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A Tribute to Ray Butts
Dear Scotty
Moore, Bill Gwaltney, whom I stumbled upon via the net encouraged me to show this amp to you. Maybe you know that Bill Gwaltney was a friend of Ray Butts and had played together with him in a band. He was the one who aggravated Ray to built him an amp with echo. So Ray went on down and did it and Bill played the prototype with the wire-loop inside for about a year or so. Then Ray came up with the tape and so Bill owned the very first EchoSonic ever made. Actually this amp was the one Ray showed to Chet Atkins. He had to loan it from Bill for this trip to Nashville.
Well, after a few emails Bill and I became very good friends though we never met. We only have contact via email a few times a week. He´s a very nice guy. I kept him updated with every step of my work on the amp and he was fascinated. That someone this young as me (23yrs) is interested in exactly the same thing like he was back then.....and that I had to go through similar problems like Ray had to. He sometimes kind of got sentimental with the pictures setting him back on a joyride to 1953 right into the back of Ray´s music shop. His wife June wrote me that he was very pleased with me updating him about my amp and all the questions about Ray and the old times that I had. He was very proud and showed his kids and grandchildren that I am working on something he had helped to invent back then. OK, now you know what it´s all about and I can tell you something about me. My name's Lorenz and I'm a 23 year old dentistry student. I live in southern Germany and my passion is music. I played the bullfiddle since I was 8 yrs. old and started to pick the guitar a few years ago. I also like to mess around with tubes. I had built a lot of amps and restored some radios TV´s and a jukebox. But my huge dream ever was to build an EchoSonic one day. I always thought that this dream will never come true as there´s so little info out there. I had built some tape echo units before but they never sounded like this your amp.
Luckily I met Tim Masters, a guy who had written in your guestbook, whom also wanted to build one. So I just mailed him, hoping that he´s got more info and maybe the schematic. But he had no more info that I had....just a few pix nothing more. Then one day he came up with the schematic. This was a giant step in the process of the amp. But we still hadn´t known how everything looked inside the amp.
And then one day in February there was an EchoSonic on ebay. Not the whole amp like Ray made them - just the chassis and tape board built into a Standel 1x12" 1x15" cabinate. This amp had belonged to James "Lucky" Ward like the seller told us. Tim went on and bought himself the amp and I helped him to restore it from here via email and phone calls. With Tim owning the original amp I was able to see all the details and how Ray did the wiring. It was amazing and very touching. This was important to me as I didn´t want to make a poor copy but set a tribute to Ray by building it as close to his amps as possible.
I made everything on my own. The wood-job for the cabinate (my grandpa gave me a little assistance with the handle), the metal work for the chassis and the wiring of course. I even had to wind the oscillator coil on my own. A very protracted process was to find out the correct measurements of the amp. You know we only had the few pictures available on the net. And so I had to do a lot of measuring from the screen and recalculating. I sat hours and hours in front of the computer until I had figured everything out. Then I made 1:1 drawings to see if something still was wrong. The whole manufacturing of the amp took a long time, as I had to attend my studies at university, too. I started to make the first thoughts about building it in November 2004......and finished the amp at the end of July 2005.
But I had to go through some troubles.....First I didn't use the original JBL D123 speaker but a german 60s alnico type. The sound was good but much too mellow and muddy. So I had to buy me a JBL on US ebay and have it shipped to Germany. With the new speaker I had these punchy bass and the awesome highs......but the amp still lacked a bit of a spark. After I took the amp to the local guitar store and showed the baffled guys I had a chance to talk shop with the repairman in their office. He listened to the amp and gave me a brilliant hint to get the amp more lively. I went straight home and tried it out and.......Ooooooweeee there it was...these smoking presence on the highs I knew so much from your recordings and missed with my amp. It was like pulling away a blanket.
I´m so glad I
was able to reproduce an amp so rare but cool down to the original
appearance and sound.
Please note that Lorenz has requested that we do not post contact info. He has been getting offers for the amp and asked to build more for sale. It was not his intention to build these for sale but rather to make a tribute to a man that he feels changed music forever. Also he will not have time to start manufacturing these amps due to his studies at University.
Tim Masters
Tim Masters of Tampa's Midnight Bowlers League who had exchanged notes with Lorenz early on sent us a few pix of his replica amp and original. At some point in the 60's he thinks someone took the original EchoSonic he has and stuffed it into a Standel speaker cabinet, possibly to add more volume. It now has a 15" and a 12" speaker in it. He worked with Lorenz on the project to fix his original and to build both his and Lorenz' replica. Having the original amp to go off of was a HUGE help.
He said, It took
me a bit longer to finish my replica than Lorenz, but the parts are
expensive and well…I had to
Sometime back (around May of 2009), Jim Elyea from History for Hire had sent me these pictures of Deke Dickerson visiting the shop with his amps. Deke used to have the Echosonic that Ray Butts gave Gretsch but in 2008 Scotty sold him the second Echosonic he had that he bought from Paul Yandell. I had given Jim Elyea a University Speaker to put in the replica they built for the CBS miniseries Elvis. When Deke dropped by with his two amps and Dave Kyle they set the three of them up and took these pix.
this section added February 6, 2013
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