Simon's Musical Den

Good Fuzzy Sounds!

2011-10-15T12:49:00.000+01:00

All right - I've done a zine about fuzz - it's called Good Fuzzy Sounds, it's written and illustrated by me, is 28 pages long and costs £2 or €3 or $4 post paid.

It covers my own first experiences of fuzz and diy pedal-building, a detailed two-part history of early fuzzy sounds on records up to 1961, leading to the Maestro Fuzztone in the US and the Tone Bender in the UK, the growth of internet fuzz geek networks, the mythology of the mojo transistor, and interviews with Pepe Rush, an early fuzz innovator on the London scene, and Devi Ever, graduate of the internet DIY pedal scene and modern fuzz goodess. Plus 'my favourite fuzz', a true life story comic strip, drawings of all 33 of my fuzz pedals, and fuzz luminaries such as Gary Hurst, Vic Flick, Big Joe Sullivan, Lee Hazlewood, Glenn Snoddy, Craig Anderton and many more. It's all fuzz, all the time, printed in red on beautiful pale blue paper. It even explains what fuzz is if you don't happen to know. It's a winner!

Pay by Paypal in the currency of your choice, and don't forget your address. It will probably be in a few shops and distros sometime, but for now it's available direct from me only. Email address for Paypal - thesimonmurphy@yahoo.com - £2 or €3 or $4 postage paid.

Reginald Johnson - Godfather Of Turntablism!

2011-02-11T16:31:00.003Z

put the needle on the record!
Originally uploaded by simonm1965

In the summer of 1927 the manager of the Theatre De Luxe cinema in Leeds replaced his orchestra with one man and a Brunswick Panatrope - a dual turntable record player. Rather than just playing records over the films like other Panatrope operators, Reginald Johnson, a skilled musician, recognised the full potential of the machine to develop an entirely new technique of musical presentation.

By October Johnson had a library of 250 records, and was combining sections of 25-40 discs per film, marking the segments with chalk, working from a complex cue sheet, and changing the needle on each deck for every record played. I don’t think he did any intentional scratching, but I think there’s reasonable grounds to name him the Godfather of Turntablism.

In Defence of Trash

2011-02-09T16:45:00.004Z

Ohio Express - Pinch Me (Baby Convince Me)
Originally uploaded by simonm1965

Bubblegum music evolved from the more commercial singles-driven teen side of rock, and the more cynical side of the music business. Bands like Tommy James and the Shondells, Paul Revere and The Raiders, and the Strangeloves - an imaginary band dreamed up by the Feldman, Goldstein + Gottehrer production team, and obviously the Monkees. These pioneers rubbed shoulders with novelty acts like The Royal Guardsmen and in 1967-8 bubblegum was born, through capitalist osmosis. It's key elements were crass commerciality, dumbness and superficiality, with a strong element of producer-manager-record company control, quickly reaching the point where the 'bands' didn't exist at all, and it didn't matter. Arguably it's the beginning of pop as we know it.

At the end of his influential rock'n'roll history book The Sound of the City, Charlie Gillett spares a few moments to sanctimoniously castigate the producers of this new low in rock music as he saw it, describing it as "the blight of the late sixties… music planned entirely as product, not as anybody's art." If he could see and hear what was on the manufactured pop horizon in the '70s and beyond, maybe he wouldn't have been so dismissive.

Sure - bubblegum records were not performed by 'proper' bands or written by serious social commentators or sensitive artists, but they knew what they were doing and they did it right - they had tunes , killer choruses and a good beat - what's the problem? There's good and bad in any genre, but the best bubblegum came out of the Kazenatz-Katz circle - Super K Productions, on Buddha and many other labels, big and small. You might object to the nasal vocal stylings of the ubiquitous Joey Levine, lead singer on hits like Yummy Yummy, Quick Joey Small and many others, but that's a minor issue you just have to come to terms with. If you really can't take it, there's always the super-smooth Archies lead singer Ron Dante to groove to. The Archies were already a successful comic book franchise when Don Kirshner (the man who brought us the Monkees) made them into an animated tv series and pop hit machine, with the help of Brill building king Jeff Barry. They are more bland than the Kasenatz-Katz outfits, but still had some excellent tunes. Plus they aren't even pretending to be real, they are fictional, two dimensional! The Banana Splits had some good songs too - the fact that you had to collect coupons from cereal boxes to get them doesn't detract from this.

Bubblegum was churned out on rockin' poppin' production lines - inane but catchy songs by manufactured groups with silly names. Nobody condemned Berry Gordy for this kind of approach in Detroit 10 years before, so why doesn't bubblegum get any respect? Because rock had apparently 'grown up' during the '60s. Singles were out and albums were in, "real music" was either going down the blind alley of blues rock in the search for authenticity, or disappearing up it's own arse looking for the lost chord, thanks to Sergeant Pepper. The best bubblegum records, on the other hand, were 3 minute pop blasts following to the golden rules of Mark E Smith's three Rs - rock and roll and repetition - dig it! Who would you rather listen to - Eric Clapton or the 1910 Fruitgum Company?

I dream of forming a bubblegum covers band that everyone will love - we would have a wide repertoire of little known gems like Pinch Me and Sweeter Than Sugar and it would be super fun to play! Will my dream ever come true?

http://www.bubblegum-music.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7XRAlzNYs&NR=1

While writing this I discovered that Don Kirshner died a few weeks ago in Florida. He prettty much started it all, for better or worse. And after I'd finished it I also found another piece on bubblegum by my old pal Bob Stanley (him again - mentioned in the last post too) from a couple of months ago - never mind, eh?

1989

2010-10-03T11:37:00.008+01:00

Manic Street Preachers first London gig Originally uploaded by simonm1965

A diversion from my usual stuff... 1989 was the year I did my last music fanzine - I did 8 or 9 issues between 1984 and 1989 - most were called Adventure In Bereznik, but the last few had other names, but always with Bereznik in the title. But this isn't really about that so much as it is about a band I haven't thought much about in the last 20 years, but millions of other people have - Manic Street Preachers.

The main source of info on the band's early years seems to be an article in Record Collector, the end of which focuses on the roles of Kevin Pearce and Bob Stanley in getting them their first London gig, and then reviewing it. I was friends with Kevin and Bob, and Kevin had told me about this amazing band who would blow me away, so when they played with the Claim (an excellent but obscure band, one of Kevin's faves) I was there. As the '80s drew to a close, good bands were thin on the ground. 'Independent' music was going corporate and embracing pre-punk 70s rock, which we seriously disapproved of at the time, and of course Kevin always had great taste. Of course there was never a 'fanzine mafia' at all, but this kind of lazy journalistic hindsight would probably have included us.

I was introduced to the band, and probably gave them fanzines. The setting was inauspicious, but typical of the kinds of gigs I had been going to several times a month for years. The lack of a stage wasn't unusual, nor was the damp patch in the corner. I don't remember much else, except that they looked really young and were very nervous; but like a small controlled explosion, they lit up the drab upstairs room of a central London pub for an instant. The set flew by. I remember we laughed (as Bob mentions in the RC article), but it was more like a nervous laugh - they didn't make sense - how could they be so serious, look so silly, but be so amazing?! I didn't talk to them much but they had a friend, like a sort of older brother figure, who wasn't quite their manager, but had something like that role, which included talking to people and being friendly. I think he probably drove the van too, and he gave me a copy of Suicide Alley from it after the next gig in Shepherds Bush soon after. I really don't remember, but for some reason the name Martin came to me as I was writing this.

Anyway, the Record Collector piece also mentions Richey's campaign of writing to fanzine editors to promote the band. So Richey wrote to me too, enclosing a photo. I don't think I have the letter anymore, and I I didn't write back, but I was looking for photos of a band I was in in the '90s when I found the photo. All this time had passed without realising I was in it.

I'm not 100% sure the photo is at the Horse and Groom, it might be from the Shepherd's Bush gig, but it's London, 1989, they are wearing the right stencilled shirts, and they are the support band. I'm there (at the front, in the white t-shirt in front of Richey), as is Kevin. I'm not sure if can recognise Bob from the back of his head, but I think I can see him too. I kind of wish I could say I've been a fan ever since, but I haven't - in my world this was their peak, and I lost interest pretty quickly, but it was a good night.

atypical outstruments

2010-09-13T18:07:00.005+01:00

This was published in a zine about the A-Band over the summer, and shows some of the diy instruments that I play. People ask me what I play in the A-Band quite a lot - and this is why my answers are a bit vague. I used to draw comics quite a lot, but slowly gave it up.... There are photos of most things illustrated in this set.

Den Outing: DJ-ing at Kira’s 40th

2010-05-02T13:55:00.010+01:00

When Kira asked me to play at her birthday party on Friday night I was flattered and jumped at the chance!

I love DJ-ing, but rarely get a chance these days…

My first regular outing was at the amazing before-it’s-time rock’n’roll cicrus that was Kitsch Bitch in the late 90s, first at what is now the Buffalo Bar, and later at Madame Jo-Jo’s. I varied my sets a lot but would try to get in something like Slow Down by Larry Williams or Sonic Reducer by the Dead Boys, or the National Anthem of Rock’n’Roll – Louie Louie. Rocket No 9 by NRBQ didn’t go down so well, but I’m glad I played it once at least.

After that I was invoved in a much smaller bar thing called the Imperial Pop Museum, with Matthew and Bob, in a place on the edge of Shoreditch, before it exploded into the hipster hell-hole it is today. We would play mostly 60s soul and pop and bubblegum between us, with some psych and garage punk, but not enough to spoil the generally calm vibe. I can’t even remember the name of the place. It had a sort of mod/James Bond theme; I expect it’s closed or has been made over by now.

The next request for my services came from Transfabulous, a trans arts festival run by some pals. I played at a couple of nights for them at the Pleasure Unit in Bethnal Green around 2006/7 I think, playing more uptempo 60s and 70s soul /disco and some 70s punk sort of stuff – Mighty Real by Sylvester was the best received of the night – it was great to see people dancing and loving it!

The next call came from Kira's pal Iris at the Moth Club at the St Aloysius Social Club near Euston. I had free reign here to play whatever I wanted, pretty much a mixture of all of the above, plus stuff like Totally Wired by The Fall, Memphis Soul Stew by King Curtis and the mighty Shack Up! by Banbarra, which I’d only recently bought, after knowing the weedy version by A Certain Ratio for many Years. I enjoyed the DJ-ing, but got busy working on my MA so had to drop it.

And after the 45 party this January, Kira asked me to play at her 40^th party underneath the Westway in another social club type place, the Maxilla. It was a great night, with a band playing Ramones and AC/DC covers and Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World and a big friendly crowd.

These are the records I played, mostly in order if I can remember. I play all 45s as they are easy to cue up and are cut loud. I only had 40 mins as the band played later than planned, but I didn’t mind…

The Name Game by Shirley Ellis – a good fun record to start! Nobody cares that it sounds exactly like her other UK hit the Clapping Song.

Rip Her To Shreds by Blondie is just one of their best songs! Kira lived in New York for a while and I knew she loves this stuff as much as I do.

Ride Your Pony by Lee Dorsey – no particular reason to play this other than it’s great – it’s got more of a funky New Orleans sound than the also-great Betty Harris version.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash – Rolling Stones – just another brilliant record, by a band at their absolute peak I think. In the back of my mind I also connected this to Kira through a friend of hers, but I really only played because of the line “I was rayyyzed by a tooth-less bearded hag!”

All I Want by Snatch – Kira is the best connected person I know, which is evident in every issue of her ‘dotty anti-fashion magazine’ Cheap Date and the excellent Cheap Date Guide To Style. Amongst her pals is one half of Snatch. She was invited to the party, but I don’t know whether she made it - I don’t think I would recognise her now anyway. This was the most obscure record in my set – I’m glad I played but not many people were dancing – time for the secret weapon:

Rapper’s Delight – Sugarhill Gang – INCREDIBLE record, and luckliy Kira loves it too! Once a bit over-exposed, I hadn’t listened to it for years, though I’ve heard lots of it in samples! I auditioned it last week and it blew me away. My only dilemma was whether to play the radio edit or the full 6 mins – with time short I went with the edit, but I think this was my favourite of the night along with the next one –

Shack Up! – Banbarra – for so long I just assumed A Certain Ratio wrote this, but glad I found out the truth, because this is one of the best dance records ever, and the anti-marriage message is cool too!

So – you’ve got the dancefloor full for 2 records – what do you play next? Something you love and hope they’ll like, risking the momentum, or something similar to keep it going? Well, floor-fillers don’t come any better that the last 2, and I had to choose between The Night by Frankie Valli which I totally LOVE but not sure how well-known it is, or Shame Shame Shame by Shirley & Co. I cued up The Night, but changed my mind at the last second. As a DJ your duty is to make people dance, not play your favourite records and hope. SSS is a groovy enough tune; I don’t love it – but people danced!

I kept the funky feeling going with Polk Salad Annie by Tony Joe White – I heard this a while back on someone’s CD player as I walked past the maket stalls setting up in the morning on my way work. It sounded good so put it in the box this week. It went well, but sometimes records drag a little on the dancefloor if they are too long, and this one did I think.

Next up another NYC record – New York Groove by Ace Frehley – this is one of the oldest records I have that I still play and love – sort of genre-defying glam-rock disco bubblegum. Kira is a fan of Frehley’s incredibly mean but funny ghost-written biog Kiss And Tell.

And back to some hard 60s soul – Let’s Wade In The Water by Marlena Shaw – excellent in every way, the original Chess version with the trumpet fanfare at the beginning beats the more piano-y rendition, because it’s longer and has better ad-libs at the end. I love the ever-expanding water-fish-boats metaphors in this this song, which are many miles from its origins in the slavery era – at one point Shaw refers to herself as a “fish-flappin’ mama”!

Feeling the minutes slipping away now, it’s got to be time for I Love Rock’n’Roll by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. A Kitsch Bitch staple, this song was subsequently lost to hipster irony for several years. We want our record BACK! It is not a joke, you wankers! Possibly the best guitar sound on any record ever, and yeah – I do love Rock’n’Roll.

I was going to follow this with Get It On by T Rex, but decided just in time that the only thing rock’n’roll enough to match it would be Born To Lose by Johnny Thunders and the fucking Heartbreakers. “I can’t HIT IT!”

And getting towards the end I allowed myself one indulgence – Head Held High by the Velvet Underground. The floor thinned out a bit, but then who has the energy to dance to 5 records in a row? Not me.

Last record - a request by Charlotte – Nut Rocker by B Bumble & the Stingers, which perfectly epitomises one facet of the great rock’n’roll dumb/brilliant dialectic. Of course the crowd love it and one and the preceding DJs, Poppy, comes over to congratulate me for playing it – she calls it ‘a real stormer’ and she’s right.

While the next DJ set was setting up I got one more, so naturally I went for Lucille by Little Richard. I love the way the backing track sounds a bit muffled at the start and his voice just slices it all open!

So, yeah - I had a blast DJ-ing - thanks to Kira one more time, and to everyone for dancing. Playing records is the easiest thing in the world, but keeping people dancing can be hard, so I did pretty well!

Email me through the address on my profile page if you want me to play records for you too.

the Lou Reed story

2010-03-13T18:34:00.006Z

Another post about 45s - reworked from a mini zine I did in this, my 45th year. The illustration is from there too.

The Velvet Underground are one of my favourite bands and I like some of Lou Reed’s solo stuff but this one is a different kind of thing. It’s by the Jades, one of Reed’s first bands and his first record, from 1958. I had a ticket to see him on a sunny day in Brighton, and went down early in the hope of getting it signed. I waited by the stage door with a few other geeks for a couple of hours, and eventually he turned up, with Antony Hegarty and an entourage of about 8 people.

He seemed in a good mood as he passed a perfunctory few seconds with his fans. I waved the 45 at him to get his attention, and it worked. He whipped it out of my hands - intrigued, excited even - “Oh my god – where did you get this?” – the inevitable answer Ebay did not go down well, and suddenly he was much more interested in telling Antony about it than talking to me. He told A that he was 16, his first record etc, and "… of course it's terrible".

At this point I tried to get back into the conversation by piping up/ butting in with '"I thinks it's alright!" which earned me a withering look and no further comment. Further awkwardness ensued when I had to explain how the special pen I got worked. Still, he signed the label + sleeve 4 times in all, and quite legibly for a change.

The Single I Was On

2010-02-15T09:25:00.003Z

Third in a series of posts about 45s - I'm 45 this year, I had a party and played 45s all day, and wrote a zine about 45s for the people at the party, and these themed posts are reworked versions of the pieces in the zine.

It was always my dream to make a single, to contribute to the sum total of rock'n'roll happiness in the world, and I came close to this with my car-crash drag punk band Six Inch Killaz around 1998, but it was not to be - you can blame Wayne Morris. The only single I'm on is a hopelessly obscure record by The Legend aka Everrett True aka Jerry Thackray, recorded a decade before. In truth it's quite bad but I do kind of like it, just because I'm on it. I think this is the way of it with Legend records. I remember buying his 2nd Creation single Legend Destroys The Blues and being appalled. I complained about it to Alan McGee and he said 'well, I like it cuz I play drums on it', and Dave Evans who was in McGee's band Biff Bang Pow piped up with 'yeah - and I like it cuz I played bass on it'. At least I liked the cover.

So anyway - I was quite a close friend of Jerry in the '80s, after falling in with the early Creation records crowd, and shared a flat with him and a couple of other friends in north London at that time. I also played music with him as guitarist in the Legend band for a few years. We would occasionally play with bands he/we were friends with, and put out a couple of records. One was a 12" EP for John Robb's Vinyl Drip label, and one was a 45 for Philip Boa's new Constrictor label, in 1987. I co-wrote one side of the single with him I think, but it's the other side I like (or kind of like). I play bass.

It was recorded and mixed in a day at a tiny recording studio near Green Lanes in north London, where the TV Personalities recorded their Privilege album. The owner/engineer guy was only ever referred to as Wilson. Jowe Head from the TVPs produced and played melodica and toy piano. Amongst the other toy instruments and stuff on the floor was a snare drum with SWELL MAPS painted on the side, which was exciting! It was a treat watching him do his noise magic with admittedly quite weak source material. Alex Taylor, who had recently left the Shop Assistants, sang on it too. She had moved to London to launch her new band The Motorcycle Boy. It was a pleasant easy going day with plenty of time - most of my other studio experience is of rushing to record 7 or 8 songs in a few hours, including mixing.

Philip Boa was (and still is) an alt-rock cult figure in Germany, and his label is still going. He was a friend of Stephen Pastel somehow I think, and one of the many people + bands who slept on our floor when I shared with Jerry. Waiting for the bus at Golders Green one night he told me how his life was changed when he travelled to London to see The Damned after hearing their first single New Rose (which I don't have) in 1976…

Old Records / 1965

2010-01-31T13:15:00.002Z

saville
Originally uploaded by simonm1965

In my youth I used to read NME from cover to cover every week, and the charts included top tens from 5, 10 and 15 years ago. As the cold death-grip of the '80s took hold I started to notice more and more that the records in the 15 yrs. ago chart were better than the current chart or the mostly even worse 5 and 10 yrs ago charts, and these were only the ones I knew from listening to to Jimmy Saville's Old Record Club on Radio One on Sunday morning.

Saville was almost a proper DJ at this time despite the haircut and cigar, and he played charts from random years, with Ramsey Lewis' version of The In Crowd as the theme tune. It was good, even though he did say 'guys n gels guys n gels' quite a lot.

So I started buying old records, from charity shops and also from Record & Tape Exchange, where thousands of old singles with no sleeves were only 10p each in the basement. There were some good shops in Canterbury where I went to college, including one which seemed to be where a local Northern Soul DJ sent his cast-offs. I wasn't concerned about condition as I had maintained a strict avoidance of hi-fi equipment, preferring basic record players and 'music centres'.

1965 - A Good Year

I would probably say 1966 was better on balance, but I was born in '65, so here are the 10 best singles I have from that year, in no particular order.

Let The Good Times Roll - Alvin Robinson
Jenny Take A Ride - Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels
Don't Talk to Strangers - The Beau Brummells
Midnight to Six Man - The Pretty Things
She Don't Care About Time - The Byrds
The Duck - Jackie Lee
The Barracuda - Alvin Cash and the Registers
Whittier Blvd - Thee Midniters
It’s Growing - The Temptations
Out In The Streets - The Shangri-Las

Honorable mention - (I Wish It Could Be) 1965 (Again) - The Barracudas

45 Revolutions Per Minute

2010-01-31T12:59:00.001Z

singles box
Originally uploaded by simonm1965

I'm 45 this year and did a little zine on the subject for a party where I had all my 45s in one room and friends came round and we listened to approx 10% of them for about six hours straight.

Last year on my birthday I made a joke about playing singles all day on my 45th birthday, and when I started thinking about my birthday, just after xmas, I thought that seemed like a good idea
A day of vinyl indulgence. There isn't enough room to have all my singles upstairs, so most of them are under the stairs to the basement at any one time. I do occasionally have the urge to hear this or that record from downstairs, but rarely is the urge strong enough to go and find it.

I decided to do the zine because records and zines go together. I started doing zines in 1984, around the time I started to get into seeing bands, buying zines and buying records every week. I
carried on doing zines and comics with a few gaps here and there until about 10 yrs. ago. So - another one. A lot of the time what I've written here is an exaggeration of my real thoughts, because that's what my 80s zines were like - lots of exclamation marks!

So the next few posts will be based on pieces from the zine - starting with:

"Why I HEART Singles"

Yes - 45s ARE the ultimate music format. They are explosions of ephemeral pop art instant gratification, yet they are unbreakable under normal use and will be left behind with the cockroaches when our civilisation dies out in a few hundred years!

In the '80s I knew a foolish fanzine writer who proclaimed that he would only EVER buy 7" singles, that he had sold all his LPs, and would NEVER buy a CD in his life. I'm not like that, but I do like 45s best. DJ-ing with them is really easy too, as they are quick to look through and cue up.

On a good single you get two short blasts of music, cut loud, the best 2 songs available to to the artists at the time (with the exception of Phil Spector and Kasenatz-Katz productions), plus a decorative label, maybe a pic sleeve or insert to enthrall and entrance, maybe a cryptic message from the band in the run-out groove. It's all you need.

It's an undisputed fact that the 45 rpm vinyl single of a given song will nearly always sound better than an album or CD version, because they are mastered and sometimes mixed differently (at least from the '50s to the '80s) to sound best coming out of a radio - punchier, treblier, attention-grabbing.

Though I don't take notes I can usually remember where if not when I bought a particular single, and often how much I paid for it. For many years the most I would expect to pay for a used single was 50p or £1. Girls Are Out To Get You by the Fascinations on the original American label - an in-demand Northern Soul classic - was the first record I paid £5 (as much as an album) for, from Rocks Off in Hanway Street in 1983.

Even as a pre-teen in the '70s I gravitated towards singles - I bought various novelty releases in dumb way - coloured vinyls, picture discs, a single shaped like a bar of chocolate - the song from the Yorkie advert - but I don't have any of these any more. But I do still have a lot of singles. One of the few singles that I have from that time is 'Carry On Wayward Son' by Kansas.

Den-Time Summer/Autumn 2009

2009-11-04T22:02:00.019Z

Strange things happen with time in the Den. Like in a science fiction comic strip where they go to space for 10 years but when they return only a week has passed. Yeah - it's just like that.

So a lot has happened, and I'm just going to sum it up in one post to get back on track. Fuzz and guitars have taken a back seat over the summer. I was briefly involved in a history of UK fuzz boxes project, but that stopped suddenly and unexpectedly. Should be interesting if it's ever finished, but without me. Meanwhile I've got more interested in the low-tech electronic music thing. I've built two new instruments (both based on the STEIM Cracklebox) and I've been playing live and recording with the A-Band, and also with my pals Deathline. The 123s had an outing to Birmingham to play our friend Tamsin's birthday - we dressed up as the (Fabulous) Stains and played their apathy-chic punk classic "Waste Of Time". I've also written music to go with some Werewolf incantations I found in an old book by Elliott O'Donnell, which I'm hoping to record soon.

But the A-Band has been my most consistent distraction/activity - recording in London and singing with Astral Social Club in May, then 8 gigs over the next 4 months including Salford, Newcastle in July and Edinburgh in August, plus a few in London. Here's some of what I wrote in my notebook on the July trip:

Writing about the A-band isn't so easy. I'm not attempting any history, but suffice to say it started in Nottingham in 1990, fizzled out some years later, reformed in 2004 and started up again with many new members in 2007, including me, although I didn't do much until May this year. There is no set line-up, no songs or riffs or rehearsals, anyone who turns up can play, musicians and non-musicians. Each time we/they play the band has a different name, always beginning with A, sometimes decided in advance, sometimes on the evening of the gig. There is something like a shared sensibility, but with so many people involved, even this is shaky. There are vague practical ideas discussed, like who plays first or how many people play at once, when loud/quiet etc, but these are not musical per se, and a frequently forgotten anyway. Beyond this it's spontaneous, veering in and out of noise - it's been called 'ambient hardcore', but there are quieter moments also - an acoustic gig this year even. At the Klinker, there were 15 people playing, it was very chaotic.

Though I have approx 20 guitars, I don't play guitar in the A-Band. I have played the video tape ribbon controller gtr thing, and the Duo Tone Party Time oscillator box, plus this year's additions the Cracklepuss and the Cracklele. I do the A-Band for fun. I'd been wanting to play live music again, and the A-Band is perfect for me right now. I mostly stand at the back.

Salford

There's an amazing old terracotta Picture Palace-type cinema near Islington Mills, the venue, but typically it's converted to a church now. The rest of Salford is pretty dead, and reminds me of Detroit - a big change from gentrified metrosexual Manchester across the bridge. I don't expect much to happening at the venue, but it would be good to get a soundcheck for once. Does it make any difference with the A-band?

Well - yes! the sound man was very conscientious and all the bands soundchecked, and the A-Band (Adorno's Allegory of blah blah) were really great tonight! This is the first time I've really 'got it', and it was quite magical. There was room in the sound for me to be heard without playing full blast, and even though a load of people joined in it seemed to hold together with some kind of intuitive structure, with a beginning, a middle and an amazing end! I won't list the players, but here's Stewart Keith's summary of the gig from the band forum:

Started with a duet of Greta on theremin and Andrea (glammed up) on table leg & banjo), with Simon in the background. They played and played and played while we all watched (our cue for going on one at a time was Andrea switching on the vacuum cleaner, which she seemed to think somebody else was going to do) So that went on for maybe twenty minutes and sounded incredibly wonderful.

Then we went on one at a time - Meg, John (John mostly played piano throughout), Gary (melodica), Joincey (new synth toy), Stuart Arnot (trumpet), me (percussion), and Lenty (guitar). Played for a while and then one at a time off again leaving just John doing a piano solo, and then everyone back on again, more music. Andrea at the piano, and a fit of screaming hysterical laughter - genius!

And so to the chaos finale, extra members joining us (Simon & Kate from the Ceramic Hobs, Gaz & Cara & Rhiann from Barbarians) and lots of metal bashing (we'd found four huge metal tubes out in the yard, and we had a hammer. Rhythmic whacking of metal, Greta singing with a contact mic on her throat and later on metal that she bashed (a terrifying sound), and eventually everyone in a rotating circle of piano players.

Next night in Newcastle was total noise chaos and a bit of a let-down by comparison. Stewart destroyed a vacuum cleaner, I got tinnitus. Someone videotaped it, but I haven't seen or heard it.

Edinburgh

Due to the persistence of Karl Waugh, the A-band were invited to play a residency in a small pub cellar venue for a week at the end of August, playing at midnight every night, as part of the Free festival. Audiences were small but often enthusiastic /participatory, and overall it was fun. More than 50 people played over the course of the week and each night we were called An Audience With ... followed by the name of an absent member. I played 3 nights in the middle of the week, and only later found out that the night after I left it was An Audience With Simon Murphy. Here some more note book bits:

Tuesday - 10 people (most of whom I had never met before) plus 5 who join in spontaneously. Lots of metal bashing and cymbal crashing. I played the Cracklepuss, DuoTone and a mic into a delay pedal, with a mixer - able to have all going at once or individually. Couldn't hear much, but everyone happy afterwards.

Wednesday - much smaller A-band, and audience even smaller! Martin has arrived from Totnes to join Karl, Stuart G and I. A more restrained set, but still good; a couple of people join in, including a guy who spontaneously sings, and afterwards says we remind him of Faust.

Thursday - Stewart, Chloe and Sharen arrive. We all have dinner together and the gig later is great. My amp is only battery powered and runs out of juice half way through, so I have time to watch the band for a while, take some photos, then play my gizmos straight into one of the venue mixers, and anything else within reach, which is the A-band way. I was sad to miss the last gigs of the week, but also glad to be going home after tiring of the Edinburgh crowds, drunks and tourists.

A photo of my Edinburgh stuff, including my two main A-band instruments over the eight 2009 gigs...

the DuoTone Party Time

Just a silly name I added to Ben's Simple 40106 Tone Generator, that I built from a schematic at Experimentalists Anonymous. It has two oscillators, so DuoTone seemed a good name. Party Time was the brand name of an old record player I had in the 80s. I put it together in 2006 and used it in it's stock state for a couple of years, and then added a small transformer to the output (for a 'warmer' sound) and a proper on-off switch + LED, and a big red 'circuit bend' switch which connects one pin of the 40106 chip directly to the output when you hold it down, raising the note a step or two at some settings. It's very loud has a super-wide frequency range, from ear-hurting highs to bowel-rumbling lows.

the Cracklepuss

Variation on a Dutch 70s noise classic - there are a few schematics floating around, make sure you use the corrected STEIM version if you make one. For some reason my one generally produces much lower bassy sounds than the chirps and squawks you hear on the YouTube clips etc. I think I must have made a mistake somewhere, but I like the mistake. The original units have a built-in speaker - my only intentional change was the addition of a small audio transformer and a volume control, so it can be plugged into an amp. The case was an old AM radio I bought 20 years ago. You hold the left eye, and flick your fingers over the other contacts, and get low bleeps and boops.

I brought the Toy Piano to Salford/Newcastle as well as Edinburgh, but didn't play it much. It feels a bit fragile now, and was slightly damaged during the Newcastle gig. I think it's staying home from now on.

1955 Supro with 1940s P-90

2009-04-20T16:54:00.010+01:00

I got this 1955 Supro Dual Tone body with no pickups in February. I had hoped to get some Supro pickups separately and wire them with an "in series" option, but there were problems with the neck fit and it was looking bad; more trouble than it was worth. I tried and failed to re-sell the body + neck on ebay. Meh.

Around this time I discovered an ancient pickup in the den, that upon further examination turned out to be a late 1940s Gibson P-90! How did that happen? I bought it several years ago and had installed it on a low quality '60s archtop, but took it off again as it was feeding back too much. My enjoyment of the Kent Armstrong P90 in my Epi LP Jr led to a new plan to make the Supro into a kind of Supro /Junior hybrid, complete with a route for the P-90 and a dog-ear cover and wrap tail.

But I didn't have the heart to cut up the pristine Mother Of Toilet Seat pearloid finish on the Supro, so ended up with a trad short trapeze tail instead of the bridge/tail I planned, and with the right amount of adjustment of the strange neck joint, whch I slowly figured out, there was just enough room to surface mount the P-90 with no cover. The first time I plugged it in I knew it was a match made in heaven! I still have the option to make it a Dual Tone again in the future, but for now the single pup is King. There's not much chance of finding a '55 Junior for £200, so this will do, I love it ...
I still have some shaping to do on the scratchplate /pickguard, but I'm happy with it overall. The neck joint is unusual, to say the least, secured by a long bolt through the body parallel to the neck (as shown below). Very secure, but awkward to work with. Valco patented this joint design in 1953, but dropped it as a method of attaching necks around 1958/9.

I think it's a great idea, but ultimately I think it may have worked out too expensive. As time went on Valco neck/body joints became progressively more conventional - ending up in 1968 where Leo Fender started in 1950, with 4 screws and a metal plate.

Shatterbox to Bardobox

2009-04-20T16:24:00.004+01:00

Ah - the lure of the super-rare cool-looking fuzz! In this case the John Hornby Skewes Shatterbox! Such a cool name, in a cool wedge shaped box, cousin of the even more rare Zonk Machine! When this circuit (or at least the stripboard version) came to light earlier this year thanks to ElectricWarrior at FSB /DAM, I had just made a Kruscher (TB 1 variant) for a rabid 60s fuzz fan in Birmingham. I was happy he liked it. He asked if I could make him a Shatterbox, and I said yes. That was my first mistake. I was soon to learn that the Shatterbox is basically a crap sounding bassy fuzz with a nice treble boost added. I should have built the circuit first and told him it was crap and not to bother, but I didn't. He wanted a Shatterbox, so that's what I made him. But: it did sound pretty crap. I knew he didn't have much money and felt bad sending him a lemon, so I offered to mod it to make it sound more like the benchmark ear-hurting fuzz sound of the guitar solo in the Third Bardo garage-psych classic 'Five Years Ahead Of My Time' that he wanted. It was hard! I came close to totally rebuilding it, but managed to make some mods to fit the bill better - a louder, more trebly fuzz, combining with the icepick treble boost to go to a place where most people don't want to go. It still sounds horrible, but horrible in a good way, for his most singular needs. If I was building from scratch, I would just hard-wire the 2 effects in series rather than keeping the pretence that the fuzz sounds any good by itelf, and cut out the fuzz control completely, leaving it on max the whole time. I'd call it the BardoBox! As it was I repainted the Shatterbox to reflect it's new and more horrible guts. Hopefully he will dig it. Ok - halfway through is the solo that inspired this - have a listen.

new stuff added to soundclick page

2009-03-16T09:48:00.003Z

... with the Windmill track split into 2, with different mixes, plus I've added pics and free download options for the other tracks http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=877149&content=music

Updates!

2009-03-08T11:48:00.011Z

I've been building a JHS Shatterbox for Sean in Birmingham, and getting stuff together for two Pep fuzzes for The Rave-Ups in California, and designing labels and logos for my forthcoming low-level pedal building enterprise (Good Fuzzy Sounds), but there are other things going on too. First of all the poster for my guitars + pedals exhibition is up on the London Underground, from Stepney Green to Sudbury Hill and all points in between - here's one at Embankment, the exh is on until May: Plus, I've been doing some 4-track recording, using the same stuff as at the February gig, and have added a v short lo-fi phone video from the gig to my soundclick page. The new track is less extreme than what you'll hear there, and is 19 mins long - I might have to upload it in 2 parts. Here are some photos fom the gig too - in the first one I'm adjusting the Thumpa Thumpa Box (subject of a future post), and the second, playing the Monatron: Ok - proper post soon.

Windmill gig, 16 Feb 2009

2009-02-18T09:46:00.003Z

feb 2009 setup (flash) Originally uploaded by simonm1965

I did a solo gig the other night and it was good. Victor (ex-homocrime collective) asked me to play at a night he was organising at the Windmill in Brixton. I was kind of viewing it as a test to see if I wanted to do this again, and I enjoyed it. There was no time for a soundcheck and I was stressed, but the whole thing came off pretty well. I had 4 sound sources going more or less continuously - a Raagini electronic tanpura (white box on floor) as a background drone, Duotone oscillator box (aka Ben's Simple 40106 Tone Generator), Thumpa Thumpa Box (a primitive rhythm box, 1970 Simonton design) into Digitech delay, Monatron > vol pedal > Jen Fuzz + Sustain > Boss DD6 delay. I tuned these all to C at first and then slowly adjusted each one in turn to make simple chords and dischords, then bringing them approximately back to unison, but the the Raagini staying on C the whole time.... the other bands, Maria and the Mirrors and Headfall were good too, but the headliners - Jer Reid's Isshi taiko drummers (billed as Tcki Tkcy taiko drummers) were astounding! The tracks on his myspace page give an idea of the sound, but live it was incredible! check their myspace page and play loud.

Den outing (no 2) - The Stratford Hoard

2009-02-02T17:07:00.011Z

Eight of my guitars and nearly my entire output of diy pedals are in an exhibition at Stratford Underground station (near the entrance to the DLR platforms) for the next couple of months, curated by Alan Kane. The exhibition showcases the collections of local people, and this is the third phase - my stuff and a ton of Beatles memorabilia. The previous phase had wind-up toys, black baby dolls, lots of different kinds of adhesive tape and packets of sugar, and 8 copies of Michael Jackson's 'Bad' LP. Here I am on the day they were installed, along with a couple more pics I took at the weekend. I'll probably upload some more photos to the set on my Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/30379212@N03/sets/72157613275768898/ also: Transport For London blurb, not up-to-date http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corporate/projectsandschemes/artmusicdesign/pfa/artists/alan-kane.asp

Den outing (no 1) - Tokyo

2008-11-03T21:36:00.010Z

So - I was in Japan for a couple of weeks with Charlotte and Kay in October, in Tokyo and Kyoto, with trips to Nagano, Hiroshima and Osaka (with our most excellent JR rail passes). I laughed, I cried, I got very tired - this holiday had everything. Whilst I didn't have guitars and pedals on my mind for most of the time, as there was just too much other stuff competing for my attention every time I opened my eyes, I did entertain the possibility of getting a guitar in Japan - I didn't really really want one, as I'd only just got the LP Jr this summer, but it seemed silly not to look at what was available, and take advantage if possible.

I did some research in advance, wanting to find older used guitars rather than shiny new ones or high end vintage guitars, so originally planned to avoid the big Ochanomizu guitar strip in favour of smaller shops elsewhere, but after wasting one afternoon looking for pawn shops in the suburbs I didn't have much time left, so I decided to go look there anyway, as it was close to where we were staying. It was quite dizzying, see hundreds of guitars everywhere. So many strats, teles and les pauls and copies, and not much else... I was hoping to see ESP, Burny and other Japanese makes, but these were few and far between, and a lot of the stock was aimed at beginners. I didn't go in any of the major vintage Gibson places as I'm not fussed with that stuff. It was interesting to see the prices of the lower end stuff - reasonable looking tele copies for about £55, but any name makes (even Epiphone) were not any cheaper and sometimes more expensive than UK /web prices. I went into about 10 shops, some 3 or 4 floors, but only one had anything really tempting - these Danelectro DC-59s, in a place called something like Big Boss Guitar Freak Emporium: I liked them, but not sure how much. They looked brand new, so I guess they are NOS (new old stock) from the 1998-2003 Korean period, as the new Chinese ones are quite different (and quite horrible). At about £200, it was good deal but not a bargain. I took the photo and looked at it a few times over the next week, and worked out I'd have time to return on the last day and get one if I wanted, and fit it in my luggage if I took the neck off. These guitars are allegedly in the "getting hard to find" bracket if you believe dealers, but really, they are still easily found in a range of colours. I'll get a Danelectro sometime, and probably a 90s one, but this just wasn't my time.

Burns Sonic guitar, 1960 ("The Aristone")

2008-10-06T21:34:00.011+01:00

One of my modest insights into the world of Ebay is that it's only good at finding things that are correctly identified. It's like cataloguing; one the places where parts of my job extend into my real life. If someone is selling an original Fuzz Face and they call it that in the main description, lots of people will find it/see it/bid on it. But if it's described as a 'round grey guitar peddle', a lot less people will see it. This was how I got the Silvertone/Valco - interest in Supro-type guitars was at a generally lower level than now, and someone checking a Silvertone listing would probably be looking for a Danelectro, and pass on it - I recognised it as a Valco and got it cheap. Look for the vague descriptions, and there are bargains if you don't mind wading through the crap. I got this Burns the same way, for £67. It sounds like bragging, but its just a case of looking a bit harder.

People with an interest in guitars of the early '60s would recognise it as a Burns, but the name on the headstock is "The Aristone", so that was the main Ebay description term. Deal! Aristone were a London company who had been making banjos and ukeleles and archtop acoustic guitars since the 1930s. I've seen one other electric guitar with the same headstock logo, a late 50s semi-acoustic, on sale for a huge sum at Andy's Guitar Workshop in the year they went into liquidation. How Aristone were related to Jim Burns is a mystery, but there's no sign of any other markings, and in every other respect it's a straight-up 1960 Burns Sonic - complete with maple fretboard, white plastic knobs, army surplus 3-way switch and first-stab trem system. My only guess is that if you're starting out trying to sell guitars and nobody knows your name, you might strike a deal to use a bigger name, even if they are best known for banjos. A lot of companies were testing the water of the future beat tidal wave, and Aristone must have been one of them. Whatever the arrangement was, it didn't last. The only other clue is that the word 'foreign' appears at the bottom of the logo - maybe it was an export model.

The tuner covers reveal another unusual detail. Guitar nerds will recognise these as Van Gent tuners from the Netherlands, but they are also stamped with the logo of their British distributors, Boosey & Hawkes. I've seen these on some 1950s Grimshaw guitars online, but mostly they are plain.

It's a funny looking thing, badly designed in some ways and brilliant in others. The major problem is the weight of the neck/body joint versus the tiny, admittedly kind of silly-looking body. I had a friend in a band in the grungeful early 90s. He was a very small person and my first thought seeing him playing it was that he must have chosen it to match his stature. I was plain wrong (and probably size-ist), but with this design, how could it be anything other than neck-heavy? This photo also shows up the brittle hollow scratchplate and military grade switch.

You see some examples with the strap button moved to the lower bout, to move the centre of gravity, but this one has stayed as Mr Burns (tee hee) intended. Balance problems come into perspective when you plug it in - theses are really great pickups, maybe even better than the Valco single coils I love, so why not just sit down if its a problem? They really bite - a very punky spiky beat sound, but with a smoother mid-range and a good growl in the bass. Yay! This the best guitar for fuzz ever.

I mentioned the trem system above and you might be thinking 'what trem system?' I took the 'pat. pending' arm off and disabled it to get the action a bit lower, but the pieces are all safe. It didn't work too well. I also reversed the polarity of the bridge pickup, for more usable sounds. Originally the pickups were out of phase, which made for a strange hollow sound in the middle position that I didn't like. I changed it, but to me it's an improvement. It's been through the wars a bit, so I don't mind making a few positive alterations. To me it's still a working instrument.

One last thing I should mention is the Selmer strap. This was another ebay find - it didn't come with the guitar, but it's a good match. American collectors call this kind of thing 'case candy'. I could never use that expression, but I don't have the case either.

Tim Escobedo's Uglyface - a modern classic!

2008-10-05T11:01:00.012+01:00

So mainly I like old stuff, but one reason I got into DIY was to discover new sounds. The Uglyface is one of THE classic DIY pedals, designed by an unassuming and generous experimenter, Tim Escobedo. I've built four of his pedal designs, and an ambitious double synthstick built into a guitar (more on this later). I think he came up with it in 2003. A lot of people on DIY Stompboxes were raving about it, so I built mine in 2006. By this time my Dymo tape aesthetic had reached the mature stage, although I probably should have the knobs away from the footswitch. In the DIY effects pedal world, there are clones or rare pedals, and there are home projects that become retail Product, and there are pedals that exist only in the pure DIY realm, because they are too weird or horrible-in-a-good way to have mainstream commercial potential, like the Uglyface. Guitarists are conservative as a group (= market). Tradition weighs heavy on their shoulders, and their music is boring. Most of them don't want a pedal that makes their guitar sound like a raygun. I didn't record this clip (Tim did), but it gives you a good idea of what this thing does. Here's another , from homewrecker/runoffgroove - if this doesn't get your attention, then we can't be friends. I built it from scratch on plain board with holes, called perfboard, or just perf. This is one of several building methods, and it's probably my least favourite. I don't use it much, but there was (and is) a perf layout of the Uglyface at homewrecker.com. It was one of my first builds beyond the basic fuzz circuits and I didn't really know what I was doing exactly at the time, but I put it together paint-by-numbers style. it took a while to get it right, but I got there in the end. The trickiest part for me was the Vactrol, which adds the envelope follower wah-type sound. I colour coded the wires carefully and made notes, so I wouldn't get too mixed up, and left myself plenty of space. So what is it? The clips should tell you all you need to know, but if I had to describe it, I'd say it's kind of like a fuzz, but instead of just taking the wave form from your guitar and amplifying/clipping it to make a square wave (like most fuzz/distortion boxes), the Uglyface takes your signal in on one side, but what comes out of the other side is a whole new signal that tracks the changes in a fuzzed out version of the input signal, but can't follow it exactly, or reproduce its complexity, so what you hear is a big wall of glitchy, synthy guitar noise. I love it. The basic envelope follower makes it even less guitar-like. Certain settings will get you the Star Wars thing going. There are a couple of ther DIY circuits that apparently have some similarity to this floating around - John Hollis' Crash Sync /Auto Crash and the 4ms Noise Swash, but this is the simplest to build, and best documented. There have been stripboard layouts and a modification or two in the last couple of years. Tim Escobedo rules. I can't help forming mental images of people I've never seen; I imagine Tim has short-ish dark hair and a full but closely cropped beard, a bit like David Fair from Half Japanese perhaps.

Epiphone '57 Reissue Les Paul Junior, 2007

2008-09-02T13:36:00.021+01:00

I haven't been adding new posts in the last couple of weeks because I've been playing my new guitar instead. I've sold a couple this year and was hoping to snag a single (bridge) pickup Valco, but even the 3/4 size Supers and Tosca brand ones are out of my price range now, plus a lot of US sellers are refusing to send stuff abroad these days because of changes with Paypal seller protection... So I decided to go for one of these Les Paul Juniors as a reasonable substitute - solid mahogany neck and body, rosewood fretboard, Grover tuners, and a lot cheaper than the '59 Gibson Melody Maker RI that I tried and didn't like last year. These were produced as a "limited edition" of the Epiphone Custom Shop - if you equate Epiphone with crap this might sound like a contradiction in terms, but I thought long and hard about this, read all the reviews and forum posts before taking the plunge. It's a basic instrument, but well made and finished I think. If I didn't like it I could sell it on easily. From what I can gather from the serial numbers of various examples found online, they were made in two batches in Feb-March 2006, and a longer period in spring-summer 2007, at the Daewon factory in Dalian, Northwest China - there's a video of the place in 2005 here that gives some idea of the environment. I think the first batch were are all Vintage Sunburst, which looks cheap to me, I got an approximately 'TV Yellow' one instead, made in March 2007 - most of the second batch seem to be this colour. Of course it isn't "real" TV Yellow, and it's thick polyurethane, not thin nitrocellulose lacquer. It's very shiny and new looking, and it's not an exact copy of a 1957 guitar, but that's what Gibson's VOS ('Vintage Original Spec') series are for if you have a spare £1,300 to spend.

It was off ebay from a young guy, but basically brand new, with all stickers etc and protective plastic stuff intact. The yellow ones aren't available new anywhere anymore, but some German suppliers still have the sunburst. Some people have a problem with them being made in China, like it's automatically suspect, but they've been making stringed instruments there for hundreds of years, so I don't think it's an issue per se. I feel slightly bad about supporting the exploitation of Chinese workers - it's cheap because labour is cheap - but that's international capitalism, right? I didn't buy it new, but still. All my other electric guitars are 40-50 years old, so the newness was more of an issue. It felt big and heavier than I like, almost 8lbs. Some of the fret ends were a bit sharp, but I sorted those out. Frets are chunky, but ok. The neck itself is apparently thicker than a '60s neck, but not a true '50s thickness - I would have liked it thicker but it feels fine really. The fretboard is dense-grained and dark, and felt very dry at first, not like old rosewood at all (surprise!) I dabbbed on some lemon oil and rubbed my greasy fingers into it for half an hour to simulate some kind of preliminary wear. I also sanded along the edge of the fretboard so it wouldn't be so sharp, and dulled down the finish on the back of the neck with 00 steel wool, so it wouldn't be so sticky. These things all helped a lot with the playing 'feel'. I made some other changes too - what can I say? I'm a tinkerer. The tuners were perfectly good, but I changed them for some nickel plated Grovers I had; I cut the nut slots down by a bit and rounded off the sharp edges around the nut so my hands don't catch on them; I swapped the wrong-looking chrome wraparound compensated bridge for a repro '50s uncompensated bridge/tail, in nickel, naturally. I'm even going to change the strap buttons for nickel ones. I like it! I tightened the truss rod a bit as it was totally loose, and improved the action (though it was ok as it was). I was really willing to give the P100 a go, because I don't have any other guitars with humbuckers and I didn't want to be swayed by the fact that everyone else has replaced it, but after various experiments I decided I'd swap that out too, for a GFS P90 I had in a kind of frankenstein Supro neck Junior I flung together earlier this year (the neck didn't really work with that body...). The consensus on GFS pickups is they're good for the money, and better than the stock Epiphones, but not as good as the £100+ boutique hand-wound ones (surprise no.2) With the pole pieces slightly down on the bass side, and screwed right down to the top, it does sound pretty much like a brighter dirtier Supro pickup. I was surprised to see the treble bleed (tone) capacitor was was a whopping 0.068uF - I changed it for a '50s 0.05 WIMA ceramic I had, but I might replace it with a smaller value in time. Tinker tinker tinker. The verdict so far is - yes, I like it and it's not going straight back to ebay, but I would still sell it quick if a Supro Belmont came my way cheap. Been playing it every minute I get though, which is a good sign, still need to fine tune the intonation and action.... The acoustic sound is quite twangy, but not as bright as the oldies.

Silvertone Artist, 1958

2008-08-11T20:51:00.018+01:00

This guitar was made by the Valco company of Chicago, for the Sears Roebuck department store house brand Silvertone. Valco also made the National line of guitars and amps, the ‘budget’ Supro line, and a range of brands incuding Oahu and other department store house brands like Airline for Montgomery Ward. It has some similarities to the Supro Rhythm Tone and Belmont models of the late 1950s, with a different headstock, scratchplate/pickguard and tailpiece. The serial number X86897 puts it in early 1958. Valco also made a two-pickup solid body guitar for Sears /Silvertone in 1958, much like the first version of the Supro Dual Tone. For some reason the two Valco guitars were given the same model name by Sears - The Artist, with the same distinctive ‘electric cowboy’ headstock logo. On the two pickup version it’s silver, on the single pickup one I have it’s gold. There aren’t many Valco-made Silvertones around, and they don’t seem to have lasted long enough to get into one of their famous mail order catalogues. The Artist is a basic guitar, but it feels really great to play. You hear a lot about ‘baseball bat’ necks online, but this is the real thing. I find it very comfortable to play, though my hands aren’t large - the neck is thick. but with a narrower than usual fretboard. Called the ‘Kord King’ neck in Supro catalogues, it has a ‘feather-light modern aircraft metal’ rod running down it but no tension adjustment. It has an ebony (rather than the usual rosewood) fretboard. It is worn in places and has a crack running down it, but the 19 narrow frets are in good shape. Valco moved to a 20 fret neck on most of their guitars in 1958/9. It has white block inlays rather than the dots used on the Belmont most of the lower end Supros, and It’s only really held on with one screw (with a second for neck tilt adjustment) but it feels very solid, with no wiggles. The scale is full Gibson length – 24.75”, though it looks shorter because of where the neck joins the body.. It’s been played enough to wear away most of the screenprinted Sivertone logo on the cracked and glued ‘deco’ scratchplate, but it’s original owner had the foresight to invest a few extra dollars on a hard case, which I also have, so it’s in good shape overall. The embossed cowboy motif leather strap is a nice touch – it’s an idea borrowed from Gretsch, who Valco built amps and at least one guitar for in this period. The finish is a thick black plastic coating that Valco called ‘Glossy Jet No-Mar’. It hasn't bubbled up flaked off anywhere. It matches the 1958 Supro line’s ‘Dashing new color theme of Black, White and Inca Gold’. The tuners are original, but with replaced buttons. I do have a spare rosewood Valco bridge I could use, but I like the brighter sound of the Tune-a-matic, plus it’s the right colour. The pickup is a single coil, but looks like a humbucker. Some people have assumed this is a deliberate deception, but Valco had their own patent, thanks very much, cited on Seth Lover’s later Humbucker patent documents. For a short time in the late 50s, Valco even took to printing their patent number (2683388) on the outer cover, I think to avoid confusion with the Gibson product. Most people seem to like these big single coil pickups, although there are some dissenters. A lot of people say they're 'great for slide', which is the main cliche used in describing Supro, National and Airline guitars. They are not super-loud, but they distort a little even at low volume through a clean amp, and I like that. They are often compared to P90s, but my limited experience says they have a weaker but more complex sound than a modern (GFS) P90 at least. It’s a little bassy for me in the normal channel, but sounds just right in the bright channel of my Davoli Studio 60 valve amp. Because the neck pocket is deeper than on later Valco solid-bodies, the pickup is set into the top rather than surface mounted. It’s my favourite guitar to play when I'm just sitting around - smooth low(ish) action and the perfect weight – only 6.5 pounds (just under 3 Kg). The range of amplified sounds from the neck pickup is not huge – but it’s great for fuzz, or with a treble booster! I would love a bridge pickup Belmont or a Rhythm Tone from the same period, but they are getting expensive now. I usually avoid stickers and things on my guitars, but this a special one – the blue dot is from Tyree Guyton of the Heidelgerg Project in Detroit, and it also reminds me of the National Enquirer’s old Lucky Blue Dot. On the back, Taking Care Of Business - speaks for itself. Charlotte got this for me at Graceland. I love the Enhanced Elvis Concept of not just TCB, but TCB In A Flash!

Terminology (digression no.1)

2008-08-10T22:39:00.004+01:00

There comes a time in every fuzz fan’s life when someone says “so, what is it with all these fuzz boxes then? Aren’t they all the same?”. One day over the xmas break a year or two ago, I decided that would do a an impromptu demonstration-cum-lecture on the history of fuzz for Charlotte and Kay, partly to pre-empt this slightly awkward question, and partly to account for all the time I was spending in the den fiddling with transistors and soldering irons [and yes - I know I’m mad; but we make our own fun]. I choose an early fuzz (Maestro FZ1-A, 1965), a “classic” Germanium fuzz (Marshall Supa Fuzz), and a 70s big rock fuzz (op-amp Big Muff), introducing and playing each one in turn in the front room. Could they tell the difference? Not really. I mean they could hear they sounded different, but not very different. Fuzz is elusive - the apocryphal story about Inuit people having 100 words for snow comes to mind. My current vocabulary for describing fuzz is inadequate. With this in mind I tried to compile a list of terms used to describe fuzzy sounds, on diy sites and forums and Harmony Central. Some of them are sizzling, abrasive, smooth, muddy, sweet, warm, squishy, thick, fat, thin, gated, tubey, fizzy, saturated, crunchy, mangled, sharp, buzzy, dynamic, grinding, raspy, fartty, creamy, mushy, woolly, dirty, psychedelic... plus many qualifying references to compression, sustain, halo, bloom and Jimi Hendrix/Jimmy Page/Ron Asheton/Billy Corgan/whoever. I don’t think these are always hugely helpful in putting across the sound of a fuzz circuit, but they are part of the cloud of associations that are part of the mystique (real or imagined/manufactured) of old (oh, I mean Vintage) pedals, that in the commercial world falls under the heading ‘marketing’. It’s also part of the mythology of ‘getting great tone’, which I won’t go into. Although it’s rarely used without a certain irony, the term ‘mojo’ does come up more frequently than I’d like. The fact that comparisons with other known circuits are more useful than most of the above terms also says a lot. They are at best a shorthand for a certain language spoken mostly only by guitarists that is mildly alienating. It masks the undeniable truth that many fuzz pedals do sound similar (there! I’ve said it!) but also that they sound different with different guitars and amps. I'll try to include short sound clips instead of getting bogged down in this. They are not recorded under laboratory conditions. On three separate occasions Inow I've tried to record a clip of the Pep Box, and been unsatisfied with it - this is nuts - from now on it's rough + ready, and probably me playing badly - clips are just to give you an idea of what each thing sounds like, but I will try to use the same guitar and amp for them - a 1960 Burns Sonic through a Selmer Little Giant with a 12" extension speaker (an early 60s Celestion G12).

Marshall Supa Fuzz, 1967-ish

2008-08-03T16:00:00.016+01:00

I've mentioned this on various forums etc in the past few years, because it's the rarest pedal, I own, but here's the story again. I bought this for £6 in 1986 or so, from the short lived used musical instrument store that was part of the Music and Goods Exchange chain (originally Record and Tape Exchange, I won't go into the details of my love/hate relationship with these shops just yet, but it might come out later). It was a ramshackle shop, with a load of scruffy amps and 20 or so guitars, and a small cabinet of pickups and tuners and pedals. The Supa caught my eye, mostly because it was the cheapest thing in the place, and it looked old. I regularly grazed the Record and Tape shops, which are still mostly grouped together in Notting Hill, just to pass the time when I was unemployed and had no money, concentrating on the bargain bins and deletions department, where you could get all sorts of 60s records in Fair or even Poor condition for CHEAP (grading was very strict back then, so Fair usually meant 'Pretty Good' , and Poor 'Playable' to someone on my budget). There wasn't a lot of interest in '60s gear in the dread 80s, it was all about being Modern. Horrible bands like U2 and The Cure and The House Of Love held sway with a collection of horrible flangers and choruses and abominations like the Electric Mistress. Yuck! I mean, some of you reading this might be into that stuff, but I was not interested at all. Bands I was in at that time were mostly of the stubbornly inept post-punk vein, that barely (or never) made it to first gig level, or played every 3 months. I had a half-broken WEM Joker amp, that I traded in for a Laney Linebacker (not cool, sorry). I could have got an AC30, but they were too heavy, and too expensive (though cheap by today's standards). The Supa Fuzz was the only pedal I ever used, throughout the 80s90s.

When I got it was unpainted, rough aluminium. I painted the word FUZZ on it - seemed reasonable at the time. The glitter was was probably not such a good idea, but it's only nail polish; removable. I used to laugh at the size of the components - they seemed huge. I had no idea it was anything special for about the first 10 years I had it, other than that it sounded great. Then Rob from The King Cheetah (then based in London, now in LA) told me it looked like a Marshall Supa Fuzz. I wasn't really convinced, nor did I realise the significance of this info straight away. Eventually I put a photo of it on my first website (that I never updated), and got into contact with fuzz expert Stu Castledine. I sent him some photos of the board, and noticed something odd:

That gold thing (an elecrolytic capacitor) at the end, was on top of a smaller one (in parallel with it, even). Both are rated at 25uF (micofarads, units of capacitance, like), so that makes 50uF altogether. I considered de-soldering it, but it looked original, and Stu said he'd seen a few different values in early Supas. But if it was added at the time, wouldn't they have use two identical caps, if they just ran out of 50uF and wanted that value? Anyway, it sounds amazing, so I think I'm leaving it. I did consider some kind of switch but I don't want to touch it really. Anyone seen this before? The transistors are Mullard OC75s. Here's a clip - neck pickup of 1960 Burns Sonic. I hear a lot of clips on the internet that are just sqiddly lead runs, I don't think these give much of an idea of the sound of any given pedal and they can be painful and embarrassing to listen to - my clips are more basic, but illustrate the fuzz sound and how I'm likely to use it. This one has a bit of Black Keys in there.
Marshall Supa Fuzz

The Supa Fuzz is a close relation to the Mk2 Tone Bender, designed by Gary Hurst. For a great history of these pedals and their variants and to see where the Supa fits in, see David Main's excellent page A Little History. Dave reckons my one is around 1967, about the time of this advert:

[minor edits + pics restored, Dec 2011]

Pepe Rush fuzz part 2

2008-07-29T15:54:00.044+01:00

I wanted to make this one because it was a 'new' circuit from the Dawn of Fuzz - 1965! Well, that's not quite true, but it was the dawn of fuzz-as-we-know-it. Maestro, a Gibson subsidiary, introduced their Fuzztone (FZ1) in 1962 and tried to sell the new sound to country players initially. Nobody wanted them, until they heard the intro to 'Satisfaction' in '65. American hardware was expensive and hard to get in Europe in the '60s, so a few enterprising London sound/electronics guys like Gary Hurst and Pepe Rush made variations on the American original for home consumption. Fuzz was happening!

This is what the original looked like - same size and shape as the Maestro, same controls, different colour.

There's a picture of John Lennon in the studio recording Revolver, with a box like it. You can see the shape and a few letters that look like they might say "PEP BOX" with a WEM logo, but it's not at all clear whether this is the same thing as the red pedal which seems to have been called the Fuzzy. Nobody knows!

This photo has been discussed at length, and Beatles nerds are fairly sure it wasn't used on the finished album, so it's a bit of a mystery. Rush did make a deal with WEM (Watkins Electric Music!) to produce a fuzz pedal in 1966, but the WEM pedal that eventually came out is a flat box with wooden sides and a different circuit using the more stable Silicon transistors. The original uses Germanium transistors - they are more difficult to get to sound right, but the fuzz sound is better to my ears - smoother, looser, woollier and more compressed. Here's the schematic and stripboard (or veroboard) layout I used:

... and an interior photo:

This is slightly different from the layout, because I niftily mounted the board on the PEP control. I also added a small bulb (not an LED), so you can tell when it's on: I used Newmarket NKT213 PNP Germanium transistors - they're normally quite rare and expensive but I got lucky with a box of 20. The original transistors are unmarked, but have the same metal can package. NKT213s are also used in the Burns Buzzaround (more on that later.) The original owner of the red pedal above sold it soon after. He didn't like it, saying it was like the typical can-of-bees 60s fuzz, like the Fuzztone. I think he's more into the heavier sounding 70s pedals. I haven't heard the original, but with these transistors, it's a much fuller bassier sound than the slightly screechy (in a good way) Fuzztone, and it's also a lot louder. The PEP control behaves much like the Attack pot on the FZ1, but where the only good position on the original is full-on, the PEP pot gives good fuzzy sounds all the way back to about the 6 o'clock position. I think it's down to the transistors. I like the way it sounds now, but often I'll change them around, try different ones after a few months, as I use sockets rather than soldering them direct to the board. It's amazing how different they sound to each other. Battery access is awkward in most DIY pedals - you have to unscrew the bottom most of the time - I solved this problem by bending the back panel inwards and mounting the batteries there, on the outside - a little bit like another early guitar pedal, the Dallas Rangemaster treble boost, which is sort of the look I was after for this one. I haven't decided how to do the sound clips yet, that's for the future. There's a whole bizarre vocabulary that has grown up to attempt to describe the many sounds of Fuzz that people use on the DIY forums I spend time on. I'll try to avoid these terms, but it's hard to describe the nuances of one fuzz compared to another - it might get difficult as time goes on - I'll need the sound clips. Once I thought that all fuzz pedals sounded the same. Now I'm a fuzz geek, cursed with trying to explain why they don't all sound the same!

First post (Pep Rush fuzz)

2008-07-16T19:35:00.010+01:00

So - this blog is intended to be a view into the den, at my guitars and home-made fuzz boxes etc, with photos, probably sound and possibly video. I'll write a bit about each thing, why I like it or why I built it etc.

Add caption

This is a fuzz I made in June - a copy of one produced in London in 1965 by a London sound engineer called Pepe Rush.
He is still around, and for the record, he is of Russian extraction, not Italian as I originally said. The pedal is as obscure as they come, it's not even clear what the original was called, but like Gary Hurst's orginal Tone Bender, it was based on the Maestro Fuzztone, although it's a different circuit to the one Rush licensed to WEM a little later.

I like old, primitive sounds and equipment, and this one fits that category well. It works on 3 volts - 2 AA batteries - and 3 old stock Germanium transistors. The schematic came to light this year after a series of interior photos appeared on the DAM forum. It amuses me to make my pedals look like faces. [edited 2011]