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Interview: Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar tech Rene Martinez

'Nobody will ever replace Stevie Ray'

Joe Bosso, Fri 30 Jul 2010, 3:29 pm UTC

Stevie plays Berkeley, 1983 © Clayton Call / Retna Ltd./Retna Ltd./Corbis

"Oh yeah. The neck that was broken wasn't the original Number One neck - I had put that aside to eventually fix, although I never got the time to do that before he died."

But after Stevie died, you put the original from Number One back on the guitar. [Number One is now in the possession of Jimmie Vaughan.]

"That's right."

What were some other elements of Stevie Ray's sound? What kind of amps and effects did he use?

"We used four pedals: a CryBaby wah-wah, an Ibanez Tube Screamer, an Octavia and a Dallas Arbitar Fuzz Face. Amp-wise, there were so many combinations we went through. When I first started working with him, it was a Dumble Steel String Singer and a 200-watt Marshall head, and each one of those amps was playing through EV-loaded Dumble 4 x 12 cabinets - one was angled and one was flat.

"We also had two black-face, EV-loaded Super Reverbs. In addition, we used an EV-loaded Fender Vibroverb, and it powered the Fender Vibratone Leslie speaker.

"Stevie liked a clean sound. He really didn't turn everything up until the last song. But in the meantime, throughout the show, it was a clean, beautiful sound, with a little reverb to make it wet. The way he had it configured was so that everything acted like one big gigantic speaker. The Dumble was powerful and clean, and he liked that; the Marshall was big and warm; and then the Fenders delivered true, clean hi-fidelity sounds. They all sounded great together. It was beautiful, just gorgeous."

What was he liked to work with? His drug and alcohol problems are well documented, but after he got clean, did he change at all?

"He was always the same to work with. When he got cleaned up, you know, his playing got better. It's like with anybody who's had a couple of drinks in 'em - they sing the way they do and they play the way they do. It was never a bad thing. One day, however, he decided he didn't want to do any of those things anymore. But he was always Stevie Ray Vaughan to me.

"We enjoyed each other's company a lot. We were in it for the duration of our lives. If we didn't get along on a particular day, it was because I was having a tough day or he was having a tough day."

The last show at Alpine Valley…What are your memories of hearing the news that Stevie had died?

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    Interview: Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar tech Rene Martinez

    Stevie live in San Francisco, California, 1983 (© Clayton Call / Retna Ltd./Retna Ltd./Corbis)

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