Question about gear during a 1970 show

[TheGreenStrat]

I cannot remember if I saw this comment on a YouTube video or somewhere else BUT, I read that there was a show where Rick Wright used a modular piece of a Moog synth during a west coast show in 1970, is this even remotely accurate? I feel like I read somewhere that he had access to a filter or something during one of those shows.

[Alanko]

Intriguing and entirely possible. Pink Floyd used fairly minimal gear to make some interesting and abstract sounds in 1970. Bands like the Grateful Dead were labelled psychedelic, but didn't use abstract sound in the same way. I wouldn't be surprised if Bob Moog, or somebody close to him, tried to get their gear on stages with more out-there bands.


On an unrelated note, I was listening to the Sheffield 1970 gig. During Alan's Pschedelic Breakfast, Dave is using a tape echo setup with much longer delay times than his Binson would allow. At a guess he borrowed a Maestro Echoplex or similar for this performance, but who really knows what the story is!

[TheGreenStrat]

I always wondered if he just used the longest delay setting on the Binson but you may be correct that it was another machine potentially.

[Blackstrat]

I think he briefly used a WEM thing for a few shows. Possibly something like this? http://wem-owners.com/miscellaneous/hand-ful-synth/

[TheGreenStrat]

Nice, if anyone knows which shows Rick used this that would be cool.

[Alanko]

Back in the Yeesh era I made a thread on the WEM Handful synth. I reckon it provides the strange sounds heard in the 1968 BBC version of Interstellar Overdrive. Rick also jabs random buttons on one during the Belgian promo video for Corporal Clegg.

Check out 2:56. The buzzy high-pitched oscillating sounds are the WEM, over Roger's usual bass stuff.

https://youtu.be/wlgNZsbUy5Q?si=xbIqnkr5yeKdvUYW

[TheGreenStrat]

That’s true! I always wondered what that WEM box was in the Clegg video. That also explains those sounds in that version of IO. I did some research into the box, I wish they made more of these back then. Now of course there’s tons of little gizmos like this but back then not so much. Thanks for the details!

[Blackstrat]

all I can hear over Roggo's bass stuff is Gilmour playing squeaky slide guitar right up the dusty end?

[Alanko]

Regarding Binsons, I think the longest delay time 'out the box' was around 360 milliseconds. Some places, like Soundgas, offer resto-modded Echorecs with speed controls that let you get longer delay times, but the fidelity drops quite quickly. The clean multi-second delays heard on the live version of Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast maybe came from some sort of experimental reel-to-reel setup or similar, influenced or created by Ron Geesin.


On a different note, you can see and hear Edgar Broughton using a WEM Handful here: https://youtu.be/ZLVVrabhEIk?si=tTZnuT7QufhT0pP0

[TheGreenStrat]

That’s what I was thinking was an additional reel to reel with the erase head removed and tape allowed into it.

[JerryIsBored]

Did the Echoplex tape delay system have longer delay times? Not sure when it came out, but it's possible they used one of those.

[TheGreenStrat]

I'm watching a demo of the Echplex that Floyd might've had access to and the longest delay doesn't sound long enough so maybe they used a Binson or some other creation. The Echorec (I believe) has a 350 ms max echo and the Echoplex has 600 ms or thereabouts. The infamous Alan's performance has a delay of at least a couple of seconds in between the guitar note and the repeat so unless there's a super duper long mode I am unaware of on the Binson I am not aware of it.

[Alanko]

Did the Echoplex tape delay system have longer delay times? Not sure when it came out, but it's possible they used one of those.

I assumed it did, but Internet Wisdom considers the longest delay times to be less than a second. Brian May modified one by giving it a longer case. Presumably this allowed the playback heads to be located physically further apart, yielding longer delays.

The other feature of at least some Echoplex models is a fairly audible low-pass filter to try and keep the hiss and noise level acceptable.

[TheGreenStrat]

The only feasible answer is David cloned himself to play both parts a second or so apart and then ditched the clone