Author Tom Wheeler Talks about “The Soul of Tone”

by Tom Watson.

To guitar lovers, a new book by Tom Wheeler is an important event and his latest, The Soul of Tone – Celebrating 60 Years of Fender Amps (Hal Leonard), is no exception. But, while the beautifully written and presented 512-page hardbound book is a must-have for every amplifier fan, Fender or otherwise, to many guitarists the inner sanctum of the amp is a bizarre, uninviting landscape that could have sprung from the mind of Tim Burton. Guitar International spoke to Tom Wheeler on December 16, 2007, about what makes the Soul of Tone a celebration the not-so-technically inclined electric guitar enthusiast might want to attend.

Which is not to say that Soul of Tone‘s invitation to celebrate wasn’t clear from a reading. The book’s introduction is one of the best examples of guitar-related writing to be found. Wheeler understands his potential audience: people who love the electric guitar, are interested about how fingers, guitars and amplifiers conspire to produce sound and tone, but who find the technical jargon of amplifier mechanics daunting to say the least. Wheeler’s introduction puts the reader’s mind at ease. He is one of us. The difference between the author and the uninitiated is that Wheeler has made the pilgrimage to the strange heartland of amplification and returned to tell the tales of the interesting characters encountered and mysteries revealed.

Amps are boxes. For years we stuck them on the stage behind us, down low where they were easy to overlook, in every sense. In a world of prom-queen guitars, could a wallflower speaker box with a luggage handle and a few radio knobs really proclaim to the world, “This is who I am”?
Oh, yeah. Belatedly, we came to recognize the obvious: Any signature electric guitar tone isn’t even electric at all without an amplifier, and if we wanted to get serious about our sounds, we had better get serious about our amps – not just their cosmetics and external features, but their hard-wired nervous systems and mysterious orange-glowing hearts as well. (Soul of Tone introduction, page 16)

Our journey with Wheeler unfolds over the course of 29 chapters that focus on three major themes: just as the amplifier is a fundamental component in the production of electric guitar sound and tone, the ground-breaking work of Leo Fender and the subsequent building on Leo Fender’s legacy serve as the foundation of the history and development of the electric guitar and bass amplifier for both Fender and its competitors (chapters 1 and 2); to understand and appreciate the veiled mysteries of what amplifiers do and how they do it, it’s necessary to make peace with and develop an understanding of amplifier language and mechanics (chapters 3-6); and, armed with the knowledge from chapters 3-6, we are prepared to follow the history of the Fender amp – woodies, tweeds, browns, blondes, blackfaces, silverfaces, solid state and more – from both the micro-perspective of design and function detail and the broader context of time, place, social and musical trends.

But, Soul of Tone is more than the Canterbury Tales of amps in text. Included with the book are two CDs that make the Fender amp experience complete. The discs are titled Vintage and Modern. On Vintage, guitarist, clinician and author Greg Koch presents 91 tracks that demo various vintage Fender amps and, for the sake of comparison, a new ’57 Tweed Deluxe, using Stratocasters, Telecasters and Les Pauls. It’s a romp through a field of classic tone monsters and Koch’s dialog is as entertaining as his licks. Modern provides a sampling of several Fender amps from more recent history (such as the ’89 Princeton Chorus), today (such as the Hot Rod Deluxe and Super-Sonic), and Fender’s nod to the future (such as the 2006 Cyber-Twin SE and 2005 G-DEC), presented by individuals closely associated with Fender and its modern line – Steve Grom, Shane Nicholas, Ritchie Fliegler, Mike Lewis, Richard McDonald and John Dreyer.

We don’t just listen to our amps, we psychoanalyze them. Some are like juvenile delinquents – aggressive, punchy, unruly. They have attitude. Some sound like dangerous pets. They growl and bite. Some amps sound sexy (they have tight bottoms, voluptuous middles), even vaguely kinky (they have spank). Some seem to be undergoing couples therapy – they are sensitive, responsive, forgiving, aggravating in some ways, yet so fulfilling in others! (Soul of Tone introduction, page 19)

Who better to serve as our Chaucer on this amplifier pilgrimage than Tom Wheeler? Though a graduate of the Loyola School of Law, Wheeler has dedicated a good portion of his lengthy professional career to the telling of guitar tales through both his ten year stint as Guitar Player magazine’s Editor in Chief and his writing of and contributions to a number of landmark books on guitars, including 2004’s already classic The Stratocaster Chronicles – Celebrating 50 Years of the Fender Stratocaster (Hal Leonard), to which Soul of Tone serves as a perfect companion. Wheeler is currently a member of the faculty of the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, a natural fit given his experience, rigorous approach to facts and details and talent for down-to-earth storytelling.

A personal anecdote

Shortly after my copy of the Soul of Tone arrived, my wife found me camped on the living room couch unable to put the book down. She knows I’m a not an “amp guy” by any stretch of the imagination, nor would I be caught dead with a tech manual of any kind. When, hours later, I didn’t respond to the call for dinner (a rare event), she poked her head through the door and said, “What gives? Amps? That’s not your kind of book.” I shook my head. “Amps? Sweetheart, this isn’t a book about amps. This is a love story.”

Tom Watson: This may be my favorite Tom Wheeler book.

Tom Wheeler: I think it may be mine. It’s the deepest thing I’ve ever done because for the other books that I’ve written I didn’t need to explain what a guitar is or how it works. A major decision in conceiving this book was that I would go ahead and attempt to explain to non-technical people, such as myself, how an amplifier works because amp people naturally throw around amp-related terms. “Well, I substituted a tube rectifier for a solid state rectifier,” they might say, but what does that mean, and what do transformers really transform? Why does a 6V6 tube sound different from a 6L6? I thought, I don’t know the answers, but if I can figure them out and explain them to people, then I think later on in the book when the experts I interviewed use these terms it will be a richer experience, I hope, for the reader. That made the book a massive learning experience for me and one of the things that made the research so deep.

Watson: You say in the acknowledgments that you’re not really an amp guy. What brought you around? You had to develop a sense of passion. At some point, there had to be a moment where … let’s say, to quote you, “Goodness, what’s come over Tommy?”

Wheeler: Yeah, thanks Mom [laughs]. I’ve always loved amps, I just didn’t know anything about them. I thought, like a lot of people, you plug them in, turn them on, a little light glows, you plug your guitar into it, you move knobs around until it sounds good, and one amp sounds different from another. That’s about it. That’s all I knew. It’s not that I wasn’t an amp guy in terms of being fascinated by them, I just didn’t know anything about how they work.

Watson: But, did you have an emotional attachment to them? As you say in the book, the guitar has sexy curves, we hold it next to us and it’s really how we express ourselves, but the amp is a box.

Wheeler: The amp is a box with a handle on it and a few knobs. I credit my pal, Ritchie Fliegler, who, years ago, wrote a book called Amps! The Other Half of Rock ‘N’ Roll, and people like Aspen Pittman, who wrote that great book on tubes [The Tube Amp Book] and has a great amp collection, for helping me to gradually realize how important amps are to sound. And, of course, we’re all fascinated with sound and tone. I think as I became a little more sophisticated in terms of tone, I began to realize that many of the secrets were inside these plain looking boxes and they began to take on a fascination all their own.

Watson: We do feel the heat at some point.

Wheeler: Absolutely. And the whole discussion of tubes versus transistors was another thing that made this a deep research project for me. Why do so many people prefer tubes? Why do so many people who have perfectly good tone play solid state amplifiers?

Researching and rethinking the whole middle period of Fender during the 19 or 20 years of CBS ownership, and appreciating just how fascinating the Fender story has been in the last 20 years, all of these things were relatively new discoveries for me and led me into all sorts of interesting territories. The Fender story didn’t end in 1965 when Leo sold the company.

Watson: In a lot of ways, it got more interesting.

Wheeler: In a lot of ways, it got very interesting, yes.

Watson: The book is a little over 500 beautiful pages, but I’m not an amp guy, I’m a guitar guy. I was a little intimidated by the massive nature of the book until I read the introduction. That’s why I think it’s some of your best writing to-date. You draw an inviting map through what can be uncharted and uninviting territory for some of us.

Wheeler: Good. That’s one of the things I was hoping Soul of Tone would accomplish and contribute – bringing more people into the amp club – because there’s a lot of fun to be had. As I say in the book, if you really want to talk about how these things work in any kind of depth, you need a degree in physics or at least several years of workbench experience. But, the average guitar player can learn a few basics and start to really have fun with this stuff and take a few steps toward those goals of sounding good, getting the most out of your amps, and finding bargains – all those fun things that, as guitar players, we already like to do.

Watson: The introduction gave me flashbacks to the late ‘60s and how I’d to go to hear a guitar or bass player and the first thing I’d do is check out the amps to see if they had metal-coned JBLs.

Wheeler: Most of us have stories in our past of the great guitar that we let go and I have an amp story. I had a Magnatone with that wonderful tremolo and I can’t remember why or how I ever got rid of it. I probably traded it in for something that seemed cooler at the time. I think one of the things that has been most interesting about our evolving perception of amplifiers is how, in many ways, as I say in the book, despite a time lag of several years, it has paralleled our evolving perceptions of guitars as they take on that vintage buzz. We start to appreciate the style and how amps look a certain way and speak to a certain period either in history or in our own childhood or backgrounds. They’re becoming collectible items. All these things that nobody predicted would ever happen with guitars and did are happening with amps as well. I find all of that fascinating.

Watson: Speaking of collecting, Soul of Tone brings to light a lot I didn’t know about the infamous CBS silverface period that collectors tend to shun.

Wheeler: I’m so glad. There was a lot I didn’t know about the silverface period. One of the things that I’ve tried to do in my whole career, and the silverface issue is a good example, is simply to look behind the one or two sort of absolute statements that we hear about something. We often hear things like “Fender went downhill after CBS bought them,” and “silverface amps aren’t any good compared to the earlier amps.” Well, it turns out that while there is always a grain or more of truth to those things, there’s also invariably a lot more behind such statements that turns out to be rather interesting.

Think of all the great sounding silverface amps out there and how very few people were paying attention to what we would call good tone during the ‘70s and up through the mid-‘80s or so, and how at that time it was all about volume wars and “my amp’s bigger than your amp” and “my amp’s louder than your amp.” Everybody thought that was the most important thing.

So, it’s important to look at these things not just from our perspective here in 2007, but to look at them as objects that existed in their own times. What were people thinking in the late ‘60s when CBS was trying to look cool in the psychedelic era? What were people thinking in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and how did design reflect that thinking? This is what really interests me.

Watson: We tend to forget that during the CBS period we were still buying Fender amps and guitars. It’s not like we turned our nose up and had nothing to do with this equipment. We still used it and in many cases loved it.

Wheeler: That’s right. How many photos have you seen with Jimi Hendrix playing a vintage Stratocaster? Zero. He wasn’t interested. He was playing an off-the-shelf, late ‘60s Strat that vintage purists wouldn’t be caught dead with. But, it seemed okay for Jimi Hendrix.

Watson: Soul of Tone tells “the other Fender story.” I thought I knew something about Fender history, but the guitar side of Fender is only one perspective.

Wheeler: One of the things that I hope people get is that this isn’t just a story about tubes and speakers and wires and knobs and so on. I found out a lot about Fender in writing this book that I didn’t know. I hope that it makes a contribution to people’s understanding, not only of amplifiers and their importance, but of the rich history of Fender. The more I research these things, the more I’m struck by just how remarkable this company has been at every stage of its 60-some-year history and how much a part of America and American culture and design the Fender company has become. It really is a wonderful institution. I think we’re lucky to have it and not just as musicians. I think we’re lucky to have it in our culture because it reflects so many things about the American experience.

Watson: It seems that many of the commentators in the book were excited that someone wanted to tell their story.

Wheeler: Yes, and I think part of that is because they were overlooked for so long. As Aspen Pittman said one time, “Guitars get all the girls.” People have been overlooking amps for too long. These folks were definitely out there preaching the gospel of the amp and saying, “Look, this is great stuff. It’s important and it’s fun. Get with it.”

Watson: That’s part of what makes the book work so well. The enthusiasm and passion of your commentators for what they’re talking about propels the reader along. We catch their fever.

Wheeler: Many of the experts I spoke to work at companies other than Fender or they’ve started their own company. But, when I called them and said I was writing a book about Leo Fender and Fender amplifiers, all of these competitors to Fender said, “What can I do? How can I help?” So, Mark Baier at Victoria, Steve Carr of Carr Amps, Randall Smith, Hartley Peavey, people from across the spectrum, Mike Soldano, Alexander Dumble, all of these brilliant amplifier designers, Paul Rivera … they were wonderful in helping me to understand not only how amplifiers work and what a rectifier rectifies and what a transformer transforms, they also had a unique perspective on Leo Fender and the Fender company that I think only a person who knows these things well enough to design and build their own amplifiers can bring to the table.

But, I’ll tell you another thing about all those people – they have a wonderful perspective on what’s truly important. Throughout the book, these people who build the $2000 and $3000 amplifiers have the same opinion as Mark Baier at Victoria who said, and I’m just paraphrasing here, “Look. If you think you need a $200 or $300 transformer to sound good, I feel sorry for you. Now, if you hire me to build an amplifier, you’re going to get a fabulous amp, but the most important thing is that you sit on the edge of your bed every day and practice guitar. You want to sound good, then you listen to the right records and you practice your guitar.”

I thought that was wonderful. They’re not saying you must have a $3000 amplifier to sound good. They’re not saying you have to swap out your rectifier and swap out your transformer and all that sort of stuff. I think that’s another important contribution that came out of enlisting all of their wonderful support and comments.

Watson: It also demonstrates an underlying respect for the Fender legacy.

Wheeler: Absolutely. One of the things I think we tend to forget is that Leo Fender had no interest whatsoever in building anything vintage. It was all about the new, and he was very much involved with and kept up with evolving technologies. He really did used to drive people crazy. Someone would come around from a supplier, someone who supplied wire or speakers or tubes or potentiometers or whatever, and Leo would reel those guys in and lecture them about the specs of their own products. The guys at Triad said it was remarkable that an executive of his stature would come by the factory and could talk to the people that were out there winding transformers about the technical specs of their own products, and do it in a real one-on-one “we’re all in this together” kind of way, not condescendingly from on high in the board room.

He really was this sort of classic American figure in the work shirt with the little pocket protector, the magnifying goggles and all that. He labored at his workbench up until the day before he died. The more I find out about Leo Fender, the more interesting he becomes. By his attempting to stay on top of technology and constantly improve and tweak and so on, a couple of different things happened. On the one hand, musicians would come to him – as you know, he didn’t play guitar – and say, “This is what we need,” and he would try to build it and those products would fulfill that function for musicians.

The other thing that happened was he would put these products out there and creative musicians would do things with them that Leo Fender never intended, could not have imagined and almost certainly would not have liked. You’ve got this circle of “we are responding to musicians,” but then the musicians are responding to the gear and trying new things. Hey, we’ve got four tubes instead of two. We’ve got more power. We’ve got two speakers instead of one. Leo Fender intended this thing to be turned up to 5 or 6, let’s turn it up to 12 and run humbucking pickups through it and see what that sounds like.

What do you get? Punk music. Heavy metal. I’m fascinated by that self-stoking cycle of Leo and his successors and their uses of evolving technology to provide products to meet specific needs. And then, on the other hand, musicians taking it further and further and coming up with new styles of music.

Watson: On the other hand, in some ways Fender’s past seems like both a blessing and a curse.

Wheeler: How so?

Watson: A blessing in the fact that certain Fender products like the Stratocaster, the Telecaster, the Jazz bass, the Precision bass, the Twin Reverb and the Bassman will always make Fender a going business, but a curse with respect to growth. How do you keep one foot in the past and place the other in the future?

Wheeler: I think it’s a blessing and a curse for all of the major manufacturers that have been around for several decades or longer. I’ve had people at Martin tell me they’re not in the vintage guitar business, they’re in the business of selling new guitars. I asked someone at Martin, “Who are your competitors? Is it Santa Cruz? Is it Taylor? Is it this company, is it that company?” and he said, “The biggest competitor for new Martin guitars is an old Martin guitar.”

But, you’re right. That has been a big challenge for Fender. In answering this question, let me ask you to imagine something. Imagine you were going to go out and buy a new car. Suppose you were going to buy a Chevy here in December of 2007, and you walked into the showroom and all of the 2007 Chevys looked exactly like a 1950 Chevy. And imagine that as you’re driving down the street from your house to the dealer, all the cars, all of them, look like they were made between 1950 and 1958. Now, there might be some differences. They might have a more up-to-date suspension or some new safety features, but with respect to the styling, it would be like stepping back in time. We can hardly imagine something so bizarre.

Yet, of course, that’s what we do when we buy Les Pauls and 335s and Stratocasters and Telecasters and Precision basses. So, it is a unique challenge. I think Fender has responded well, and obviously extremely successfully, by recognizing the heritage of these instruments that were designed, in terms of guitars, pretty much from ’50 to ’54, and the basses up through about ’60 or so. They have managed to revise, update and improve, while at the same time preserving the design heritage and integrity of those original instruments. That’s a tricky balance to find.

Watson: I used to be almost anti-purist, thinking that detailed discussions about tubes and whatnot were like debating the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin, but then I realized from your commentators, that whatever it is, it’s fun.

Wheeler: That’s right. The most important thing, I think, is to have fun with your gear and, whether you’re in your living room or playing with friends or on stage or recording or whatever, it’s important to sound good, to get the sound that you want. People take this stuff to extreme degrees sometimes, and they kind of lose the fun. I’ve never responded to musical instruments in that way. I think, as supposedly inanimate objects, they’re actually quite animated. I’m looking at my one vintage amp, my little brown Deluxe. Boy, it’s a beautiful thing. Leather handle, the wheat-colored grill and the brown faceplate with the brown knobs … it’s just the sweetest amp, and man does it sound good. There is unquestionably a sort of romantic glow that emanates from these things. The more we think about it, they are more than boxes with knobs and handles.

Watson: The holy grail idea about tone and the fact that we may never arrive there also makes it fun.

Wheeler: That’s right. What’s the old saying? It is better to travel than to arrive. For me, I just want to sound good. I’m positive that if you substituted cloth sheathing for the rubber or the plastic or whatever’s covering the interior wires in my Stratocaster I could not tell the difference. Who hears this stuff? On the other hand, I have to say that these little things do add up. I think that’s where the magic is.

One of the things that has really been a lesson for me and that I tried to share and contribute in this book is that an amplifier is a system, there’s a whole world of interacting components in there. The designers and builders helped me realize that you can have a tube that leans in a certain direction, and maybe you balance that tube with a transformer that leans in another direction, or you can design a front end that’s going to be a little bright, so you pick a speaker that’s a little mellower to counteract that. You have all of these balances, this sort of complex wave, this ebb and flow of effects of different components inside an amplifier, and they add up to the personality and the tone of this particular instrument.

That’s another thing, too. The more I find out about amps, the more I come to think of them as musical instruments.

Watson: When I finished the book, I was tempted to find an old tube amp and start tinkering with it.

Wheeler: It is a lot of fun and I hope this book will encourage people to experiment. One of the things that’s always fascinated me in all of my research is finding the story behind the story. A lot of what we take for granted in the world often turns out to be not particularly accurate. I loved finding out, for example, that some of those roaring, massive tones on some of our favorite records were played through 4 and 5-watt amplifiers, and that Jimmy Page, best known for playing Les Pauls through Marshalls, recorded “Stairway To Heaven” on a Telecaster, probably through a little Supro, a little lunchbox-sized amp. Finding out those sorts of things has always been fascinating for me, that sometimes our assumptions lead us up the wrong street. The truth is often more interesting than those rumors that have been flying around for years and years.

Watson: It’s also interesting to demystify some of this amp talk.

Wheeler: Yes, though I think we’re only going to demystify it so much. At the end of the introduction I include a quote, I think it’s from David Lindley, that says, “If you have a great sound, if everything sounds perfect, don’t change anything. Don’t even blow the dust off the tubes, because you never know.” I thought that was just great and I thought, that’s me. I’ll never know “the final formula,” no matter how deeply I get into this stuff.

But, it is good to demystify it, and that’s kind of what I do for a living. I like to look at a big body of information that I’m not particularly familiar with, figure it out and then explain it. If I’m passionate about it, if it’s fun for me, I try to capture that and explain it so that other people can share in my discoveries. At the same time, though, there’s always going to be a little magic. Why does that amp sound a certain way? As Ritchie Fliegler says, “It sounds that way because it sounds that way.” We can only know so much, and as I say in the book, it will always involve a little bit of magic and that’s okay with me.

Watson: There’s always that unidentifiable element. Like your quote from Santana where he says, “I can give you a list of every piece of equipment I’ve ever used, but it won’t make you sound like me.”

Wheeler: I think Carlos is exactly right. We have come to appreciate that one of the great things about the guitar is, in a way, how primitive it is. You play it by putting both hands directly on the strings, or maybe you’re holding a pick, but it’s a very tactile kind of thing. Your hands, your fingers, and your fingernails if you’re finger picking with your right hand, are really going to affect the sound. I played one of Eric Clapton’s guitars one time. You know what? I didn’t sound like Eric Clapton. Sorry.

Watson: No matter how solid state we get, you can’t get away from the fact that flesh is involved.

Wheeler: A friend of mine, Andy Ellis, who’s an equipment buff – I mean, he could even tell me what kind of cord he was using – interviewed Eric Johnson one time in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and Eric just had a Strat and a little practice amp. Now, Eric is a guy who, of course, is famous for having ridiculous ears and being extremely picky and having a very complicated rig. Andy said, “Guess what? He sounded just like Eric Johnson.”

Watson: Soul of Tone does an excellent job of demystifying the technical aspects of the various components that go into making an amplifier. What was the trick? Was it balancing technical detail, people, and the use of ordinary language?

Wheeler: That’s a very interesting question. Yes. As I say in the beginning of chapter 3, where I really begin this electronic journey, if you truly want to understand this stuff, you have to understand where the word “electronics” comes from. It comes from electrons. You have to know something about atoms and negatively charged particles that are flying around inside a tube. I don’t think there’s any other way. In other words, if you’re going to get deep into this, you have to go all the way. So, I went all the way down to the subatomic level. My challenge was to pick and choose information and try to chart a course of explaining what’s happening from inside a tube to inside your ear in such a way that it doesn’t get too far off the track of simple language.

Watson: And you do it in a story-like format. You take me by the hand and I’m along for the walk.

Wheeler: I like that a lot, because I think it’s a convenient way to present the information about sound and tone. The thing is, as this train’s rolling down the track, it’s picking up stuff every step of the way. I think you really do need to start with what happens with a vibrating string and then just briefly what happens inside a pickup. If you look at a pickup as vibrations going in and a coil of wire and a magnet, it’s fascinating to me that at the other end of this entire chain, after going through all these components, at the amp you’ve got kind of the same thing in reverse. Now you’ve got electricity going into a magnet, moving a coil, attached to paper we call a speaker, and it’s hammering the air around the speaker.

I also want to know why we call these things the names that we do. You simply ask a person who knows what he’s talking about, who designs, builds or repairs amps, what does a transformer transform? What does a rectifier rectify? If we use the word “transform” in everyday language, we know what that means and if we use the word “rectify,” we’re usually talking about solving or fixing a problem. So, why do we use these terms with respect to amp components? It turns out there are very good reasons. By explaining those reasons, I’m hoping that people can begin to demystify some of the electronic components and see this as a process that begins in the fingers of the player and ends in the ears of the listener.

Watson: It helps that you got your commentators willing and able to explain these things in a joyful manner.

Wheeler: That was easy, because I really didn’t have to get them to do anything. My challenge in interviewing people was simply framing questions in a way that I thought would most likely produce answers that I could understand myself. There were many times when I would go back and interview some of these people, oh gosh, 20 times, on a particular aspect of a speaker or a tube or a phase inverter and so on. Sometimes you get conflicting opinions.

Take the early ‘60s Fender amp tremolos, or vibrato as Fender calls them – here’s a perfect example. The misuse of these terms just cracks me up. I’ve got a hand tremolo on my Strat. Well, it’s really a vibrato. And my amp says vibrato, but it’s really tremolo. That’s part of the somewhat messy romance of all this stuff.

If you read the explanations of the photocell tremolo and all the others, here’s the question: Is that extremely rich-sounding early ‘60s trem like you might hear, for example, from a blonde Twin, phase shifting? Well, the less technically inclined experts say yes and the guy who spent 25 years at Hewlett-Packard as a full-time engineer says, “No, but here’s why it sounds that way.” The explanation I give in the book of that tremolo, I’ve got to tell you, took me easily 20 different interviews, and I don’t mean 20 one-hour interviews, I mean going back on just this particular little nit-picky thing to figure out why some experts who know 100 times more than I’ll ever know about this stuff are telling me one thing, and other experts who know 100 times more than I’ll ever know about this stuff are telling me something else. How can they all be right?

One of my biggest challenges was to reconcile the occasionally conflicting feedback that I was getting from experts. It’s not because some of them knew what they were talking about and some didn’t, it’s just because some might use the language a little differently or some might be more casual in their use of otherwise technical terms.
Now, you asked about their enthusiasm. All I had to do was tap into it. Most or all of them are players and they love to talk about these things, so it was easy to capture that.

Watson: Also, with technical people, if you don’t phrase the question correctly, you’re going to get a different kind of answer.

Wheeler: That’s why, in some cases, I went back to these folks again and again and again. This was a three-year project for me.

Watson: Three years?

Wheeler: Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6, alone represent several months of work. That’s kind of a book within a book right there. This is a book about the history of Fender amps but the history doesn’t start until chapter 7. The first couple of chapters attempt to place Leo Fender and the Fender company in this larger perspective, not only in the music industry, but of American design and culture. Then, chapters 3-6 are about how amps work, whether we’re talking about Fenders, which I concentrate on, or amps in general. So, that was months and months of work just to write those few chapters, which don’t even begin to address the Fender amp history. That doesn’t even kick in until chapters 7 and 8 and the next 20 chapters or so.

I became somewhat more sophisticated in my understanding of these things as the project evolved. Oh, my gosh, figuring out class A, what a morass that is. Every single person you talk to, you ask, “Hey, what does class A mean?” and they usually give their answer by saying, “Oh, boy.” Like, now we’re going to get into trouble. These are highly complex and sometimes very controversial topics. So, it was fascinating for me, but very time consuming to figure out what single-ended really means, what push-pull means, and what class A is. I would interview one person, interview somebody else, interview a third person, interview the fourth person, and by then I’m ready to go back to person number one at a deeper level. That was the process for a period of several months, just on the technical aspects. As I became more and more aware and somewhat more sophisticated in my grasp of these things. I could go back to the same people and speak to them a little bit more on their own level.

Watson: When I got the book, frankly, I couldn’t wait to get to the Fender history sections so I glossed over chapters 3-6. But the conversations that start in chapter 7 inspired me to go back to 3, 4, 5, and 6 so I could enjoy them more.

Wheeler: I’m hoping that that’s the way it works. Chapters 3-6 – I could have written this book without any of that, but knowing Hal Leonard they would have said, “Hey, why don’t you take a few more months and figure all this stuff out and explain it?” At one time in the early stages of this book, we were talking about having a glossary, which I could put together in a few days – a really good glossary. I wrestled with this, agonized over it, in fact. Do I want to try to explain how all this works? If somebody buys a book on Fender history and there’s no Fender history for several chapters, what are they going to think? It was a gamble, in a way.

Then I thought, what would I want as a reader? If I’m going to encounter experts discussing tubes and speakers and phase inverters throughout the entire book, wouldn’t it be great if I knew what they were talking about? So, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge and that was a huge part of my research for this book.

Watson: You and your experts tell the story from chapter 7 on in such an engaging way that we’re inspired to go back to chapters 3-6 to better follow the conversation.

Wheeler: And that’s the key word – story. That’s what fascinates me. I think we all like stories. Our parents read stories to us when we’re children and they’re important, they’re very much a part of who we are and how we see the world. I’m just fascinated by the stories of the people who designed and created these things and then the creative musicians that came along and used them in ways to make music that has really changed our lives.

Watson: The Soul of Tone is an excellent title.

Wheeler: It’s the result of a conversation that I had with my wife when the book was still in the works. She, understandably, wanted to know, “What are you doing when you get out of bed at 5:00 in the morning every day for several years and go out to your computer in the back house in the dark and work, work, work?” I tried to tell her, these aren’t just boxes, this isn’t just electronics, it’s not just wire and speakers. I was just rambling semi-coherently about fun and passion and tone, and she said, “Oh, well, you’re trying to get to the soul of it.” I thought, perfect, thank you. We’ve got ourselves a title.

Watson: Fender-Leo, Fender-CBS, Fender-Bill Schultz, are we in the fourth Fender era now?

Wheeler: That’s an interesting question. Sometimes it’s a little too soon to tell. I think simply with the passing of Bill Schultz, because he was such a towering figure – no exaggeration to call him the man who saved Fender, as anyone at the Fender company will tell you – I think the answer is probably yes, we are in the post-Schultz Fender era.

But, I think what we will see is a continuation of the Fender company that Schultz built almost from scratch. The only thing he had was a few guitars, no production facilities. He had the Fender name and he had a few key passionate, dedicated, talented people, but still, not much. He really rebuilt that company. Here was a company with a 40-year legacy, but by the mid-’90s it was really only a 10-year-old company that Bill Schultz and his crew raised from the ashes. I think people forget that.

But, I think it’s too soon to tell. We don’t have as neat a milestone as we had in January of 1965 when the sale to CBS is finalized, or in ’85 when Schultz and his investors take over the company. We’ll just have to wait and see, but I think it’s fair to say that with the passing of Bill Schultz, Fender does find itself in its fourth incarnation. I see number four as a continuation on the foundation that he built – he and his very talented and dedicated associates.

Watson: What do you think about the future? Are we headed toward a software approach to amplification?

Wheeler: I wonder about that. I read an interesting article recently called “Is Photography Dead?” My first reaction was, gee, I hope not. There’s a fascinating article in Newsweek about a product called the Kindle, which Amazon is going to be selling. It’s an electronic book. Is the book, is paper, is print in danger? I’m a journalism professor, so we think about this stuff all the time and talk about it almost every day.

Where is media going? For myself, I like books. I like magazines. I like print. I spend more time on my computer than I want to. I don’t want to do everything on the computer. I don’t want to watch movies on my computer. I don’t want to read books on my computer and magazine articles. I use my computer every day. I love it. I do research, I do email, I write on it. I don’t want to go back to a typewriter. I don’t consider myself a Luddite, but I do respond to print.

Now, that may be a generational thing. My kids, who have grown up with computers, who have never known an age without them and for whom a vinyl record is an artifact like a Model-T Ford, may see it differently. I do think it’s remarkable that 50 or 60 years after the invention or the design of 335s, Les Pauls, Precision basses, Telecasters, and Stratocasters, we’re all playing and valuing those instruments and their descendants, and a lot of people still like tube amps. Where it’s going, I don’t know. Beats me.

Watson: I’m thinking about a generation of YouTube players who sit in their bedroom and don’t even own an amplifier maybe. They plug their guitar directly into the computer and use modeling software. That has to be a growing market.

Wheeler: It’s huge, and I think you’ll see companies like Fender getting more and more into that. For me, as much as I love guitars and amps, that’s only part of it. I like the social aspect. I like going out in the garage with my buddies and crashing around and making music. I like performing in front of people. So, I think how technology is going to influence the social aspects of making music is what interests me the most, and the answer is, I don’t know. I wish I did.

Gibson’s got this new Robot guitar that will re-tune itself for you. If you want to play open tunings and stuff, you just push a button and suddenly you’re a slack-key guitar player. I mean, the technology is only going to increase and accelerate evermore rapidly. But, how these things affect the social aspects of playing music, I don’t know. The Garage Band software is so cheap now that it comes in your Macintosh. It’s free. They just throw it in. And it’s wonderful. It’s fantastic that kids can do the equivalent of multi-track recording from their bedrooms and make music. So, I’m very excited about it, but it’s hard to predict.

Watson: Like you said earlier, too, there’s still an important tactile element involved. We like the feel of things, we like the warmth of an amp. I remember cold winter nights at gigs sitting on my amp warming my butt as that little tube furnace inside got going.

Wheeler: I hope that doesn’t go away. It’ll never go away for me. It’s like with synthesizers. I think they’re wonderful. I think it’s cool that you can approximate a string part on a demo without having to hire a string section. You can approximate a horn part without hiring a horn section. That’s all very useful. It’s great. But, at some point, when playing music is replaced by knob twiddling, the more and more things you replace with the knob twiddling, the closer you get to turning on a radio. I mean, if you turn on a radio and listen to music, that’s twiddling a knob and music comes out and the knob twiddler is removed from the experience entirely and becomes a completely passive participant.

I like active participation, and I think every artist, whether amateur or professional, has to draw his or her own line in terms of how much music making we’re going to replace with knob twiddling. If I have an octave divider on my guitar and I can play two parts at once, that means I can play it one time instead of two and I’m happy to do that. But, I think everybody has to draw his or her own bounds.

Watson: What are some of the surprises you stumbled upon during your research? You mentioned a couple in passing, but what were some of the things that floored you or you never would have guessed?

Wheeler: I mentioned that people who make expensive amplifiers are the first to say a lot of this stuff is overrated. I thought that was wonderful and it was a pleasant surprise.

To learn how design was reflective of the consciousness and the perspectives of the day, whether it was the ‘50s or the ‘60s, these were pleasant surprises, things I hadn’t really considered.

The emphasis placed on volume in the 1970s. Steve Grom said, “Hey, nobody complained about the tone of those amplifiers,” and that was interesting to me. We complain about them now. “Hey, my silverface Twin with a push-pull master volume and all that stuff doesn’t sound so good.” Nobody was telling Fender that back in the day. If they had, Fender would have responded.

Watson: I think that’s one of the best points you make about the silverface era.

Wheeler: That was kind of a surprise. There were others along the way in my research. I think many of us assume that things happen logically. We assume that if some inventor out there is doing something in 1951 and somebody else is doing something in 1953, that the person in ’53 must’ve known about the person in ’51 and must’ve been building upon whatever contributions that earlier person made. But, the reality is people often labor in total ignorance of each other’s work. Things aren’t neat. They’re not always chronological. There are many dead ends here and there.

I asked Leo Fender one time about the very distinctive necks on his early instruments. I remember the first Fender guitar I ever saw. I remember the name of my friend who had one, I remember which model it was, and I remember opening that incredible rectangular case – the case alone was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I opened it up and here’s this blonde neck with black dots on it. I asked Leo Fender about the maple necks and the maple fingerboards and I was expecting a dissertation on the superior resonance and density of hard rock maple wood. He said he thought it was pretty.

That floored me. It was pretty. He liked those big blonde Epiphones. He had seen them in catalogs and he’d seen somebody playing one on television. He thought they were pretty. Its those sorts of things, the funny little accidents and the things that you can’t predict and how they mix with the results that do come from planning, design and intention, those are the things that fascinate me the most.

Watson: In other words, we can talk about physics and capacitors all day long, but it’s still a people story.

Wheeler: It’s a people story. That’s exactly what it is. And it’s a story of people living in their times.

Related Links
The Soul of Tone – Celebrating 60 Years of Fender Amps on Music Dispatch
Hal Leonard Online
Book Review: The Stratocaster Chronicles by Tom Wheeler
More articles by Tom Watson