Gear In-depth & Longer Blogs — Pete Townshend

We recently had the Grampian 636 you see below come up for sale by sealed bids. This blog post is about that unit, as well as some history and technical information about these superb, legendary machines. If you are looking to buy a Grampian or have one to sell in any condition please get in touch. UPDATE: we compiled all the demos of this Grampian into this Youtube playlist. I first encountered one of these unprepossessing grey boxes while trawling ebay many years ago. As ever, I was looking for inexpensive old effects that would sound different to the run of the mill...

There are probably as many answers to this question as there are different models of spring reverb out there: even the most unpromising cheap plastic box with tiny springs can shine when you're looking for a different flavour. We happened to have a stack of vintage spring reverbs all in one place so thought we'd put them all against each other and produce: The Soundgas Snare Springathon - 13 Spring Reverbs head to head with a Roland TR-808 snare… (You may have already seen this video - we made it a few months ago now - but we'd always intended to add our thoughts...

We had our inaugural Soundgas Christmas night out last week, delivering a newly-restored Binson Echorec 2 to none other than Pete Townshend at The Who Hits 50 gig in Nottingham. Pete very kindly arranged VIP tickets for us all and met up for a chat backstage afterwards. The Who were on top form, playing for nearly two and a half hours: all killer, no filler. A truly memorable night: not sure how we top that next Christmas...   Pete had been searching for a Binson for many years - ever since he saw Syd Barrett with Pink Floyd at the UFO club in 1967: "When I saw him...