The background: My father practiced psychiatry first in Austin and then Houston from 1968 to 2001, and during that time he treated thousands of patients both in the Texas Medical Center and in his own private practice. He specialized in treating drug addiction, but he also worked with many Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD, and with others suffering from severe depression. He was an amazing, brilliant guy that was also very eccentric and would throw himself into whatever disparate hobbies interested him until he mastered them (cooking, photography and black and white film development, fly-fishing, competition rifle shooting) and he loved tinkering with anything small and mechanical. For most of my youth though, he didn’t really appreciate my musical tastes (punk, new wave, and other early alternative, grunge, and so on) and only really started showing an interest in my bass playing once I became a competent upright jazz bass player in college. He did mellow in his old age though, but he was probably greatly relieved that I found a job in the energy industry and that I play music for fun rather than rely on it solely for my income.
Anyway, he passed away back in 2015 – surviving through 6 different forms of cancer that first manifested themselves in 1996. He was a tough old bastard and ultimately succumbed to pneumonia after having hip-replacement surgery. His last few years though were very happy despite all the physical hardship. Going through my parents house and cleaning out old things was really difficult… physically, and emotionally. What to keep, what to donate, who to ask if they want something for sentimental reasons… I feel for anyone who has to go through that. And he was such a packrat. One morning, my older brother and I were in his garage when I came across a latched, cloth-covered box with a handle, and everything that wasn’t metal was pretty much disintegrating in the extreme Texas heat and humidity. When I opened it up though, I was only mildly surprised. It was a portable Medcraft Model B-24 ECT device probably dating back to the early 1970s or possibly even earlier). It still had all the instructions, the hospital ID information, the power cord, etc. My first thought was, “He kept this? Of course he would… ” I dusted it off, put it in a cardboard box and took it back to my house… for you see, I too am a bit of a packrat. Normally, I’d have been one of those people that many of you identify with who would start singing “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” and/or who might think aloud, “How do I put a gnarly LFO / Trem / Fuzz in there?”, but I was still grieving, and I must have forgotten about this little treasure until this year.
Fast-forwarding to a few weeks ago, I saw an FB thread in one of the Pedalboard groups there was a guy who had a vintage Time-o-Lite darkroom timer and wanted to rehouse a delay or something. I thought, hey, that’s a pretty cool idea. I wish I had something like that, and then I remembered that I did. When I got home, I dug through the boxes, and I found it. I’d briefly considered selling it to someone who might take up a cool project like that. Then I looked over at my collection of delay pedals… so many delay pedals. One of them spoke to me in its lush, warbly delayed tones though, and it quoted Tina Fey… “I want to go to there.” And so it started.
Not wanting to butcher the job myself (I can craft desserts and bake at a pretty high level, but electronics are not my expertise), I enlisted the help of Juan and the good folks at Steamboat Ampworks because, even though they specialize in making amps, I know them to be very cool guys and they're totally down with the occasional oddball request.
The first thing to address was the enclosure. Since the original cloth-covered plywood box was falling apart, we agreed upon building a new enclosure. I liked that the original box had a side compartment for the power cord, electrodes, tongue suppressor/guard, etc., so I decided to keep that. It’s a good spot for patch cables, the power supply, and other goodies. The enclosure was covered in cool Ampeg Portaflex tolex, because, hey, that stuff is way cool.
The faceplate and guts had some reconfiguring, of course:
• “Volts” corresponds to “Level”.
• The On-Off toggle corresponds to Chorus-Vibrato toggle.
• “Seconds” corresponds to “Delay”.
• “Glissando” corresponds to the “Chorus-Vibrato” knob.
• Holes for the “Feedback” and “Blend” knobs were manually drilled and punched, and the controls have been placed between “Volts” and “Seconds”, (unlabeled on the faceplate for the time being).
• “Electrodes” are now the input/output jacks.
• On the top right is the expression jack input to control “Feedback”
• “Check” light is now the on/off light for the effect.
• “Press to Treat” is the footswitch on/off for the effect
• The power jack sits above the “Chorus-Vibrato” toggle.
• The “Overload” light is above the “Chorus-Vibrato” toggle.
• The power switch was removed and the device has been hard-wired such that the pedal turns on as soon as the power supply is connected.
In case you were wondering about the name, “The Randle McMurphy Special”, it comes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You can see a very similar version Medcraft B-24 being used in the scene in the link below around the 2:00 mark (I’m not sure how often ECT was administered like this, but my father once told me it was used in hospital settings with consent from the patient and with a mild anesthetic. Even then, it was typically used only with severely depressed patients who didn’t respond to medications.)
https://youtu.be/d_mASr1djMM
I'll be picking it up from the shop this week, and I'll try to post a video at some point. In the meantime, here are a few pictures (sorry if the're cut off a bit).
