Charlie Hall

ROCKHAPPENZ Public Collection

Charlie Hall  —  Ely, Cambridgeshire, England .....

Charlie Hall, based in Ely, near Cambridge in the UK, is a guitarist and audio electronics designer with over 50 years of experience in both fields.  Charlie started writing echo patches for various digital effects units in 1994, marketing them under the brand Echoes From The Past — at that time the platform utilsed was the Alesis QuadraVerb which morphed into the QuadraVerb Plus and QuadraVerb GT, eventually in 1996 evolving into the powerful 20-bit Q2.  These patches were subsequently migrated to the upgraded Alesis Q20 unit and were supplied to Hank Marvin for the Shadows' final tour, patches were also supplied to Peter Frampton for use during recording and live performances.  The patches were ported to various other platforms including the Yamaha Magicstomp and a number of Zoom Effects Pedals (508, G2, G2Nu, G3 and G5).  Charlie also worked on, and finalised the design of, a signature guitar amplifier for Hank Marvin.

Always experimenting with design ideas, Charlie developed valve/tube emulation with solid state technology some time before the Hall and Collins Signature Echo was conceived.  He was always frustrated with the lack of features of existing effects units that prevented highly accurate emulation of specific echo sounds, sounds that originally came from units that have been unobtainable for nearly half a century, so he often hoped to be involved with developing a dedicated unit that could include the features needed to reproduce these sounds extremely accurately.  And so it was in March 2010, after some encouraging initial results, that John sent Charlie an email with details of his experiments.  Charlie offered John some tips on how to improve the echo sounds of John's basic digital design, and then Charlie saw the opportunity to realise his long-time dream of helping to develop an echo unit that could emulate echo sounds to an accuracy that had never been reached with other effects processors.  He offered to work with John as a team to develop the unit, so after nearly five years of research and development, and continual improvements and fine tuning, the Hall and Collins Signature Echo became a reality.