Make that
music to go.
A conversation with
Roger Mayer
afterwards, and we had to
send Noel around to the flat.
He picked up his Telecaster,
and that’s when we did the
overdub for “Purple Haze” and
“Fire,” using the Octavia.
Octavia
What was the idea behind the
original Octavia?
C
Will it ever be finished?
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Well, 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. And then we looked at it, electronically and figured out what to do. We came
up with the mirror imaging technique.
Most people think it’s full-wave rectification, but that’s not an accurate description
of it.
Y
What would be an accurate description?
CM
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It’s a mirror imaging technique in electronics. The way it’s actually implemented
virtually makes it like a mirror image, you
know? It’s a phase-inverted mirror image
of the signal, which makes it double.
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The Octavia has evolved since those
early days. Are you finally happy with
the design, or are you still tweaking
on it?
No, I don’t think so. I’ve got a Formula
One attitude; there’s always development
to be done. There’s always something you
can do to make it better, to make it slightly different, to make it use a little bit more
input from the player. The current range
of, say, the Vision Octavias are much more
expressive than the old ones. That’s one
of the main reasons I never reissued the
transformer version, because it’s like taking a step backwards—there’s no point
whatsoever.
Yeah, because there are always things you
can do, you know?
And that’s kind of your general
philosophy?
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It’s ‘
Forward-Ever, Backward-Never,’ you
know? You
wouldn’t want
Volkswagen to
go back to making the same
cars they made
back in the day.
You’d say, “What
the fuck is this?
This is ridiculous!” Those
who can invent,
do, you know?
Those who can’t,
copy.
