A couple of days ago, we posted a freakishly weird talking guitar video from 1962, because it demonstrated how guitarists were making vocoder-like talkbox sounds a long time before they had a mainstream electronic music context. 

Electronic music artist Richard Lainhart left a comment on that video, noting that Alvino Rey was doing crazy talkbox stuff back in 1939 – in a big band context. That’s thirty+ years before vocoder and talkbox effects were common in pop music and sixty years before Daft Punk. 

According to Big Band Library, “When Rey formed his own band in August 1939, his amplified pedal steel guitar was his featured instrument, and an off-stage vocal microphone plugged into it with a Sonovox made it seem as though the guitar could ‘talk’.”

Vocoder-like effects have a long history, and Alvino Rey’s take on the St Louis Blues, while dated, is still pretty awesome. 

If you’ve got any more info on this signal flow, leave a note in the comments.

We haven’t ruined your day with scary videos recently, so we thought we better remedy that with this creeptacular vintage video of Roddis Franklin “Pete” Drake doing his 1962 “talking steel guitar” hit, Forever. 

I had no idea that this sort of thing was going down in 1962 – 8 years before Wendy Carlos did her thing with the Moog vocoder, but Boing Boing set me straight. 

Drake was a record producer, record company founder and musician whose steel guitar playing was heard on hundreds of hit recordings including such chart toppers as Lynn Anderson’s Rose Garden, Charlie Rich’s Behind Closed Doors, Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay and Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man.

There’s not a synth in site, yet this is still spectacularly awesome. 

Says Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder: ”This is where David Lynch got his ideas.”

Update: Richard Lainhart left a comment, noting that Alvino Rey designed and used the first talkbox, in 1939. Rey’s greatest fame may be as one of the key guitarists of the exotica movement, because of “the other worldly Theremin-like sounds he coaxed from his console guitar”.