pour l'histoire : l'arrivée de la Zendrive dans la vie de Robben !
"Birth Of The Zendrive Pedal :
Clearing out and organizing my tour years memorabilia and gear, I ran across my Zendrive prototype.
Here’s the story of how the Zen came to be.
Whilst touring with Robben Ford during 2004, we began looking for a Dumble style setup to use consistently whenever we could not take Robben’s stock Dumble rig with us.
Robben was usually fine with any provided clean sounding amp, usually Fenders, but needed a pedal he could rely on to get the tones he liked.
People often brought us pedals they had built, wanting Robben’s opinions, so we went thru several months of trying out virtually any pedal presented to us.
Robben felt many were good, some excellent, but none that quite fit what it was he was looking for.
In the summer of 2004, he performed at a club in Florida.
As I was setting up the stage gear, a gentleman approached the stage and told me he had a pedal he’d designed and built especially for Robben and asked if Robben would be interested in checking it out.
I gave him my stock answer of, “Sure, he would, so I would take it but I didn’t know when we would get around to trying it out.”
I assured him, though, that Robben would indeed try it when we got the chance and we would get back to him. He left his contact info with the pedal and wandered off.
Shortly, Robben came in for soundcheck, quickly went through his paces, was satisfied and, because we still had some time to kill before ‘doors’, I mentioned to him that someone had dropped off another pedal to try.
Robben was in the mood and said “Sure, let’s try it out”.
Within a few quick chords and guitar licks he broke out in a big grin and said, “This is it, Dave! The sound I’ve been looking for! Is the guy who brought it in still around?”
I told him he was and I would go find him.
The gentleman was, of course, Alfonso Hermida who loved the sound of Robben’s work.
As I found out later, Alf was a real ‘rocket scientist’ working for NASA.
When experimenting with a new NASA chip one day, he came up with the idea of how to use it to get a ‘Dumble-in-a-box’ tone and set to work designing the pedal.
Once he was satisfied with his invention, he needed a name for it.
As Alf later told me, he was one day talking with guitar builder, Gene Baker, about the new peddle he was designing for Robben and wondering what to call it.
Gene said, “Well, he’s a pretty zenful kinda guy...”
And so it became the Zen pedal.
I went outside the venue and found Alf hanging out, then took him to Robben’s dressing room to meet Robben.
The first prototype Zen had only 3 adjusts on it... volume, tone, and gain. Robben suggested adding a voicing control.
A week later Alf sent one to me with the voicing mod and Robben loved it.
As everyone knows, he’s been using them ever since.
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A few years back, Alf called me to ask if I still had that prototype.
I told him I did and asked if he wanted me to send it back.
He told me no and that I could keep it.
But he did ask me to open it up and look inside because he had written a date inside and he wanted to know what that date was.... “Prototype 07/09/04-01”, is what I found.
So I still have that first 3 knob Zendrive pedal after all these years.
Pictures are attached.
I don’t remember why I put a piece of tape labeled “2” on it, maybe because for awhile after Alf built Robben’s 4-knob Zendrive, I continued to carry it as a backup.
But, as you can see, it is clearly labeled inside as “prototype” with a ”-01” attached to the date, indicating it is the first.
And that is how the Zendrive was born.
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Zen proto 3 buttons
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Musician: Someone who puts $50,000 worth of gear into a $5,000 car to drive 100 miles to a $50 gig.
L'intelligence artificielle ne fait pas le poids face à la stupidité naturelle !
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