It's time to discuss the Fender Vibratone—Fender's "Leslie" guitar speaker. The Leslie cabinet is famously known for making the swirling sound of the Hammond organ, which everyone has heard in classic soul, gospel, and blues recordings. But the Leslie is also great for guitars. I try to be a natural-tone idealist, eschewing most effects, but Leslie-style modulation is my guilty pleasure.
I first heard a Hammond organ with a Leslie via Booker T. & the M.G.'s on The Blues Brothers movie soundtrack in 1980. I think I saw that movie over a hundred times as a kid, and I memorized the dialog and could play the songs and guitar licks. The tone, groove, and melody in "Time Is Tight," with Booker's organ and Steve Cropper's guitar locking and trading, hit a nerve in me. I still consider it the best soul instrumental ever.
"I first heard a Hammond organ with a Leslie via Booker T. & the M.G.'s on The Blues Brothers movie soundtrack in 1980."
So, let me explain how this swirling sonic effect works and share how to get great tone out of Fender's rotating pseudo-Leslie. The patent for "continuous modulation by acousto-mechanical means, e.g. rotating speakers or sound deflectors" was filed in 1956 by Donald J. Leslie. Since CBS owned both Fender and Leslie in the mid-'60s, they crossed brands and introduced the Vibratone for guitarists in 1967, based on the Leslie 16. The Vibratone was equipped with a single 10", 4-ohm Jensen speaker and required an external driver amp. In front of the vertical speaker, there is a rotating, circular Styrofoam rotor, with an asymmetrical opening. As an internal motor spins the rotor, the sound waves are intermittently blocked and allowed to pass through its opening, which creates a 3D Doppler effect. The audible result is that the frequency and volume are changed as the sound exits the cabinet at three places—both sides and the top—which simultaneously creates both tremolo and vibrato effects. The rotor has two speeds: approximately 40 and 340 rotations per minute.
Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour, and Robin Trower are among the notable guitar-wielding, classic-rock proponents of the Leslie effect. Here, the author drives his Vibratone with a Bandmaster Reverb head.
Since the Vibratone speaker sits deep into the cabinet, it sounds muddy, bass-y, and not as loud as a regular cab. Swapping with a louder 12" speaker is recommended, so the Vibratone can keep up with other amps onstage. Speakers with neodymium magnets can reduce weight in the 77-pound cab. I like to use powerful 40-watt driver amps with wide EQ possibilities to get enough cut and clean volume with the Vibratone. Also, I prefer to not plug in via the cabinet's crossover coupling unit with its high-pass filter. Instead, I install an input jack on the back, simply wired directly to the speaker. Keeping things simple reduces sources of failure, and the amp's crossover introduces unnecessary complexity. Without that mod, I simply dial down the bass on the amp.
Black-panel Bandmaster, Bandmaster Reverb, and Bassman amps are great drivers for the Vibratone since they are powerful, 4-ohm rated, and have enough sparkle. Plus, they sit nicely on top of the Vibratone. I use a second combo amp—for example, a Super Reverb—with the dedicated amp driving the Vibratone. An AB/Y pedal lets me select the Vibratone alone, the Super Reverb alone, or both together. I use two microphones on the Vibratone—one on each side. They are panned oppositely in the PA, with the left microphone panned 80 percent to the left and the right panned 80 percent to the right. This creates a big swirl in the room, and the audience can hear the powerful rotating vibrato effect in stereo through the PA. You don't get this kind of full stereo vibrato in a room with a single amp and a chorus pedal.
Note the sound ports on the top and sides of the cabinet, which, along with the rotor, give the Vibratone its Doppler effect.
The only other amp vibrato effect to challenge the sound of the Vibratone appeared in Magnatone combos of the same era and continues to be part of the recently revived brand's recipe. Magnatone's frequency modulation happens in the electrical circuit, using tube gain stages with varistors, which are resistors that simply drop in resistance value as the voltage across them increases. This circuit-based vibrato is more electrically advanced, requiring more components and more tube and overall circuit maintenance. But the upside is that you can get stereo vibrato out of small and lightweight combos without lugging around a bulky speaker cabinet with its electrical motor, belt, and a rotor that requires oiling and other maintenance.
There are several modern rotating speakers that are easier to find and maintain than a vintage Vibratone or Leslie. I've also found a few good Leslie-effect pedals, like the Analog Man chorus. But they don't beat a mechanically rotating Leslie-designed Vibratone in stereo mode, IMHO. Now, I hope you are inspired to go find your swirl.
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In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”
With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
Photo by Frank White
Guitars
- Alpine white Gibson SG
- Gibson Custom Shop ES-335
- Delaney 512
- Stogie Box Blues 4-string
- Danelectro baritone
Amps
- Category 5 Andrew 2x12
- Fender Hot Rod DeVille
Effects
- Dunlop volume pedal
- Analog Man King of Tone
- JHS Mini Foot Fuzz
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Boss PS-5 Super Shifter
- Voodoo Lab Pedal Power ISO-5
Strings, Picks, & Slides
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010-.046)
- 1.0 mm picks (any brand)
- Various brass and ceramic slides
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
