BLUEPRINT
British pedal maker ThorpyFX recently teamed up with Lee Harris of Pink Floyd splinter group Saucerful Of Secrets to make an overdrive that captures the sound of Syd’s Selmer–the Scarlet Tunic
Fewsounds in rock are as viscerally memorable as the growling twang of Syd Barrett’s guitar in the opening notes of Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive from the band’s 1967 debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Unlike the stratospheric, soaring tones that characterised later-era Floyd tracks with David Gilmour on guitar, Syd Barrett’s guitar sound is jagged, janky and wiry, somewhere between Vox and Marshall in voice.
The reason it’s a bit hard for the ear to pin down is that Syd used Selmer amps, which are collectible vintage items these days but largely forgotten by mainstream guitarists. The Treble And Bass model that Syd played on Floyd’s debut album is perhaps the bestknown of Selmer’s 60s creations, but, for many years, the only way to capture the distinctive sound of that amp was to buy an old one and get it running reliably. For Lee Harris, guitarist with Floyd spin-off project Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, that wasn’t really a viable option. With Nick himself on drums, the standard of sonic accuracy in the band, which performs songs from Floyd’s early albums, had to be high. So Lee decided to approach British effects maker ThorpyFX to see if the elusive tone of the Treble And Bass could be conjured up in an effects pedal.
“I was using a Plexi-type pedal,” Lee recalls, “but what was annoying for me was it just sounded like a generic sound of that period. I felt like I really needed to get the sound that Syd had on the album. I needed to honour that more because his two solo albums haven’t got that distorted Interstellar sound on them and there isn’t anything else of his out there [that sounds similar]. It’s just that album with that sound on it. And I really wanted to honour it correctly, you know, so that’s when I went to Thorpy and said, ‘Is there any way to put a Selmer Treble And Bass into a pedal?’ Dan Coggins [the effects designer behind Lovetone and present-day ThorpyFX collaborator] has a late-1966 Treble And Bass 50-watt MKII. We don’t know exactly what [version of the Treble And Bass] Syd had. We presume it was the same amp, though. He also had a Selmer Stereomaster. But it’s the same tone stack, you know?”
The danger with pedals that emulate amps is, of course, that you conjure up the general flavour of the original but fail to capture the sonic soul of the valve-driven amp the effect is based on. But Lee says ThorpyFX was able to get an uncommonly good match to the sound of the original.
“We actu
