The gear
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The Gear
When I started out doing this part of the site, I thought I could get away with just writing:
"Jimi was playing the Fender Stratocaster and used Marchall amps" - but I stand corrected... |
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In the following we'll walk thru:
· The guitar
· The strings
· The amps
· The effectsAs source I have mainly used www.musicplayer.com
I've got the guitar images from this site |
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The guitar
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Somewhere between his 11th and 13th birthdays, Hendrix received his first guitar - an inexpensive acoustic - from his father, who bought it after seeing his son holding the neck of a broom and strumming the bristles.
His first electric guitar was a white, single-pickup Supro Ozark that his father purchased from Myers Music in Seattle in 1959. |
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Supro Ozark 1560S |
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Hendrix family archives |
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Next came a red, single-pickup Silvertone Danelectro that Hendrix was slinging with Seattle's Tomcats in early '61. He parked this guitar with a girlfriend when he joined the army that year, and switched to a cheap Eko or Kay for a while. Eventually, he asked his father to send him the Danelectro, which he had nicknamed "Betty Jean". |
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Silvertone Danelektro |
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Hendrix with his "Betty Jean" |
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While gigging around Tennessee with the King Casuals in '62, he traded in the Dano for a new Epiphone Wilshire - a dual-pickup guitar with a solid-mahogany body and a glued-in mahogany neck.
He also bought an Ibanez electric from Collins Music in Clarksville, Tennessee. Unable to pay the $10-per-week installments, he voluntarily returned the guitar. |
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Epiphone Wilshire |
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Jimi with his Wilshire |
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During his nine-month stint with the Isley Brothers in 1964, Hendrix got his first Fender - a blond '59 or '60 Duo-Sonic. With Little Richard's Upsetters in '65, he slung a Fender Jazzmaster. He switched back to a sunburst Duo-Sonic with Curtis Knight & the Squires, but later returned to a Jazzmaster. |
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Fender Duo Sonic |
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The Isley Brothers, Essex County Club |
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Fender Jazzmaster |
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With funds supplied by his then girlfriend - and the trade-in of his Duo-Sonic - Hendrix bought his first Strat from Manny's Music in New York, in the summer of '66. He used a number of different CBS-era Strats - mainly rosewood-fretboard models - while gigging around New York's Greenwich Village in '66 and '67 as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and, later, with the Experience. Hendrix would narrow his choices to the black or white Strats with maple fretboards that were his primary axes for the rest of his career. (Although he owned innumerable Stratocasters - and often carried more than 13 at a time when touring - only six can be accounted for today.)
Hendrix bought right-handed Strats because he preferred to have the controls on top. He'd reverse the nut, and wind his low-E string the opposite direction around the farthest tuner in order to keep it from jumping out of the nut slot.
He originally tuned to standard pitch, but he eventually tuned down a half-step to ease the strain on his voice. |
Fender Stratocaster, black |
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Of course, Hendrix bought and played other guitars - lots of other guitars - and he gave many away. Henry Goldrich of Manny's recalls selling him everything from a Gibson ES-330, to a Gibson Firebird, to a Mosrite electric resonator guitar. His other guitars included a Guild 12-string acoustic, an Acoustic Black Widow Spider, a double-neck Mosrite, a Hagstrom 8-string bass (played on "Spanish Castle Magic" from Axis: Bold as Love), various Rickenbackers (a bass, a 6-string, and a 12-string), a '67 Gretsch Corvette, a left-handed Guild Starfire Deluxe fitted with a Bigsby tremolo, a '67 Gibson Flying V, a '55 Gibson Les Paul, a '68 Gibson SG Custom, a black, left-handed Flying V, a Gibson Dove acoustic, a Martin acoustic, and a Hofner electric. Modifications to his instruments were minimal, and his frets were rarely reworked because the guitars didn't last long enough to become worn. |
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The strings
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Hendrix's strings of choice were light-gauge Fender Rock 'N' Roll sets (gauged .010, .013, .015, .026, .032, .038). However, guitarist/producer Bob Kulick - an acquaintance of Hendrix's during the Greenwich Village days - remembers him breaking a string in a dressing room, and saying, "Uh oh, I don't have any extras." Kulick asked him what he needed, and Hendrix said he used an E string for a B. "That was the first time I'd ever heard of anyone moving their string gauges over like that".
But, then again, Band of Gypsies drummer Buddy Miles insisted that Hendrix used a very heavy E string, a medium gauge on his A and D, a Hawaiian G string, a light B, and a super-light E. This was supposedly not just for experimentation, but something Hendrix did because he thought the mixed gauges would keep the guitar in tune better. (Michael Bloomfield apparently tried some of the Hendrix Strats that Miles owned, and he was also a proponent of the mixed gauge theory.)
For picks, Hendrix chose whatever medium gauge his hand came up with when he stuck it into the drawer at Manny's. Barrett simply reports that the Experience carried thousands of picks, as well as hundreds of guitar straps - all selected to match Hendrix's shirts.
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The amps
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Hendrix experimented with various amplification systems, but, to use Eric Barrett's words: "It was 99 percent Marshall." The guitarist's route to the Marshall stacks that eventually became his familiar backline was a process of elimination. He reportedly owned a Silvertone amp and a matching 2x12 cab during his days in Tennessee in '61 and '62, but he mainly borrowed amps for gigs. |
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From '65 through '66, Hendrix's mainstay was a Fender Twin Reverb. He reportedly sniffed out Orange amps at Pink Floyd's December 1967 "Christmas on Earth" show in London, and again at his very last concert. Apparently, he couldn't get the sounds he wanted from them. |
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Fender Twin Reverb |
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Also in 1967, Buck Munger solidified a five-year contract (which actually lasted 14 months) between Hendrix and Sunn amplifiers after the Monterey Pop Festival. Sunn agreed to supply the entire Experience with anything they needed, in exchange for Hendrix's research and development input.
Hendrix started out with a 100-F cabinet, loaded with one JBL D-130 in the bottom and an L-E 100-S driver horn in the top. There was not much midrange - Munger described the tone as "almost a surfer sound" - and Hendrix combined the cab with a stack of Marshall 4x12s to get a blend. Later, the Sunn setup included up to five Coliseum P.A. tops - altered for guitar at 120 watts RMS each - with ten speaker cabinets loaded with two JBL D-130s each.
"We then went to four 12" Eminence speakers at Jimi's request, and we also took his advice that the minimum acceptable power at that time was 100 watts," recalls Munger. |
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For the Experience tour that began in February '68, Hendrix used Fender Dual Showmans and Marshalls, and then added 100-watt Sunn Coliseum P.A. tube amps, plus an array of Sunn 2x15 or horn-loaded cabs. Stage photos from this period show quite an assortment of Sunn, Fender, and Marshall gear, but Hendrix soon severed his relationship with Sunn and began using Marshalls almost exclusively. "Jimi was used to the big numbers," explains Munger, "and when he turned his Sunn amps up, he got a lot of noise he didn't like."
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Hendrix's Marshall of choice was the 100-watt Super Lead driving two 4x12 cabs, and his standard backline would quickly grow to three Super Leads and six 4x12s. He plugged his guitar into one amp, and linked it to the others by running a cable from an adjacent input (the Super Leads had four inputs) to the second amp's input jack, and so on.
Because Hendrix performed with his amp settings nearly always on full, his systems wore out fast. |
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This was a long way from the band's humble beginnings, when Hendrix and Noel Redding shared one miked 100-watt Marshall during the sessions for their first album. |
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The effects
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Effects were pretty new when Hendrix began forging his classic sound, and he once said that the first time he heard wah-wah was on Cream's "Tales Of Brave Ulysses." Soon after, a Vox wah became an indispensable part of his sound. |
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Vox Wah Wah |
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Mayers Octavia |
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Though Hendrix began using a fuzzbox (probably a Maestro) while playing with Curtis Knight, it was after meeting a young effects builder named Roger Mayer in London in 1967, that he was introduced to the neutron bomb of fuzz technology - a prototype design that Mayer called the Octavia. A fuzzbox with frequency-doubling circuitry that synthesized a second note an octave above the fingered note, the Octavia was first used by Hendrix on "Purple Haze" and "Fire". |
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Mayer signed on as a guitar tech for the Experience's 1968 U.S. tour, and he continued to work with Hendrix for some time thereafter. Though Hendrix's main fuzzbox was the Arbiter Fuzz Face, Mayer says he built 16 or 17 fuzzes for Jimi, along with an unknown number of Octavias. |
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Another essential ingredient in Hendrix's tone chain was the Univox Uni-Vibe - a chorus/rotating-speaker simulator that was introduced in 1969. Hendrix immediately added the device to his setup, and he continued using it throughout his career. |
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Uni Vibe |
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Hendrix sound
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By Arthur Gaba |
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Fuzz Face
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One of the things that particularly shaped Hendrix sound, especially on the first album, were the Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, which is the red round effect you can see on some pictures, that looks like a smiling face.
It were the Fuzz Face that gave him the overdriven sound, and that were responsible for the raw some times little uncontrolled sound. In some songs he uses the Octavia in front of the Fuzz Face, to give an octave higher mixed in, and more aggressive sound. If you back of the volume knop on the guitar, it is possible to ´clean up´ the sound from the Fuzz Face, so that you just get a little bit of snarling on the clean tones, when you hit the strings harder. I dont know how much Jimi used this, but he certainly has a snarl on many of his clean sounds. |
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Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face |
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The Wah pedal, mostly of the make VOX, is first heard on the album ´Axis Bold as Love´, and the UnivVibe comes in around 1970.
The Fuzz Face were originally made with a now obsoleted transistor technology, made of Germanium. They overdrive in a special way, but is technically quite primitive.
( Heat make them float, they have a high leak current and they are in all ways not easy to deal with ). That means that in earlier times you had to be there when a dealer got a load of Fuzz Faces - to pick the one that sounded best.
Later Arbiter came out with a blue model, with Silicium transistors, which had a brighter and more raw sound, that not so many people liked. Jimi is also reported to have used those at certain times. People sometimes laugh at it, but the battery is to a certain degree part of the sound, so often you would try to have half worn batteries at hand to shape the sound of the Fuzz Face.
With regards to amps there were certain small changes to the 100w plexies, even ones from the same year, but right now ( summer 2006 ) Marshall reports that Jimi requested a certain change in the tone stack ´to get more treble´ and Eddie Kramer is cited so say that ´those KT66 had a major influence on the sound´ ... and that is now when everybody says that a part of his sound came from the EL-34 tubes ;-)
It could be a marketing stunt from Marshall to get the ´new´ amps sold, because the earlier 1959 re-issues did not exactly nail the old sound - they were too bright.
And then you also have to consider the loudspeakers. OK, everybody knows that Jimi used 4*12" Marshall cabs - but what did he put inside them ?
In the start he could have used 15 or 20w Celestion Alnico speakers, which Celestion made without the bell for other vendors than VOX, who explitely had made an agreement with Celestion, not to sell the Blue Bulldogs to other than VOX themselves. 15 / 20w does not sound a lot, when a 100w Plexi can deliver about 140 w on full throtle - but they were quite robust. Later Marshall used the ceramic G12M-30 - also called Greenbacks, but rumor will know that Jimi allways changed the speaker configuration to G12H-30 wich at that time were used in bas cabs.
It sounds reasonable in that the Greenbacks has a somewhat loose bottom end, which can not be said about Jimi´s sound. To make things a little bit more confusing the G12H-30 came in 2 flavors: 55 Hz and 75 Hz, and the dont sound alike. It would probably be the 55 Hz version he used. There are also few rumours that he should have used JBL 120F-6 speakers - it can be true, but I think not that often then.
For the overall sound you also have to consider what happened after the initial recording, being: Doubling of guitar parts, phasing, flanging, room, strong panning, echo and reverse recording, right from the first album - which also can be heard when you compare the sound from records with live concerts. One man is NOT able to play that much at the same time - not even Jimi ;-) |
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