Jimi did use reverb and echo in the studio a lot! Clearly he liked his Marshalls juiced with some reverb and echo.
Adds ambience to a dry sound, especially in a small room.
Many years ago when I started recording ad music professionally, I became interested in how Eddie Kramer, Jimi's engineer, got those huge, classic sounds onto tape.
So I've read a lot, including Kramer interviews. I've also tried these techniques myself in studio recordings I've done for my own national ad music, as well as on my and friends' records.
Reverb, delay, and many effects in Jimi's studio recordings (like flanging) were always added at the console, and not in front of the amp.
Is there a difference in the result in the recorded sound? Yes. There's a bigger-sounding signal, and the reverb and delay don't water down the impact. Coming in as an aux send and return mixes wet and dry signal, and that's how the tracks were made.
Kramer ran Hendrix' miked, dry sound into the Helios console at Olympic studio, and later, at Electric Ladyland, which he helped design. To get reverb, he blended EMT Plate reverbs on an Aux send/return on the Helios console - these were invented in the late 1950s, and are giant steel plates in a box that weighs about 600 pounds (I've used them, and in fact helped install two in a friend's studio years ago). Nothing sounds like a real plate, no digital emulation does.
Delays were added with an open-reel tape machine running at 15 ips, again on a console Aux send and return, not something lo-fi like an echoplex in front of the amp. Why this technique? Keeps the guitar signal fat. It's also higher fidelity.
Here's Eddie Kramer, Hendrix' recording engineer, in his own words on the classic recording technique weighing in with his thoughts about getting a fat, in-your-face tone on records:
"Do I love just a guitar straight into an amp? You bet. One or two, three pedals, fantastic. I think the over-usage of pedals sort of masks the music. Yeah, it’s fun, it’s cool, it’s interesting, nice tone colors. But I’m a little bit, shall we say, prejudiced in terms of the purity of how things should sound or could sound without the intervention of a pedal board.
...If a band walks in and they’ve got a gazillion pedals on their pedal board, I say, “Guys, bypass everything. Let me hear you play straight through the amp. Let me just see what you’re doing. Oh, OK. Well, that sounds nice. Maybe we just add a little bit of this, and a touch of that. And all of a sudden, the sound is purer and heavier, fatter and in your face; and the message doesn’t get degraded."
It's also noteworthy that Kramer engineered tracks from Beatles'
Magical Mystery Tour, Led Zeppelin II, and The Rolling Stones'
Beggar's Banquet, Kiss, Houses of the Holy, Physical Graffiti, John Mayall, Peter Frampton, Joe Cocker, Curtis Mayfield, Santana, David Bowie, and Derek & the Dominoes using these same techniques.
If you want the Bible on recording some all time classic records, there it is.
Granted, do I get that you don't want to ape Hendrix?
Sure, of course! I don't either!
But the original Hendrix amp on which yours are based was designed to do certain things, and that's worth understanding for its own sake - it's not like there are any drawbacks in knowing this stuff. One should do one's own thing, no doubt about it, but it's nice to have an understanding as to why what was done was done.
Would Hendrix be doing other things today? Probably. But in a similar way, he might not be using the amps he was known for. As long as we're speculating counterfactually, it's possible he'd have moved on to who-knows-what just as most guitarists do. I never thought Clapton would be playing Fender tweed amps, or Bonamassa leaving his beloved Marshalls and Dumbles behind, and ditching his pedalboard.
