FX Files
How to recreate guitar’s greatest FX moments
Effect: Echo/delay
Player: John Martyn
Gear: Maestro Echoplex
Hear it: Rather Be The Devil (Solid Air,1973)
Scottish singer-songwriter and acoustic guitar innovator John Martyn has conjured a few FX-laden journeys, but on his cover of Skip James’s Rather Be The Devil, looping squalls from his Echoplex blend with keyboard and bass to take on a demonic musical persona all of their own.
Martyn first experimented with the effect in the mid-1960s. Invented by Mike Battle and first sold in 1959. the Maestro Echoplex was a tape-based analogue delay which worked by sending a tape in a loop over recording and playback heads -users choosing two points along the tape. via a sliding head. to set the ‘delay time: This led to slapback sounds, longer repeated delays. and sounds merging with sounds in endless cloned loops. Martyn used the effect until the beautiful orchestration of it on Small Hours – the final track on 1977’s One World – signalled the end of its vinyl outings for Martyn.
Buy it: Original tube-driven Maestro Echoplexes are one of the most sought-after effects, but rarely appear on the market. Later solid-state specimens are available for under $1,000, but for a modern variant of the warm, analogue echo, a Fulltone Tube Tape Echo (£1000, www.fulltone.com) offers a pro substitute. At the cheaper end of the scale, a Boss Space Echo is an alternative (see next issue’s Longterm Test for a full report).
Anonymous
Guitarist Magazine
1 Apri1 2008
