BESPOKE INSTRUMENTS & ELECTRONICS, THE ART OF SOUND

BESPOKE INSTRUMENTS & ELECTRONICS, THE ART OF SOUND

I made my first electric guitar when I was 11. I got a cassette recorder for my birthday. I knew from the manual, if I plugged an earpiece into it, I could monitor what I was recording. Then I worked out plugging a speaker into it while it was recording effectively turned it into an amplifier. I got an old plank of wood the builders had used to lay a concrete floor in Dad’s garage, put the microphone inside an egg box, then stretched green nylon garden string across it. Lumps of concrete left on the surface of the wood acted as frets.

I turned everything up full and gave my first concert to the daisies in our garden from the patio. The second concert took place on our flat garage roof. I would have carried on it the neighbours hadn’t complained. I got told off, so I threw the cassette recorder out of a third floor bedroom window. 

Remorseful and undeterred I customised the second electric guitar I bought by boxing the pickup in with plaster of Paris. The result was microphonic. Howling feedback was much louder than anything I played. This was probably a good thing because the bridge was in the wrong place making it impossible to tune. I got told off for making a horrible noise and swapped the guitar for a bicycle. I explored sound by turning the bicycle upside down, putting things in the back wheel and turning the crank really fast. This ended with rather a lot of blood, a visit to A&E, some ether and two very damaged fingers. 

My third guitar came from a friend’s mum. She loaned me a Hagstrom Futurama II. What I didn’t realise was the guitar either belonged to or was given to her by Ralph McTell. I actually thought it had something to do with the puppet on the Jimi Hendrix singles album cover. When she told me it hadn’t, I took it to mean I could do what I wanted with it. Having this thing about Telecasters, I chopped it up and painted it green. Erm .. that didn’t go so well for me either. While I liked what I had done with it, nobody else did. I got told off, then had to pay somebody or another 50p a week till I had paid £15 for damaging it. 

Around that time my amplifier was a hacked Phillips radio I was given for my birthday. This had the unusual characteristic of adding a very distorted sub octave to the sound if I turned it up too loud. I’d heard valves were really good, so I hacked the family TV and added an input jack to the back of it. It wasn’t an earthed appliance, so when I leaned my guitar against a radiator the strings melted and our house plunged into darkness. My Dad was very annoyed that I was still getting it wrong. I blew up the electrics in the school, got told off and sent home with reports saying things like “Mark is a very intelligent boy, he would be top of his class if he applied himself”.

Over time I bought old radios from jumble sales, made circuits from a book called Electronic Music Projects by R.A. Penfold out of BC108 transistors and short circuited radios to turn them into synthesisers. I bought (and modified) better guitars and made home recordings dubbing between whatever machines were to hand and mixed through a sea of sellotaped twisted together wires.

Over time I’ve worked in studios all over the globe. I’ve confounded engineers from London studios like Abbey Road, Air, Metropolis, Olympic, Townhouse, New York’s Powerstation, Prince’s Paisley Park, Sunset Sound and more by interfacing impossible solutions through a rats nest of tangled and mismatched connectors accompanied by the instruction “I’m not really following you Mark, if you think that will work you can do it but I don’t see how it can and I’m not taking the blame if you blow everything up”.

It’s resulted in a lot of unique noises. Many of them you will have heard on the radio. My guitar playing often sounds like synthesis and shows up here and there. I’ve realised as I get older the early berated and much vilified art of my youth has a place.

I’ve learned my strengths and weaknesses. I’m a fairly skilled engineer and technician but life needs chaos. When I try and do something the way someone else would do it, it doesn’t yield good results. I’ve run a music shop in Glastonbury for seven years and worn myself out trying to meet conventional musician’s needs. I notice there are  different kinds of people who are into guitars. Like everything else there are niches. And I’m here to serve a small number of people who are as excited by my niche as I am.

Before you are going to consider commissioning a sound artwork by me, the main questions you need to ask yourself are:

• How does it excite you?
• When you’ve seen a guitar, electronic effect or instrument you want to buy, where do you fit into the picture?
• How much better is your music going to sound when you move away from off the shelf sound into the world of experiments?
• Or are you a guitar collector or a player?
• Where could you display it? How does it promote your image as a musician?
• How will you use it? For recording? Or live?

• or are Sawing up a £700 guitar and putting it in a steel box might