The spring reverb, and the fault nobody could design out

In 1959 the Hammond Organ Company put a new reverb on the market. Smaller, cheaper, and the springs hung from a T-shaped frame like a necklace.

It worked. It also had one flaw. Knock the cabinet and the springs banged into each other and into the frame, and the speakers let out a crash like thunder.

The company that built it still writes about the problem with something close to irritation, because in the 1950s a thunderclap wasn’t part of the act and it certainly wasn’t welcome in grandma’s living room. Fifteen years later, across the Gulf of Mexico, that noise stopped being a fault.

A fake room inside a cabinet

The first Hammond organ appeared in 1935. Buyers wanted the sound they knew from church. A carpeted room with heavy curtains gave them nothing of the kind, so Laurens Hammond went looking elsewhere.

Bell Labs had built an electromechanical device to simulate the single delay of a long-distance call. Two springs carried the signal, four more damped and centred it, and one of them ended in a short tube of oil, where the amount of oil set the decay.

He modified it to make many echoes rather than one.

The application went in on 15 July 1939. It was granted on 4 February 1941, under a title that gives nothing away, Electrical musical instrument.

The purpose is spelled out in the patent itself. The system has to alter the signal the way an auditorium with the best reverberation characteristics for that music would alter it, which is a long way of saying build me a church I can keep in a cabinet.

Everything else is hardware, measured to the thousandth of an inch. Wire of .030. Coils .30 in diameter, springs around 32 inches long, and a machine four feet tall that lived in the speaker cabinet.

Alan Young’s briefcase

In 1960 the thunder problem went back to the engineer who’d built the necklace in the first place. Young was a musician as well, and he took the work home with him in the evenings and at weekends.

The constraint he set himself was about size rather than sound. The thing had to fit his briefcase.

What came out was the Type 4, Hammond first and Accutronics later, and it did the one thing the necklace couldn’t manage, which was to sit inside a cabinet without announcing every knock and every scraped chair leg to the whole room. Everybody bought it.

By 1964 Hammond had run out of room to make them and moved production to Janesville, Wisconsin, and seven years after that the reverb business moved again, to a Hammond subsidiary in Geneva, Illinois, called Accutronics. The name on the tank changed. The tank didn’t.

The first buyer of note

Fender took that tank in 1961, dropped it into a valve box, model 6G15, and developed the thing with Dick Dale. The manual wasn’t aimed at guitarists alone. It listed guitar, accordion, microphone, phonograph and taped programme material.

There are three controls and one of them does the real work. Dwell decides how much signal gets pushed into the springs.

Turn it up and you get the metallic drip that ended up defining an era, which is a strange fate for a control whose entire job is to decide how hard a signal gets thrown at a piece of wire.

No Fender amp had reverb built in until the Vibroverb of 1963, and the standalone box stayed in the catalogue until 1966.

Listen while you read

Kingston, same box, different trade

King Tubby’s studio was a bungalow on Dromilly Avenue, in Waterhouse. You can list the whole inventory without pausing for breath. A four-track machine, an MCI board, a spring reverb, a tape delay, and a lathe to cut the mix straight to acetate.

What’s missing is the thing that normally makes a studio a studio. There’s no booth for musicians.

It was never a recording room. It was a room where something recorded somewhere else got taken apart and put back together in a different order, and where a piece of gear was worth exactly as much as whatever you could make it do and not a penny more.

The crash that Hammond spent 1959 trying to design out is, in a room like that, a percussion instrument you already own. Nobody has to invent it. It’s sitting in the cabinet, and it becomes available the moment you stop treating the box as an appliance.

The man who was there tells it differently

The convenient version of this story has a brand name making the sound, and the brand name people repeat is Fisher. Someone who mixed in that room is blunt about it.

Hopeton Overton Brown, known to everyone as Scientist, learned the job there as a teenager, and in March 2020 he sat down with Geoff Stanfield for Tape Op and got asked about exactly this kind of gear myth.

There was a Fisher reverb there, and I mixed two songs on it, but the reason I didn’t mix any other songs on it was because it sounded noisy. It didn’t sound good. So, this whole concept that, “Oh, there was a Fisher reverb on it,” yeah, but I didn’t use that on any of the mixes. I developed techniques using a console to get the reverb to sound like that.

The same goes for the other half of that sound. Plenty of listeners heard a phaser. It was the high-pass filter on the board, and Scientist reckons that filter, dropped into any other console, simply wouldn’t work.

We spent an afternoon passing the records around, trying to hear where the spring ends and the hand begins. We didn’t agree. We still don’t.

There’s a small joke buried in all this. The record Scientist names as the one stuck in everybody’s head, Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, isn’t on the streaming services today. The spring travelled further than the catalogue did.

What is left of the spring

Line the journey up and it’s short. A simulated telephone delay becomes a fake church for the living room, then a briefcase, then a box beside a guitar amp, then a piece of furniture in a room in Waterhouse.

At every step somebody used the object for something nobody had planned. Only at the last step did the fault stop being a fault, and the box hadn’t changed at all.