Another obvious "Not Working According To Spec..." example -Eddie Van Halen using the Variac on his Marshall back in the day.

agiant wrote:J Mascis' Rams Head Big Muff.http://www.kitrae.net/music/J\_Mascis\_Big\_Muff.htmlit just had really odd components values, very different from anything he had seen in a vintage Big Muff before. He mentioned to J that maybe EHX had made a mistake with the value of the components they used. While it is on the outskirts of that(and almost feels like "Tone" apocrypha), Duane Allman's 1968 was supposedly something more like an SVT when they opened it up(seems like Paul Reed Smith described it that way?).

Link Wray's Premier Model 71 amp with the slashed /punctured speaker...

In this post about a fucked up amp, FM Dr Tony Balls coined the term "borken," which now means some piece of equipment not working according to spec, but being better because of it. In the case under discussion there, Kurt Cobain had a Fender Quad Reverb that only had one working power tube, and that amp being overdriven was a key part of his guitar sound on the In Utero album.Some notable examples of borken gear: Peter Green's Les Paul had a neck pickup whose magnet was installed backwards at manufacture, making it out of phase with the bridge pickup and creating his signature tone. Brian Eno had a Mini Moog whose envelope generator triggered randomly, and when he had another problem serviced he had to warn the technician not to fix that "fault."Let's have more examples of borken equipment.

The fuzz bass solo at 1.30 in "Don't Worry" by Marty Robbins was a bad tube in a mic preamp, but everybody liked the sound so much they declined to fix it.

Adam P wrote:FM Ben Adrian s Kowloon Walled Bunny pedal was begotten of a borken Distortion+, yes?Came here to post just that! It was FM Scott Evans pedal that was the borken one that inspired the KWB:https://benadrianaudio.wordpress.com/20 ... led-bunny/

The guitar amp heard on Jackie Brenston's 'Rocket 88' was borken when it either fell off the roof of the car or got rain damage in the trunk. Sam Phillips was able to recognize the improvement, the fuzzy-sounding guitar became legend, and rock and roll was thus invented.

not sure if this qualifies:Creation of the Garnet Herzog was the result of something else getting borken: œGrowing up playing violin, I loved the sustain, especially of a viola or cello. So early on in the mid 60 s, I found out that by plugging a small amplifier into a bigger amplifier, I could get this sound. Now I was taking the power out, which normally would go to the speaker and plugging it into the input of another amp. The result, for a few short minutes was a cool, great new sustained sound. Gar Gillies had a tv/radio repair shop, was a cool musician, and I wasn t embarrassed to take in my amps, which were literally burned by the power misuse; fried, to say the least. Gar asked what the heck I was doing, and when I told him, he said, you re insane to do this, its very dangerous. So he offered to help me do it a safer and less destructive way. “ Randy BachmanThe result of this collaboration was œRandy Bachman s Herzog , a preamp, which provided the guitar sound made famous on the Guess Who s œAmerican Woman . http://canadiandesignresource.ca/produc ... ns-herzog/

The Moog Prodigy I've been using since the mid-90's has a very nicely borken mod rate knob. When it is turned below 8 or so it starts doing this crazy Stuka dive bomb noise. Then if you very gently ease it back towards where it modulates normally you get cool Stuka / UFO bloopy weirdness that's fun to play around with.You can hear some of this in the first few seconds of this song (this is pretty loud and annoying): https://jonathancanady.bandcamp.com/track/v

I've always heard that part of the wonderful sound of Marshall amps came from a miscalculation for the appropriate output transformer and that the wrong transformer was used. I don't know if this is just lore or the real story.