How It Started
My first encounter with a guitar wasn’t particularly promising. I was about twelve when my parents bought me one, but it was almost impossible to tune and even harder to play. I soon gave up and the guitar was sold.
A few years later, at college, we had to choose an extracurricular activity to fill part of the week. Football was my first choice and learning guitar my second, despite the minor problem that I didn’t actually own a guitar.
I didn’t get football.
So, on my first day at college, I had to go home and tell my parents that I needed them to buy me another guitar. Having already bought me one that I’d abandoned, they were not amused.
This time it was a Spanish acoustic with nylon strings. We were being taught fingerstyle playing, which I found difficult and, frankly, wasn’t really what any of us wanted to play. Within a few weeks we’d persuaded our teacher to show us some rudimentary blues riffs instead. Suddenly things began to make much more sense.
Eventually I moved on to a steel-strung Yamaha acoustic, bought with the help of a proper loan that I could repay from my part-time work. Compared with the Spanish guitar it sounded wonderful. My friends and I fitted pickups to our acoustics, plugged them into whatever amplification we could cobble together — including old tape recorders — and eventually found ourselves playing pubs, covering songs by the likes of Bob Dylan and the Eagles.
Around this time, I also began experimenting with recording. My earliest attempts involved trying to synchronise two tape recorders while playing another part live. I’m still looking for some of those tapes. If I ever find them, I fully expect them to be dreadful.
From Playing to Recording
About a year after those first recording experiments, I met and married my wife. Not long afterwards, she bought me a beautiful 12-string acoustic guitar. It had that wonderful Byrds-like sound and, surprisingly, wasn’t particularly difficult to play.
Unfortunately, its stay was relatively short. My wife had a car accident — thankfully she was fine, but the car wasn’t. Money was tight and something had to pay for the repairs.
Bye-bye 12-string.
Several years later it was my wife who decided I should have another guitar. This time I bought a Fender Strat with a Floyd Rose tremolo and a fairly basic but very loud amplifier.
By then, though, life was changing. Children arrived, my career was progressing and there simply wasn’t the space to leave a collection of musical equipment set up. Playing live had pretty much stopped and music became something of a sideline.
What hadn’t disappeared was my fascination with recording.
Eventually the children grew up, we extended the house and, for the first time, I had somewhere that musical equipment could remain permanently set up. By then tape multitrack machines were rapidly giving way to digital recording, and that opened up a completely different world.
The First Album
My entire first album was recorded using a tiny four-track Boss Micro BR digital recorder. It seems remarkably primitive now. I could export the files and even created spreadsheets to remind myself what I’d recorded on each track and which instrument settings I’d used.
When I wanted to add bass guitar to my recordings, I asked a musician friend for advice and bought a Yamaha bass of my own. I wanted to play the parts myself rather than digitally simulate a bass using my six-string guitar.
It was also during this period that life changed rather dramatically. I went through a serious period of ill health and recovery took several years. Music and recording became particularly important during that time. I can still remember the sense of achievement that came simply from being able to complete a song.
In 2012 I completed my first album, First Blues, released it through CD Baby and joined PRS. It was also the first time I’d actually sung on my own recordings.
Like a lot of people, I’ve never been entirely comfortable hearing my own voice played back. Somehow, though, I carried on doing it.
As my health improved, I became increasingly productive and the collection of guitars grew with me.
A Very Special Guitar
A couple of those guitars eventually needed servicing, which led me to Martyn Booth. I initially thought I was simply taking them to a very good guitar repairer. I soon realised that Martyn was a highly regarded luthier who designed and built his own instruments, and we got on well.
When it appeared that Martyn might be considering retirement, it was — once again — my wife who suggested that this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that I should ask him to build a guitar specifically for me.
So I did.
The process took several months, with virtually every aspect of the guitar becoming a decision for me to make before Martyn turned those choices into the finished instrument. The result was my unique Martyn Booth 158, completed in 2018.
It really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and one I’m very glad I didn’t miss.
Eight Albums Later
My recording setup has changed considerably since that little Boss four-track. Around nine years ago I moved to Logic Pro with a Scarlett 6i6 interface, and over the years I’ve gradually expanded what I use in my recordings.
Guitar remains at the heart of much of what I do, but more recently I’ve introduced harmonica and some keyboard work, using a keyboard I inherited from my father.
Then, in 2019, life intervened again. By then I was fit enough for my wife and me to take on a major house renovation project. It became all-consuming, and serious writing and recording largely disappeared for several years.
I didn’t really return to it until the end of 2023.
There was no particular rush this time. I was happy to keep working on the songs, changing things and trying to make the recordings better than anything I’d done before.
The result is Eight — thirteen original tracks and, appropriately enough, my eighth album.
These days I’m far happier in the studio than on the stage. I write, perform, record, engineer and master the music myself, but the part I enjoy most is still creating the songs. My wife remains enormously supportive and is also my go-to critic when I need another pair of ears — although that doesn’t necessarily mean she always tells me what I want to hear.
Ultimately, I’d love to hear other artists take some of these songs and make them their own.
For now, though, the aim with Eight is quite simple: I’d like to get the songs heard.