Guitar Amplification in the Atkins Style
November 1966 Radio-Electronics

November 1966 Radio-Electronics [Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Radio-Electronics, published 1930-1988. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

The 1966 Radio-Electronics magazine article details an interview with guitar-playing legend Chet Atkins, RCA Victor's A&R director and legendary guitarist, focusing on guitar amplifiers and electronic effects. Atkins explains his preference for lower-wattage amps in studios to avoid microphone interference, while acknowledging younger players' love for distortion. He discusses his custom Gretsch guitars, pickup placements for tonal variety, and experiments with frequency dividers to mimic bass or saxophone sounds. Atkins shares his DIY approach to studio gear, including homemade reverberation units and tape-loop effects, while critiquing commercial devices like Fuzz Tone. He highlights RCA's advanced EMT steel-plate reverb systems and Nashville's recording techniques, such as close-miking amps and using isolation booths. The piece captures Atkins' technical ingenuity, from modifying amplifiers to building his own echo chambers, while offering insights into mid-60s studio innovation and the balance between electronic experimentation and musical taste. Chet Atkins and Les Paul duet.

Guitar Amplification in the Atkins Style

By Forest H. Belt, Editor

"For a really meaningful story on guitar amplifiers and special effects, we should talk to an expert - someone who knows a lot about both."

That is part of a conversation that led me a few days later to be jetting my way to Nashville, Tenn., music-making center of the United States and headquarters of Chester B. (Chet) Atkins, the world's top guitarist.

Chet Atkins was a natural choice. As well as being master of the guitar, he is an expert in the electronics of guitars and recording. He's so good, in fact, that he's the artist and repertoire (A&R) director for RCA Victor Records in Nashville.

Photographer and art director Harry Schlack was with me, to shoot pictures for the story and hopefully to get a cover photo. We met Chet in his spacious and comfortable office in the new RCA Victor Recording Studios building a few blocks from busy downtown Nashville. He welcomed us and put us at ease with the real warmth of a true Southerner. A tall, quiet man, modest - even vaguely shy - he held a short cigar between his first two fingers, like a cigarette, and puffed it unobtrusively from time to time.

Chet settled into an upholstered desk chair and made small talk while I plugged the mike into my tape recorder. He assured us he'd do whatever he could to help develop a good guitar-amplifier story for Radio-Electronics readers.

My first question was, "Do you have some preference regarding the output power of an amplifier you use with a guitar?"

"Well, that depends. In the recording studio, you don't need much power. If you play too loud you get in all the other microphones, and the recording engineer can't control it.

"At shows, if you use the public address system - that is, if you put your amplifier on a mike - you don't necessarily need a large amp." Chet puffed twice on his cigar, and continued: "But most of the kids don't do that. They get a lot of watts and a lot of speakers, and turn it up pretty loud. If it distorts, let it go. In fact, the kids seem to like a little distortion nowadays."

"Even in their singing," I joked. "Yeah," Chet responded, and we both laughed.

"For your own use, Chet, do you prefer any particular type or size of amplifier?"

Another puff on the cigar. "Oh, the one I use most has 6L6's or 5881 's, in push-pull parallel. Puts out about 50 watts, I guess. But I put a mike on it, anyway. You see, I play a 'finger' style and if you get the amp up too loud, it feeds back into the guitar pickups. So I always try to put a mike on it."

"You mean you connect the guitar to the guitar amp, then put a mike in front of the guitar-amp speakers; and play over the PA system?" I wanted to be sure.

"Yeah. That's it."

"Do you ever plug the guitar directly into the PA, or doesn't that work out very well?"

"No, I've never done that. I play concerts with Floyd Cramer and Boots Randolph all the time - we call ourselves the Festival of Music - and we've been talking about getting four or five good mikes and a bunch of plugs that will adapt to most any PA system, and using our own sound setup. I think we'd get a lot better sound if we did that. But then we'd probably have to take our own sound man, and get more involved."

"What about the speakers in a guitar amp?" I asked. "Do you have any special preference?"

"No, not really. The one I use on personal appearances has two 10-inch jobs in it. They seem to work pretty well ... a little smoother, maybe. On recordings, I use an old amp I've had for years. It's a Williamson circuit and I like the sound of it ... it's kind of a mellow sound that I like." Chet puffed again on the now-stubby cigar. "On recordings, a lot of times I don't use an amp at all. I wire into the control-board direct."

"You can do it that way?" "Yeah, if you want a lot of presence on the recording, that's a good way to get it."

Chet blinked a few times to get rid of the effects of a flashbulb. The photographer was popping them all around.

I continued, "You design your own guitars, is that right?"

"Yes, I have a few I worked out myself and the Gretsch people made them up for me. This one in the stand here behind me is a brand-new one. Just got it yesterday." (The beautiful red guitar he indicated is on this month's cover. )

Chet went on: "Also, lately I use an acoustical guitar a lot. My last couple of records were made on an acoustical."

"Acoustical in what way?"

"Well, it's a classical guitar - just the romantic type of guitar. And then, I have a guitar that came from Brazil - has a metal resonator in it, like a speaker cone. It's a terrific guitar."

"I've seen the ones with the metal cone," I said. "Fellow I used to know played one."

"Yeah? I've got one I picked up from the Indians - Los Indios Tabajaras. That's where I first heard it. It and the Brazil one, they're really great. A lot louder and real mellow-toned, penetrating. I prefer an acoustical guitar, but you can't use it on some things."

"Can't get the effects you want?" "No. And if you've got a loud drummer, forget an acoustical guitar."

The phone jangled, and I used the break to check my tape recorder. Still running. When Chet turned back, I pursued the guitar-design question.

"I've seen guitars with two, three, and even four pickups under the strings. Why so many?"

Chet answered, "Well, it's like ... when you play the guitar back close to the bridge, you get a sharper tone - more highs." He pointed on the guitar behind him. "So, you put a pickup back there and you get a lot of highs. The pickup up next to the fret board gets a lot of lows." He turned back to me. "Really, I just use one pickup most of the time - the one up next to the fingerboard, because I like a pretty sound. But most people want a variety of sounds, so they get a guitar with two or three pickups. I think you can get almost any sound you want with two pickups."

I had an idea. "Has anyone ever thought of feeding the separate pickups into separate amplifiers or channels, with tone filters to accentuate the effect of each pickup?"

"Yes, I've done that myself. I wired one up at home one time. The first three strings were on one pickup and the last three on another. I did it so I could get a lot of bass or a lot of treble whenever I wanted."

"How'd it work out?"

"I've listened to some of the records I made with that setup, and they sound pretty bad. I used too many highs. That was back when Les Paul was the thing, and he got a lot of highs. I was trying to get something similar to that. But, you know. your taste changes as you move along ..."

"As you grow older..."

"Yeah. Les Paul never played anything in bad taste in his life, but he did use a lot of highs and it's hard to do without sounding twangy."

"I've admired the pureness of your notes on records."

Chet almost blushed at the compliment. He fidgeted with slight embarrassment, and murmured, "Thank you."

I hurried on. "Do you have any special effects you like? Echoes, vibrato, reverb, that sort of thing?"

"I've fooled around with about every kind of special effect there is. About six or eight years ago, a very smart engineer friend of mine, Bob Farris, and I worked some with dividers. We had separate pickups on the fifth and sixth strings, and fed them through dividers so that when I would playa note, you could hear another note an octave lower along with it. Made it sound like a bass. We perfected that pretty well. But then we checked the patent office and found out a guy in England had done it about 1946. He was way ahead of us, so we finally forgot about it. It's home in my base-ment somewhere - sure looks like a rat's nest."

The phone rang again. Chet talked a few moments, then turned back to our conversation.

"We took this effect with the divider and filtered it ..."

"This was a frequency divider?" I interrupted.

"Yes ... and filtered it so it sounded like a bass guitar, or very similar. And we also filtered it less and got a great sax-type sound - very raspy, like a baritone sax. Funny thing, some of the boys here in town stumbled on this later because something went wrong with an amplifier - got to distorting so badly that it got the same sax-type sound. They made some hit records with it. Somebody puts out a gadget now that does it - called Fuzz Tone."

"What else have you experimented with?"

"I've fooled with a foot pedal, too. I had a foot volume control, and I wired it up so it would accentuate the highs or the lows. You can get dramatic effects with it. I used it on a couple of albums."

"How about vibrato? Do you use it for anything?"

"Vibrato? Yes, I had a good engineering friend of mine up in Illinois build me an amplitude and frequency vibrato - a thing that'll do both. We used it on some recordings here. It's a high quality thing. Has high- and low-impedance inputs on it, and you can put a voice on it ... get vibrato in the singer's voice. Or, you can put it on a sax, or trumpet."

I wondered aloud if it was patented. "No. It's just like a guitar amp, only better quality. And you can use it on any instrument. It's a phase-shift thing, actually raises and lowers the frequency slightly. It's not anything new; some companies have had it in their guitar amps."

Chet dismissed vibrato with a wave of the hand. "I also started experimenting with tape reverberation back about 1953."

"Head-to-head?"

"Yes. A friend of mine built this reverb unit into an amplifier. It was one of the first with a tape loop. I still have it, but I don't use it much any more. You can get some novel effects."

Chet paused to reminisce for a few seconds, then: "I was trying to put reverberation into an amp years ago. Of course, they have it now with the springs unit. One I had back then was a rubber medical hose about 50 feet long, with a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other. And it worked! But it was pretty big, and the novelty soon wore off and I forgot about it. It's still around somewhere."

I asked Chet, "There are other ways of getting reverberation, aren't there? Room echoes and all that?"

"Oh, yes. I have a unit I got in Italy. It uses a metal flywheel instead of tape. It doesn't flutter nearly as bad and it doesn't wear out like tape."

I asked who makes it.

"Benson, in Milano, Italy. I use mine when we play out in the open. It's great, because you don't get any natural reverberation at all outdoors."

"What about tape reverberation - does anyone use it much?"

"Yes, a lot of the boys here in town do. You know, one of the problems of tape reverberation is that it has rhythm effect that's inherent. Some people in Ohio developed a little unit, called Echo-Flex, that has an adjustable head so that you can set the distance between play-back and record heads and get it right in rhythm with any tune you're playing. You can get some great effects with it. Grady Martin uses one all the time."

"Chet, there is a guitar effect I call a 'dead-string' effect. It's done sometimes with the heel of the hand. The way it sounds on your records is so smooth, I wonder if it's electronic."

"No, I do it most of the time with my hand. Now, this guitar behind me has damper on it - with a rubber cushion on a bar. Just pull the switch and it deadens all the strings. I've never had this on my guitar before, though. It gives a good effect, because you can play without having your hand back so far. I think that's the effect you're talking about. I haven't heard about anything different."

"On some of your records, it sounds like you're chiming the guitar, but you're playing tunes. Is this chiming sound made with the pickups?"

"No, I'm actually chiming the guitar. I play a lot of chimes."

"How do you get that sound on so many notes?"

"Well, you can chime anywhere on a string, and you do it with your right hand. You pluck the string and at the same time barely touch it. For example, if the string is open, you can touch it in, the center with your left hand. If you note the string behind the first fret, that, changes the center point on the string, and you've got to move the point you touch two frets down from where you touched with the string open. Here, I'll show you ..."

And he did. Taking down the guitar behind him, he treated us to a quick concert of the finest music you'd ever hope to hear on a guitar. Chimed scales and arpeggios, tunes of pure notes with harmonic chimes to accompany them.

... As a long-time fan, I'd waited 15 years to sit like thi and watch this master perform. A thrill I won't soon forget.

Chet pulled me back to reality by explaining, "It's just like in audio equipment, You have a main tone (the fundamental) and multiples thereof (overtones and harmonics). You have the same thing on the strings. A long time ago I developed a way to play other strings and playa harmonic with them. I thought it was brand-new and original, but since then I've found things that were written 50 years ago and they did that in them.

"So ... that's how it's done," Chet said as he put the guitar back on its stand.

I watched with regret; I'd almost forgotten the interview. But ... back to business. "Chef, somebody has an effect called the 'singing guitar.' Do you know who that is and what it is?"

"You're probably talking about Pete Drake, the steel-guitar player. He ran around here for years, wanting to make his guitar talk. I told him how Alvino Rey did it years ago. l even tried it a couple of times myself, but I never was very successful with it. Anyway, I told him, 'You've got to get the sound in your mouth, and throat and form the words" with your lips.' So he talked with some other people, and then he went over here and bought a piece of surgical hose and a speaker driver and put one end of the hose over the driver and the other end back in the side of his mouth and it works great! He makes albums and sings the songs on the steel guitar, and is very successful with it."

"Yes," I said. "I've heard it's really an unusual effect."

"Sure is. It's very good. He also uses it to get 'doo-wah' effects on rock-and-roll records. And he can make a guitar sound like a horn or anything. It isn't the way Alvino did it, but it sure is successful."

I had still another question about special effects: "On an organ, there are all sorts of ways to change the sound to mimic almost any instrument. Are there any electronic ways of doing this with a guitar?"

"Yes, there are. You can do it with dividers, like I was talking about before."

"The frequency dividers?"

"Yes, and with multipliers and filters. There were some guys here from California the other day. They had developed the same thing my engineer friend and I had worked on a long time ago. But they'd developed it to a very high degree. And theirs is transistorized - ours was so bulky with the tubes and all. It'd be fine for studio work. It has a beautiful organ effect. But you know, it's not a guitar any more: it's an organ, because it sounds like one. Except when you push and bend the notes, and then it's a cross between a guitar and organ."

"And they did it with dividers, filters and multipliers?"

"Yes. They had separate microphones on each string, which you've got to have with dividers. They had it developed to a high degree."

I decided to turn the subject back to Chet himself. "I understand you have a studio and workshop at home. Did you do your own design and wiring?"

"Yeah, and it's pretty messy. I won't let anybody see it. It's pretty bad."

"So's my lab in New York," I admitted.

"My stuff is pretty well matched, though. I don't get much distortion. It works."

"I'd say that's the important thing." "Yes. As long as it sounds all right, I hide the wires and let it work."

"What's in your studio?"

"I have an old RCA console that was built for radio stations. Since then, they've developed circuits a lot better, so I've rewired it. And I built a new power amplifier and a new line amplifier. The line amplifier has a limiter in it that I copied from a unit I borrowed; it works very well."

"You punched the chassis, wired it, and all?"

"Yes. If I've got a schematic, I can build 'most anything."

"You mentioned earlier having some low-impedance pickups. Guitar amplifiers have high-impedance inputs usually. Do you just plug them in and ignore impedances or do you match them?"

"Well, the amp I used them with had a 50-ohm mike input; I just plugged into that. But when I wanted to plug into anything else, high impedance, I used a matching transformer."

"Like this one, maybe?" I showed him the one in the mike lead of my portable tape recorder.

"Yeah. Say, they are making them smaller now. The one I used was a great big fellow. I just taped some wires to it and dragged it along the floor!"

"Tell me more about your studio at home."

"Well, it's just a little room in the basement. I have a couple of Ampex tape recorders, a three-channel for stereo and a full-track mono. I have some equalizers I built. I use a couple of big Altec-Lansing theater speakers. And I have some VU meters, tape erasers, and vtvm's and test equipment of various kinds - a distortion analyzer and audio generators. I have a lot of fun down there."

"Do you repair your own studio equipment?"

"Oh, yes. I check all of the things out with the distortion analyzer and audio generator every once in a while to make sure they're up to specifications. If they aren't, I try to find out what's wrong. I'm usually able to fix them."

Chet looked around, probably for another cigar, gave up and went on talking.

"I have an echo room at home, too. It works very well, but not as good as our echoes here at the studio. So, if I record anything at home I just bring it in and remix it and add the echo here. My room could be mellowed to give a good echo, but my wife's always putting a chair in there, or something." He grinned.

I asked, "How do you make an echo room, acoustically?"

"Well," he answered, "when we built the house, we had this vacant space in the full basement. So I said, 'Plaster that, and varnish it, smooth it down real smooth.' Turned out to be a pretty good echo room."

"What size is it?"

"About 14 by 16, I guess."

"That gives a pretty good length of reverberation." I said.

"Yes, but it's square, and it shouldn't be for a good echo chamber. You get standing waves. The walls shouldn't be square. What do they call that, when they're not square? There's a word for it."

"Splayed walls?" I volunteered.

"Where no two surfaces are parallel?"

"Yeah, some kind of screwed-up rectangle."

"Speaking of acoustics, you said that when you're recording you use the guitar amp and put a studio mike in front of it."

"That's right," Chet agreed. "Doesn't that introduce a certain amount of studio reverberation?"

"To some degree. But not too much, because our studios are fairly dead. Not completely dead, because then the musicians can't get any feeling going and they lose interest. Some of the musicians on our recording sessions add the reverb in their amps. but I prefer the studio reverberation myself."

"You mean just space the mike far enough from the amplifier to get the studio reverberation you want?"

"Yeah, but not necessarily. We have some German echo units that add a real good reverb effect, so we can leave the mike pretty close to the amp, 6 or 8 inches away."

"What are those German units?" "They're called EMT units, stands for some German word [Electromess-technik]. Each one is a big sheet of steel suspended by springs inside a big crate. At one end is a driver and at the other is a pickup. It's about as big as a bedspring stood upright - about 6 feet high, 8 feet long, and 8 inches thick. It's a great echoer. as good as any room, I think. We altered ours a little, and they work great. We have six or eight of them."

"Don't you have regular echo rooms?"

"Yes, we have three, but we don't use them too much yet. We've only been in this building a short time and haven't had time to experiment with everything yet. "

"So you use these EMT units for echo."

"That's right. We had to suspend them from the ceiling by rubber things because noise from the air conditioning was getting into them. We were getting a low-frequency rumble in the mixing."

"I hadn't thought of getting reverberation or echo by vibrating steel and picking up the vibration after the delay of moving through the steel."

"It's very expensive. You won't see them in any homes. They cost a couple thousand or more I suppose, by the time you install them."

"What else do you think would interest our readers about your RCA studios here?" I asked, leading toward an ending.

"Well, we use condenser microphones, mostly. Of course, on the bass fiddle we use an RCA model 44 ribbon mike, because you don't need a lot of highs.

"Our mixing console is 15 or 20 channels, all transistorized. And we have all sorts of tape recorders - a four-channel, a bunch of three-track stereo machines, some mono units, and some two-tracks.

"We also have a little isolation room in the studio where we can put a singer who sings so softly that the band gets into his mike too much. Seldom use it: I think the last guy we used it on was Vic Damone. I think Sinatra uses something like that, too.

"We have one of the largest studios in the country - 75 x 50 x 35 feet. If we want a smaller sound, we have these baffles 8 feet high and 10 feet wide. We move them around and isolate one instrument or one microphone from another.

"We don't have much trouble with outside noise, although we have busy streets on both sides of us. Once in a while we've had electrical storms with thunder so loud we'd have to do another take."

I interjected, "Does the studio have its own power system?"

"No, but we use voltage regulators on all the equipment. We used to blow a lot of fuses, so we added regulators."

"One more thing, Chet. I've heard that you record your own part of an album, alone, at home, and then add it to what's done in the studio by the other musicians."

"That has never been the rule. I do it sometimes when my playing doesn't satisfy me. I'm on the center track of the three-track stereo machines, so if I want to improve on my part I can. With the self-sync method Ampex utilizes, you can play back and record at the same time. I'll take a tape and do my part over if I don't like what I did.

"It's a great thing to be able to do that, because I'm a pretty shy person. If someone walks in while I'm recording and I think maybe he doesn't dig me ... well, it's like your golf game: somebody says something and your swing goes all to hell.

"I do my recording separately once in a while, but to no great extent any more. Guess I'm getting a little more confidence or something."

And I added, "With good reason."