X-15 4-Track Recorder

The X-15 was a 4-track cassette recorder that was built by Fostex in the 1980s. Not unlike the pre-amp that was built into the Echoplex EP-3 that gave it such vibrancy, the X-15 was reported by Dokken's guitar player George Lynch to be a piece of equipment that, when overdriven, gave his guitar signal a great tone.

We found this comment posted by Michael Wagener (production engineer for Dokken's album "Under Lock and Key") to the user forum at gearslutz.com:

Gearslutz.com Forum: "George Lynch tone":

"Obviously George's tone is coming from the way he plays, out of his hands, but since you asked:

The setup for George's guitar tone on "Under Lock And Key" was as follows: We had two Marshall heads and two Laney heads, not sure which models, but one of them was a Plexi. We had cabs in three different rooms: two cabs were placed in the big room at Amigo, one connected to a Marshall, the other connected to the Laney. The Marshall was responsible for the high end part of the sound and the Laney was set to take care of the low end. There were 14 (fourteen) mics set up in that room in various positions around the cabinet and some further away to get some room tone. The second Laney was sent into a very dead room and had a Boss chorus pedal in front of it, set to very slight chorus. The second Marshall was sent into a small, tiled bathroom, to add a different room tone. Those 16 mics came in on the MCI 500 console mic pres. They were bussed to one bus and that bus had a UREI 530 EQ on it (best guitar EQ ever). George mentioned that he always gets a great tone with his Fostex 4track recorder when it's in total overdrive, so I asked him to bring it in. So after the 530 everything was sent to the Fostex 4track, which lived under a packing blanket under the console, so nobody would see it. The Fostex was on stunn, completely overdriven and was sent on to the 3M 32 track dig machine from there.

No, I am NOT kidding!!!"

This was confirmed by George Lynch's guitar tech Gerry Ganaden on George Lynch's website: (link no longer available)

"...Fostex X-15 4-track cassette recorder, and with the I/O of it, somehow, it contributed a great tone going into the Randall RG-80 [solid state] amp – and that Fostex machine ended up becoming part of George’s live rig for a little while. Pretty rinky-dink looking rig at that time but ...it kicked ass."