Octavia

Mayer grew up in southwest London, played guitar, and knew Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. He built treble boosters while he was still at school. In 1964 he made fuzz pedals for Page and for the session player Big Jim Sullivan, who used his on P.J. Proby’s “Hold Me.” After six years at university he went to work at the Admiralty Research Laboratories in Teddington, on vibration and acoustics, and kept building guitar boxes on the side.

The Octavia started with a simple wish:

I was thinking as you go up the fretboard, wouldn’t it be nice to double the frequency, so you could play notes that weren’t even on the fretboard, you know? That was the idea really.

He met Hendrix in a London nightclub, the Bag O’Nails, a few days after his 21st birthday. When exactly depends on who you ask. Mayer puts it on 11 January 1967. One Hendrix history has Mayer introducing him to the Octavia back in December 1966. About two weeks after they met, Mayer showed him an early Octavia backstage at a gig in Chislehurst Caves. Hendrix played through it and asked, “Can you do that to it?” Within about three weeks of meeting, by Mayer’s dates, it was on “Purple Haze.”

It isn’t really making a note an octave up. Mayer is particular about this. Most people call it rectifying the signal, and he says that’s not accurate. What the circuit makes is “a phase-inverted mirror image of the signal, which makes it double.” It doubles the images of the note, and the ear hears twice the frequency, even though it isn’t really there.

What you get depends on what goes in. Push it with a fuzz and the upper octave jumps out, the way it does in the “Purple Haze” solo. Feed it a clean tone with the treble rolled off and you get strange, ring-modulated overtones instead. It works best high on the neck, on the top two strings from the seventh fret up, on the neck pickup.

Hendrix usually ran it after a fuzz and a wah. On “Purple Haze” the fuzz in front is argued over. One account says a Fuzz Face. Mayer says it was a germanium driver of his own, in a separate box. Either way, the octave is the Octavia.

Chas Chandler, Hendrix’s manager and producer, had wanted to try new sounds on “Purple Haze.” After it, he forbade any more experimenting with the Octavia, finding it too far out for the public.

Mayer kept going anyway. That first unit was never used again in its original form, and he threw it in the bin. In less than a year there were at least 15 versions. “Some only had a life of a week or so,” he said. He says the latest of them was on several tracks of Axis: Bold as Love, the effect cleaner and better defined, though he doesn’t say which.

At the end of 1967 he designed a wedge-shaped case, made by his father’s electronics company, about five of them. He toured America with Hendrix in early 1968. “We never lost an Octavia though,” he said. In early 1969 he finished another small run, about five Octavias in wedge boxes, for players including Syd Barrett, Peter Frampton, Steve Marriott and Keith Relf. And Jimi, of course.

Hendrix had his own name for it. Mayer called them Octavias. Jimi called them the Octavio.

By May 1969 Mayer had moved to New York. Just after Christmas his phone rang. Hendrix had a show at the Fillmore East on New Year’s Eve, with a new band, and he needed an Octavia: all of his had gone missing.

Mayer had one left from that 1969 run, and a distortion box. He took both to rehearsal.

Billy Cox, the bass player, said Hendrix was using a new combination of effects for the first time at those shows: a Uni-Vibe, a Fuzz Face, a wah and the Octavia. On “Machine Gun,” from the first set on 1 January 1970, the black Stratocaster runs through a Vox wah, a Fuzz Face and the Uni-Vibe, with the Octavia at the very end. On “Who Knows,” listen to the solo. Mayer says those ring-modulated overtones are the Octavia on a clean tone.

Hendrix once called Mayer “the secret” of his sound. Mayer didn’t build the Octavia for shops until around 1978 or ’79, in a rocket-shaped case, years after an American company called Tycobrahe had copied it and taken the name.

Before that, there was no Octavia in any shop. There were a handful of boxes with no labels, and a friend with a spare when Jimi called.