Neil Young's Whizzer

[tele-martini]

Just read a 2 page sidebar in "the Soul Of Tone" by Tom Wheeler on this fascinating device. A box that sits on top of Neil's Tweed Deluxe equipped with servo motors to adjust the 3 knobs automaticlly. It has 4 presets that he can change settings with via a footswitch at his mic stand. Neil had Sal Trentino design this for the 78-79" Rust Never Sleeps Tour". The objective was to change settings/tones w/o interupting the signal path with stomp boxes or other devices.Struck me as a really cool and interesting innovation.
Gene

[tazzboy]

Yeah there is interview with Neil's guitar tech Larry Cragg and some pictures at tonequest.com

http://www.tonequest.com/pdf_pubs/sa...ep06_Proof.pdf

[casterway]

They used to drill holes in the stage to set it up....

[tiktok]

Originally Posted by casterway

They used to drill holes in the stage to set it up....

I think that was actually for the custom spring reverb setup, to keep it from rattling or feeding back due to volume or people jumping around. As I recall, the spring is mounted inside a mic stand, the stand sits of the floor of the arena, so there's no coupling with the stage.

[64Strat]

Originally Posted by tele-martini

Just read a 2 page sidebar in "the Soul Of Tone" by Tom Wheeler on this fascinating device. A box that sits on top of Neil's Tweed Deluxe equipped with servo motors to adjust the 3 knobs automaticlly. It has 4 presets that he can change settings with via a footswitch at his mic stand. Neil had Sal Trentino design this for the 78-79" Rust Never Sleeps Tour". The objective was to change settings/tones w/o interupting the signal path with stomp boxes or other devices.Struck me as a really cool and interesting innovation.
Gene

I've been enjoying my copy of that book.

[tele-martini]

I guess it was very interesting to me because I work with robotics and automation for a living. I'm sure we could build one where I work if I could just talk the engineers and programers into putting their efforts into it instead of the machinery their actually responsible for.Damn those guys worring about what the owner/president of the company thinks.

[aunchaki]

Originally Posted by tele-martini

I'm sure we could build one where I work if I could just talk the engineers and programers into putting their efforts into it instead of the machinery their actually responsible for.

I know that Neil is a big shareholder in Lionel Trains (he's a big model train buff) and I *think* I read that those guys helped him build the original rig -- I could be wrong, I don't want to spread misinformation.

[tiktok]

There have been two versions of the Whizzer. The first one was from the Rust Never Sleeps era, and the second one is from '91. The original only had two settings, the second one has four.

Mike Soldano did a preamp back in the 90's that had the motors built in, and said he spent more than half his time figuring out how to keep motor noise out of the audio signal path. Later on, Yamaha had the top end of their DG modeling amps with motorised knobs.

One of the main obstacles to making one of these things is that has to fit a specific amp model because of the knob spacing, and for optimum results you bolt the thing to the amp so the settings are accurate and the alignment of the knob shafts and the motor coupling is dead on.

[studio1087]

I know that Neil is a big shareholder in Lionel Trains (he's a big model train buff) and I *think* I read that those guys helped him build the original rig -- I could be wrong, I don't want to spread misinformation.

I've read this many times in many places. A technician or engineer at Lionel developed a number of Neils ideas. Now I want to google this and learn the connection.

[tiktok]

Originally Posted by studio1087

I've read this many times in many places. A technician or engineer at Lionel developed a number of Neils ideas. Now I want to google this and learn the connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Trains

The Wellspring era

Lionel changed hands again in 1995, when Kughn sold controlling interest in the company to an investment group that included rock star Neil Young and the holding company Wellspring Associates, which was headed by former Paramount Communications chairman Martin Davis. The new company became known as Lionel LLC. The company continued marketing reproductions of its vintage equipment, and the trend towards producing new equipment that was ever-more-detailed (with a correspondingly higher price) continued.

Additionally, Young, who has a 20% stake in the company[1], helped finance the development of Trainmaster Command Control, a technology similar to Digital Command Control which permits, among other things, the operation of Lionel trains by remote control. In order to proliferate this standard, Lionel has licensed it to several of its competitors, including K-Line. Another element of Young's vision was the creation of "Railsounds II" a sound system that would faithfully reproduce the sound of a particular locomotive, with electronics and loudspeaker built into each model.

In "Shakey", the Neil Young biography, it describes his train room which is a converted bar. As I recall, it's at the foot of a hill, and he had a fake tunnel opening made and some full-size rails laid so that it would appear that the real train he owns was coming out of the tunnel.

[amp boy]

that ranch is like my willy wonka factory tour.....oooohhh if only i had the privilege of a golden ticket.

[peteb]

"The objective was to change settings/tones w/o interupting the signal path with stomp boxes or other devices.Struck me as a really cool and interesting innovation."

that and what I read in a Gerald Weber book about the interactivity between the tone controls of the 5E3 allows you to control the amount of break up to an even greater degree