I have had guitars for many years, my first guitar was homemade by a neighbour it was an acoustic with strings about half an inch off the fretboard. My next guitar was bought new from a shop, another acoustic. I then decided to buy an electric guitar, I have bought and sold quite a few since. I am self taught, I often used to watch pub bands looking to see what the guitarist was doing, so I could later try and play it myself. I like acoustic and electric guitars. There are so many good players, and many different styles of playing, Classical, Folk, Pop, Rock, and Jazz to mention just some. My favourite guitars include Gibson Les Paul's, SG's, Epiphone Coronets, Fender Telecasters, and Stratocasters, also electric 12 string guitars, as one of my favourite bands was the Byrds.

I personally like guitar players such as, Roy Buchanan, Albert Lee, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, who used Fender Telecasters to brilliant effect. Also Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Lukather, Eddie Van Halen, and Amos Garret, to mention a few. (I have added a webpage of my favourite guitarist Jeff Beck to my site as a tribute. See the link below.)

In my younger days I would often tinker with guitars altering the wiring to get different sounds, or different pickup positions on the switch, adjusting the string height by the bridge, and or the depth of the slots cut in the nut for the strings. I have bought books about guitars, their wiring, and also on the subject of guitar amplifiers. Guitars have given me great pleasure through the years, though possibly not my neighbours.

I have many years ago dabbled in making recordings of my guitar playing on an old Revox reel to reel tape recorder, using the sound on sound feature adding bass, keyboards and a drum machine, and sometimes another guitar. My nephew Simon also played the guitar, or keyboards on a couple of tracks, we had good fun doing this.

This part contains some of my history playing in groups. I used to jam with Bill a Bass player and his brother Peter who played Drums in their parents garage, mainly playing blues and rock music. Later I met a drummer named Colin whose parents allowed us to play a couple of times at their house. Later I met Barry a Bass player who wanted to form a group, he had a friend Peter who was invited to sing with us, we practised in a school class room. I left the group through mutual agreement, and gave them a guitarist friend Barry's phone number he agreed to join them. I went through a period of making up numbers, and recording them on a Revox superimposing eg: adding bass , and some simple synth sounds, and drum box effects. I was invited by Bill to join a morris dance band, I thought why not try it, and we played a number of gigs together which was fun. We seem to part company when I got married and moved. Moving on some time, where I worked we had a new cleaner he said he was in a rock n roll group and they were looking for a guitarist to join them, I went along to the rehearsal, and though I am not a rock n roll guitarist they seemed impressed and said I could join them. We rehearsed for some time improving our repotoir, but I left them before actually playing any gigs.

At present I am playing Bass Guitar with a group named "EARTHASYLUM" formed by Simon who is our lead guitarist/vocalist, and our other musicians are Pete on an African Jembi drum and Congas, and Debbie who also plays Congas and other percussion instruments. For more information about "EARTHASYLUM" look for the link to the website on the Homepage on this site.

If any one is interested I have some mp3 tracks which I composed and played using a multitrack tape recorder a good number of years ago, have a listen, go to Steve's downloads.