Music and electronics have gone hand-in-hand for me from the very beginning. The folk songs we were taught in junior school didn’t really grab me, and the first tunes that really did when I was 15 were two guitar instrumentals, Apache by Cliff Richard’s band the Shadows, and Ghost Riders In The Sky by US band The Ramrods. Both made gloriously excessive use of echo machines, and I badly wanted one.
Around that time (1960) Britain was still peppered with shops and dumps selling ex-WWII electronic surplus: we had a local one, a corrugated-iron Nissen Hut in a farmer’s field full of RAF-surplus radar sets and similar stuff. We used to hang out there, buying bits to make crystal sets - or even one-valve sets for the more ambitious - on which to listen to Radio Luxembourg, which was the only place, apart from café juke-boxes, we could hear proper rock ‘n roll in those days. I bought ex-RAF intercom carbon microphones, and attached one to a cheap, nasty Eko acoustic guitar as a pickup, to be played through the family radiogram as an amplifier. It sounded awful, but not awful enough so I made an echo machine using the coiled wire element from an old electric fire stretched between two more carbon mikes as a mechanical delay line. Then I learned Ghost Riders In The Sky and Apache.
A couple of years later I was among a team of 6th-formers who won a prize for building an analog computer that could solve sixth-order differential equations, using op-amps made out of RAF surplus components, including a green-screen radar oscilloscope as output. I went off to college in The Big Smoke where one could purchase real electric guitars (a Hofner Colorama) and real electronic effects, like a tape-based Watkins Copicat echo and the first Fuzz Face distortion box. I graduated from surf-rock to jazz, then to free jazz. Alongside an excellent bop alto sax player, I played gigs where I sat on a small Fenton Weill amplifier, playing my Colorama with lots of feedback and Mike Bloomfield-style bends and occasionally a violin bow. That amp had a crazy built-in tremolo effect, and by twiddling its rate and depth knobs I could make it work like a primitive beat-box.
I was never a jazz purist: in those days boundaries weren’t so sharp. I revered B.B. King and Hendrix and Clapton and Jeff Beck. I bought a Harmony Sovereign acoustic and learned ragtime blues finger-picking. I loved the classic jazz guitarists like Joe Pass, Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel, but didn’t want to play like them (clean-toned archtop guitars and fast fancy chord and scale work). Nor, later on, did I fancy becoming a heavy-metal shredder. No, tone was becoming most important to me, and electronics were the way to great tones.
Nowadays I have a nice vintage, Made-In-Japan Fender Stratocaster, an Ibanez Artcore semi-acoustic, plus looper, delay, tremolo and freeze pedals and a multi-effects box crammed with signal-processors that can emulate 100 different effects, amplifiers and rooms. This is a golden but whacky age for guitar playing, in which people debate endlessly about the tonal properties of different woods (and pay outrageous prices for them) but I don’t buy any of that: it’s all in the electronics.
Regular readers may recall my frequent mentions of the US guitarist Bill Frisell, which is because he’s been my hero and role model in all matters guitar for many years. He has pulled together all the genres that I most enjoy - surf rock, blues, pop, bluegrass and free jazz - into a seamless synthesis, but better still tone is his artform and effects his principal instrument. His pedal board isn’t large, it’s what he does with it: at centre is a Line 6 DL4 delay pedal which lets him not just record and repeat passages, but speed them up, reverse them and much more: stooped over to twiddle its knobs in mid-performance, Frisell gets unearthly sounds far deeper and richer than any synthesiser just by mangling the signal from his Telecaster.
During his long career Frisell has played with the best of the best, like ex-Miles Davis sidemen Paul Motian and Ron Carter, and has run two long-term trios of his own. If you want a taste of his music to see whether you’d like it, try his gorgeous solo rendition of the Beatles ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ at https://youtu.be/DioXHQmGQko. If you liked that, a 1995 concert with two late greats, ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker and ex-Ornette Coleman bassist Charlie Haden is much wilder: https://youtu.be/AwBtJm7JiDI while if you’re still on board after that, this marvellous set might hook you for good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwGTKZ6uNxXkrjkDlToJXU2EPG2awfGFx
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