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I have long wondered how the guitar tone on this record was achieved. I'm hoping someone here may know. I have seen the video of the group miming the tune and so I know that they had Burns guitars. It seems to me that there is some phase or flanging effect on the lead guitar.

Incidentally, I had a flimsy record of the song that came with a box of Honeycomb cereal in the mid 1960s. The guitar in the warped cereal box record really sounded weird!

That record was recorded & produced by Joe meek , theres no telling what strange effects or gadgets he experimented with at the time in his studio.
its certainly a distinctive sound.
someone with a bit more knowledge of Joe Meek and his recording methods should be able to shed more light on the origin of the guitar sound.
regards
Jay

The sound of the HITR guitar is, I think, produced by the Vib/Trem channel on an AC30 producing a vibrato (frequency modulation). Joe did his usual trick on HITR - he speeded up the track, which makes the modulation much faster and more pronounced. The Honeycombs were not happy with the speeding up. It pitched lead singer Dennis D'ell's voice quite high (In The Triumphs, we backed Bobby Rio, one of Joe's artists who wanted to sing HITR in the key of B! From then on, Rob Bradford (The Triumph's lead singer) found himself singing it in B!) I ws playing guitar then in The Triumphs and I used a vibrato setting on my Zoom G2 effects pedal, set to give a 'Honeycombs' sound (using the guitar's bridge pickup.)

I have read that the Honeycombs singer was not happy with the way Meeks sped up the track. Judging from the mimed video, they played the song in the key of C major and the recording is in D. I slowed the recording down to get the key back to C and it sounds much more natural. The Vox Vibravox sound is unlike anything in the Fender amps I have.

I tried an experiment with a Spark 40 last night. It has a vibrato pedal within its modulation pedal menu. I turned the speed all the way up and the depth low and got a sound reasonably close to the record. Ray L - I think you are correct about using the vibrato channel on the AC30 for the original recording.