The “amp sandwich” trick Pete Townshend taught Jeff Beck
When legendary guitarist Jeff Beck passed away in 2023, a number of famous figures from the British rock scene and beyond paid tribute. One was Pete Townshend, the guitarist and primary songwriter for The Who. Beck and Townshend had crossed paths both personally and professionally on a number of occasions, with Beck adding a titanic lead guitar line to ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ when the pair teamed up with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2012.
“He walked into Abbey Road Studio 1 with a guitar and asked if I had an amp he could use,” Townshend remembered in his official statement following Beck’s passing. “He really could get his sound with almost any amplifier… Jeff was easy to be around, so natural as a musician with such a good ear for melody. As soon as he heard something, he could play it.”
Townshend goes on to call Beck the “Miles Davis of rock guitar”, an honourable distinction. The pair might seem like a slightly odd couple: in his later years, Beck was on a mission of volume control and tone purity, while Townshend was never able to shake his preference for incredibly loud sounds.
“The louder the stuff is on stage, probably the worse it’s going to end up sounding,” Beck observed to Guitar Player in 2010. “Your hearing goes, your pitch goes, and you can’t really hear any depth of field. If you have to question whether it’s too loud, then it is too loud. The power has to be there, but without the level. But if you’re going to be loud, get the speakers away from you. Lately, I’ve been one putting one 4×12 facing backwards, just so that the P.A. guy doesn’t go around the bend with too much volume.”
Strangely enough, it was Townshend who taught Beck an interesting trick to combat massive amplifier sounds. Townshend had struggled with his own hearing problems since at least the 1970s, so he was interested in finding creative solutions that allowed The Who to retain their allegiance to loud rock and roll without putting himself in harm’s way.
“I’ve also seen Pete Townshend with a stack of Fenders facing each other like a sandwich, so the audience only gets the back of it,” Beck recalled. “Sounded great to me, but I haven’t gone that far. On a big stage, I might put four Marshalls up there, like two big stacks, and have them right at the back just to see what they sound like wide open. But they’d have to be damn deep in the stage so there’s not too much spillover. I’ll try that on this tour, but I’ve got a feeling that the little Champ will win out because the orchestra and the Champ are going to sound in proportion.”
“I played with this powerful band that had 18 pieces, and I thought I’d need a Marshall for it, but I didn’t; I needed a Pignose,” he added. “Even though the trumpets and the horns were blasting away, the difference in character of the guitar with that concentrated trebly sound just cut right through.“
Watch Beck and Townshend play ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ down below.
