I've been playing with the Strymon Volante over the past week or so with my Zoom G5n set on a straight Vox AC30 tone with no other effects engaged, using the Zoom as a preamp before my Roland Cube EX. The results are very good and satisfying and I have noted that the echo volume on the Strymon is critical to getting the effect to perfection, EG too much level and the sound is dominated by echo, but too little and you don't 'feel' the sound as you would expect. It's fiddly, but very rewarding if you persist. Same goes for the tape saturation knob for how much grit you want in the actual echo, I've learned quite a bit this week.
Back in the day I know that Hank would have had big deviations on his Meazzi machines and would not be able to guarantee his same sound from one session to the next, simply because the Meazzi units are so bloody temperamental as to how the controls, drum or tape respond on a given day. Listening to all those Shadows classic hits that we all use as a yardstick for the sound, we try to copy them with every nuance, but in truth there would sometimes be a problem with his Meazzi (EG on Apache the feedback wouldn't work properly) and that resulted in no feedback added to the echo signal, which was accepted and made history. The number of times that Dick Denney was called upon to fix Hank's Meazzi at gigs and in the studio became intolerable for Dick and it culminated in Dick smashing up The troublesome Meazzi and burying it in his garden if the stories are to be believed. I can vouch for the Meazzi machines being troublesome and temperamental, as I have experienced it with my own Echomatic.
So what I am saying is, that we are all trying recreate something from a catalogue of freak events that occurred with pretty unreliable kit. I sometimes despair at getting the sound exactly as I hear it on those recordings, only to lose it the next time I set it up, simply because of anomalies with the controls and how they choose to react on any given day. What I have accepted is that the way the music is played is important and that's where we should focus. I have listened to Hank playing Apache on all the recordings I own and there are hundreds, but only the studio recording from Abbey road, the one that cut the original single, is the one with THE magic. The rest of them you can mostly tell that it's Hank, but the sound lacks that same magic of the original record, which is something I have accepted and moved on from , on the premise of, If he can't do it, we certainly won't. Later in the 1960s Hank switched to using Binson Echorec machines on stage and they were more reliable, but I didn't realise that he hadn't used the Binson on Apache (I didn't know until 1999) and we all accepted his sound as being what it was. Incidentally the Binson can't get near the Meazzi's echo pattern for Apache, but I never noticed at the time. I know now because of all the comparing I've undertaken and studied the machines and how they work, but back then I was not so well informed.
I won't begin to tell you how important Bruce's J200 part is in that tune on the original recording.
