DAWNER PRINCE
108
GUITARIST JANUARY 2021
IMAGES TO BE SHOT
W
e’ve all heard the name Leslie
used as a generic term for a
rotary speaker, but although
that company was the original inventor
and manufacturer, several brands have
produced rotary speakers over the years.
The Fender Vibratone is well known to
guitarists, but how many know that arch
rival Gibson also got in on the act with
the Maestro Rover RO-1?
Launched in 1972 and looking very
space-age in its silver circular housing,
the now extremely rare Rover was a
much smaller and lighter proposition
than its rivals. It featured a built-in
35-watt amp feeding a six-inch rotating
speaker and had fully variable speed
controlled by a foot pedal moving
between slow and fast speeds set by
the user. A notable Rover user is David
Gilmour. He’s used Leslie and Yamaha
rotary speakers at various times, but he
employed a Rover for the recording of
The Division Bell. Furthermore, to recreate
that album’s sound on stage, Gilmour got
his techs to make several custom cabinets,
called Doppolas, based on the Rover
six-inch rotating speaker design but with
more power. And it’s with that little bit of
history that we introduce Dawner Prince’s
Pulse, a pedal taking its inspiration from
those Rover and Doppola sounds.
Taking a mono guitar signal and offering
mono or stereo output, the Pulse has a
pretty straightforward user interface.
Besides the standard bypass switch,
you get a second footswitch that toggles
between fast and slow speeds; acceleration
or deceleration when switching from one
speed to the next is set by the Inertia knob.
Those speeds are set by the Slow and Fast
knobs, which respectively run from 0.4
to four and from four to eight revolutions
per second, so you can have two speeds
that are quite close together. Alternatively,
you can do the speed switching with a
footswitch plugged into the external input,
but you may prefer an expression pedal for
foot control over the whole speed range or
a chosen part of it.
SOUNDS
Since the pedal is designed to recreate
the sound of a mic’d up rotary cabinet it
has a knob to set the distance between the
virtual microphones and the revolving
speaker cabinet, offering a very practical
David Gilmour’s rotary speaker sounds recreated
Words Trevor Curwen Photography Phil Barker
PEDALBOARD
Pulse
CONTACT
DAWNER PRINCE WWW.DAWNERPRINCE.COM
MODEL
PULSE
PRICE
£319
MANUFACTURER
DAWNER PRINCE
DAWNER PRINCE
GIT467.peds_dawnerprince.indd 108 26/11/2020 13:52