Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Very interesting Dean. I have never seen one of these units before. How did the idea of a reverb for an acoustic evolve in the first place?

Actually, this story kind of relates to the "Jammin in the Can" thread from 2005.

Roberto was always playing jazz licks in his tiled bathrooms to get the natural reverb he loved (phenomenal improvisation skills, and great flamenco licks). So he wanted to try to get something he could take with him anywhere. He studied spring reverb tankss, and a drawing of a mod done to Strats to change the vibrato tension springs into an on board reverb. His idea sprang from experiments with these studies.

The final consumer product was a plastic or wood enclosure with a ratchet style tension adjustment (for different body sizes and styles)that slid over the tail of the guitar (even had a slot for the strap button to clear). The pickup had 3 tongues with flat tabs that slid between each string pair and the bridge. Once on the guitar (I can slide mine on in a couple of seconds) you slide the casing on the ratchet to get the best tone and desired reverb time for your instrument and taste.

Aspri made only 3000 units in total, of which about 500 were the maple wood case model, and only about 1000 were for steel string instruments. Only one wood case model for steel strings was made to my knowledge. Originally the plastic units retailed around $60 while the wood case models were around $100.

It's pretty useless for recording or stage work, but if your a busker, local party, or campfire player, it is a treat and gets a lot of attention.

I found one collecting dust in a small town music store near Montreal about three years ago and bought it as a gift for about $30, so there are still a few kicking around. I still have both my prototype and production units (both plastics).

...Dean

Regarding the Accutronics tanks; they're the same thing Fender used back in the day. It's the same company, just the name was changed at one point. I have an original 60s era tank that got really weak, so I replaced it with an Accutronics tank, which sounds awesome! An examination of both tanks side by side shows them to be the same.

The tanks are the same model numbers over the years, but there have been subtle changes in materials and design, and this changes the sound. Some of the older reverb tanks sound way better than the new ones, but it is hit or miss often times.

These tanks are made to fill an approximate range of mechanical and physical size specs, and of course over the years are made to lower and lower costs in order to maximize profits.

I look for NOS tanks whenever possible. Recently I stuffed a longer, Fender tank into my Magnatone M10, transferring all of the capacitor-drive circuitry from an old Maggie tank onto the Fender frame. It was a tweezer job, especially when it came to the choke coils and laminations, which are quite tiny.

Here's a good example of a really big reverb tank:

The best reverb tanks I've ever heard...the freshwater storage tanks at the seawater distillation plant in McMurdo:



This one's Tank #3...you can see into it through the manhole (we didn't have the cover welded in place yet)...you wouldn't believe what a sledge hammer dropped on the floor of that thing sounded like.