By Tom Mulhern
We take effects for granted–like microwave ovens, Nintendo, and NutraSweet. Not many people muse, "Gee, when were effects first used?" We just use them. Their history really hasn’t been very well documented, mostly because many effects were outgrowths of studio techniques, the tinkerings of engineers with wild ideas, or quick fixes to improve or change a signal. This greatly contrasts with the evolution of effects today, when manufacturers devote big bucks and hordes of engineers to the pursuit of newer, better, stranger effects.
Fame has a way of shaping our knowledge of effects history, just as it has shaped our knowledge of guitar and amp history. For instance, who knows who was really the first guitarist to raise the pickups up close to the strings and run an amp at full volume into an under-rated speaker to create distortion? We only know of the famous instances. We know of the contributions by pioneers like Paul Burlison, Chuck Berry, and before them Charlie Christian, in creating our perception of guitar tone. The first use of fuzz? Good luck. So, rather than get into every bit of minutiae that’s been gathered about effects and their evolution, let’s look at some of the big bangs that have rocked music.
In terms of musical history, electronic signal processors are very new. Part of the reason is obvious: Electric guitars have only been around since the 1920s, and rock and roll has only been with us since the early 1950s. The primary concern in the early days of the electric guitar was merely amplifying it. Making it loud. Period. This meant trying to find ways to get the sound of the guitar coming out of an amp to sound like the guitar’s tone that was put into the amp. And for that reason, the first electronic effect was the tone control, which simply removed some of the treble.
Among the oldest effects that we really consider effects are reverb and delay. Even without an electronic box, reverb was always pretty easy: Put a mic in a room and an amp somewhere else in the room and record it. Engineers knew how to duplicate this with tape by spacing the record and playback heads, creating a time delay. This was introduced to musicians at large in the early 1960s as the WEM (and Guild) Copicat and the Echoplex. Reverb using springs to delay the sound became a part of amp technology at the threshold of the ’60s. Tremolo and vibrato also came along in the early 1960s as well, with arguably the coolest vibrato being the one in Magnatone amps. With reverb, tremolo, and vibrato on the scene, the sound of surf was forged.
In 1960, when Gibson introduced its SG-style, pointy-bodied guitars, it also released its EB-0 bass, with a startling option: a built-in fuzztone (the bass was the EB-0 F). Crude but fuzzy, it was a rarity that was less than successful. However, by the mid 1960s Gibson had its own stand-alone fuzztone, and by the time the Rolling Stones put fuzz on the map with "Satisfaction" in 1965, fuzz boxes sprung up everywhere, from companies like Jordan (their Bosstone plugged directly into the guitar–not very useful for Strats, because of their slanted jack), Fender (the Fender Blender), and Vox (the Tone Bender). By the dawn of the 1970s, the Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face and countless other fuzzes were available. Most relied on a pair of transistors to boost the signal to the point of harsh clipping, and occasionally diodes were used to make it even raspier. A pseudo-octave effect (listen to just about anything by Jimi Hendrix) was added by Roger Mayer and eventually others such as Foxx. Some of the most innovative fuzzes came from Maestro, a division of Gibson. In the first few years of the 1970s, Gibson introduced a bevy of fuzz variants, including the Bass Brassmaster, which had induction circuitry to produce a brassy sound for bass guitar, the Fuzz Phazzer, the Super Fuzz, and several other distortion-related devices.
Another major twist in effects came in 1966 when Brad Plunkett, an engineer working for Thomas Organ (Vox’s American counterpart) was trying to simplify the midrange circuit on the Vox Buckingham amp. He found that turning a pot instead of using a rotary switch created a wah-wah effect. Placing the circuit into a volume pedal from a Vox Jaguar combo organ and plugging a guitar through it created an instant sensation in the Thomas Organ plant. In only a matter of months, the Vox Clyde McCoy pedal was on the market. (Apparently, Clyde McCoy was a trumpet player in the 1930s who used a mute to create a wah-wah effect on his instrument; hence the name.) Demand for the wah-wah outside of Vox distribution channels led to the creation of the Cry-Baby, which was the same circuit in a different pedal.
Around the same time, the Uni-Vibe was developed, a rotating-speaker simulator that was eventually a big part of Jimi Hendrix’ sound. By today’s standards, it was noisy and finicky, but at the time it was a real breakthrough. Sadly, Jimi was about the only well-known musician using an Uni-Vibe, and it never caught on the way the phase shifter of several years later did.
For years, people had heard a studio technique known as flanging, employed by Phil Spector on "The Big Hurt," the Small Faces on "Itchycoo Park," and other hits. The Leslie rotating speaker, originally designed for organ, was sometimes adapted for guitar (George Harrison was a very, very visible exponent of it). But until CMI, Gibson’s parent company, marketed the Maestro Phaser–designed by Tom Oberheim, who later became a mover and shaker in the synthesizer industry–there was no easy way for guitarists to get the sound onstage. The sweeping, Leslie-like sound of the phaser, which hit stores in about 1973, was slightly similar to the Uni-Vibe, but more pronounced and less noisy. Just as fuzz and wah-wahs were the sounds of the ’60s, the phaser was the defining sound of the mid 1970s.
The early ’70s was a hotbed of innovation for signal processors (integrated circuit prices were plummeting and some guitar-pickin’ and keyboard-plinkin’ engineers did some serious experimenting). As the sound of the synthesizer started to creep into popular music, Mike Biegel’s Mu-tron III, a filter that followed the volume envelope of picked notes, provided guitarists with the first auto-wah, which went wah, wow, or wuh with every note or chord.
The Talking Bag (remember Iron Butterfly?) looked like a boda bag for wine, but had a tube coming out of it that a guitarist put into his mouth while standing in front of a microphone. As each note was played, it was amplified through a driver in the bag, the sound sent through the tube, and then the notes shaped by the guitarist moving his mouth. The effect was described as "vowel articulation." A few years later, Bob Heil’s Talk Box was made famous by the likes of Joe Walsh, Jeff Beck, and Peter Frampton. By the end of the 1970s, this funky novelty was pretty well washed up.
Throughout the entire decade of the ’70s, Electro-Harmonix created a mind-boggling number of effects, including the Big Muff ¼ distortion, the Screaming Bird treble booster, the Graphic Fuzz (distortion and graphic EQ together for extensive tone shaping), and numerous other devices. Like Maestro in its heyday, EH took otherwise mainstream effects and produced some of the most creative variations and combinations, at least until the advent of rack-mountable multi-effects units in the 1980s.
Two hot items in the mid ’70s were actually just variations on one item: The analog delay and chorus were based on bucket-brigade, or charge-coupled delay integrated circuits. As delays go, they sounded sort of muddy, and got muddier as more delay time was squeezed out of them. MXR’s green Analog Delay was one of the best, even with its pitiful (by today’s standards) lack of treble and short delay time. Roland’s CS-1, a large metal floor pedal ignited guitarists’ passion for chorusing and created a standard for what chorusing sounds like (in fact, one of the first big-name users, Genesis, employed it on practically everything on their A Trick Of The Tail album–including drums).
Just as 1980 was peering over the horizon, the next big thing in effects was being cooked up: Digital electronics. Previously, effects were analog circuits, built from transistors, resistors, and capacitors (eventually integrated circuits housing lots of transistors, etc., replaced many of the free-standing transistors).
A first few forays into digital electronics were octave dividers, using ICs called flip-flops to divide a square wave (really raspy fuzz) by two; dividing a frequency by two drops its frequency by one octave. Mu-tron’s Octave Divider and MXR’s Blue Box were about the coolest, but both freaked out when you’d play two notes at once, or if you fed really low notes into them.
The serious digital stuff–effects with analog-to-digital converters at the front and digital-to-analog converters at the back started with digital delays. MXR, Electro-Harmonix, and DeltaLab blazed the first paths, but were soon joined by dozens of others. As prices fell for memory chips–the heart and soul of these digital boxes–and the chips became more complex, the cost of a DDL zoomed downward from "studio-only" prices of several thousand dollars to the mere hundreds of bucks that delays cost today.
Since the advent of digital, most effects have been refinements of software, rather than of hardware. The occasional analog effect comes along, including tube-based distortions, but the folks juggling algorithms and 1’s and 0’s are cooking up the bulk of processing horsepower. And create, they do. Eventide’s Harmonizer, originally a variation on a complex digital delay at the close of the 1970s has become an amazing piece of equipment capable of great backwards, harmonized, and other effects. So big is the Harmonizer’s impact that many other manufacturers have created similar (although often less sophisticated and/or less expensive) processors. And Lexicon’s early over-$10,000 early digital reverbs gave birth to an ever less-expensive, more powerful world of simulators for rooms, halls, and chambers. Multi-effects with sound-shaping in the digital domain–including digital EQ–are now commonplace. Does this mean that we’re at the end of the line for what effects can do? Is this all there is? Don’t bet on it. When the right engineers (or musicians) combine with the right hardware and software, you can bet on some very, scary stuff. Imagine combining SurroundSound, killer tube amp sound, and easy-to-tweak complex samples, and you begin to understand what the future has in store.