Blast from the past: the Hollis Research GX7

Keefy

I have been working on a cover of David Bowie's 'The Man Who Sold The World'. I had previously done this on 4-track cassette, and when I dug out my recording notes from 1998 I found I had tracked the lead guitar part via a Hollis GX7:



For several years this was the only amp sim I possessed. Although I think I exploited it to the full, it fell well short of what is available today. I think I got it because at £80 it was a lot cheaper than the other analog gadgets available from the likes of Tech 21 and Session at the time.

Does anyone else remember this? What else did people use if they couldn't mic up? The article that prompted me to buy one can be read online here.

Full disclosure: I still use analog amp sims a lot of the time, namely a Revival Drive and a Sansamp PSA-1.

Dodge

I remember them. I think I've got an on board Hollis preamp thing in the spares box that came out of a guitar I bought.

Stuckfast

Gawd. For about a nanosecond I had a Tom Scholtz Rockman which looked quite similar to that, I guess it was quite a bit older though. It came in a big cardboard box of pedals I snagged off eBay and I sold it almost instantly, it was truly awful.

Keefy

Dodge said:

I remember them. I think I've got an on board Hollis preamp thing in the spares box that came out of a guitar I bought.

I don’t recall hearing of anything else that Hollis made but it makes sense that it was something like that.

Stuckfast said:

Gawd. For about a nanosecond I had a Tom Scholtz Rockman which looked quite similar to that, I guess it was quite a bit older though. It came in a big cardboard box of pedals I snagged off eBay and I sold it almost instantly, it was truly awful.

I used to see the Rockman in Guitar Player mag from the US. It was way out of my reach. It’s quite comforting to think that it sounded crap!