The Shadows' Echoes

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The music of the Shadows has made effect use of echoes in their recordings. Did the echo effect come from the sound engineers at Abbey Road Studios or was this the brain child of Hank Marvin and the Shadows?

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Charlie Hall has kindly written a detailed response to the question with regard to the Shadows' Echoes. Thanks Charlie, your comments are appreciated. Here is his response.

Hi Peter,
It is a fairly well known story with Shadows fans and players here that Joe Brown had an echo box and decided he didn't like it so he gave it to Hank. I don't know if Hank paid for it or not.

What is not clear is whether this unit from Joe Brown was the first Meazzi that Hank used on Apache, probably the first recording that the Meazzi was used on. There is a theory that the Joe Brown unit may have been a Watkins Copicat. It is generally thought that Hank never used a Copicat, except for a story I heard that Hank was loaned one for a live show when his own had packed up. It is possible that Hank may have acquired his first Meazzi from Vox since they were the importers of Meazzi equipment at the time and The Shadows were involved with Vox at that time, and certainly Dick Denney who designed the Vox AC30 was heavily involved in the echo units, even accompanying the Shadows on live shows and visits to studios while the Shadows were recording, to make sure the echo and other equipment kept working properly.

I don't think any of this would have been to to with the studio or producers. Their only part in it would have been to make sure the echo was set in order to get a good sound on record, like too much echo or too little etc.

The echo was always connected between Hank's guitar and the amp and was recorded that way in the early days, probably right through the 60's at least, maybe even later.

More recently, the echo would be added after the dry recording of lead guitar was made, to give more control of the final sound, and a dummy echo track would probably be sent to Hank's monitor so he could hear echo (that was not being recorded) while he was recording a part.

Regards,
Charlie