Ray Butts EchoSonic

The EchoSonic is a guitar amplifier made by Ray Butts. It was the first portable guitar amplifier with a built-in tape echo effect, and it allowed guitar players to use slapback echo, which dominated 1950s rock and roll guitar playing, on stage. He built the first one in 1953 and sold the second one to Chet Atkins in 1954. He built fewer than seventy of those amplifiers; one of them was bought by Sam Phillips and then used by Scotty Moore on every recording he made with Elvis Presley, from the 1955 hit song "Mystery Train" to the 1968 TV program Comeback Special.Deke Dickerson called the amplifier the Holy Grail of rockabilly music.

Ray Butts, an "electronics wiz," owned a music store in Cairo, Illinois, in the early 1950s. By this time, rockabilly and other guitar players (such as Les Paul) had discovered the "slapback" echo effect, which had become generally used but could, however, only be made in a studio setting. Butts thought that maybe guitar players would want to use the effect on stage, and using a Gibson 15-watt amplifier with a pair of 6V6 tubes, he fabricated a combo amplifier with a built-in tape echo for a local guitar player named Bill Gwaltney.

Butts took the second version of his EchoSonic to Nashville, where he looked up Chet Atkins in the phone book; the next night, Atkins used the amp at the Grand Ole Opry, having given Butts $395 and a 100-dollar Fender combo for it (this at a time when a top of the line Fender Twin cost $239). The collaboration between the two produced more than just good advertising for Butts: he helped Atkins set up a recording studio, and in 1954 or 1955, prompted by Atkins, he invented a humbucker pickup which was adopted by Gretsch and introduced in their Atkins-endorsed Gretsch 6120 in 1957 as the FilterTron pickup, creating what would become the legendary "twangy" Gretsch sound. Atkins recorded much of his music of the 1950s with the Echosonic, and in his autobiography spoke of the connection between the amplifier and the humbucker (the first humbucker, according to Atkins, but Gibson patented their PAF before Butts did): the pickups on Atkins Gretsch produced an awful hum in conjunction with an unshielded transformer in the EchoSonic, leading Butts to connect two single-coil pickups serially and out of phase, creating the first humbucker.

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