Ain't Bad for a Pink

by Sandra Gibson

  Today’s sound engineers don’t get the sound balance right. They’re using up to 80% capacity on what was once called the backing group and leaving only 20% for the vocals, which are then drowned. In the early days of the Majestic Ballroom in High Street, Crewe I could walk from one side of the stage to the other and hear each instrument in turn with vocals twice: a cabinet each side.

  Acoustic Guitar vs. Electric Guitar

  I’ve always played both electric and acoustic, intermittently. With an acoustic guitar you’ve got what you’ve got and it’s self-sufficient: it sits on its own with a voice. The only other instrument that can do that is the piano. With an electric guitar you need a bass and drum and you’re involved with amplification and effects. An electric guitar turns you into a party animal; it’s an audacious, showy instrument played standing and strutting, and there are so many variables that can compensate for sheer lack of talent. The acoustic guitar gives a different, perhaps more serious mood, a more intimate experience. There’s something about the warmth and character of an acoustic guitar. My Martin was made in the Twenties and I’ve had it for twenty years. It bears evidence of my playing: small marks where my little finger has nestled. Songs done on an acoustic guitar have more depth, greater resonance and every acoustic guitar you pick up sounds different – has its own character. Electric guitars can be fun and appropriate to the occasion but I just don’t understand this crazy over-estimation of the electric guitar where you pay thousands for mere planks, just on a whim of fashion.

  PAF (Patent Applied For) vs. Humbucking

  The world of musical instruments is imbued with erudition and mystique and there are people like Rob: a self-confessed anorak when it comes to Gibson Les Pauls who can look at a pick-up – any pick-up – and say, “That screw’s not right.” Let me introduce you to the refinements of pick-up snobbery. I have a Gibson guitar with the residual registration which indicates that it had a PAF pick-up. The patent for this type of pick-up was applied for before 1963 and has had a certain caché amongst the rock star fraternity. It costs £200. A named Gibson Humbucker pickup costs £50. It is exactly the same as the PAF but without the mystique. A PAF is a pre-1962 Humbucker but dates in this field are always a bit vague because the changeover is dubious and guitars often have the same bits on them as before the change. It is this mystique, fortified by popularity, high profile exposure and the mystery of age that gives it the added value, not necessarily as a musical aid, but as an object in itself.

  The man responsible for the manufacture of the PAF pick-up did something to demystify the subject when, asked a rather breathless question said, “We had a magnet; we had copper wire and we wound it. We wound it till it was full.” Of the pick-up known as the Zebra Humbucker, which is black and white plastic, the same man, who had also designed and built it said, “We ran out of black plastic.”

  But why trouble people with the facts?

  Capo

  A capo is a device for shortening the strings; it enables you to change key on a guitar without changing chord shape. They are mainly used by acoustic players. If you’re playing an electric guitar you’re playing barre chords. A barre is in fact a capo with the index finger free . If you put a capo on, this enables you to get the same melodies and basses but in a higher key. I feel this is cheating a bit! Most pop tunes use three or four chords and you tend to use shapes repeated up and down the neck. To change key you just move your hand with exactly the same shape. You have made your left hand into a capo. Some capos are modified to put an open tuning in.

  Capos are either brass or nickel plated brass. I don’t bother with brass ones: I have brass with nickel plating because brass is affected by the atmosphere. For the same money you can have a nice plating and not have to clean it. I haven’t actually seen a gold capo but if gold is available it’s such a thin sprayed coating that it wears off in no time. It’s a gimmick.

  Gibson Les Paul vs. Fender Stratocaster

  I have always preferred the Gibson over the Strat. The Gibson Les Paul was designed by a guitar player; it feels like a guitar should, as far as I’m concerned. The Fender Stratocaster was a lucky accident: designed by a radio repair man. Like the Ford Model T it’s good for mass production.

  And the sounds are so different. The scale length is different as well. The Strat stretches your hand out. Any Gibson I play feels as if it comes from the same stable and it’s much easier to play. Gibsons are more fragile than Strats; they break at the back of the neck by the headstock whereas you could kick a Strat down the road and it would be OK!

  CD vs. DAT

  CDs have been found to disintegrate; the Americans are having to re-record all their important information. They’ve gone back to tapes: Digital Audio Technology tapes which have perfect sound but not compressed sound like on a CD. The sound is stored in a tape format a lot smaller than a cassette. DAT players are used by recording studios and journalists and they are the next technology. The album I did at Whippoorwill Studios was recorded on DAT and transferred to CD.

  The Music Doctor: Instrumental Transplants

  If I see a guitar that needs repair then I have to do something with it. When I was fifteen I renovated a Dobro that was in a dreadful condition. You couldn’t easily get the parts then, either. I resurrected it with my own skills but also needed to call on the skills of two others, thus setting the pattern for all subsequent dealings with damaged instruments. The image of this seminal instrument appeared on my early business cards.

  Quite a bit of my work has involved getting instruments repaired and restored. Sometimes, as with cars, there’s just nothing that can be done except to use the spare parts. Some guitars aren’t worth much, are badly made and although they could be restored, it just isn’t worth the trouble. Then there are those instruments that are well made or have a certain style or are worth money and therefore merit the time and effort and money that buys renovation.

  The worst cases are those where a crude job has already been attempted and botched. I have a Gibson jazz guitar L42 (circa 1940) that someone has tried to convert to electric. The butchery seems shocking and it has been given the wrong surround. I’ve found a DeArmond jazz pick-up more in keeping with the instrument and had a wooden cover made for it.

  I have a network of skilled people to whom I sub-contract whatever I can, partly because I like to patronise such skills – many of which are dying out – and partly because I know I will get a good job. I’m essentially an ideas man, though not without my own practical skills and most things can be overcome by research and logic but Crewe has traditionally had many, many skilled people who had served seven year apprenticeships. If a cog on a machine head had gone there were guys from Rolls Royce or Crewe Works who could make you one.

  In late summer, 2006 there were more needy instruments than usual. This was because one of my colleagues had returned some instruments that he hadn’t been able to finish. Cockney Bob “The Builder” Snell has renovated guitars and exchanged favours with me over the years. Some of the returns were ready to be passed on to the specialists to whom I sub-contract; some I would deal with myself, and others would be used for their parts only.

  To the casual observer a pile of wood standing on top of a speaker would be ideal for the barbecue but this was actually the basis for the radical repair of a Guild. There was a piece of spruce and a piece of mahogany to repair the front and the back, with elegant pencil guide lines and a piece of corrugated card labelled “rosette”. Bob left these and I knew exactly what had to be done. It’s wonderful that these formless bits of wood and these minimal guides can be transformed into a viable musical instrument.

  There was also a lovely little Italian guitar, a hundred years old and partially restored. It was essentially feminine, with black and white contrasting purfling (a sort of decorative edge-binding, usually done in plastic or abalone on modern guitars), a decorative rosette round the sound hole and a decorative pick guard. I have a mandolin, similar in style, which indicates its Ita
lian origin.

  If you take a glimpse behind the scenes at some of the ‘scaffolding’ that holds a guitar’s structure in place so that it can do its job, you’ll see that the unseen parts of a guitar comprise strutting: the curved wood that holds back and front together and the criss-cross bracing that deals with the stresses. Without such structural elements any guitar, however pretty, high tech or baroque would just be a fragile façade.

  I had a double bass in for repair, standing near the door, like a bouncer. It had been mended and was ready for collection but suffered further damage when a rep. found it impossible to resist playing it and had not replaced it properly. So its sound post had come adrift. Fiddles as well as double basses have these sound posts. They support the top. During transportation, double basses are moved without the sound post then a specialist is summoned to fit it with a coathanger-style tool. This is somehow pleasing as a piece of musical ritual.

  When you first meet a double bass you’re struck by the sheer presence of this man-sized instrument. The one I had was a combination of industrial utility and decorative power; especially in the head, with its wooden Viking scroll and metal keys and cogs! It was of European origin; the top was spruce and the back was sycamore or beech. If its provenance were American, the back would be maple wood. The wood was dull and there were signs of natural wear and tear where you would expect it to be: at the bottom right hand curve. But it was not this that had required attention. It was the vulnerable neck, highlighted by a strip of shiny glue at the junction between head and body that had been mended. Once the sound post had been sorted it would be ready to dance again with its player.

  Sometimes an instrument has just had it. If it was a cheap instrument to start with and hasn’t accrued any worth, then its not worthwhile investing time and money to mend it. If I look round my shop I see exposed guitars: neckless, stringless, lifeless, and I know there is no hope for them. I would have to spend £200 to resuscitate such an instrument and it is therefore worth more to me if I sell the parts. I write it off as a cheap knacker and salvage what I can.

  A lad brought in a guitar shaped like an electrified amoeba: a nicely made piece with a mahogany back and maple top. His GCSE project. He had made the fundamental mistake of earthing it to wood rather than metal. You’d think his teacher would have spotted the mistake before he made it permanent. As it stands it’ll be tricky to rectify and that’s a pity – a good guitar in danger because of ignorance.

  Sometimes a guitar comes from a bad home! I had a guitar in once that bore the imprint of a human foot stamping on it, splintering it in a moment of rage – a truly shocking sight. But the guitar had a greater survival chance than the warring marriage it lived with.

  Dougie Wilkes

  Another of the people I can rely on for renovating instruments is Dougie Wilkes. He is a guitar mender/maker who lives near Keele, Staffordshire where he has a small workshop with lovely hand-built tools from Stoke-on-Trent and all-pervading sawdust. He does a Meat Loaf tribute band at the weekends.

  Dougie has learnt his woodworking skills doing car dashboards – where would you see a walnut dashboard nowadays? He’s done a lot of repairs over the years; he repaired the double bass, for example and he’s very good on head stock breaks, re-frets and refinishes.

  But this specialist is a dying breed. It costs as much to repaint a guitar as to buy a new one, so most people would just buy new in a throwaway society. Refurbishing is bound to diminish when the valuable guitars potentially needing it are in collectors’ hands and the restoration work’s been done.

  Barry Bray

  Barry Bray is not an electrician by trade but a very gifted and enthusiastic amateur who has spent his life acquiring technical skills through helping his father make and run model railways. Sometimes he comes to collect equipment; sometimes he comes to drink tea. Sometimes both.

  I sub-contract my electrical repairs to Barry, who has visited the shop since 1980. He originally worked at Smethurst and Oldham, a sewing factory in Queen Street, Crewe. This was in the Fifties. Of course, Crewe had several clothing factories at one time. He reminded me about the advertisement for Adonis Shirts painted on the factory roof that you could see from the Manchester train.

  In the Sixties Barry saved up to buy a decent Jason sound system and taught himself about wiring from books. Everything he knows about repairing electrical equipment is self taught and he was soon repairing black and white televisions and other stuff for people at work.

  A singer called Mark who did his own recordings and who lived down the road from Barry recommended his skills to Reg, who was complaining about the cost of sub-contracting work. So that’s how the network operates.

  Barry talks about how tedious it was waiting ages for parts and then how much more complicated it became when manufacturers started amalgamating parts and charging three times as much. He says that the old valve amps and the older transistorised amps were much easier to repair and still are. Recent miniaturised stuff is far more difficult to handle. I always suggest repairs for older equipment because the older it is, the more chance there is of repairing it: Barry has parts you’ve never heard of! Keith Marriott does the electronics on the guitars in for repair and has done since he was a kid.

  Innovations

  In Business

  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.

  Customized Slide

  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 th
e 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.

  Smooth Surface

  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.