The Chetboard

If anyone is interested in getting that Chet Octabass sound Musicans Friend has a pedal called the Octabass. No more need to having to have a certain guitar set up for this effect anymore.$160.00. Happy New Year . Joeb

I remember reading the octabass guitar used on Chet's Solo Flights album was on the guitar where only the low E and the A strings were replaced with bass strings. There was another effect he had back in the 60's where the octave note was mixed with the natural note. It sounded like a duet of a bass player and a guitarist. These two effects sound very different to me.

I imagine that you could also reproduce the effect with maybe a Variax, or the Roland VG-99 system, or anything where you can do custom per-string tunings. In my experience, the Solo Flights stuff sounds great on a standard 6-string. Chet re-did the Octabass stuff on the DVD he did with Jerry Reed in later years, but by all accounts it was a cast-iron bitch to keep it in tune.

Back in those days when "Solo Flights" was still popular among Chet enthusiasts I had a guitar that was always ready to play things like "Drive-In" , "Three Little Words", "Mercy, Mercy", etc., but was frustrated at the limitations of what sounded right when the 5th and 6th strings had been replaced with bass guitar strings. I'd play a few songs suited for that setup and then try a few others that just didn't work well and I'd quickly find myself grabbing a different guitar.

... which is why we need lots of guitars.

Chet's original Octabass was made using his prototype SuperChet according to Paul.
When Chet went with Gibson he had a gibson CG and a gibson Tenny fitted out for Ocatabass and had Paul restore the SuperChet to its original state.

Kinda like a twelve string. Only good for certain applications and fraught with its own tuning issues.

And to reenforce Craig's comment, Chet certainly had enought guitars to tinker with...

Craig, and one of the "lots of guitars" in our collection should be a "Craig Dobbins Signature Model" by Kirk Sand, right? I would love that!