Cut Up Celestion G12 Vintage 30

We took inspiration from Dave Davies’ legendary slashed speaker cone that apparently created the distortion on The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” (1964) - video linked below. We started with a brand-new V30 and progressively cut it with knives and razors. These models capture each phase of the speaker’s destruction, ranging from light rattle and fuzz to the ruin of 28 cuts. The damaged cone introduces unpredictable harmonics, compression artifacts, and the raw character that defined early 60s rock distortion. The speaker was surprisingly resilient and needed serious damage before it started to break up. I think you can really hear the distortion starting at 14 cuts. The speaker is driven with a clean Fender Deluxe Reverb (my best attempt to isolate the speaker distortion without a solid state on hand) and was recorded with a blend of an SM57 and a Neumann U47. If you really want it to sound like Dave Davies pair these models with a British preamp or amp head captures like a Vox AC30. RIP to a perfectly good V30... it died for NAM.