Yeah, that's the one. He's credited with shaping Stevies tone, although I'm sure Stevie had something to do with it!
Uh...could you mean Rene Martinez???
BTW that link just goes to a Fender amp *shrug*
Rene Martinez was indeed SRVs guitar tech, not Cesar Diaz. Althought Diaz did some stuff on Stevie's amps
www.tonequest.com/pdf_pubs/samples/TQRDiaz.pdfTQR: So you moved to D.C. and how did you hook up with
Stevie Ray?Cezar Diaz: A friend of mine named Steve Jacobs took me to see Stevie,
and looking back on it, he really changed my life when he
invited me to hear Stevie play, so I want to give him credit
for that. Steve Jacobs is a guitar player who’s really well
known in Blues circles. (....)
My friend Steve Jacobs told me, “Man, you have to see this
guy play – he’s really got the Blues,” and I said, “No white
man has ever had the Blues. You don’t know what’s it’s like
to be called a
![]()
i173.photobucket.com/albums/w51/fnulnu/nutz/smilies/censored.gif[~original/img].” I’m pretty brown myself, and I’ve been
called a few names in my life. I’m the only guy I know that
has changed races 8 times in a decade. Now, I’m like, Latino,
which is really hip today… So I went to see Stevie and he
was great, man, but he had the worst tone in the world.
TQR: What amps was he using?He was using the VibroVerbs, but they needed servicing, and
the guitar needed to be set up. He wasn’t fully on top of his
form yet.
TQR: When and where was this?1979 I believe, at a place called the PsyhiceDeli.
TQR: And he was using 2 Vibroverbs…Exactly, both with JBL’s. I walked up to him and said,
“Man,
you’re a great player but your tone sounds like crap.” I’ve
never been one to say no to a fight – I have a few scars – I’ve
been around, but I’ve never run away from anybody, so I was
prepared for this Texan guy to get cocky with me, but he was
just the opposite – just a really nice guy. So, when I told him
he sounded like crap, he said, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah,
and I can help you.” He said, “Well what can you do for
me?”
I explained to him that we could match transformers,
match tubes, change the filter caps, and make those amps
sound brand new with genuine vintage parts. At that time I
had all of the original parts and back then they were only 10
years old, you know? I truly believe that a lot of this “new
old stock” is nothing but a bluff. It’s only my opinion, but
from experience I think all of that stuff has a shelf life –
tubes, for example. It doesn’t do a tube any good to be sitting
around for 30-40 years. And tube matching – all of those
Fender amps were unbalanced, and they’re push/pulls to
begin with, so sure, it would help to have matched tubes, but
it wasn’t super necessary.
That’s not something they did at
the factory, sitting there matching tubes and resistors, testing
each part. They’d just put them on and every once in awhile
one was magical and the next one would be suck-butt. That’s
mainly why I never played a
Stratocaster, because out of all
the guitars that Fender made, those were the most inconsistent– you could find 1 that sounded great and 20 that sounded
horrible.
TQR: Why?Because of the way they were set up, and because of the
pickups. They didn’t say, “Lets put the weakest one in the
neck position, the next weakest one in the middle, and the
strongest pickup on the bridge.” They didn’t realize things
like that until much later on. A few years ago, I visited the
Custom Shop and I met Abagail Ybarra , the lady who had
been winding the Strat pickups in the 60’s.
I had done a lot of
rewinding and testing of the Stratocaster pickups from that
era, because my whole thing was, “How did Jimi Hendrix get
his tone?” That’s how I got anywhere – helping people get
that tone, and it was definitely Stevie Ray’s thing, getting
Jimi’s tone. Anyway, spending all of that time examining and
testing those pickups when I was young and had the time
, I
realized that all of the pickups from that era were about 200
turns off, and the resistance was much lower. And I began to
put this together – why was Hendrix only using the post CBS guitars
with the big headstocks? You’ll see very few pictures of him playing a
pre CBS Strat, even though Jimi had access to any guitar that was
ever made – Les Paul Standards, all of the Strats, Broadcasters – all
of that stuff was around to be given to him for free. Why did he choose
to only use Stratocasters from that period? To begin with, the
bigger headstock gives you more sustain, because the more
meat you have on the neck, the more sustain you’re going to
get. But also,
the least amount of gain you have coming out
of the pickups, the better it’s going to sound when you run
through a fuzzbox or any kind of gain device. Obviously,
Jimi wasn’t a very scientific guy – he just did it because it
sounded good, but in any case, that’s what he chose to do for
a specific reason.
When I was at the Fender Custom Shop, I
asked Abigail Ybarra if the winding machine was off in the
counter. Her eyes got huge and she said, “How do you know
that?” I said, “Well, I’ve taken a lot of pickups apart and I
know that you wound them by turns, and I’ve seen published
figures that so many turns equalled so much resistance.”
Personally, I’ve never gone strictly by the number of turns,
I’ve always checked the resistance. No matter what my
counter would say, I’d always test the resistance when it
looked like the coil was getting fat at certain points. I’d set it
up so that the neck pickup would be about 5.5K or 5.75K,
and go only up to 6.0K ohms – any more than that and you’re
just going to get mud. I know that because I’ve had hundreds
of pickups go through my hands.
TQR: So to sum it up, the Strat pickups of the mid to late
60’s were of lower resistance – weaker – and
because of that they sounded better when combined
with certain gain-boosting effects…
Yeah, it made them clearer and more appropriate for being
used with a lot of different effects.
) and linked a bunch of different amps together and played them at very high volume levels. It probably has little to do with his supposedly 'overwound' pickups. 
