The Technology of Jimi Hendrix

In this article, I want to focus on a weird (and super interesting) phenomenon we see in Jimi Hendrix’s career. Basically, as soon as there is a new piece of gear on the pedal market, Jimi is the first to use it on an album and the first to make it famous.

Basically, Jimi makes the gear famous. Or is the gear that makes Jimi famous? Read on to find out.

Hendrix’s Early Career

Jimi’s career basically starts in 1962 and goes through 1970. There are some pretty major events that correspond with his musical career, including 24 singles that he released in that time with R&B acts like the Isley brothers, Little Richard, and Curtis Knight. He also has four major solo releases and three Experience releases.

Jimi Hendrix was born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27th, 1942, and died September 18th, 1970. He started playing guitar at the age of 15. He was originally from Seattle, Washington. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army and trained as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. He was discharged the following year. He moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, soon after he was discharged and began playing gigs on the Chitlin Circuit, which was a network of clubs and venues based out of the southern United States. Almost immediately, Jimi earned a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band, and later as a sideman with Little Richard (whom he continued to work with through mid-1965) and Curtis Knight and the Squires.

Hendrix hadn't yet moved to England, which is an important point. A lot of people think Hendrix is English. He's not. He’s American. At this time, he played R&B and blues on the Chitlin Circuit, but he hadn’t been discovered yet. He was still just a sideman. You’ll see him in the background of a lot of photos of the Chitlin Circuit around this time.

We should note that even though Hendrix hadn’t been “discovered” on a national level, people still recognized that he had talent during his Chitlin Circuit days. Even though Jimi was a sideman, people encouraged him to go out on his own. There was a very interesting dynamic where some really influential people looked at Hendrix and said, “Hey, you should try to sing,” and he said, “I can't sing.”

Jimi finally moved to the U.K. when Linda Keith (Keith Richards’ girlfriend at the time) found him and introduced him to the guy who would become his manager: Chas Chandler, the bass player for an English R&B band called the Animals. At the time, the Animals were on an American tour. Chas wanted out of the band and he wanted to become a manager. When he met Hendrix, he saw his opportunity. Chas took Jimi to England, where he promised to make Jimi famous. Long story short: he did.

It’s a pretty wild story when you think about it: an American guy playing on the Chitlin Circuit is taken to England, becomes famous, and that's where all this starts. Jimi’s first single is “Hey Joe,” which is a cover with “Stone Free” on the B side. Then he put out his first album on May 12th, 1967, Are You Experienced, which was the first Experience record (out of three). The majority of his music through the rest of his career was done with this band. Later, there's a U.S. release called Electric Ladyland.

Jimi's career drastically follows the technology of the sixties, year by year and sound by sound. Before we go into more detail on that, however, I need to break down what I call the “Marshall factor.”

The Marshall Factor

Jim Marshall was a drummer who imported Fender products to the UK, which was a very expensive business. Two of his associates, Ken Brand and Dudley Cravens, convince him, “Hey, let's build the ’59 Fender Bassman here in the UK and put your name on it. It'd be way cheaper to sell, plus we’ll make a pile of money.” The Fender Bassman was one of his most popular imported amps at the time, and this was a pretty safe bet. So they did. They cloned it, built it, and sold it. There was one unexpected twist. The parts used in amps in London were (and are) very, very, different from the parts that Leo Fender used in California. This resulted in a unique sound for the Fender clone, and it's a pretty big part of guitar history.

The first amp Jim Marshall created was the 1962 JTM Head, and then two years later we got the 410 combo and the 212 combo. The circuit was originally intended to be used by bass players, but when you plugged into it with an electric guitar and cranked the volume, the effect could only be described as magical.

Long story short: in trying to clone the ’59 Fender Bassman, Jim Marshall inadvertently created one of the most popular pieces of gear in guitar history, the Marshall amp.

Let’s bring it back to Hendrix. What's really interesting here is that Jimi’s career started in 1966 as a solo artist, which happened to be the exact same time that the Marshall amp as we know it really took off. In 1966, Eric Clapton dropped a live record with John Mayall, affectionately called Bluesbreakers or Beano, and in doing so Eric Clapton made Marshall amps a household name with this record. Bluesbreakers is considered the greatest British blues album ever made, and Eric Clapton clearly shows that he’s playing through a JTM 45 Marshall amp in a photo on the record sleeve. Eric Clapton brought American blues to the UK in a very loud and powerful way by turning up the Marshall Bluesbreaker amp.

Now this amp was a JTM 45, which essentially is the basis of all Marshall heads. It's a modified Fender clone, a combo that Clapton used for the Bluesbreaker record. Now, Clapton left John Mayall’s band and joined Cream that same year. Later on, Clapton used Marshall stacks instead, but the artist who really popularized the Marshall stacks was -- you guessed it -- Hendrix.

Now, Jimi purchases two or three Super 100 Marshall Heads and four 4 x 12 cabinets from Jim Marshall in the fall of ’66. He’s seen using them during a short French tour, on October 13th of ’66. These were the first Jimi Hendrix Experience shows ever. So Hendrix is tracking a record, records the record with two guys from his band the Experience, buys his Marshall amps, and Hendrix's first tour is immediately after this purchase. To clarify, Jimi’s live career starts the moment he buys his first Marshall amps, and right as Eric Clapton has made the Marshall amps famous on the Bluesbreaker record.

That’s what you call good timing.

We’ll go into this in a bit more detail in “Clapton is God,” but it’s important to know that Hendrix was a huge fan of Clapton, and I mean that literally. The way that Jimi’s manager Chas Chandler (the bassist of a London band called the Animals) convinced him to get on the plane to go to London in the first place was because Chas said he could help Jimi meet Clapton in person. Clapton was Jimi’s hero. You really have to get that to understand the gravity of what happens next.

So, picture it: Hendrix finally meets Clapton. In rock’n’roll history, this is a huge moment. This is Washington crossing the Delaware. This is Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon. Chas Chandler (Jimi’s manager) convinces Clapton and the rest of the band in Cream to let Jimi play with them on stage. Jimi is still completely unknown at this point, but Clapton says, “Okay.” So Hendrix and Clapton get out on stage together, and they basically have a guitar duel.

And here’s the crazy part: Hendrix wins.

Really. Clapton, who is literally called “God” in the rock’n’roll world, plays his guitar against a young, unknown black American blues musician, and the American wins.

There's a story where Clapton's on the side of the stage after it’s all over, and he’s trying to light a cigarette, but his hands are shaking so badly he can’t get a light. He’s literally shaking because Hendrix is so incredible. It blew Clapton away. There are these really amazing dynamics where Clapton introduces the Marshall amp to the rest of the world, and then Hendrix gets the Marshall stack, starts to tour, and his primary live sound and studio sound was based around that cranked amp effect.

Here's a quote from Jimi: “I really like my old Marshall tube amp, because when it's working properly, there's nothing that can beat it, nothing in the whole world. It looks like two refrigerators hooked together.”

Just a few days before, Jimi had sat in with a band called Trinity in London. He just walked up on the stage. He didn't have an amp there, but he had his guitar and he walked over and dimed the Marshall amp and just played. He told the band, “Go into ‘Hey Joe,’” and just went for it. Everyone was stunned. Basically, every jaw in the room dropped

In England, these white musicians were playing American blues music that came from a black culture, artists like B.B. King, Muddy Waters, etc. In the middle of this movement, this black American walks onto the stage, dimes the Marshall, and plays “Hey Joe,” and he’s the real thing right there in front of them. It was a pretty amazing moment.

As a result of these two historical moments, and because Hendrix used this same gear so heavily in his records, Marshall is forever tied to Jimi’s sound.

Maestro Fuzz Tone

In May of 1966, Jimi borrowed a pedal from his bandmate: the Maestro fuzz tone, the first fuzz pedal ever created. Hendrix couldn't afford one, but he was playing in the Chitlin Circuit with Curtis Knight and the Squires, so he got to borrow this for a couple of weeks. As a result, he got his first taste of experimenting with feedback and loud sustain. Pretty soon, he was working it into his routine. Unfortunately, the band didn't like it. You have to understand that up until this point in music history, feedback was a technical error. You didn't want feedback, and you definitely didn’t create that effect with your guitar on purpose.

Jimi didn’t care. He had created this new, live sound that was really crazy, and he liked it. There's a photo of Jimi in New York City at the Cheetah Club, and you can see the Maestro Fuzz Tone sitting at his feet. So the first fuzz ever is manufactured in ’62. It reaches Hendrix four years later, and he gets his first taste of fuzz.

Here's a quote from Mike Bloomfield, who played on Bob Dylan’s records like Highway 61 Revisited and in the Mike Bloomfield Blues Band. He says the first time he saw Jimi play, he was Jimmy James and his Blue Flames, which was Jimi's original solo band in America before he went to the UK. Mike says, “I was performing with Paul Butterfield and I was the hot shot guitarist on the block. I thought I was it. I'd never heard of Hendrix. Then someone said, ‘You gotta see this guitar player with John Hammond.’ I was at the Cafe Au Go Go, and he was at the Night Owl or the Cafe Wha? I went across the street and saw him. Hendrix knew who I was. And that day, in front of my eyes, he burned me to death.

“I didn't even get my guitar out. H-bombs were going off; guided missiles were flying. I can't tell you the sounds he was getting out of his instrument. He was getting every sound I was ever to hear him get, right there in that room with a Stratocaster, a twin Fender, twin Maestro Fuzz[es], and that was it. How he did this, I wish I understood. He just got right up in my face with his guitar, and I didn't even want to pick up my guitar for the next year.”

Hendrix started his career in ’66, so this is pre-Experience Jimi. The Maestro Fuzz Tone had been out a few years, and this was his first dabble in effects pedals.

Soon after, he discovered his next gear obsession.

Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face

Jimi ends up in England in the winter of ’66, and the Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face comes out right as he shows up in London. Chas Chandler had taken him to London to become famous. The Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face was released in London, the exact moment he arrived in London. That said, no one knows exactly where and when Jimi got his first Fuzz Face.

We do know that the earliest photo of Jimi with this Fuzz Face comes from the Big Apple Club in Munich, Germany on November 8th, 1966. His playing enthralled the audience so much that they pulled him off the stage and broke the neck of his guitar. Jimi responded by grabbing the guitar and bashing it on the stage, just completely destroying it.

A lot of people say that people responded this way because he was using fuzz. It was such a new sound. It's hard for us to imagine that, because we heard fuzz and distortion growing up, but you’ve got to picture this guy, Jimi Hendrix, playing psychedelic blues in Germany. It’s completely new. It’s nuts. People have never heard this kind of stuff. This Fuzz Face pedal is a prime ingredient for the volume and crazy distortion, that feedback he’s known for, the way that he played and filled up the stage. It got him excited, and the audience too, obviously.

His first recorded track with the Fuzz Face is November 24th, 1966, the song “Love or Confusion.” Then, in June of ’68, Life magazine writer Frank Zappa told readers, “If you want to sound like Jimi, buy a finished Stratocaster, an Arbiter Fuzz Face, a Vox Wah, and four Marshall amps.” The world learned about the Fuzz Face through this article.

It’s also another perfect example of how every move Jimi made lined up with a significant technological creation in guitar. It's really, really wild.

There is one other mystery associated with Jimi’s Fuzz Faces. Jimi worked extensively with a sound tech/pedal inventor named Roger Mayer from 1967 through 1970 (we’ll hear more about him in the next section), but one important thing to note is that Roger Mayer was continually tweaking and designing effects for Jimi through his career. Roger states that he worked on several mods for these Arbiter Fuzz Faces to achieve specific sounds and needs that Jimi wanted in the live and studio environment. But these modified pedals still looked exactly the same as a standard Fuzz Face.

You have to understand that in the late ’60s, you couldn't just go buy a pedal enclosure at Guitar Center or order one on Google. Instead, Roger would take these existing enclosures, gut the circuit out, and put in his own modified versions of Fuzz Faces, his own circuits. These were all over the place. That means that when we're looking at certain pictures of Hendrix past ’67, we actually don't know what's in the case. It could be a standard Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, or it could be a completely different circuit, which Roger Mayer called the Axis Fuzz, named after Hendrix’s second record Axis: Bold as Love. The Axis Fuzz would be the primary fuzz used on that whole album, and through the end of Hendrix’s career. Even in the Axis sessions, you see pictures of Jimi using a standard Fuzz Face, but it's actually Roger Mayer's Axis Fuzz.

Roger still worked for the British military at that time, so even though he was Jimi’s sound tech, he couldn't go to every show in person. His job when he was at the shows was to collect the effects and guitars after the show was over. For that reason, a lot of the original gutted Axis fuzzes were stolen at shows where Roger didn’t come in person. We just don’t know where a lot of these custom Fuzz Faces ended up, so there's a bit of mystery as to exactly what fuzz Hendrix is playing on Axis or other recordings.

Octavia

On January 11th, 1967, Hendrix met Roger Mayer at the back of Nell's Club in Soho.

Roger was a Naval acoustic engineer who worked for the British Navy, and he had a hobby of and making guitar pedals. He had made some stuff already for Jimmy Page, who was a session player at the time (this was before Led Zeppelin), and for Jeff Beck of the Yardbirds. So, a week after meeting Hendrix at the back of Nell's, Roger goes to another show at the Chislehurst Caves and he ends up backstage with Jimi. He hands Jimi a brand new prototype and calls it the Octavia. It's something he invented.

Jimi was finishing up a full length album, but he loved this effect so much that he invited Roger over to Olympic Studios to finish up tracking the final guitar parts for his first album. So, this is after the “Hey Joe” single, and right before the first Experience record.

This effect is a big deal because Jimi liked it so much that after playing it in the back room of this gig on a small amp, he said, “Roger, meet me at the studio. I want to finish up some tracking.” And the rest is history. Jimi tracks “Purple Haze” and “Fire” using the Octavia pedal. Put on some headphones and listen to those tracks carefully; you’ll be able to hear the fuzz and a high octave above it. It's amazing. And it was the first time this effect was ever used. Hendrix ends up using it in his first record, popularizing this brand new effect.

Once again, new technology met Hendrix at a crossroads, and he took advantage of it.

Roger Mayer said that the first prototype unit was weak, and advised Jimi to use a fuzz with it. Later versions of the Octavia were revised to have the fuzz effect built into the pedal. Roger was pretty pivotal in Hendrix’s journey as a musician, so much so that Jimi called Roger Mayer “the secret of my sound” several times in interviews.

So, Jimi's Octavia era came to an end in Madison, Wisconsin on May 2nd, 1970. What’s crazy is that this pedal, this prototype, basically disappeared off the face of the earth. It's unclear whether that original prototype unit was stolen or broken, but it never entered the signal chain after May 1970. We don’t have any photographs or anything, so we have to file this one under “Unsolved Mysteries.”

We do know that Jimi was tired of playing a lot of the Experience music. He was in the middle of recording Band of Gypsys, and he just didn’t want to play songs like “Purple Haze” anymore. He was shifting into a different sound, and his gear reflected that.

Next up is one of the most iconic effects Hendrix used in his career.

Vox Crybaby Wah

Let’s backtrack a bit to February 20th, 1967. Jimi recorded “I Don't Live Today,” and this session was the first time that Hendrix used the wah effect. Not the pedal, just the effect. For this session, there was no wah pedal. The Vox Crybaby Wah, which is an iconic pedal that Hendrix used throughout his career, didn't exist yet, but there was a way of achieving that same effect with a control in your hand, which Hendrix called the hand wah.

Hendrix says that the first record where he heard the wah-wah effect was “Tales of Ulysses” from the album Disraeli Gears. He actually heard it in June 1967 as a flip side of the “Strange Brew” single by Cream. Jimi noted, “It's a very groovy sound but on Are You Experienced?, ‘I Don't Live Today,’ recorded February 20th, 1967, there's a talking wah guitar solo, but we used a hand wah, which sounds very good. We were doing it with our hands. So then Vox and this other company in the States in California, they made a foot pedal thing. We released our record about two or three days after Cream came out [with Disraeli Gears]. It was coincidental, because we didn't know anything about their record and they didn't know anything about ours.”

Long story short: completely independent of each other, Cream and Hendrix released separate records that showcased the brand new wah effect, and (again, purely by coincidence) they released these records only a few days apart. Once again, technology meets Hendrix in ’67.

There's a bunch of theories as to how Hendrix gets a hold of a wah for the first time. Some people say that in July 1967, Hendrix saw Frank Zappa playing in New York City and went and bought a wah immediately after the show.

Noel Redding (Jimi’s bass player) says Jimi got interested in the wah when they were still in London. Noel says they used to hang out at this hub of guitar shops on Charing Cross Road, and he says that a guy found out he was playing with the Experience, and he said, “We got this new thing called the Crybaby. Bring Jimi in so he can try it out!” The story goes that Jimi went to his shop, tried out the Crybaby Wah, and liked it so much he got one right then.

Honestly, though, how Hendrix actually got his first wah is a bit of a mystery. The first known photo of Hendrix using a wah is August 15, 1967 in Ann Arbor, when he was recording track two of his second album, Axis: Bold as Love. Jimi wastes no time using the wah. The first song, “EXP,” is this atmospheric/experimental track, and the second song, “Up From the Skies,” is the first real song on the album, and Hendrix showcases the wah immediately on it. Once again, technology meets Jimi Hendrix at a pivotal moment in his career, and he rolls with it.

Electro-Harmonix Big Muff / Guild Foxey Lady

Next up is the Big Muff mystery. So, Mike Matthews, the creator of Electro-Harmonix, knew Jimi back when he was Jimi James playing the Chitlin Circuit. Jimi would come through New York, and at the time Mike was actually a band promoter and would book shows. Mike Matthews was also a really great organ player / pianist back in the day, and he played in some of these rock bands in the area. He actually booked Curtis Knight and Jimi Hendrix (at the time he was known as Jimi James), and got to know a lot of these musicians. Mike is one of the guys that told Jimi, “You should sing,” and encouraged him. Mike believes he actually had a big part to play with Jimi doing his own thing, which is really cool.

So, Mike’s a promoter. He and Jimi become friends, and they’re already friends when Jimi leaves for London with his new manager to “make him famous.” And Chas Chandler (the bass player for the Animals) is as good as his word. When Jimi returns from England back to New York, he's super famous. He leaves New York as a nobody, but during that trip to London, he became a sensation almost overnight.

When Jimi comes back to America, Mike is still friends with him, and Jimi invites Mike to several recording sessions for Electric Ladyland in late ’67 through ’68. As they're tracking different things, Mike says that he walked into Manny's Music in New York City and was told, “Hey, Jimi bought your fuzz.” Now the problem here is that Mike says, “I went over to sit in on an Electric Ladyland session, and I saw Jimi recording with the Big Muff.”

Mike is specifically quoted as saying, "...I saw Jimi using it (the Big Muff) in the studio. He used to invite me to all his recording sessions when he was in New York, and one day Henry at Manny's Music [Henry Goldrich, salesman at Manny's] told me he just sold a Big Muff to Jimi, and I went down to the studio to show him [Jimi] something else - this early version of the distortion-free sustainer [eventually sold as the E-H Black Finger], and I saw he had the Big Muff on the floor of the studio. I know early on he used Fuzz Faces, but he did eventually use a Big Muff."

This story was pushed further by Electro-Harmonix in their marketing literature throughout the 1970s, claiming this as the pedal Jimi relied on for his Electric Ladyland sound.

The issue is that these sessions were recorded in ’67, ’68, but the Big Muff wasn't designed or released till ’69. So there was some logistical issue at play here, which probably comes down to Mike not remembering the years correctly.

There's another interesting factor at play. What Mike most definitely saw Jimi play in that recording session was the Guild Foxey Lady, not the Big Muff. So in ’67, ’68, when the actual tracking of Electric Ladyland was happening, the Big Muff didn't exist. But before Electro-Harmonix started, Mike was building fuzz pedals for Guild, and one of them was the Foxey Lady Fuzz. This is a Mosrite Fuzzrite clone, and this is probably what was on the floor at those recording sessions. That explains why Mike may have mistaken it for the Big Muff, since he created both pedals. It also explains why his friend at Manny’s Music would have said, “Jimi bought one of your pedals,” because he technically did.

The mystery gets even more interesting from there. There's also a photo that Eddie Kramer, the sound engineer, took from these sessions, and in it you can see a couple of pedals on the floor. One is in an unbranded prototype, so no one really knows what it is. Pretty fascinating. And then later Mitch Mitchell of the Experience released an Experience gear collection, and one of these unbranded pedals was in it. That's probably what Mike is referring to and what he actually saw.

The pickle here is that we are fairly sure that Jimmy had the Big Muff V1 later on (the 1969 model), we just don’t have a clear timetable on when it entered his rig. It would have been on the market when he came back to New York, but we have no real evidence that he actually used the Big Muff first issue. If he did, it would have been on one or more of the songs recording through the last few months of ’69 through ’70, which include: “Midnight,” “Trash Man,” “Ships Passing in the Night,” “Ezy Ryder,” “Hear My Train a Comin,” “Keep on Groovin,” “Freedom,” “With the Power of God,” “Earth Blues,” “Bleeding Heart,” “Message from Nine to the Universe (Earth Blues and Message to Love joined),” “Message to Love,” “Lover Man,” Message To The Universe,” “Izabella,” “Burning Desire,” “Easy Blues,” “Beginnings,” “Machine Gun,” “Sky Blues Today,” “Mastermind,” “Room Full Of Mirrors,” “Stepping Stone,” “Dolly Dagger,” “Them Changes,” and “Power of Soul.” So, a lot of Band of Gypsys stuff.

Shin-Ei / Honey Univibe Chorus Vibrato

There's a piece for a magazine called Record Mirror, and in it the writer, Valerie Mabbs, says Hendrix is now using a strange new effect, which he had shown her during the interview. The effect was reported to produce strange and otherworldly sounds that nobody had heard before on guitar, not even Jimi himself. Naturally, she was referring to univibe.

The first univibe pedal was released in 1968 by Shin-Ei / Honey, called the Univibe Chorus Vibrato. They also had Jax labels on some of these pedals, but it was all the same company, and they would label it different ways. What’s interesting is that the first univibe was released in ’68, but we don't hear Jimi using it until ’69. It's a bit of a mystery.

Normally, Hendrix experiments with these new effects right away, but in this case almost a year goes by until we see him with it. So for some reason, maybe touring or session work, we have no evidence and no recordings to show that Hendrix used the univibe effect until 1969. Bear in mind that a lot of this information is easy to spot, because he recorded constantly and those archives have been released with dates.

The facts are clear: until ’69, you just don't hear the univibe. And if he'd had one, he would have used it.

So, Jimi’s first use of the univibe is August 10, 1969 during a session 14 days before Woodstock. So they're in Woodstock, they're jamming, and Woodstock had a pretty hip culture. Dylan lived there, a lot of artists, the band, and Jimi is up there jamming. He’s apparently found a univibe. Now, Roger Mayer says that when the univibe first appeared, he actually modified it. “Actually all I had to do was fine tune it,” he says, “I set it up a little differently, and Jimi loved it.”

Jimi first used the univibe live on August 18th, 1969, at Woodstock, during one of his most iconic performances: “The Star Spangled Banner.” During this same show, I also noticed that Jimi had switched over to silicon Fuzz Faces instead of germanium, which is very interesting.

So, once again, Jimi Hendrix was in a prime position as a musician, he was looking for new sounds, and the univibe was released. There was a little more of a delay between the release of this effect and when Jimi started using it (in the case of the Octavia, for instance, he used the prototype before the official pedal was even released), but when he added it to his board, he single-handedly helped popularize this very odd, very unique effect. This was his career in a nutshell: every step of the way, new guitar pedal technology met Jimi Hendrix right when he needed it.

Jimi appeared later on the Dick Cavett show, which was like a Johnny Carson-style variety show, and he talks with Dick for a few minutes and then jams out to “Machine Gun” with his Woodstock band. This song was recorded a couple months later on the Band of Gypsys album, which was released March 25, 1970. It's considered the prime demonstration of what Hendrix could do with a univibe.

So we have a lot of crazy stuff happening in Hendrix’s (relatively) short career. He really gained celebrity status starting in 1966, and this continued all the way through the end of his career in 1970. You have the Fuzz Face that came out in ’66, the Vox Crybaby Wah in ’67, the Univibe in ’68, the Big Muff in ’69, all these iconic pieces of gear released within just a few years of each other that Hendrix pretty much put on the map. In most cases, Jimi is the first (or one of the first) musicians to ever record with it.

His career starts basically a couple years after the first ever fuzz pedal is made, the Maestro Fuzz Tone. You have the Big Muff possibility in ’69, right after Electric Ladyland is recorded. You have Roger Mayer, this sound tech who basically volunteers to make him completely unique pedals right off the bat. When he's in London, this kid Jim Marshall is making effects for the first time and trying them out, and Jimi (with help from Clapton) is the one who gets the product into the limelight. It's fascinating that Jimi comes along and at the exact moment of every guitar pedal, technological advancement, and invention they're on his records almost immediately.

You can’t deny that Jimi’s very short career was fueled by these effects pedals and the Marshall amp. At the end of the day, the real question is: who made who famous