World's First Effects Pedal? Dearmond Model 800 Trem Trol. Mechanical Tremolo Electric Guitar
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- Опубліковано 14 вер 2024
- Today we are getting in up to our elbows in 5+ pounds of vintage goodness. The Dearmond Tremtrol 800 was released in 1946 and started the guitar effects craze that continues to this day. Its design is absurd, yet simple. Foolish, yet ingenious! and we are going to explore every nook and cranny as I troubleshoot and repair this rare pedal.
My Patreon:
/ notaluthier
Speedy West and Kayton Roberts Steel guitar Samples are from:
• Steel Guitar Legends
Brent & Madeline
brentandmadeli...
My band from a really long time ago:
hymm.bandcamp....
Without question, the best vintage guitar effect pedal restoration video to be watching when the edibles hit.
Hahahah! It’s a narrow field, but I HAD to be the best at SOMETHING
Certainly added an extra dimension to the micro dosing 🤪
Look up the UA-cam video of David Lindley playing the song Little Green Bottle on Weissenborn acoustic Hawaiian lap steel; it's a song about the mind altering effects of the original Excedrin PM formula, and the way he plays with the pitch and timing will definitely trip with your head.
you into that chaw still grandpa?
@@goodun2974 i went down the David Lindley rabbit hole because of your comment! Thank you so much for your service!!!
I have one these that belonged to my father, he had it since the 50s at least. It wasn't working at all. With the help of Dan Formosa (THE expert on these), I was able to restore it and get it working again for the first time in probably 40 years. Awesome little mechanical device. Definitely use Windex, it works best. I had to repair the motor windings (NOT EASY). replace the power cord, patch cable and the switches as they were all toast. Can't tell you how happy I was to get that thing tremolo-ing/vibrato-ing again.
Wow! I’m glad I didn’t have to do ALL of that. I’ll try winder next time. Now that I know the right measurement it’ll be much easier to swap fluids
I'm pretty sure Uncle Doug rebuilt one of these units and put up a video about it; I'm positive he's worked on other electro mechanical rotary tremolo and vibrato devices.
Cool
I wasn't on mushrooms when I sat down to watch this, but I had to check several times throughout the video to make sure I still wasn't.
Perfect 🍄🍄🍄
@@Notaluthier Next pedal/non amp added effect was in 1950 and was a spring reverb box too big to be a pedal being the size of a Fender Super Champ head where it is the 2 piece model with separate head but was not an amp/amp head.
This is the trippiest restoration video of all time.
I absolutely love this kind of content.... eccentricity and electricity = mildly shocking entertainment.
Hahahha thanks ⚡️⚡️⚡️
Eccentricity and electricity; sounds like a capsule description of Captain Beefheart.
Impressed you got the switch back together, sure I wasn't the only one thinking, no no no leave it be 😢
I thought those tabs would clear! Whooooops
I feel like I have just gone through real esoteric and spiritual heroes' journey. I am not the same man I was when I started this video. I am questioning my whole reality. I now know I can never be who I used to be. So, I guess thank you for destroying what I thought was and showing me what is real. Llloyds will guide me on the way to enlightenment. All paths are open to me now. I will always remember the great words of the prophet " Always buy all the random ass crap at estate sales." Let these great words be law, for they are the truth. You can TBH with me any time. O'h great prophet of lubricant.
Our new mantra is
Lloyd's, Lloyd's, Lloyd's, Lloyd's...
Hahahha wisdom spurts from your fingertips! Heretofore absorbed by AI to forever be assimilated into The Borg. The Borg thanks you.
Loved it regardless of who's on first ! That early engineering surpasses modern techniques and has a unique sound - Tremelo is making a comeback!
Daughters are the most enlightening happening to ever happen, you seem like a good dad. Pretty cool stuff, love this channel!
Thanks, she is the BEST
Sloshing liquid to ground the signal is such a clever mechanical solution to this. Reminds me of Duane Eddy describing the literal reverb tank they used in recordings
I've seen oil can delays on Uncle Doug's channel, but a water based tremolo is a new one to me! Cool device, and works surprisingly well.
Hmmm, it’s been a while since I’ve checked out his channel but I love his videos and am fairly sure he made a couple iterations of trem-trol Luke effect units.
Thank you for sharing and restoring this old forgotten artifact from Atlantida! 🌊
My absolute pleasure…except the unpleasant parys
Kicking off a guitar repair shop next month……you and Ted are inspirations! It’s gonna be ……..FUN!
Congrats!
It was a valuable repair regardless of its efficiency.
This is by far the BEST and most fascinating pedal video ever !!
🤙
Dig it! As a teenager I tried all kinds of crazy stuff. I started with a big ol reel to reel, mic in, speaker out to the input of my DanElectro! Anything with an in and out I tried. I even wired the grounds together and ran the signal through passive stuff like a clothes iron and the foot pedal from my mom’s sewing machine. Not sure what I was lookin for but nothing really stuck around although some of it worked, as in…made noise. I think the main problem was I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Good times!
Love it or not that pedal is a cool piece of guitar history 👍 Thanks for showin it to us!
I love that these old pedals are made like "yeah let's have as much movement as possible inside" lol gotta love 'em!!!!
you do a really great job servicing and your editing style is funtastic. i have not been THIS entertained by a (gag) guitar related youtube video in a loooooooooong time - and those clips you shared! thanks for sharing your work
This beautiful piece makes a vintage Tone Bender look hi tec.. 100% analog effects.
I use Windex/window cleaner in the canister as described in this Vintage Guitar article. Worked well.
I usually am very hyperactive due to my ADHD but the way you talk makes me super sleepy lol! Maybe I should go to sleep since it's 12:36 AM ?
I lurv gadgets.
Mostly guitar, and
that is the most gadge-ity thing ive seen in a minute.
DeArmond was the Popeel of its day 🎉
Wah-wah
You made me such a big star
Being there at the right time
Cheaper than a dime
Wah-wah, you've given me your wah-wah, wah-wah
13:11 This is the moment I paused and needed to decide whether I should take more or less drugs before continuing the video 😂
I'll take the hint! I'll go to sleep and come back at bed time tomorrow to check out the last the rest of the video because I am so sleepy at this moment due to this calming music, sooth smooth talk and ambient sound of the fiddeling of tools and components and screwing in the screws lol! @35:09 now! I'll just come back tomorrow and click the time stamp on this comment and continue where I left! have a good one! 😀
Oooh good UA-cam hack
@@Notaluthier Well, i woke up, went to check my phone, saw notifications, randomly noticed that I had put the wrong timestamp, and had to edit the comment to 35:09 which was the actually correct timestamp, I remember the cap "I will come to find out" and now I'm off to bed again since its a bit too early to wake up at 2:24AM! Also yeah the timestamp UA-cam feature is pretty nice, a little youtube/life hack for when you wanna come back and finish something you started watching 😀 I mean if you manage to write the correct timestamp that is, which I did not at first lol! Must have been the effect of the video that dozed me off!
@@FingalPersson, Sometimes when I only watch part of a video and come back to it the next day the video will remember where I left off and start from that point, but other times it does not do this, and it seems to be totally random.
@@goodun2974 Yeah that's because the cookies loading in is failing probably, and sometimes it works, but what does work is to just write in the time stamp and you're good to go :) I guess you didn't know about that, and you're welcome in that case 🙂
At 11:20, " Remember that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also looks back into you". Nietszche
Nice ! Thanks for sharing that !
For the soldering paste/flux, if it stay mostly liquid, you can use it inside a syringe to apply more easily.
And the liquid : of course, water will works. Risk of oxidation of course. You can also try different viscosity, could affect the effect
I really enjoyed that! Even the hour of diminished chords 🙂
Contact cleaner is literally magic
the use of period tools is a nice touch.
the pedal's old- don't want to scare it!
slightly annoyed that other people have beaten me to the bucket-brigade gags though.
Oh that National guitar is like a fire breathing dragon!!!
When the sloshing water or other conductive fluid intermittently contacts the electrode inside the can, that's a Lloyd Bridges moment! ( Auto correct tried to substitute intimately for intermittently, which would be a "Beau" Bridges moment!)
Well, I think this was my fave resto-vid of yours so far 🙃
Yay! Thanks!
I put a dab of Elmer's gluestick on the back of the washer and then put it down on the surface. It holds it secure enough to get assembled without causing any issues.
At 6:03, "I'm never really lonely, in my Excentrifugal Forz......" Frank Zappa
Very nice. Love all things vintage, but for now I'm happy to stick with my Guyatone VT3 Tremolo pedal.
Why do people not realize for guitar... it works well with the tones of tube and vintage.
Organic yes
The way guitar was born to sound.
Digital sounds good, but when you go with Organic and it's done correctly.... people will listen and say wow
I have to say your content is genuinely some of the best on UA-cam at the moment, for me specifically and I suspect for others as well. Idk if you want a bunch of subscribers but you deserve them
Thanks so much! More subs are always going to help me out, and help me justify the input involved in video making!
13:10. What an eccentric video.
Your content, editing, humour and b roll is quite brilliant . Thank you
Much appreciated!
Okay I am @20:40 and still counting, I an dead sleepy right now, nothing wrong with your content, it's just the ambient sounds and the over soothing voice you talk with, it's like an electric bedtime story and my eyes be like shutting... DEAD OPEN!!! shutting.... DEAD OPEN AGAIN!!! then I shake my head, be like wow, I'm falling asleep!! what hypnosis video did you make man!? Some in the comments even mention they had to check if they're on shrooms or not, what did you do to this video lo! It's as if someone gave me a sleeping pill, even though the video is interesting lol
Got to the end. This pedal is awesome.
🤙🤘✌️⚡️🤩
Instead of plain water, buy my condensed water. I let it boil for a patented amount of time, which means the water thickens a little bit. I found the perfect ratio to boil my water down to for a smoother, warmer tone. $125 an ounce plz.
@@wulfman15 , Perhaps it would be easier to get the correct viscosity if you simply blended soft water and hard water together in the right ratio......🤔😉
That first video of the guy playing steel guitar in black and white, is a video I saw many many years ago on youtube 😀 haha
It's not the first perhaps but it did standardize pedals I'd say especially getting into the 50's through the 60's it was a revolutionary time
Love the videos man, hilarious but also informative. All around fun to watch, thank you
Thanks!
While I was making my breakfast, I had a few minutes to wait for water to boil, and I saw a new Naughty Loiterer video, seeing the 1:02 time on it, thought, 'ah just a minute & a few seconds, just enough time for the kettle to be done', sat down and watched it, totally forgot what was going on in the kitchen for an hour. Good thing it's one of those kettles that shuts itself off, and not the old type that sat on the stove, and would boil dry, and melt into a messy puddle.
Oh my! Sounds like something I would do!
Laughed my ass off at "PET TOAD"
Alvino Rey and his Talking Pedal Steel Guitar used to appear on the King Sisters' TV show back in the 60's. It really did sound like his guitar emulated human speech; not sure how he formed consonants, though...
He had a talk box! Like an early vocoder.
I believe his wife was backstage mouthing the words for Stringy…and I just read it sent the signal of his guitar through a contact mic that she had on her throat.
@@Notaluthier Cool! I guessed it must have been a setup something like that, since the camera always seemed to focus on his hands during the "talking" passages, and there was no movement from his mouth whenever it did cut back to his face.
@@Notaluthier So she was a Hatsune Miku pedal IRL
@@NotaluthierYup! It’s a device called a Sonovox, very popular for ads and animation up through the early 60s. It was used in several Disney cartoons, notably.
Oh man, this thing is so cool!
I don't think volume and tone boxes count,I think this one was the first! HOW DO YOU GET ALL THE COOL STUFF, STUFF IVE NEVER HEARD OF.John Frusciante and Eric Johnson woukd love this channel
It's called a salt water rheostat or liquid rheostat. Pure water, like distilled, would not work, there must be ions to carry the current. Most tap water will have enough impurities to be slightly conductive, that's why you need to use distilled water in old school lead-acid batteries. Adding for example salt to the water will increase it's conductivity which would probably make the effect stronger.
I have seen a large 3-phase salt water rheostat being used to start a big (about 200 kW) slip ring type electric motor, there was a pump that would pump the salt water into a container that had 3 conical electrodes connected to the armature windings through the slip rings sticking down from the roof, the higher the water level got the smaller the resistance and finally a time relay closed a contactor to short the armature windings. After the start cycle the pump would stop and the container would drain for the next start.
Oh wow, great info. I will try a different liquid soon.
Sounds great!
Most channels I watch where they build their own amplifiers they all sound like farts. Your channel seems to have very cool stuff and usually it all sounds great
love the methstang, long live the methstang, all praise the methstang!
Those flat blade screws with the pillbox shaped heads are known as fillister screws.
@@CarsInDimension , Very interesting, I had never heard that term before. Even then there are variations, because some of them (most of the vintage ones anyway) have flat-top heads and others have gently rounded heads; they're generally more often seen with a slotted/straight-blade type head, but they can also be found in a Philips-head variety (and probably in Hex or Torx nowadays). Another variant version of the fillister screw has a hole drilled horizontally through the head so that you can pass a wire through it and wire the screw to something so that it can't vibrate out and disappear.
dis irregardless, it was a nice journey
I'm enthralled, I'm goin' to eke this one out... possibly 'Uncle Doug' worked on a similar device... 'Walkin' on the back roads, by the rivers flowing gentle on my mind.'
Yes @uncleDoug made a couple of these! I LOVE his videos
@@Notaluthier Gosh I finally clicked! It reminded me of a leslie I cannibalized from an Organ (it was free and someone had actually been in before me so is that cannibal?) but anyways I'd searched up variable speed for leslies which is modern fan motors but then realised... I can jingo up something like this uses, retain the original motor, but replace the drive wheel with a spindle like this and the fabricate something where the drive belt wheel is on a separate gizmo that moves it up and down the spindle... choice!
What a cool pedal. 😎 Love it
I should say bucket-O-PCB’s in order for to phil that canister
So excited about this
Great video! :D Love the sound in th end!
Thank you very much!
Sardonic vest escape pod.
Enjoyed the video, I’ve never seen one of those before but it does sound cool. I’ve got a couple of DeArmond volume pedals, one has the old cast metal body and the other is a 1960s model with a pressed steel body, they both appear to be strong enough to survive being run over by a truck. A friend of mine had a DeArmond volume/tone pedal which sounded great when you got the knack of swivelling your foot for the tone option, I believe that the Beatles used one on If You Wear Red Tonight and The Shadows used one on some of their instrumentals. I did have a quick look inside it but couldn’t figure it out.
Idk how the Dearmond works, but W roccotone appears to have cables to pull on the tone pot.
This Lloyd was brought to Lloyd by Lloyd’s.
I was in the middle of re doing this customers charcuterie board and just stopped to watch the video..she is in the living room talking with my wife....lol
Hahhahahah! Love it
Great content as always. Thanks
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing, and I just thought my MXR distortion pedal was old
MXR 1970s distortion pedal
I think You should invest in a Gooseneck Phone Holder, then your hands free :)
that pedal and its dummy complicated electrical engineering with its blend of primitive mechanical engineering reminds me of early calculating machines.
hmm the sleepyness must be the music aswell still hanging on @30:40 right now!
You need a bucket off PCB’s ti full that little canister
The wheel is in the opposite direction, the two conical surfaces of the axle and the wheel must coincide in the same plane
i dont have an hour for this, so instead i will just drop a comment
Appreciated!
For my money, I'd say active powered circuitry makes it a pedal, over a passive remote volume or tone control.
SUBSCRIBED for Lucille2
That black nut isn't rusty so much as it is painted or anodized: it would have been easier to solder if you had cleaned the sides of it as well, and perhaps tinned the bottom surface before you soldered it to the can.
Someone has been in there in the past. They replaced the lead to the tank with the wrong kind of wire. It's supposed to be a piece of braided steel wire. The same stuff thats used on speaker cones. That way it can withstand the constant motion without breaking. Like that wire did...
I've used braided solder wick with good success. It has good flexibility. But it still won't hold up like the braided steel.
Yeah there was indeed some previous tampering. Good to know about the braided
Expert texpert choking smokers
I believe your research may not have been sufficient. The DeArmond Tremolo Control (the little box with two knobs and that cute handle, made somewhat famous by Billy Gibbons and others) was introduced in 1946, but the Model 800 Trem-trol was not introduced until the mid-1950s, some time between 1953 & 1955.
I own a DeArmond Model 600 manufactured between 1957 & 1960, and judging from the appearance, I would date your Model 800 to the same era.
I may be wrong- this stuff is not easy to research; but you may want to take another look at the timeline.
Great video; I just discovered your videos a few weeks ago, and I’m sure I’ll be back...
Oh, I definitely did not do the research justice on this one! Entirely possible I misread, but yes, overall the Internet is quite unreliable for facts.
@@Notaluthier, The potentiometer and the switch will probably have date codes on each, but since you've put it back together you won't be able to find the date codes stamped on the parts, unless they're visible in the video ( I haven't watched the entire thing yet).
I think I can build one of those from a vintage record changer and stuff from around the house. Chassis will look different, but.
Yep
Damn I wish I saw this video BEFORE I ate 2 cans of Lloyd's!
The videos is even better AFTER though!
I'd would hazard to guess the reason folks say to use windex instead of water would be for anti-freeze protection. Windex, or pretty much any glass cleaner, freezes at a much lower temperature than water. Regular anti-freeze is corrosive and would ruin the electronics.
Interesting!
Water itself is also corrosive, to steel and iron. Windex is not.
Step away from the contact cleaner 😂 your camera is tripping. Cool video though
amazing technology for 1946! No wonder we won the war!...well no one wins a war but we did Ok!
Half remember reading Bo Diddley used one of these in the 50s, maybe 60s. Would this make sense timing-wise and similarity-of-sound-wise?
Steel Guitar also has knee peddles.
The reason you use Windex instead of water is not any imagined tonal quality or improved conduction even, the reason is rot and mildew resistance!
Makes sense! I’ve heard it’s frothy though! But I will try it out
You also don't want it freezing, expanding, and blowing out the canister. ;-)
I'd definitely use Windex over water in that case.
If you have the scratch, for getting stuff out of those hard to reach vintage aqueous conduction medium canisters, an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner might be just the thing. Like one of the $80 US vevor jobbies, not your many thousands of dollars lab quality science machines.
Awesome
Hmm..woukd have liked to see the dates on the vintage adds samples you showed. Im suprised at the eary dates of origin...I would have thought very late 40's,/early 50's as pedal steel guitar wasnt in common use until around that time.....but I could be mistaken. Cool pedal nonetheless.
Those were meant only as examples of what can be done with volume and tone. The Rocco-tonexpressor is from the 30s.
At 36:05 , *vise*, not "vice"; your vices are your own business, and as they say, what were once vices are now habits!.
LLOYD'S yeahhhh 😂
I have to wonder if the rubberised material you found in the canister was the remnants of a dampening liner to even out the water movement?
It’s conceivable, or some other kind of melted gasket.
@@Notaluthier something gotta stop the water slotshing about, lol
And another swell video! I cringed every time a screw was about to be lost or another calamity seemed inevitable. But you overcame all obstacles. I wonder if this pedal had any celebrity endorsers or was used on any recordings when it was new. I'll have to look that up...
Bo diddly
Good luck getting a paintjob on a cast enclosure with a rough finish. It's not gonna look good and the paint will start flaking, even if you powder coat it.
Dampers maybe? The rubber doohickeys…
Kinda look like motor mount damper type washer thingy-majiggs
Steampunk pedal.
Is the can from factory filled with oil not water? Or a mix 🤔
They don’t specify in the paper work but the canister is prefixed with “hydro”. Oil can trem is a different unit.
57th comment and I’m hungry
A wet/dry mix...but literally