How Spinal Tap Changed the Way Guitar Amplifiers Are Made
England’s loudest and most impressively punctual band will soon return in the highly-anticipated sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which comes out later this year. While no footage has been released yet, we did get a teaser trailer in which Nigel Tufnel turns his amplifier up to 11 — and then infinity.
Obviously, this is a reference to the stand-out scene from the original This Is Spinal Tap, in which Nigel shows off his Marshall amp to filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner). Somewhat unusually, it was outfitted with knobs that go up to 11, which is of course “one louder” than 10. Sure, you could just make 10 the loudest possible setting, but this one goes to 11.
Oddly enough, this nonsensical joke actually seemed to make an impact in the world of rock music. Specifically, Marshall’s JCM 900 amplifiers, released six years after the film’s release, came with two different distortion knobs, “one that went from 0 to 10, and another that went from 11 to 20.” The company even enlisted Christopher Guest to play Nigel in a promo hyping the amp that goes “up to 20.”
The teaser trailer’s joke about an amp that goes up to infinity seemingly stems from the “custom head” that Marshall supposedly made for Nigel boasting an infinity symbol next to the knob which “keeps spinning around as if it were broken.”
Other amp companies such as Soldano and Friedman-Runt similarly “created a Spinal Tap-inspired amp where both knobs went to 11.”
This Is Spinal Tap didn’t invent the idea of pushing the volume setting past 10. For example, vintage Fender Champ amplifiers contained a volume knob that went up to 12 (which we probably don’t have to tell you, is one louder than 11). But there’s no question that the fake heavy metal band set a trend. “This has been ripped off big time,” Guest stated during a commentary for the film’s LaserDisc release. “Almost every amp company now sells knobs that go up to 11.”
Even beyond the world of rock music, this joke has made a big cultural impression; the BBC’s desktop iPlayer was designed to go up to 11, as a nod to Spinal Tap. And a modified Porsche made headlines for including a tachometer that, you guessed, went up to 11. And on the Internet Movie Database, This Is Spinal Tap is the only movie that’s rated on a scale of 1 to 11 stars, rather than 10.
And you can bet that the stars of the new movie asked that their paychecks be cranked up to 11.
