Jimi Hendrix' Gear and Mods at West Coast Organ and Amp

[Tazin]

Here's a video of the SLP I modded to West Coast specs, with a (modded) JH-F1 Fuzz Face and a (modded) vintage King Vox Wah :

That sounded really good.

[daveweyer]

Just remember when you modify these FF units that the pot you use to replace the resistor values should be the same value as the two resistors you replace on the collector of Q2, i.e. 8K2, 10K, 12K, or whatever the circuit you are modifying uses as the total collector load on Q2.

Bill's clip was outstanding, and really demonstrates what I have tried to impart here, namely that if you take more of the FF signal and apply it to the output volume pot, you can get more sustain and more crunch from the input of your amp, all with the fuzz turned down. It might only take a quarter turn of the pot, even less. All it does is change the resistor divider value that was originally fixed at 330 and 8K or whatever you have.

The FF mod and the West Coast mod sound was scary close to the sound I remember from the late '60s.
Jimi would be proud.

Congratulations George for getting the server configuration worked out. What would we do without our forum???

[bill bokey]

This is Dave's way to increase the output of the transistors, before the volume stage of the fuzz. So it can deliver such gradual fuzz or drive i'd say, even without fuzz gain , or very little, between 0 and 2 as dave described jimi's fuzz. is it correct Bill ?

Yep, volume dimed and fuzz on 2.

That sounded really good.

Thanks !

Bill's clip was outstanding, and really demonstrates what I have tried to impart here, namely that if you take more of the FF signal and apply it to the output volume pot, you can get more sustain and more crunch from the input of your amp, all with the fuzz turned down. It might only take a quarter turn of the pot, even less. All it does is change the resistor divider value that was originally fixed at 330 and 8K or whatever you have.

The FF mod and the West Coast mod sound was scary close to the sound I remember from the late '60s.
Jimi would be proud.

Glad you like it Dave and thanks so much for your help !

[shakti]

This does sound really good and very interesting. I need to experiment more with the fuzz as the last part of the equation. Listening again to the BOG recordings, it sounds to me like Jimi is using the fuzz on for larger parts of the 12/31 late show (haven't got the new CD of the early show yet), but you can hear some very gradual nuances of fuzz from almost clean to a rather wild, saturated fuzz which sounds very much like a fuzzface, but with less of the splattery bottom end you usually get with a FF. The gradual control over the fuzz that you demonstrate in this clip is very, very interesting!

[Xplorer]

There's a new CD ? what's the name of it please ?

with my univibe clone this modded fuzz sounds fantastic, but i couldn't record such nice clip.
i've modded it just the way bill did. it was very motivating and simple to do.
To me, THIS was the kind of fuzz we were looking for, for the west coast amp, exactly as you described thorleif.
These BC108 are quite hendrixy, all it needed was a better way to use them. i Wonder how some other transistors would work and sound now ... different flavour ... which would be good candidates guys ? AC128 ? BC109 ? the high gain germaniums that dave used ? ( i don't remember the name ).

Btw, did you some more tweaking ? and tried the octavia ?

i wanted to post a picture on the forum but it didn't seem possible, got this message :
It was not possible to determine the dimensions of the image. Please verify that the URL you entered is correct.

so here it is :

http://i.imgur.com/AOD1QBb.jpg

[shakti]

Experience Hendrix just released the entire 1969/12/31 early show:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Machine-Jimi-H ... achine+gun

Mine is in the mail, but reviews have been uniformly excellent to raving.

Maybe a tweaked Dunlop Hendrix fuzz is the ticket? But does it get enough fuzz/saturation in this configuration?

[Xplorer]

sure ! it gets A LOT MORE fuzz and saturation .... i think i didn't even try to max the fuzz gain pot. it would be colossal ...

to me this is more than enough to produce these beautiful chaos sounds that he did :

https://youtu.be/HfZHGJxv3qQ?t=97

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwfy3r3ykpY

and thanks for the link !

[bill bokey]

http://www.deezer.com/album/14167460


Thanks shakti, I didn't know about that album. I am listening to it right now and it's very close to the sounds I got with the 'West Coast' SL and modified Fuzz Face, more so than the original BOG album.

I think you can hear when the Wah is engaged if the fuzz is on or not : the Q seems narrower when the fuzz is on. I'm not sure the amp has enough gain the way I set it up but the FF definitely has ! And that's with the fuzz control on 2 !

BTW there's some really good playing on that 'new' Fillmore album ! Ezy Rider is amazing ! Never really cared for that song until this version !

I have not yet tried with the Octavia but I will later on. The owner of the amp will send me his Fuzz Faces, Octavia, Wah and vibe clone so I can modify and tweak them. There'll definitely will be more videos then !

[Xplorer]

i've played for an hour along this new album this evening. very impressed by the quality of the recording. we already knew these versions but this mix is just perfect.
The second part of burning desire is to die for.

And i don't know what to say, you maybe won't believe me but ... this fuzz mod type is really the real deal. it cleans up like no other fuzz i've ever played, and it does what i allways wanted in a fuzz. There's this gradual kind of saturation, and it preserves the strat signal unlike a classic fuzz which use the gain pot instead of the volume pot. it changes everything. it brings this strange clean / Crunch / wilderness we were trying to understand.

If you add a really accurate Honey univibe replica or the real deal, you'll be very surprised ..
It feels like the quest for Jimi's tone is a over, but of course it's not, it's endless of course.

Now it has to be tested out there, to show the capabilities of this magic setup. Randy Hansen would be sooooo jealous ....

[daveweyer]

As promised, here is a short (sort of) story about a West Coast Wah provided to Jimi.

It was late 1968. It had been a rough year politically for a lot of folks, but it had been a good year economically for West Coast Organ and Amp Service and the Thomas Organ Company.
The Vox division of Thomas Organ was busily designing their new line of amplifiers to be called the Series Ninety, and had geared up for a new Wah Wah pedal which, in order to save money on production and insure more consistency from pedal to pedal, they intended to build in-house. Savvy marketers always, the new pedal was to have an indentation on the very front of the aluminum casting as large as the case could accommodate, to allow the application of a Vox logo, the large lettering could then be seen easily by anyone watching a concert, or any visual media reproduction of a concert, essentially giving Vox a lot of free advertising. The idea followed the same principle as the provision of the theater organ played by Bob Ralston on the Lawrence Welk show, the organ having a highly exaggerated Thomas Organ logo, clearly visible in every shot when the organ was either featured or in the background. To the delight of the Vox higher-ups, the Wah pedal had been very popular, with tens of thousands of units having moved across music dealers’ display counters. One might reasonably argue that it had been Eric Clapton, and then of course Jimi Hendrix, who made the pedal a must-have for every rock musician, and every up and coming hopeful who wanted the musical association with such hugely popular figures in the field of rock music. If you recall seeing the pedal on TV or in film, you will likely associate it with one of these stars, or other mega-acts of the day. Perhaps it was symbiotic, because what would Jimi have done without the Wah pedal?

West Coast Organ and Amplifier in the meantime was growing. They had moved from a small shop hardly a block away from Hollywood High School, to an alley-accessed second level of a building located on Melrose Avenue just off Vine, shared with Fay Peterson’s Golden West Musical Instrument Rentals. The upstairs suite sat directly over a Spanish speaking radio station. The owner of West Coast, Jerry Sanders, had been the assistant national service manager for Thomas and Vox until 1967, when he decided to open his own service business. He had been responsible for overseeing another visual marketing scheme for Vox, the entire 1966 Beatles tour, being on stage every performance to keep the solid state equipment up and running, absolutely.

I had been the Thomas field technical representative in Montana, a job I started in 1963 when I was hired by Ed Schaeffer, the rather prolific local dealer. I was only in high school at the time, but had a radio background and was building amps with along with my childhood friend Bob Hovland every chance I got. Bob and I moved down to LA in ’67 or ’68, Bob taking an engineering job with Thomas under the tutelage of Brad Plunkett, arranged partially through the goodwill of Jack Malmston, one of the organ gurus at the company. Both Bob and I had been introduced to the company hierarchy, including the president Joe Benaron, by Ed Schaeffer, and we had both had a chance to briefly discuss Thomas' plan to buy Jennings Music with Joe at the 1963 NAMM show in Chicago. (Where Bob got to know Jack Malmston and all the other organ gurus along with Stan Cutler the chief engineer) I opined one evening while sitting at a conference party table with Joe Benaron at a giant dinner party hosted by Thomas Organ for its dealers, that the only way to keep guitar players happy would be to build tube amps, and hoped Joe would listen. But he averred, insisting that solid state was more reliable, and that he had a guy, Sava Jacobsen, who could make solid state amps sound exactly like tubes and would design the new equipment, especially the driver transformer. Incidentally, the profit would be much higher on solid state equipment. I can quote Joe with reasonable accuracy on the most important issue to him, “I see three million youngsters out in middle America who see the Beatles on TV and want to own the same equipment as they are playing. There is no way Jennings could make that many tube amplifiers and get them over here for us to distribute out to that sized market in time to take advantage of the trend, besides I have a whole factory full of solid state organ amps already made.”

I certainly understood the concept but there were things about it that bugged me. I didn’t buy, for instance, that these solid state amps would sound just like tubes, having been repairing Thomas Organ amps for a year already at that time, and certainly seeing nothing remotely as alluring in them as I saw in a Jennings AC30, but you can read Sava’s statement on the Vox site where he takes credit for accomplishing that very feat, with an analysis that sounds utterly primitive by today’s standards, hubristic as well. I do have to give credit though for a reasonably good showing for a solid state output system, In fact, if you start with a good tube amp, and then use the output amp module from a Beatle 120 watt solid state head to re-amp the signal through some good Celestion or Jensen speakers, you can create an extraordinarily loud and good sounding concert amp that won't blow up just when you are hitting your stride. Still, it was that in-house hubris that couldn’t see the need for actual tubes in a guitar player’s amplifier which eventually robbed Vox of the very market it was intending to conquer. It also didn’t help that Moog and Arp showed up, giving musicians new and powerful sounds in more or less portable keyboards. The writing for home organs was on the wall, the new market was rock music. But in 1968, the end was a ways off.

When I got to LA I looked in the classifieds of one of the local papers and saw a want add for an organ and amp technician in Hollywood. I showed up for the interview and met Jerry Sanders at the front desk, now in his own business of servicing organs and amps, at a new location, and flush with enough business to have taken on a very delightful secretary named Lynette Faust. I was hired on the spot and given the absolutely wonderful deal of getting half of everything I generated fixing amps, plus a salary of $150 per week. We were now all Thomas Organ extended family, and I had a walk in welcome mat at the company; my best friend Bob was working for Jerry’s best friend Brad Plunkett, and I knew every VIP at the company, at least on a superficial level. Soon, another friend of Jerry’s, Neal Moser, would join us at West Coast, handling the guitars. Neal had been guitar final inspector at Vox, and had become good friends with Jerry there. Every one of us had been associated with Thomas. Neal cut the fret notches in Jimi’s necks for the Foxy Lady thing and installed the Tele neck on the Strat during Hendrix In The West, plus all the other guitar work for Jimi, Neal Young, and the famous and not so famous others of the “summer of love”.

With the internecine relationships between West Coast Organ and Amp and Thomas/Vox, I found I had unprecedented access to engineering expertise, and just as exciting, unbelievable availability of parts. As the Wah pedals came rolling into West Coast for all the various repairs they were known to need, I was able to perform modifications to improve their performance, based on ideas passed down to me directly from Brad Plunkett himself.
Having Brad and Bob to talk things over with and get suggestions was just amazing. Everybody at West Coast thought I was a genius! Brad would say, “just put a .22uf there, add a 47K resistor around the loop, and tell me what happens”. Those little tidbits gave me something most tech guys didn’t have back then. Brad really understood solid state electronics, Bob calls him a genius to this day.

The Wah pedal from the 1968 period has been called the “transition model” by the knowledgable builders out there because it came between the older Clyde McCoy pedal and the new model Vox was tooling up for in late 1968.
Some folks refer to that new design as the “Sepulveda model” because it was made right in Sepulveda CA in the Thomas/Vox factory with outsourced parts and circuit boards. Even though both models are called the V846, the insides are different, and the tone is too, at least marginally. Vox thought the new model sounded the best of them all, even though the variances between pedals were still all over the map. Sharp eared musicians like Jimi Hendrix could hear the difference, and talked about it. I reckoned I might be able to get a little momentum for West Coast by optimizing these pedals, especially for some of the most famous players that used West Coast Organ and Amp Service.

During that period of mods and repairs we had been using 2N3391 transistors as replacements for the 2N3900 units Vox used in their Wah pedals because you could get them with lower noise. Not only that, you could run a power supply of twice the battery voltage and not exceed the breakdown voltage of those transistors. That trick changes the equation considerably, although I am not aware that Jimi ever did that, the battery compartment was too small for one thing. At the time, Vox didn’t even separate their 2N3900s for beta for the pedals because there was not enough profit in them—basically they didn’t care how noisy they were, and of course some were good and some weren’t. Jimi noticed though, and so did a lot of other musicians.

Sometime in early 1969 I was visiting Bob at the Vox engineering department and saw some of the assemblies for the new Vox Wah pedal which was slated to arrive on the market en masse in 1970.
I had an idea that perhaps I could get the components and build one of these to give to Jimi, knowing there would be absolutely nothing on the market like it, and that it would make him the first musician in the world to use one of these in concert. It also seemed like it would be a great reputation builder for West Coast Organ and Amp, and maybe create some increased demand for mods and devices.
To that end I gathered up some of the new components, a pedal casing which had lost or never had its Vox logo on the front, the new circuit board with the Stackpole resistors and the Paktron film capacitors, a newly numbered Allen Bradley pot which Bob or Brad provided from engineering stock, a wiring harness which had been thrown into the parts bin, and a bent bottom plate with the new lettering scheme. These pedal parts were just being accumulated because the production line had not yet been fully integrated within the existing manufacturing process, I think that was all set up later in 1969. To get the rest of the parts I picked through some TDK and other inductors after hours with Bob, and got several to take with me. The 5103 inductor from TDK was really good sounding, but the values were all over the place, and to get the pedal to sound right you needed to be able to get the mh value that suited the rest of the circuit. Everything had 20% tolerances. I tried a 500mh toroid from Triad, several cup inductors from an east coast supplier, and some of the new 5103 TDK plastic enclosed inductors, Thomas had ordered several other values from TDK and would begin using them in their organs and Band Box voicing circuits.

I had only just finished putting the new pedal together when Bob Hovland called and said the Motorola rep had just been in and brought them a new transistor to try (the 2N5089) which had an hfe of up to 1500. Bob recalls the event in this email:

Dave,

When Bob Pekrul the Motorola rep for LA brought in their new low
noise transistors from the 2N5089 family in 1969, these set a new standard
for low noise, since their beta range went up into the thousands on
selected parts. The noise is just about proportional to base
current, so when you put a higher beta part (has to be a low leakage
chip) in, the noise drops in most instances as long as the input
impedance the device sees is in a region where base current is the
major contributor to noise.

If I remember correctly, these are the transistors I brought you one
day after I saw how low the noise was.

Best,

Bob

With the new devices in hand I immediately pulled the 2N3391A transistors out of the Wah pedal and installed the 2N5089 units. The results were great, and the sound of the unit seemed even sharper. I did not even bother to change the base current biasing scheme, but even lower noise could be achieved if the values were worked out for the beta of those units (about 750), and I imagined that I would do that on a future pedal. But for now, it was how quickly I could get this thing to Jimi to try out. Like many techs of the period, I wanted to keep my secrets for possible future business, or even just to create a mystique around the particular item to create musician interest, so I sanded off the small printing on the transistors, making them a mysterious unknown item. Of course, anyone could have reversed engineered the pedal and discovered what I did, but that was part and parcel of the thinking of “garage engineers” back in those days.

Thomas sorted their transistors for hfe and noise distribution, at least on the important items, and put colored dots on the top so assemblers and engineering could tell them apart. When I did the Guitar player article back in 1995 I told them about the purple dots on the top of the transistors, actually orange, green, purple, and even white, all according to current gain/noise.
Art Thompson, the author of the piece had never heard of it, and did not seem to have known what an integral part of the Jimi experience Brad Plunkett had been, in some way he may have learned through me since I worked directly for Jimi and had quite a few stories that had never been offered to the public. I told him to call Brad Plunkett because any story about Jimi’s gear would not be complete without him. I also told him to call Neal Moser, who did Jimi’s guitars and was my partner at West Coast. Art did both, but the relationship with Brad turned into a productive story telling effort over the years, perhaps you have seen the film “The Pedal That Rocked The World”. It seemed to make Brad feel good about the contributions he had made to the rock world, even though his invention was intended for something else entirely.

I mentioned to Art for his story that I had gotten a bunch of speakers for Jimi’s Marshall cabinets from Thomas (they had thousands of Rola Celestian speakers there) and that topic is still debated today on various forums, some still saying the whole Guitar Player article was a fabrication. What can you do, Guitar Player, if it is to be faulted, was only guilty of not providing text for their interviewees to fact check before publishing. I could have straightened out several details in the beginning and saved a lot of needless conjecture over the years.

So the new pedal, at least the West Coast version, used 2N5089 Motorola transistors with a beta of about 750, stock Stackpole resistors which provided 4.192 volts on the collector of Q1, and 3.3 volts on the emitter of Q2 with a new 9 volt battery, Paktron film capacitors for the signal circuitry, and a Kemet 10uf electrolytic bypass capacitor. (I obtained the Kemet 10uf capacitor from Allen Organ Company because of their reputation for using only the longest lasting parts) The inductor was a 530 mh TDK plastic encased coil, and the pot was an AB type J, 120K # 24-5103-3 with a low value exponential taper. (This pot was used in some early Clyde McCoy pedals before it had gotten the Thomas number coding) The jacks were Switchcraft models obtained from Yale Radio, and the 10K output resistor was an IRC, also obtained from Yale Radio. In the production model released in 1970, the jacks were obtained from Carter, and were black in color.

There has been a lot of discussion about the film caps from Paktron, and they have gotten a bad rap from a bunch of guitar players who have encountered Vox gear with a multitude of defective capacitors. Thomas had terrible luck with electrolytic capacitors from Temple, and that is where the horror stories originated, but it was not the Paktron caps which went bad. Even Wah expert Geoffrey Teese admits that the sound of the Paktron film caps is tough to beat, but because of the stories circulating about defective Thomas caps, he had to use Mullards in his reproduction pedals so as not to scare potential customers away. Geoffrey also states that even though he used a different inductor than the TDK 5103 in his own pedal design, that a properly tuned Wah circuit using the 5103 inductor is just so sweet. I note that a number of youtube video demonstrations of pedals using the 5103 inductor show their authors coming to the same conclusion.

So, Jimi had a never- before-seen Wah pedal in 1969, courtesy of the engineering department at Thomas Organ Company, and West Coast Organ and Amp Service. The real discussion of the provision of that pedal revolves around which concerts it appeared in during ’69 and ’70. As I have mentioned before, Jimi had a box full of Wah pedals, and I worked on every one. Likewise, Roger Mayer recalls working on 13 of Jimi’s Wah pedals. There is no reason to think either story is false, because the pedals were notoriously fragile in situations like the concerts Jimi played, and whether simply repaired or modified, they would most likely need service at either coast.
Add to that Jimi’s penchant for trying the latest invention and you have a pretty reasonable story.

I believe Jimi had three pedals which had no Vox logo on the front of the casing. A friend of Roger Mayer’s has told me that one of them was an original Clyde McCoy (you can see the printing on the bottom in some photos, and they did not have the logo on the front anyway), another was a transition model that Roger had modified, and the other one is a mystery (I believe that would be the one I made for him).
I did repair the West Coast pedal along with the equipment we fixed up for the Woodstock concert (the bottom got smashed up a bit and I pounded it back out with a hammer on the anvil of a bench vise, a new battery and cable clamp for the gear), so I know there is a pretty good chance Jimi used the pedal in that show or others of that period. He never mentioned if he absolutely used that particular pedal at Woodstock, but he did say how much he liked it. (We didn’t see much of Jimi for a while after that.) There is the West Coast sticker on that same pedal which was applied at an angle on the bottom, whether or not that was replaced when the pedal came in for repair is also unknown. There is a scratch which goes all the way across the sticker and is also in the paint underneath, at least as far as you can see without removing the sticker.

Now as you will see in the photos, there is a signature on the inside of the casing that says “Jimi ’69”. We have been around and around on whether it is Jimi’s signature or mine or someone else's at West Coast.
I have encouraged Jimi handwriting “experts” to voice their opinions on the matter, and have gotten mixed results, some saying the 6 cannot be his because it is not round enough, but others offering that the J and small m are typical of his style, especially considering that it was a difficult angle at which to print the normal flourishes. He also apparently most always dotted his small i letters, and generally left a small vertical bar on the beginnings of his m, but not always. There have even been claims that the marker pen was not around then, but I checked that out and discovered that the hardened felt tip pens showed up in 1963.
If you look really closely you can see my pencil markings on the circuit board for the transistor lead arrangement, the old transistors had a different basing scheme.

Jimi gave me the pedal in late 1970 after it had been through quite a few concerts. I repaired it again and fully intended to give it back to him as a gift, but it all ended in September, it seemed, just when the show was really getting started. By then he had accumulated plenty of the new production Vox pedals, but none yet with that particular mod from West Coast. Pedals and gear dispersed immediately as everyone involved wanted something out of the deal.
I’m pretty sure there is a quantity of Jimi gear still out there, either being hoarded, or perhaps just worshipped every day by folks who really wanted to touch that phenomenal moment in rock music evolution.

But this is the short story of that particular West Coast modded pedal as close as I can call it without some more memory jogging, luckily I have pictures to share. In fact I have re-taken some of them to get more detail.
I’ll get those up soon.

So, if I have forgotten something, or gotten the sequence wrong in some aspect or another, fire away! Oh, and forgive spell checker weirdness too, I re-read this but it’s easy to miss stuff.

If I can get Adrien or Bill to send me an MP3 audio file of their best raw guitar Jimi licks, I’ll send them through the pedal and Jimi’s amp and then post them on the forum. Maybe someone will recognize a particular sound.

[Tek465b]

nice article
i love those bits of story you provide us, its awesome. !!

Its soo great to have you around, i love that. I hope you stay with us forever .

[shakti]

Yes indeed, most interesting info and thanks for sharing! Too much for me to take in right now, will have to read over it again a few times, but all this info is very welcome. We will make of it what we want, but as bill's latest clip showed, the WC mods really do help in getting that elusive late period Hendrix tone. Think I'll have to get a Dunlop Hendrix fuzz now and mod...but how about that three transistor West Coast fuzz again...how does that differ from the modded fuzzfaces, and was it something you possibly ever assembled for Jimi? There is so much info in these threads I am losing sight of it all...

[Xplorer]

Very cool story, i didn't finish to read it yet.

anyway, here are the pictures of Jimi's Wah !! From Dave :

http://imgur.com/a/ORqKH

[daveweyer]

The picture of the little inductors is just to show the types Thomas was using at the time. You've probably heard of the "48", or stack of dimes; the inductors all had similar numbers i.e. 41, 70, 71, 51, and so on. When Thomas switched to using TDK inductors, their circuits began to have those little red plastic cases pop up here and there, that type shown on the left. The famous 5103 which was used in the Wah had a square case with four pins on the bottom, those were soldered into the circuit board so the inductor would not wobble and break off during shipping or rough handling.

[daveweyer]

While I'm busy unloading, I wanted to pass this bit on about Jimi's gear from the earliest days of the band. Jimi didn't have Marshalls or Strats. Those all came later. His earliest equipment was Hofner guitars and Guild amps, you know, those crappy things that you can't get $150.00 for on ebay.
My contention is that you can hear the Jimi Guild amp on the Experience album:

“And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, “we were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.”

' Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio – first the singles: “Hey Joe”, the inimitable “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary”, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). “I never realised quite how hard he worked,” says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role – if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule.'

So, the cheap equipment was the stuff they used in the studio.
Would anyone like to hear Jimi licks played through the Guild amp and an early FF?