I was fettling in the shed one day, as you do, and one of Rob’s old cracked cymbals fell off the workbench, landed on its edge, spun gloriously, and produced the most captivating sound. This happy accident, resulted in my exploration of spinning sound effects and the Doppler Effect.
After further experimentation, I got an engineering company to cut the cymbals to shape, and I finished them, so that Rob could incorporate this unusual sound into our live performances.
This seed of an idea led to the development of the Doppler Speaker.
I fitted two 12” speakers at either end of a 3’x 1′ box, which, when spun on its central axis, produced a phenomenal 3D guitar sound, that audiences loved!
This set-up became legendary. During a live gig at The Academy, Boscombe, the Doppler Speaker was positioned on top of a double 4 x 12 Marshall speaker stack and, when centrifugal force did its thing, the whole stack came down and was evermore known as “Pete’s Flying Machine”.
