The Birth of Jimi's Sound

Effects pioneer Roger Mayer tells Jamie Dickson that Hendrix’s gear choices were shaped by budget as much as tone

- Jamie Dickson

There’s a thriving market for gear that emulates the tones of famous guitarists – and few players’ tones have been so widely emulated as that of Jimi Hendrix. Roger Mayer knows a bit more than the average pedal-maker about that subject, however. As a young electronics engineer with an interest in music, Roger struck up a friendship with Hendrix shortly after Jimi arrived in the UK in late 1966. This relationship saw Roger become Jimi’s technical adviser on guitar tone and the nascent world of effects pedals.

“I met Jimi a few days after my 21st birthday in January 1967,” Roger recalls. “I spoke to him straight after a gig and told him about a new effect I was working on, which was the Octavia, and he suggested I come down to a performance about two weeks later at the Chislehurst Caves in Kent near Bromley. That’s where Jimi tried out the Octavia in the dressing room and he really liked it.

“He said, ‘Come down to this club in Windsor, called the Ricky-Tick, and afterwards we’re going to Olympic Sound Studios and we’re going to do overdubs for a couple of new singles that I’m making, right?’ One was Purple Haze and the other one was Fire. We became friends and the rest, as they say, is history.”

The Octavia’s otherworldly sound was unlike anything else available at that time and, unlike today, creating strikingly new sounds wasn’t seen as a leftfield pursuit but the main goal of effects designers.