
freakout-land was captured on tape.
The earliest JHE concert recording
with wah-wah dates from August '67
when the group returned to London after
their first U.S. tour. On August 27, they
played Brian Epstein's Saville Theatre
(never one to be upstaged, Epstein
dropped dead during the set) and a tape
of the show reveals that Hendrix originally
incorporated the pedal as an effect for
Catfish Blues. After Mitch's drum solo,
Jimi comes back in with his clean Strat
tone fed through the wah (similar to his recording sessions with Curtis
Knight in July '67 ).
Interestingly, during I Don't Live Today
(his earliest known live version) at the
Saville, Jimi uses only fuzz to probe his
solo, even though the album version featured a hand-controlled wah-wah
solo. Clearly,
on stage Jimi was avoiding using the wah-wah
pedal while his fuzz was switched on.
Fuzz &
Wah on floor -
Stockholm Sept. '67
The breakthrough tapes to feature fuzz
and wah in combination on stage come
from two Stockholm gigs on September 4th.
During the first set Jimi again confines the
wah-wah to Catfish Blues riffs. We can
hear him precisely switch the Fuzz Face
on only after he turns the wah off. But
later that night another version of
Catfish was recorded (this cut appears
on the EXP Over Sweden CD, along with
super wah-wah concert versions of EXP
and Up From The Skies).
Fuzz &
Wah on floor
For the late set in Stockholm, Jimi's wah-wah
solo for
Catfish is exceptionally loose. A superb
8mm color film from this set shows him
change to his painted Flying V Gibson for the
blues. "What's the matter?," he asked the
crowd that night. "Haven't you seen a
guitar like this before?" During the solo,
he switches over to fuzz at the usual cue,
but this time the wah-wah is left on with the fuzz tone,
probably
by accident. This time the resulting
shrieks are musical. Jimi discovers that by
rocking the wah-wah pedal up and down, from treble to bass
position, he can stop the fuzz tone shrieks. Suddenly,
his riffs erupt and scale the Everest of his
neck to it's highest pitch of peak treble
intensity (on the .mp3
recording link below, listen to Catfish at 9:29 to hear the fuzz/wah squeals).
The Strat SCREAMS as it has
never screamed before. Stockholm is
shocked. Jimi finishes his climax as the
crowd roars to its feet for seventy breathless seconds. Some weird
barrier had
been pierced with Fuzz Face and wah-wah. For a Stockholm radio show
appearance the
next night (released on Warner's 1991
Stages 4-CD box set), Jimi
begins to integrate the fuzz/wah combination effect into other
songs, starting with I Don't Live Today.
Never again would this tune be heard
without wah-wah. In terms of Hendrix's
guitar tone, these Stockholm shows mark the
start of a whole new ballgame. In fact, my theory is that the wah-wah
sound is a major factor in his future attempts to rid himself of the
gymnastic theatrics on stage and focus instead seriously on the music
itself. Prior to the wah-wah, the "variety" in his sets centered on the
weird sounds he got by playing with his teeth, or rubbing the guitar
neck along his elbow, or along the banks of amps. He used feedback
squeals and visual gestures to engage the crowds. But once he mounted
the "fixed" position with foot on floor pedal, a brand new range of
sound varieties transformed his speakers. Suddenly it was the
manipulation of all these wah-wah/fuzz signals that became the central
thing on stage - like an artist going from five primary colors, to
several dozen more shades. Like the true musician he was, he just
became consumed by composing with this new palette, the new sounds from
his amps excited him more than the pre wah-wah reliance on visual
gestures for variety. From then on, his audiences were split between
those who responded to his musical improvizations, and those who came
to watch him molest/beat-up his instrument.
AUDIO:Catfish Blues
(fuzz/wah breakthrough at 3:14 and 7:54), the high piercing notes use both wah and fuzz.
- Stockholm, Sept. 4, 1967
Earliest
wah-wah video (see 2:59) - Stockholm, Sept. 4, 1967
LOOK FOR PART 2 OF MICHAEL FAIRCHILD'S
HISTORIC LOOK INTO THE GEAR OF JIMI HENDRIX IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF GUITAR
SHOP....
