Michael Gregory Jackson, putting his Superman into it, onstage with his Stratocaster Deluxe.
During the climax of the final piece of an ensemble concert held at a gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson climbed up a stepladder so tall that an acrophobic would have a heart attack just looking at it. Once high up in the sky, Jackson let loose a bucket of ping-pong balls in the direction of the audience. “Kinetic motion, sonically beautiful, startling, if not shocking,” recalls Jackson, “The concept was to break and disturb the plane and formality—the distance between the performers and the audience. To add a little mayhem and surprise. It also sounded great.”
Even as a youth, Jackson already had a rebellious nature. “I ran away from home to see Led Zeppelin’s first American tour. I knew I wasn’t going to get permission to go, but I had to go,” says Jackson. “It was as good as I thought it was going to be. It was great. You know what I mean? They were this incredible band and it was no frills back then. They didn’t have the whole giant stage. They were just four guys up there playing music. That’s my foundation.”
Jackson’s musical horizon has significantly broadened over the decades, to the point where it now defies categorization. Vernon Reid has noted, “Michael Gregory Jackson has always cut a singular musical path on his journey through the many genres that have been his wheelhouse, through many schools of jazz, through alternative rock, and even avant-folk.” Other luminaries like Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, and Nels Cline have also sung Jackson’s praises. Unfortunately, the more outside the box you are, the harder it is to achieve mainstream notoriety. Jackson has largely remained an unsung guitar hero for decades.
Michael Gregory Jackson - "Prelueoionti" [Excerpt from the album 'Electric Git Box']
The Pathway to a Unique Musical Vision
Originally wanting to be a drummer, Jackson picked up the guitar at age 7 at his father’s urging. He took lessons at the local music store until he was around 14, and by that point he was already impressing audiences daily in his school’s expansive courtyard. In addition to Zeppelin, his early influences were classic rock acts like Hendrix and Eric Clapton. (“Clapton is a bad word these days,” jokes Jackson.) He later got turned on to jazz giants like Wes Montgomery and Grant Green before veering off and checking out more obscure artists. “I was always attracted to different music and still am to this day. My influences are definitely not only guitar players, by any means. I’m really influenced by drummers, saxophone players, and pianists. From the age of maybe about 12 or so, I would buy two records a week completely just based on the cover art. I would not know what the music was. So, one week I’d buy Tauhid by [saxophonist] Pharoah Sanders and the other album would be [rock band] Blue Cheer. And then I would also go to the library and take out all the Nonesuch recordings and anything else that struck my fancy—like Stockhausen and John Cage. There’s nothing that I won’t listen to. I don’t like everything, but I’ll listen to it. Of course, I have my mainstays. A Love Supreme [by John Coltrane] is my Sunday morning music. To this day, I listen to it every, every Sunday. The expansive feeling, emotion, and the meditative quality of that music are really attractive to me.”
A revelation led Jackson to follow and stay true to his own musical path. “I realized very early on that I had something to say, and I wasn’t going to get to the point where I could say it by emulating someone else. I knew that Wes Montgomery was amazing, but I knew I wasn’t going to take the kind of time it took for me to work on that style of music, even though I loved it. I just felt like there’s one Wes Montgomery, there’s one Miles Davis, there’s one John Coltrane, and on and on. So, I had no desire to occupy that particular space.”
I was putting my Superman as opposed to my Clark Kent into it, you know?”
Jackson’s musical inclinations have always reflected an uncommon eclecticism. In the ’70s, he immersed himself in the NYC loft-jazz scene. Not the famed loft scene with jazz giants Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman, and Steve Grossman, but its counterpart: the avant-garde jazz scene with the likes of Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake, and Anthony Braxton. But playing free jazz was only one facet of Jackson’s musical personality. Simultaneously, he also enjoyed and pursued other musical interests.
In 1979, he landed a deal with Arista Records as an R&B artist and recorded Gifts. Jackson’s rebellious spirit soon came to the forefront. “After Heart & Center, my second record for Arista, I thought that I’d have a deal quickly, as I knew a lot of record people. I was meeting with Clive Davis and he wanted me to be an R&B singer, which I am, but at that particular point in time, that’s not what I was interested in,” recalls Jackson. “I was told if I wanted to play jazz or R&B they would sign me, but they would not sign me playing so-called ‘rock’ music.” In those days, the music business was extremely segregated, and record labels strictly cast white artists as rockers. The record companies pigeonholed Jackson as an R&B singer, not a rock singer. Seeing no pathway for a creative outlet, Jackson asked to be released from Arista Records.
TIDBIT: “It was kind of a fight to play the music because some of it’s difficult, but luckily I’m in touch with that part of myself,” Jackson says of his new album.
“That [being an R&B singer] wasn’t my plan at that time. I was interested in the punk-rock scene and I started my rock band, Signal,” explains Jackson.
Michael Gregory Jackson’s Signal toured extensively up and down the East Coast between 1979 and 1983. But even with a new, harder-edged focus, he was still in tune with his more introspective side. In 1982, he recorded Cowboys, Cartoons and Assorted Candy for the German label Enja, which was originally going to be a live solo performance from the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1981 but ended up being a studio album.
This period turned out to be particularly productive for Jackson. In 1982, he collaborated with the late Walter Becker of Steely Dan. That same year,Nile Rodgers heard him at Seventh Avenue South in NYC, the Brecker Brothers’ club, and proposed getting together. This meeting resulted in Situation-X, an album Rodgers produced for Island Records in 1983, which saw Jackson on lead vocals and guitar, and featured Steve Winwood on keyboards and backing vocals for the track “No Ordinary Romance.” Jackson had shortened his stage name to simply Michael Gregory for that album, to avoid confusion with the pop phenom who shared the same name.
Michael Gregory Jackson’s Gear
A 1959 Gibson SG and a 2006 Fender Stratocaster Deluxe are Michael Gregory Jackson’s two main instruments.
Photo by Gillian Doyle
Guitars
- 1959 Gibson SG
- 2006 Fender Stratocaster Deluxe
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010–.046)
- V-Picks Medium
Amps
- Polytone Mini Brute with Eminence Texas Heat speaker
Effects
- Pigtronix Echolution
- Pigtronix Disnortion
- Modified Boss DS-1
- DigiTech Supernatural
Jackson was very prolific in his rock explorations. At times, he would write five songs a day. But past Situation-X, he couldn’t get Island Records to record and promote another rock album. Disillusioned, Jackson left the music business and took on work helping people with disabilities.
The Healing Power of the Git-Box
In 1988, Jackson returned to the music business with an RCA/BMG album called What to Where. He has since rekindled his passion for improvised music and formed Michael Gregory Jackson’s Clarity Quartet and Trio, among other pursuits.
“The concept with that particular band is to make the songs as concise and powerful as possible within four to five minutes,” Jackson explains. “You hit the ground running. Obviously, there are times when we do a long-term build up into something, but sometimes I just really enjoy getting to it right away. That’s the way playing solo is. I’m not going to generally play a piece for 10 minutes—not that I couldn’t—unless it’s really happening for me at the time. So, I try and make the pieces concise, powerful statements. And structurally, when I’m playing solo, I can move the time around. I can slow down. I can speed up. I can do all these things. ’Cause I have the freedom to do that.”
Jackson’s latest release, Electric Git Box, is an honest reflection of the strife that weighed heavily on the guitarist during the period of the recording. It was a pivotal time in his life. He had made the trip from the East Coast to the West several times a year to escape the cold and had finally decided to permanently relocate from Maine to California. After about six months staying in Airbnbs, Jackson finally found a home in Pasadena. Then, abouttwo months later, just as he was about to immerse himself in the new scene, Covid hit.
Structurally, when I’m playing solo, I can move the time around. I can slow down. I can speed up. ’Cause I have the freedom to do that.
Jackson fell into a deep funk and found it hard to reinvigorate his musical passion. “Maybe a year or more into Covid, I was not feeling that great,” recalls Jackson. “I wasn’t feeling like playing music. I was pretty stressed out by all that was happening—between Covid and the police killings of black people. You know, I was in shock. That first year, especially, was particularly rough and it was a lot to grapple with. When you have things in you and they’re intense, sometimes painful things, sometimes the urge is you don’t feel like letting them out or talking about them. I really had to go inside and do some work on feeling better about things and feeling motivated to play and make music.”
As his spirits slowly lifted, he started picking up his git boxes (Jackson’s endearing term for his guitars) again. He was asked to do some streaming concerts and that kickstarted his musical reawakening. “I decided that I would record the music with some of the edge and angst I was feeling,” says Jackson, who found the timbre of an overdriven guitar sound instrumental in expressing his inner void. “It’s not like I’m playing heavy-metal distorted guitar. It’s a kind of distortion that’s based on blues distortion. Whether it be a harmonica or a guitar, there’s a certain overdriven edge to the music, because a lot of the music is really coming from that expanse of black music. The culture is historical, and the depth of that music is incredible. For me, this was very, very personal music that I really was feeling. I was putting my Superman as opposed to my Clark Kent into it, you know?”
Electric Git Box was recorded over a three-day period and features reworked solo arrangements of Jackson’s earlier compositions, in addition to some new songs. Unlike Jackson’s previous solo guitar release, Cowboys, Cartoons and Assorted Candy, there areno overdubs or loops on Electric Git Box.
Jackson circa 1988, when he returned to the music business after a hiatus with the album What to Where.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
Other than slight delay and reverb, it’s pure-toned solo guitar, which is an extremely difficult format to succeed with. Even the late, great Jim Hall has remarked that solo guitar albums can tend to get boring fast. Electric Git Box is a compelling listen, not because of any Joe Pass-style fretboard wizardry, but because of its undeniable raw emotion and the explicit heart-on-sleeve expression of Jackson’s inner turbulence.
It is akin to a public viewing of emotional surgery, with Jackson’s git box being the only doctor capable of mending his wounds. “I was really feeling it intensely and my feelings were very, very on the surface,” he admits. “It was kind of a fight to play the music because some of it’s difficult, but luckily I’m in touch with that part of myself. I was really in the right place to convey what I was feeling. It’s real and raw, but it’s also with the intensity, fire, and emotional push that I really wasn’t going to keep bottled up. It was really liberating, and it was really saying, ‘I am free. I am powerful. I can say what I want to say.’
“Music is liberation. I am free. It’s not like I don't face what I face here in this country—systemic racism, and all of that. And you know that’s not designed to support me, exactly. So, I, we, have to find ways to live our lives and make our lives enjoyable and functional, and not just be eliminated by that, you know? ’Cause that is the goal of it—to eradicate me—which is a strange thing to live with.”
Pieces like “Karen (Sweet Angel)” and “Theme-X (For Geri Allen),” with their question-and-answer phrasing between haunting chords and despair-filled melodies, explicitly reflect Jackson’s inner turmoil. The wistful, African-influenced “Prelueoionti” sees Jackson using a fingerstyle approach to make his guitar sound like a kalimba—before using his thumb to strum a funky chordal figure with a grooving bass line embedded. “Sweet Rain Blues” opens with angry double-stops, articulated with right-hand thumb and index fingers, in a call and response with fluid pentatonic runs.
The pieces on Electric Git Box reflect a fluidity of form. “I’m not really that concerned with that aspect of the music—song form. Music is a funny thing, you know. It can be analyzed according to anybody’s system. People say the blues is a 12-bar form, and I say the blues can be any form. It was never meant to be one thing and that’s it. I mean, same thing with quote unquote jazz. No one stayed in the same place—Miles or Coltrane or anybody that you’d like never stayed in the same place. There are people that stayed in similar spots because they have a style. But you know, Miles never was interested in going back and doing Sketches of Spain. He just kept moving. And that’s the inspiration for me.”
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Jackson’s Clarity Quartet is an outlet for him to explore new sounds in an ensemble context. “My goal for that quartet is to have them know what their voice is. Obviously, voices are always changing, but to have them know and be secure and strong enough in their voice that they could keep up and play with me,” says Jackson. “Because when I go out and play, I approach it as … I wouldn’t call it a battle, but I’m not leaving anything on the stage.”
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Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
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The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
The Jack White Pano Verb features unique stereo-imagine options. “[White] wanted to be able to do sort of startling things with each speaker’s content,” says Fender’s Stan Cotey.
Hooking up with Fender for the Jack White Signature Collection—which includes the Signature model hot-rod Jack White TripleCaster Telecaster and the stunning Jack White TripleSonic Acoustasonic—is as big as it gets, and this week’s announcement is proportionately epic.
The all-new Jack White Pano Verb amp looks to be one of the most forward-thinking advances in tube amps we’ve seen in … well, a very long time! Although it’s roughly inspired by three vintage Fender models—a 1964 Vibroverb, a 1960 Vibrasonic, and a 1993 Vibro-King—the Pano Verb is a rare all-new design that is poised to thrill. The single-channel stereo amp delivers 70 watts of combined power and features stereo harmonic tremolo and stereo reverb circuits, with unique routing options through the hip pair of 15" and 10" speakers. If you haven’t checked out Fender’s video announcing the amp, prepare to have your mind blown by the possibilities.
“It wasn’t based on what we could or couldn’t do, or what even was or wasn’t possible. It was just what Jack was looking to accomplish.”
Fender Vice President of Research and Development Stan Cotey, who worked closely with White to develop the prototypes for the Pano Verb, says, “There were no restrictions as far as how wild something could be. It wasn’t based on what we could or couldn’t do or what even was or wasn’t possible. It was just what Jack was looking to accomplish.” Putting those goals into action was a kick for Cotey. “I love the fact that we’re still pushing the idea of vacuum tubes and that there are things remaining to be done,” he says. “And [the Pano Verb] is a really crazy thing. It’s fun when one of the larger companies tackles a big crazy thing and releases it in a bold manner.”
We rang up Cotey to get the scoop on designing the amp as we wait to get our hands on one.
Cotey calls the Pano Verb “a really crazy thing,” and says, “It’s fun when one of the larger companies tackles a big crazy thing and releases it in a bold manner.”
The Pano Verb has a refreshingly unique and adventurous set of features.
Stan Cotey: There’s two separate power amps, there’s two separate preamps, there’s a reverb circuit. There are two separate harmonic vibrato circuits. There’s two full, separate amps in it—there’s one power supply, but everything else, there’s at least two of.
There are several different kinds of stereo interaction that could happen. The harmonic vibrato could be stereo. The reverb, even though it’s a mono tank, could be steered to the speakers differently, which kind of gives a stereo-imaging thing. So, that opens up myriad possibilities for how things could work.
How involved was Jack in the design?
Cotey: He was completely hardcore. He cared in great detail, exactly down to fine decimal points, how it worked. He was very particular about the voicing. He was very particular about the features he knew. He’s pretty studio savvy, so he had a sense of routing, how he wanted the stereo interaction of the sections to work together. He very much had an idea of stereo-ness for the amp at the outset of it. He talked early on about miking both speakers and panning them—he wanted to be able to do sort of startling things with each speaker’s content.
I think my role was to take the stuff that he wanted to do and figure out how we could do it. So, the stereo-ness of the amp, the 10" speaker versus the 15" speaker, the routing stuff you could do where the reverb goes to one speaker or both, all that stuff came from Jack.
Jack’s Vibrasonic was a touchstone for the Pano Verb.
Cotey: That amp lived with me for quite a while. He knew that he liked the harmonic tremolo.
The stereo harmonic tremolo, that’s a fairly part-intensive circuit, even in a normal brown amp. In this amp, there’s two full circuits in it, so it is literally double the parts of one of the more complicated earlier ’60s amps, just for that part of the amp. I worked out how that works. That’s two harmonic tremolos that are in sync, but opposite polarity. So, when one’s going up, the other is going down, and vice versa.
Stan Cotey is Fender’s Vice President of Guitar Research and Development and worked with White to design the prototypes for the Pano Verb.
The reverb mix on the Pano Verb is rooted in some vintage designs, but it’s handled a little differently here.
Cotey: In the video, he talked about the reverb tank in front of the amp, which forms the Vibro-King, and that he liked the idea. I think he liked the idea of having a more comprehensive, dedicated reverb circuit in an amp, not where it’s just kind of spread on the top, like margarine or something.
In a traditional Fender amp, there’s a feed that comes off the preamp circuit that goes to a driver, which is a tube and a little transformer, and that drives the reverb tank. Then, the output of the reverb tank goes into a recovery amp, a little gain stage with a tube, and that gets mixed with the output of the channel and shoved into the power amp. So, the reverb kind of occurs between the preamp and the power amp. It largely takes the tonality of the preamp on because the tone controls are upstream of it.
Jack has an old Fender amp from the early ’60s that had reverb added. I don’t know who modified it, but they actually used the second channel of the amp as the reverb return, which I think is really super clever. Then you get tone controls for the reverb. So that’s where that idea came from. He didn’t necessarily want the reverb circuit in front. He liked it between the preamp and the power amp, but he wanted to have it be more comprehensive than what would be on a typical mid-’60s Fender amplifier.
What was the most exciting feature for you to create?
The stereo harmonic tremolo was really fun, and the journey that we went on to get there was really cool. I have a tweed amp from the late ’50s from Guild that has tremolo in it, and it’s a stereo amp. It has two separate everythings. The tremolo only works on one side, and that gives the apparent sound that it’s kind of going back and forth between the speakers. We tried having just the harmonic tremolo on one side of this, and it really wanted to have two complete full circuits. So that was one of the changes that got made.
Getting the power amps to work well together was fun too. That was more about transformer and tube selection and working the power supply parts out, getting the amps where they would distort in the right way at the right times or right level. But the harmonic tremolo was definitely the elephant dancing on the bucket with the streamers going off.