Which Rockabilly Artist's Slap-Back Echo Did the Stones Use on 'Honky Tonk Women'?

The slap-back echo on “Honky Tonk Women” was lifted straight from Elvis Presley’s Sun Records sound. Specifically, the Stones were trying to replicate the short, percussive tape delay that engineer Sam Phillips used on Elvis’s 1954–55 singles like “Mystery Train” and “That’s All Right.”

To recreate it in 1969, the band didn’t have access to Phillips’s original Ampex 350 tape machine setup. Instead, they used a separate tape machine as a delay line: they fed Keith Richards’ guitar signal to a second recorder, then