
A youthful Duane Eddy poses with one of his Gretsch 6120s in this early career promotional photo.
The Gretsch 6120-bearing instrumental-rock pioneer has died at age 86, leaving behind an unmistakable sonic thumbprint and that continues to reverberate in creative music.
Instrumental rock arrived with a growl and a twang in 1958. The growl was from Link Wray’s fierce “Rumble,” which put distorted guitar on the pop charts—at No. 16—for the first time. The twang was the low, reverb-bathed, tremolo-burnished sound of Duane Eddy’s Gretsch 6120 on “Rebel Rouser,” which reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in May.
For the next 66 years, Eddy and his 6120 were inseparable, and he remained the undisputed “King of Twang,” releasing 21 albums over the next nine years that influenced the sound of guitar, from the Shadows and the Beatles to John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen to the composer Ennio Morricone, whose famed spaghetti Western soundtracks often employed a 6-string approach—big tones, big melody—plucked from the Eddy handbook.
The master of twang died on Tuesday, April 30, of complications from cancer at a hospital near his home in Franklin, Tennessee. He was 86 years old and is survived by his wife, Deed, and daughter, Jenni Eddy. At his passing, there was an outpouring of tributes from members of the guitar community. Springsteen posted a video remembering Eddy on Instagram, noting “without Duane, there’s no this,” before playing the riff from “Born to Run” on a Gretsch hollowbody. And Fogerty called Eddy “the first rock ’n’ roll guitar god.”
Eddy was born in Corning, New York, on April 26, 1938, and was playing guitar by age 5. After his family moved to Coolidge, Arizona, he formed his first band with high school friend Jimmy Delbridge, called Jimmy and Duane. They were discovered by local disc jockey Lee Hazelwood, who would become a famed singer-songwriter and producer. Hazelwood produced Eddy’s first single, 1955’s “I Want Some Lovin’,” and continued to work with Eddy into 1960.
Eddy wanted a Gretsch, in part, because of its Bigsby whammy bar. As he suspected, the device became an important part of his twangy sound.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
By ’55, 16-year-old Eddy had already begun to formulate his own style, picking out melodies on his guitar’s bass strings. Soon he would acquire his first 6120. Eddy used the instrument’s Bigsby vibrato and his low tone, saturated with reverb and tremolo, and picked the strings about four inches above the bridge to complete his distinctive sonic profile. Another element was his choice of 2x12 Magnatone amps, which he had hot-rodded to 1x15s with the output power goosed up from 65 to 100 watts. As legend has it, Eddy became so devoted to reverb that he once acquired a 2,000-gallon water tank to use as an echo chamber and placed an amp inside it during a recording session.
In 2018, when journalist Michael Ross profiled Eddy for Premier Guitar, Eddy told Ross the story of how he acquired the first of his beloved Gretsch models: “After we moved to Arizona, I bought a goldtop Les Paul for $75 in a hardware store in a little town south of Phoenix in about 1954. A guy in town made these orange-crate amps with a 12" speaker and chicken wire in the front. I used that for the first couple of years. Then, around 1957, I was at Ziggie’s Music in Phoenix looking at guitars. I looked at a White Falcon, but it was too expensive and didn’t play that great. They brought out an orange 6120 and handed it to me. It sat in there just so beautifully and the neck was a dream. I thought I would come back with my father to cosign for me. I picked up my Gibson and started out. Ziggie [Zardis] said, ‘Where you going?’ I replied, ‘I’ve got to get some dinner and go to work.’ ‘Don’t you want to take this with ya?’ he said. I said, ‘We haven’t signed anything.’ He told me, ‘It’s your guitar, take it. When your dad gets back, have him come by and sign the paperwork.’ I left there a happy camper. My dad didn’t get there for about three months.” [laughs]
“A guy in town made these orange-crate amps with a 12" speaker and chicken wire in the front. I used that for the first couple of years.”
Between 1958 and 1962, Eddy and his 6120 sound became embedded in American popular culture. On radio, “Rebel Rouser,” “Ramrod,” “Cannonball,” “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” and “Because They’re Young” became staples. And on TV, he contributed the theme to the hit show Have Gun — Will Travel (the song is 1957’s “The Ballad of Paladin,” with vocalist Johnny Western), then covered the instrumental title number Henry Mancini composed for the detective series Peter Gunn, which reached No. 27 on the charts. When Eddy revisited “Peter Gunn” with the British avant-pop band Art of Noise in 1986, it once again returned to the charts with his eminently twangy guitar in the lead. The recording was awarded a best instrumental rock Grammy the next year.
Although Eddy is mostly remembered with the 6120 in his hands, Guild made him a signature model in 1961, based on their T-500 model, and he became the first rock guitarist with an instrument bearing his name. The company made both a DE-400 and a DE-500, the latter with fancier appointments. These guitars are quite rare today, and priced between $4,000 and $6,000 on the vintage market. In later years, however, he returned to the 6120 both live and in the studio.
By 1967, when he cut the albums Tokyo Hits and The Roaring Twangies, Eddy’s musical approach had fallen from favor. But his reverberating guitar sound and tough picking was not entirely out of step with what was happening in evolutionary rock at the time. Replace Eddy’s quieter melodicism with angularity and distortion, and there’s a sonic correlation with Syd Barrett’s playing on Pink Floyd’s debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love.
Duane Eddy was among the historic American music makers who played at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans in 2014.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
“They brought out an orange 6120 and handed it to me. It sat in there just so beautifully and the neck was a dream.”
But at that point, Eddy took a 20-year break from recording as a leader. He returned after the success of his collaboration with Art of Noise, with an album called Duane Eddy. Despite being produced by Paul McCartney, Jeff Lynne, and Ry Cooder, and featuring George Harrison, McCartney, Cooder, David Lindley, James Burton, and Steve Cropper, the disc slipped into obscurity. Eddy also moved to Franklin, Tennessee, at about the same time, and played on the album Thirteen, by the legendary country singer Emmylou Harris. His final album was 2011’s Road Trip, where Eddy paid tribute to Django Reinhardt, Chet Atkins, and other influences. It also failed to catch fire.
During the past decade, Eddy also did some recordings with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, performing on the 2016 Auerbach-produced solo album by the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, Alone, and adding guitar to “Livin’ in Sin” on Auerbach’s 2017 solo album, Waiting on a Song. Coincidentally, one of the more interesting contemporary purveyors of the Eddy-influenced twangy, reverberant approach is another Auerbach-produced band, Hermanos Gutiérrez.
Today, Eddy’s sound continues to literally reverberate in guitar-based music. So do the words he shared, reflecting on his technique, with U.K-based music journalist Matt Parker in 2018: “You have to have your own sound, do it with authority, and let it all hang out. If you do that, you communicate with your guitar.”
Duane Eddy "Rebel Rouser"
Duane Eddy and his band mime a play-through of their hit “Rebel Rouser” for TV cameras in 1958.
An ode, and historical snapshot, to the tone-bar played, many-stringed thing in the room, and its place in the national musical firmament.
Blues, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, rap.… When it comes to inventing musical genres, the U.S. totally nailed it. But how about inventing instruments?
Googling “American musical instruments” yields three.
• Banjo, which is erroneously listed since Africa is its continent of origin.
• Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica, which was 37 glass bowls mounted horizontally on an iron spindle that was turned by means of a foot pedal. Sound was produced by touching the rims of the bowls with water-moistened fingers. The instrument’s popularity did not last due to the inability to amplify the volume combined with rumors that using the instrument caused both musicians and their listeners to go mad.
• Calliope, which was patented in 1855 by Joshua Stoddard. Often the size of a truck, it produces sound by sending steam through large locomotive-style whistles. Calliopes have no volume or tone control and can be heard for miles.
But Google left out the pedal steel. While there may not be a historical consensus, I was talking to fellow pedal-steel player Dave Maniscalco, and we share the theory that pedal steel is the most American instrument.
Think about it. The United States started as a DIY, let’s-try-anything country. Our culture encourages the endless pursuit of improvement on what’s come before. Curious, whimsical, impractical, explorative—that’s our DNA. And just as our music is always evolving, so are our instruments. Guitar was not invented in the U.S., but one could argue it’s being perfected here, as players from Les Paul to Van Halen kept tweaking the earlier designs, helping this one-time parlor instrument evolve into the awesome rock machine it is today.
Pedal steel evolved from lap steel, which began in Hawaii when a teenage Joseph Kekuku was walking down a road with his guitar in hand and bent over to pick up a railroad spike. When the spike inadvertently brushed the guitar’s neck and his instrument sang, Kekuku knew he had something. He worked out a tuning and technique, and then took his act to the mainland, where it exploded in popularity. Since the 1930s, artists as diverse as Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong and Pink Floyd have been using steel on their records.“The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.”
Immigrants drove new innovations and opportunities for the steel guitar by amplifying the instrument to help it compete for listeners’ ears as part of louder ensembles. Swiss-American Adolph Rickenbacker, along with George Beauchamp, developed the first electric guitar—the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 lap steel, nicknamed the Frying Pan—and a pair of Slovak-American brothers, John and Rudy Dopyera, added aluminum cones in the body of a more traditional acoustic guitar design and created resophonic axes. The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.
As the 20th century progressed and popular music reflected the more advanced harmonies of big-band jazz, the steel guitar’s tuning evolved from open A to a myriad of others, including E7, C6, and B11. Steel guitarists began playing double-, triple-, and even quadruple-necked guitars so they could incorporate different tunings.
In Indianapolis, the Harlan Brothers came up with an elegant solution to multiple tunings when they developed their Multi-Kord steel guitar, which used pedals to change the tuning of the instrument’s open strings to create chords that were previously not possible, earning a U.S. patent on August 21, 1947. In California, equipped with knowledge from building motorcycles, Paul Bigsby revolutionized the instrument with his Bigsby steel guitars. It was on one of these guitars that, in early 1954, Bud Isaacs sustained a chord and then pushed a pedal down to bend his strings up in pitch for the intro of Webb Pierce’s “Slowly.” This I–IV movement became synonymous with the pedal-steel guitar and provided a template for the role of the pedal steel in country music. Across town, church musicians in the congregation of the House of God Keith Dominion were already using the pedal steel guitar in Pentecostal services that transcended the homogeneity of Nashville’s country and Western clichés.
Pedal steels are most commonly tuned in an E9 (low to high: B–D–E–F#–G#–B–E–G#–D#–F#), which can be disorienting, with its own idiosyncratic logic containing both a b7 and major 7. It’s difficult to learn compared to other string instruments tuned to regular intervals, such as fourths and fifths, or an open chord.
Dave Maniscalco puts it like this: “The more time one sits behind it and assimilates its quirks and peculiarities, the more obvious it becomes that much like the country that birthed it, the pedal steel is better because of its contradictions. An amalgamation of wood and metal, doubling as both a musical instrument and mechanical device, the pedal steel is often complicated, confusing, and messy. Despite these contradictions, the pedal-steel guitar is a far more interesting and affecting because of its disparate influences and its complex journey to becoming America’s quintessential musical instrument.”The author dials in one of his 20-watt Sonzera amps, with an extension cabinet.
Knowing how guitar amplifiers were developed and have evolved is important to understanding why they sound the way they do when you’re plugged in.
Let’s talk about guitar amp history. I think it’s important for guitar players to have a general overview of amplifiers, so the sound makes more sense when they plug in. As far as I can figure out, guitar amps originally came from radios—although I’ve never had the opportunity to interview the inventors of the original amps. Early tube amps looked like radio boxes, and once there was an AM signal, it needed to be amplified through a speaker so you could hear it. I’m reasonably certain that other people know more about this than I do.
For me, the story of guitar amps picks up with early Fenders and Marshalls. If you look at the schematics, amplifier input, and tone control layout of an early tweed Fender Bassman, it’s clear that’s where the original Marshall JTM45 amps came from. Also, I’ve heard secondhand that the early Marshall cabinets were 8x12s, and the roadies requested that Marshall cut them in half so they became 4x12s. Similarly, 8x10 SVT cabinets were cut in half to make the now-industry-standard 4x10 bass cabinets. Our amp designer Doug Sewell and I understand that, for the early Fender amps we love, the design directed the guitar signal into half a tube, into a tone stack, into another half a tube, and the reverb would join it with another half a tube, and then there would be a phase splitter and output tubes and a transformer. (All 12AX7 tubes are really two tubes in one, so when I say a half-tube, I’m saying we’re using only the first half.) The tone stack and layout of these amps is an industry standard and have a beautiful, clean way of removing low midrange to clear up the sound of the guitar. I believe all but the first Marshalls came from a high-powered tweed Twin preamp (which was a 80-watt combo amp) and a Bassman power amp. The schematic was a little different. It was one half-tube into a full-tube cathode follower, into a more midrange-y tone stack, into the phase splitter and power tubes and output transformer. Both of these circuits have different kinds of sounds. What’s interesting is Marshall kept modifying their amps for less bass, more high midrange and treble, and more gain. In addition, master volume controls started being added by Fender and Marshall around 1976. The goal was to give more gain at less volume. Understanding these circuits has been a lifelong event for Doug and me.
Then, another designer came along by the name of Alexander Dumble. He modified the tone stack in Fender amps so you could get more bass and a different kind of midrange. Then, after the preamp, he put in a distortion circuit in a switchable in and out “loop.” In this arrangement, the distortion was like putting a distortion pedal in a loop after the tone controls. In a Fender amp, most of the distortion comes from the output section, so turning the tone controls changes the sound of the guitar, not the distortion. In a Marshall, the distortion comes before the tone controls, so when you turn the tone controls, the distortion changes. The way these amps compress and add harmonics as you turn up the gain is the game. All of these designs have real merit and are the basis of our modern tube–and then modeling—amplifiers.
Everything in these amps makes a difference. The circuits, the capacitor values and types, the resistor values and types, the power and output transformers, and the power supplies—including all those capacitor values and capacitor manufacturers.
I give you this truncated, general history to let you know that the amp business is just as complicated as the guitar business. I didn’t even mention the speakers or speaker cabinets and the artform behind those. But what’s most important is: When you plug into the amp, do you like it? And how much do you like it? Most guitar players have not played through a real Dumble or even a real blackface Deluxe Reverb or a 1966 Marshall plexi head. In a way, you’re trusting the amp designers to understand all the highly complex variations from this history, and then make a product that you love playing through. It’s daunting, but I love it. There is a complicated, deep, and rich history that has influenced and shaped how amps are made today.
Lenny Kravitz’s lead-guitar maestro shares how his scorching hit solo came together.
Hold onto your hats—Shred With Shifty is back! This time, Chris Shiflett sits down with fellow west coaster Craig Ross, who calls in from Madrid equipped with a lawsuit-era Ibanez 2393. The two buddies kick things off commiserating over an increasingly common tragedy for guitarists: losing precious gear in natural disasters. The takeaway? Don’t leave your gear in storage! Take it on the road!
Ross started out in the Los Angeles band Broken Homes, influenced by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, but his big break came when he auditioned for Lenny Kravitz. Kravitz phoned him up the next day to tell him to be at rehearsal that evening. In 1993, they cut one of their biggest hits ever, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” Ross explains that it came together from a loose, improvisatory jam in the studio—testament to the magic that can be found off-leash during studio time.
Ross recalls his rig for recording the solo, which consisted of just two items: Kravitz’s goldtop Les Paul and a tiny Gibson combo. (No fuzz or drive pedals, sorry Chris.) As Ross remembers, he was going for a Cream-era Clapton sound with the solo, which jumps between pentatonic and pentatonic major scales.
Tune in to learn how he frets and plays the song’s blistering lead bits, plus learn about what amps Ross is leaning on these days.
If you’re able to help, here are some charities aimed at assisting musicians affected by the fires in L.A:
https://guitarcenterfoundation.org
https://www.cciarts.org/relief.html
https://www.musiciansfoundation.org
https://fireaidla.org
https://www.musicares.org
https://www.sweetrelief.org
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Tobias bass guitars, beloved by bass players for nearly half a century, are back with the all-new Tobias Original Collection.
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