Ain't Bad for a Pink (43 page)

I’ve never become musically famous though a lot of people know me. But I have experienced another kind of fame associated with my ability to innovate. Many of my designs were revolutionary and ahead of their time. As the name implies, my business provides the custom building of equipment. Initially I had to solve a problem with the badge that went on my cabinets: as a small firm I didn’t want to commission them because the minimum number would have been too many. I resolved this by recycling the “custom” badges found on both wings of Ford transits – the accepted vehicle for bands – for which we scoured the scrap yards. An economical music-related coincidence.

The idea for the business came very early on in my career as a musician. I only had to look around at the sheer number of musicians around at that time to know there was a business supplying their needs. Parallel with the practicalities of making, hiring and selling, I was soon building up a business in vintage guitars. I’d had some business training and I was the youngest management consultant in the country at twenty-one years old. I had thirty vintage guitars by the time I opened on Nantwich Road and I started a vintage guitar boom in the North West that was written about in all the magazines. I also designed the biggest PA system of the day.

Custom Amplification
45 Nantwich Road Crewe 4779
45 Hope St. Hanley 266897
Second hand Gibsons and Fenders.
Special custom built P.A. systems and guitars etc.
Pearl and Premier Drums and Traynor and Pearl Amps.
Call Pete at Crewe for a chat.
(12)

By the time I had been a Gibson dealer for eighteen months Custom Amplification appeared in the
Market Report
for Gibson. “Supplied BJ Kramer with Gibsons”, it says.

When Son House first showed me how to use slide he told me the slide needed to be a certain weight in order to sustain the notes. Persistent use of the slide has increased the size and strength of my slide finger. I designed my own slide because I couldn’t get the right weight and size commercially. Slides are usually not heavy enough for me and usually too short. The other thing is that guitar necks have got smaller and narrower since the Sixties to facilitate pop music. As it developed, strings got lighter and action got lower so slides were designed with that in mind, whereas if you play a vintage National the neck is more like a baseball bat and it fits a man’s hand. For finger picking you tend to have wider fret boards and more room on the neck, therefore you need longer slide to cover all strings. My slides were chamfered off and have a bevelled edge at the end so you can play single notes down the bottom of the guitar without infringing anything: it gives you more control over single notes.

When the problem with my hands developed I had a slide specially made: full slide on one side and with a hole in the other side for the knuckle. This accommodated what was happening to my fingers at the time. Someone from Crewe Engineering made this slide to my specifications. I get by with a much lighter slide these days; I wouldn’t want to put undue stress on my fingers.

One of my early innovations in sound technology was the use of fibreglass instead of wood. Wood is excellent for housing things but is not necessarily a good deflector because of its absorption properties. The beautiful, smooth, curved shapes possible with fibreglass were ideal for sound projection. If you’re trying to throw sound, the harder and smoother the surface, the better the response.

I got to know the qualities of fibreglass very well: I had made fibreglass canoes at the age of fifteen and renovated a fibreglass sports car at the age of seventeen. I also acquired further knowledge of the material whilst working at Ideal Standard and Pete Whittingham, an artist as well as a musician, who had worked in the restoration of stately homes, had also used it for fibreglass slate and woodwork to replace missing or damaged parts of buildings. So the knowledge was readily available for conversion into musical equipment.

My sound systems were acknowledged as revolutionary. Magazine articles appeared and I was commissioned to build and exhibit equipment described as “The Biggest Sound System in Europe” at the London Music Show held in the Bedford Hotel, near Russell Square. I had designed massive trapezoid cabinets – rather like truncated pyramids – to house exponential horns, vastly increasing the audible output. The intimate size of the venue showed off the exhibition to advantage.

By this time I already had a reputation for fairly revolutionary new designs. I had made Voice of the Theatre cabinets with GRP exponential horns shaped and curved all the way round like a megaphone – unlike the more basic World Leader cabinet which was straight at the top and bottom of the horn with curved sides.

During the oil shortage of the Eighties, vinyl – which is petrol-based – became scarce so I decided to make cabinets out of marine quality plywood. The trend was for equipment to get smaller anyway: speakers were high-powered and venues were getting smaller, so these well-designed and well-made pieces of furniture caught the spirit of the times. They had routed edges so they wouldn’t chip and the wood was stained. I also planned luxury tour buses and cabinets that have only recently come into being.

Not all my systems were on the scale of the exhibition at the Bedford Hotel. I built up a local reputation in clubs and pubs in Cheshire and Staffordshire. The letter I sent out by way of advertisement shows how confident I was about my product
:

If you would like “clarity” to come to your concert room, why not invite us along to do some demonstrations free of obligation. We can produce purpose built public address systems to suit any size building and quite a few bank balances. Our systems are already in use in the area, to the agreed advantage of the owners. If you would like to see any of these working, one of our staff can arrange a demonstration.

If you want to separate sound, either use crossover units (very expensive and complicated) or try to use the natural flow of electrical impulse. This was an idea I had, using the fact that electricity is like water: it flows to the easiest places. Use good quality fifteen inch speakers of little resistance that will naturally take most of the power. Then, if you put a higher resistance twelve inch speaker, that will take roughly half the power the fifteen inch will take. So, I take one fifteen inch at eight ohms and one twelve inch at sixteen ohms. The horn can have a single capacitor to stop base response.

This system worked for twenty-five years and most clubs were happy with them. Some changed to more modern systems then came back and asked us to rebuild another one like the previous one – the one I innovated. We used to get orders sub-contracted from other companies that fitted machines and pool tables etc. who would provide PA systems through us.

The heyday for Custom Amplification was from about the mid Seventies to the early Eighties.

I came across a magazine article about a guitar I designed thirty-five years ago. I felt pleased to have been acknowledged.

We knew a feller called Pete Johnson back in the early’70s who was a bit of a mover and a shaker in the rock ‘n’ roll retail trade. He was aware that we had ambitions to move into manufacturing, and approached us with plans for a guitar that he thought would sell. It was basically a Les Paul Jr but a bit more modern: instead of the P90 it had a tapped humbucker…Now it’s one of our claims that we invented the tapped humbucker.
(13)

My collaboration with Gordon-Smith started off with me taking up say, a guitar neck I’d salvaged and asking him to build a body compatible with it. After several of these prototypes we started on the actual Gordon-Smith range.

There was an article about Gordon-Smith guitars, described as “the longest continuous guitar manufacturer that England has ever produced” in the February 2006 copy of
Guitar and Bass.
The firm is distinguished in another way, too: it makes its own pick-ups. I see some parallels with my own business in terms of longevity, central control and specialization.

John Smith just picked the skills up and applied them to what was an interest and a hobby. From refurbishing instruments he gained knowledge of structure and refinements and from there he went on to manufacture his own instruments. This was the firm that I approached in the Seventies with a plan for a viable guitar: basically a Les Paul Junior but more modern. My modification would overcome the inherent weakness in the structure of this guitar which had the tendency to break at the point where the neck joins the body. I had acquired a nice neck and wanted the body custom-made with a strengthening volute. A volute is the shaping of wood on the back of the neck on a guitar. It is a strengthening piece at the vulnerable part of the instrument. Martins have a diamond shaped piece standing proud of the neck.

But there was another suggestion, too: having a tapped humbucker instead of the P90. We had a conversation about using a tapped humbucker, using two pick-ups on a guitar in the same position but I said I liked the option of giving a combination of both. His innovation cancelled the option by combining both. Whereas in the magazine article John Smith is very humble about it, I am adamant that he did invent it and that, moreover, coil-tapping was something not done by any major manufacturers for the next ten years. This prototype: Rocker 1 had one pick-up. The magazine article states: “Pete Johnson had guessed the market correctly, it seems, for the new Gordon-Smiths were an instant success. The single pick-up model was quickly followed by a double pick-up version”. Rocker 2 had two pick-ups. Rocker 1 was fitted with a push-pull volume control enabling the musician to vary between humbucker and single-coil pick-up, effectively giving the sound of a double pick-up guitar out of one pick-up. Rocker 2 had a double amount of variation. It was a massive advantage to be able to go from one to another on one instrument. However, if you get a guitar and change the pick-ups, no matter what the owner thinks, the value is diminished because buyers want the original and then do their own modifications.

For the uninitiated, pick-ups are the things under the strings that pick up and amplify the sounds. The more pick-ups there are on a guitar, the less the sound. Humbucker pick-ups are double pick-ups that increase volume and sustain sound. They have been available since the Fifties and are two singles strapped together. They were originally called “Hum-cancelling” pick-ups but the name used is much more rock ‘n’ roll! A single coil sounds good in certain situations where you want a clear, clean sound. It is the startup default mode giving almost a country sound. The humbucker pick-up is associated with the rock guitar; it gives more sustain and a ‘dirty’ sound. A lot of jazz players favour the humbucker because it gives more tone quality. In the Eighties there were some clever new designers in pick-up technology. They stacked the humbuckers one on top of the other. This device could be fitted to a Fender guitar without altering anything, so it could easily be put back to standard again.

Pick-ups can be expensive items, especially vintage ones such as “patent applied for” pick-ups which are worth £200 plus. People express surprise that I have such items lying around in wooden boxes with other paraphernalia. “I bet you’d lose your finger before I lost a pick-up,” is my grim reply.

My involvement with the innovations described took place some years ago but I’m still surprised to find references and to have my advice sought. For example I was recently leafing through
The Guitar Magazine
, 8 June 1997 and came across this letter:

MULTIPLE RESONATIONS.

The resonator feature [TGM vol 7 no 6] as an overview on these guitars was, as usual, excellent. As you say – once played and the slide mastered, they are totally addictive.

One minor point: National and Dobro branded guitars are not exclusive to The Acoustic Centre in this country – you can also buy them off the shelf from Frailers Guitars in Runcorn [01928-573087]. There is also Custom Amplification in Crewe [01270-214779], where Pete Johnson (alias Snakey Jake) stocks used vintage resonators. In addition, Pete has to be rated as one of the UK’s top slide players!

Otherwise, your feature was on the ball, as always.

R. Davies, Wrexham.
(14)

Sometimes at twilight you look into lighted properties and there are people gathered together, at ease with one another and united by a common interest on which their minds are focussed. You find this in bike shops; you find this in workshops where people are gathered round a vintage car that’s being renovated and you find it in music shops. The single-minded interest of the people in what is happening in that particular place excludes the rest of the world and creates a little world that is self-contained, and from which all the other things happening in people’s lives are excluded for as long as they are in this particular pool of light.

(1)
Wayne Davies (Slim) interviewed by Sandra Gibson 30th January 2007.

(2)
Dec Higgins aged 16 years, interviewed by Sandra Gibson at Brine Leas School, Nantwich, January 2007.

(3)
Wayne Davies (Slim) interviewed by Sandra Gibson 30th January 2007.

(4)
Zoe Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 26th April 2007.

(5)
Matthew Johnson, from a conversation at Custom Amplification, 19th March 2009.

(6)
Pete Johnson: Georgia Journal.

(7)
Ibid.

(8)
Wayne Davies (Slim) interviewed by Sandra Gibson 30th January 2007.

(9)
Jim Farmer, interviewed by Sandra Gibson June 2006.

(10)
Phil Doody, from a conversation at Custom Amplification, 19th March 2009.

(11)
David Rushworth, the rep. from Inter Music, from a conversation at Custom Amplification 15th May 2007.