I guess I was born to love the guitar. The first song I ever recognized from memory was “My Generation” by The Who. I think that was about 1975, so I must have been four years old. It had a profound effect on me! Later I would strum acoustic guitars in primary school, but it wasn’t until my final year there that I finally saw a real electric guitar. It was a red Stratocaster with a white pick guard - probably not a real one, but that didn’t matter: it was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my young life!
Eventually I “inherited” a classical acoustic guitar from my mother (still have it, mum!) and taught myself how to play the basics, but it just didn’t sound heavy enough to copy the tones I aspired to. I had moved on to much heavier guitar sounds. This was 1986 and “Master of Puppets” had just been released. My musical life was to change beyond comprehension – here were guys playing the most brutal riffs and solos, and with a killer tone! My secondary school had a couple of electrics which I was allowed to play, sometimes for extra periods when I’d been “good” and helped with the less talented music classes. How I relished those precious minutes and hours plugged into the little combo amp thinking I was Randy Rhoads. However, life would become much sweeter because that year, for my combined Christmas and birthday present, I would finally own my very first electric guitar.
Once my hands stopped shaking with excitement I was able to get to grips with it: it was made by Pulse (who?? it did not matter), had one pickup, and was a cool flying-vee-meets-Explorer shape painted in white. (Still got this one too! Later in life I would realise how little money my parents had at that time, and how much it must have cost them, making that instrument very precious to me indeed.) Life was never the same after that. School finished and I went to my room to play more Metallica. I spent years doing that. Years. School and its various amateur metal bands came and went, and soon it was time to get a job and earn money of my own. Soon a second/third/fourth(?)-hand 1985 Westone Spectrum LX found its way to me – guess what…..I still have it too! Now I would experience the sweet tones only possible from a neck humbucker! A larger Peavey combo amp and some basic stompboxes shaped my sound as well.
Years soon passed, and my interest in the mighty instrument waned in comparison to the usual stuff of life, like getting married, making a home and having children. But soon there would come again the old familiar stirring…..and in 2005, after almost ten years of very occasional dabbling, I started looking at guitars and guitar-related things on the most ponderous and marvelous discovery: the Internet!! Soon a new guitar had been sourced from a seller on eBay – a basic Washburn WR150 , in metallic green, but it had a nice Ibanez RG style body and a wonderfully flat fingerboard! Nothing like new gear to keep the interest flowing! My very good friend (and fellow guitar-aholic) Magnus showed considerable interest in that guitar, leading me to sell it to him. To date, this has been the only time I have ever sold one of my own guitars, and is something I have regretted ever since! At least I get to play it sometimes. Over the next couple of years there followed a BC Rich STIII , which I upgraded with EMG active pickups, a brand-new Aria Mac 57/7 7-string guitar (which I also fitted EMGs into!), and another Washburn WR150 (which became a test mule for a Floyd Rose conversion!).
But in
early 2007, having become much more confident and proficient at almost every
aspect of guitar tweaking, I took the ultimate step and decided to make my own
guitar from scratch!