does anyone know what effects ernie isley used on who's that lady? I know he used a maestro phase shifter and big muff, but I still can't quite get that sound.

I know he also used a roger mayer octiva.. I've tried to get that sound as well, with clones and never quite got it..

Maestro made some sort of fuzz/phaser thingy. I know it's what he used I just don't know what it's called. Carly ...... ?

I thought it was just the phase shifter, could be totally wrong. It sounds so loaded upw ith fuzz who knows? =>

The Carl Martin Two Phase is susposed to be an exact clone of it, but I am still trying to get the StarShip Trooper sound of out it.

Scratch my last post. It was a Roland Jet Phaser. Two footswitches and a few knobs in a case that sort of looked like a CE-1.

quote:

Originally posted by klasaine:
Scratch my last post. It was a Roland Jet Phaser. Two footswitches and a few knobs in a case that sort of looked like a CE-1.

ahhh could be.
This is what guitargeek has listed, who knows how correct it is:
http://guitargeek.com/rigs/img/i/isley_bros_ernie_1977.gif

According to Malcom Cecil and Robert Margouleff:


“When he came to us, he brought his Stratocaster and I took him over to meet Roger Mayer, who was another Englishman I'd known since my childhood in England in the late '40s, when we'd go over to surplus stores on Edgeware Road in London to pick up old bits and pieces to build equipment, because that's what we liked to do. There were all sorts of surplus equipment around after the war. Roger went on to become Jimi Hendrix's guitar tech and then Jimi brought him back to the States. I bumped into him in New York and he helped me build some of TONTO, as well as working on audio treatments and [building] limiters."

“Anyway, he took Ernie's guitar and completely re-modified it exactly the way Hendrix had his, and he also built him an Octavia box, which is part of what allowed Hendrix to get that screaming sound. And Roger taught Ernie how to use it. So, we essentially Jimi Hendrix-ized Ernie when he was 18. He was so blown away and enamored with it; he took to it like a duck to water. He'd be in there just playing and playing; he wouldn't give it up.

"The lead guitar part alone took several tracks: “We had the Octavia box, a direct from the guitar, a Berwin noise suppressor, limiters, all sorts of things going,” Cecil says. “The Octavia made a tremendous amount of noise, so we had to use whatever means were available to minimize it. One small turn of a knob and all the parameters would change. It was trial-and-error. Ernie would play a line and we'd try different sounds on it. He'd come back in the control room and we'd listen to it, decide if it was right. Then, when it came time to mix, because we had four or five tracks for the guitar, we'd find the blend that worked best. Ernie was always very cooperative, and he could really play.”

“The mixes,” Margouleff adds, “were four hands on the console: Run the tape, if we made a mistake, leave the 2-track running, back up the multitrack and start it up again to right where we were before we made the mistake, then keep going, then go back and edit the 2-track.”



This subject has come up time and again over the years, and I don't recall encountering any sort of absolute concensus. While I've read of the dirt being contributed by Big Muff, Foxx Tone Machine, or Roland Bee Baa fuzz (haven't done the timeline and the math, wasn't "there", could not say), it was almost certainly the Mayer Octavia.

I've also read accounts that have acknowledged use of the Roland Jet Phaser. However, Maestro PSA-1 phase shifter is far more likely, as The Isleys had an established relationship during this period with Bob Moog, who, as I understand it, had an intergral role in developing the Maestro phaser.