This is an excerpt from my book.
Musicians used to come to Brook Street, as they had to Upper Berkeley Street, to visit, and one frequent and welcome caller was Roger Mayer.
Roger was an experimenter for the Royal Navy Scientific Service, working in the field of vibration and acoustic analysis systems.
I never completely understood what he did, I just knew that it was extremely technical and that he was a nice guy.
He and Jimi were on the same wavelength, so to speak, talking about the sorts of sounds, feedback and distortion that Jimi wanted to achieve and adapting all sorts of electronic equipment to make the guitar sound different.
I had to stand for hours with my foot on the pedal while they fiddled about with knobs and switches. Every now and then they would tell me to press the pedal, but I could never work out what they were talking about.
It irritated me in later years when I heard that people like Eddie Kramer, one of the recording engineers at Olympic Studios – had been credited with creating Jimi’s sound. I had always thought that Roger and Jimi had invented it, using what were at the time state-of-the-art electronic techniques for underwater warfare.
Unlike Eddie Kramer, Roger was a close and personal friend. He used to go down to the Speakeasy and other watering holes with Jimi, discussing all the possibilities of electronic sounds.
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