Tommy Bolin

Emote with Your Echoplex Speaking of innovative, Bolin even figured out a way to “play” his Echoplex that went way beyond the norm. “The Echoplex was almost like another instrument to him,” says Johnnie. “He actually had two of them mounted on a podium. He would use the echo as part of the solo or to end the solo, but he didn’t need it to disguise anything. He had it down to where he knew how to get all kinds of rhythms out of it.” One of Bolin’s favorite Echoplex tricks was to preset an eighth-note, eighth-note triplet, or sixteenth-note rhythmic delay time, dime the “repeat” knob, then click it on for the last note of a phrase to produce a quasi-dub effect. (Fact: TB was a reggae fanatic.) He also loved to let the signal run away into regeneration feedback while he simultaneously manipulated the playback head to either change pitch or cause all kinds of multi-speed regeneration mayhem. (The Echoplex playback head is mounted on a manually adjustable horizontal slider as you face the box.) You can hear this in action on Cobham’s “Quadrant 4” (Spectrum), Mouzon’s “Golden Rainbows” and “Nitroglycerine” (from Mind Transplant), and the killer live versions of “Post Toastee” and “Hard Chargin’ Woman” (a mind-boggling solo where, at 6:12, Bolin actually trades “twos” with his echo feedback!) on The Ultimate: Redux. To end the effect, Bolin could either cut off the regenerated signal abruptly with a footswitch, or by gradually backing off the repeats knob until it faded out naturally. Another fave move was to momentarily effect a totally dry solo tone with a few bars (or even half of a phrase) of prominent slapback echo, as witnessed at 3:10 into Cobham’s “Red Baron.” Realizing that only tape echo will give you the real deal (you can accomplish this with some digital delays, but we’re going old-school, Bolin-style here), set your tape or analog unit of choice to a 50-50 wet-to-dry signal ratio, dial in some preset regeneration feedback by cranking the “repeats” knob, then revisit every lick we’ve covered thus far, switching on the echo on the last note. The next choice is yours: Either cut the echo off abruptly, or head to outer space by messing with the playback head or delay time controls for as long as you like. Crazy, man, crazy!