The Birth of Jimi’s Sound
Effects pioneer Roger Mayer tells Jamie Dickson that Hendrix’s gear choices were shaped by budget as much as tone
There’s a thriving market for gear that emulates the tones of famous guitarists – and few players’ tones have been so widely emulated as that of Jimi Hendrix. Roger Mayer knows a bit more than the average pedal-maker about that subject, however. As a young electronics engineer with an interest in music, Roger struck up a friendship with Hendrix shortly after Jimi arrived in the UK in late 1966. This relationship saw Roger become Jimi’s technical adviser on guitar tone and the nascent world of effects pedals.
“I met Jimi a few days after my 21st birthday in January 1967,” Roger recalls. “I spoke to him straight after a gig and told him about a new effect I was working on, which was the Octavia, and he suggested I come down to a performance about two weeks later at the Chislehurst Caves in Kent near Bromley. That’s where Jimi tried out the Octavia in the dressing room and he really liked it.
“He said, ‘Come down to this club in Windsor, called the Ricky-Tick, and afterwards we’re going to Olympic Sound Studios and we’re going to do overdubs for a couple of new singles that I’m making, right?’ One was Purple Haze and the other one was Fire. We became friends and the rest, as they say, is history.”
The Octavia’s otherworldly sound was unlike anything else available at that time and, unlike today, creating strikingly new sounds wasn’t seen as a leftfield pursuit but the main goal of effects designers.
“We were both into science fiction,” Roger recalls, “so we were interested in painting a sonic picture in your mind that would make your mind travel, you know? Much the same as, say, the music for Walt Disney’s Fantasia and a few other classical pieces that really had a vast palette of tonal colour. So, yeah, we were into the esoteric side of breaking new ground and pioneering the new techniques that were available then,” Roger says.
In contrast to the pure innovation that both he and Hendrix were interested in, Roger reveals that many of Jimi’s now-canonical gear choices were driven by workaday considerations, not the least of which was saving money – at least in the early days of Jimi’s alltoo-brief career. Mods made to Jimi’s guitars usually had to be applied on the fly.
“We didn’t have that many guitars to play with in the beginning because Jimi was losing them or they were getting smashed up or stolen,” Roger explains. “And we didn’t have a lot of time because Jimi was playing gigs almost every night or he was recording, so we never really got that much time to delve into the guitars – there was a little bit in the beginning, but not much. One modification we did make was wiring the pickup directly to the output, bypassing the controls – because Jimi never used the tone controls, so there wasn’t a lot of point in having them in the circuit, really.”
Likewise, Jimi’s now-famous association with the Fuzz Face was at least partly prompted by the pragmatic need to use a pedal that could be easily and cheaply replaced.
“Jimi needed a fuzz box that he didn’t mind getting stolen or breaking,” Roger tells us, “and that was the Fuzz Face, which at the time were pretty cheap to buy. But you had to buy a lot of them in order to find one or two that worked well because they were made down to a price, you know, and [the quality of the] parts varied a lot. So you could get 20 in and there would be one that became Jimi’s favourite. The rest of them? As far as we were concerned, you might as well throw them in the bin.”
Marshalls, too, were selected by Jimi for down-toearth reasons rather than any special affinity he had with them – though he did return to them time and again, after trying different brands. “Marshall was the loudest, cheapest amplifier you could buy,” Roger says.
“We used Sound City as well, in the studio, and Fender to get different tones – or combinations of the three. When we went to America for the first few concerts in early 1968, we had Fender amplifiers and Jimi didn’t like them much, and then we had Sunn for a very
“Jimi and I were both into science fiction, so we were interested in painting a sonic picture that would make your mind travel”
short period of time. Maybe it was about six months or something… I don’t know, it wasn’t a long time. And then we went back to Marshalls. But to keep them going was a nightmare, you know?”
Interestingly, Roger says he feels people tend to overestimate the importance of gear in shaping Jimi’s sound. The aim, at least in the earliest phase of Jimi’s solo career, was to choose equipment that performed well on a limited budget, leaving Jimi’s mind free of niggling distractions so he could put in the best possible performance. Music was the goal, not GAS.
“We were going into the studio knowing that we’d got all the tools at our hands to get a great sound,” Roger says. “But the most important thing was that both of us understood what we could do and then just executed it. It’s like Lewis Hamilton rocking up to a grid and knowing that he’s got great mechanics around him. After that, it really comes down to how Lewis feels as to whether he’s going to do a fast lap.”
Roger also cautions against regarding any piece of gear as being a magic bullet for achieving the incredible tones Hendrix got down on vinyl.
“The most misunderstood thing about Jimi’s guitar sounds on albums is that what you’re listening to is at least seven generations away from the Master, right?” he says. “And that means that you really have no idea what it took in the studio and in post-production and so forth to obtain that final tone that you listen to at home, on your loudspeakers, earphones, in the car, on the radio… whatever. Imagining that [reproducing it] would be as simple as just playing through one pedal and one amplifier… would be a complete misunderstanding.”
Perhaps surprisingly for an engineer, Roger stresses that the most important element of achieving great tone is working on your playing and your personal connection with music itself – because everything else flows outward from that, bad or good.
“Music is a mission, not a competition,” he reflects. “You’re not supposed to compete with the people that you’re supposed to be having fun with. People spend too much time obsessing over bits and pieces that make no difference. I mean, if you can really play, you’re going to get the best out of even a mediocre guitar – people are still going to say, ‘Wow, they can play.’”