The Monatron
A product of the summer of '97, the roots of this monster go back a year or two further, to my first sighting of a 10ft long plank with a piano string and a pickup at a friend's flat in Brighton, built by a guy from Glasgow called Will.

I carried the idea of this in my head for some time, waiting for it to mutate into this: Five strings, one pickup and a volume control (just bits I had lying around, added the tone later) and a swirly pink paintjob, inspired further by Lou Reed's 'Ostrich' guitar and the Sonic Youth 1985 power-drone.

ItÕs tuned E-B-E-B-E and played by scraping a piece of metal tubing across in a steel guitar style, through the Fuzz. The result - a huge noise comparable to 'Metal Machine Music' played through a big fucking Stylophone from hell.

60s fuzz box

No-name fuzz box
Bought in the early '80s from the instruments shop at Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill (now closed).

Everybody wanted nasty flangers and chorus pedals at this time and they practically gave it away - a 60s fuzz box for £6.

The body is cast aluminium and the components are comically enormous. It looks quite similar to an old Marshall Supa Fuzz pedal, but the corners are sharper. All I know is that some of the components are made in England.

Maybe it is a Marshall, as my pal Rob from King Cheetah insists. He knows about these things, but I still sort of doubt it. I painted the word 'fuzz' on it, and cheapened it further by adding a layer of glittery nail polish
 
Walco Sound Go Round Sound-Go-Round
A quirky cheap effect from the early 1970s sold as New Old Stock on Ebay – it came brand new in its lovely original packaging. It kind of chops the signal up into equal-size chunks, a nasty sounding square-wave tremelo. Pointless and totally impractical*, but fun.

Originally housed in this cute little green box, I successfully transferred it into an old volume pedal, for foot operation.

* Found a use for it in 2001, starting my tremelo phasing experiments MP3 - Detroit (edit)


KAWAI
My first internet purchase before I discovered ebay. $150 - which I now realise was a bit steep. I was originally told it was a Teisco too, but they were wrong. Had it a couple of years then sold to Music & Video Exchange.
BIG BLACK
 A good old Covent Garden markey find. £20. Good action, great Teisco sound, but large, heavy, badly balanced and awkward, with bodged alterations. Stripped the hardware and sold the body and neck. Shoulda kept it.
MUSIMA ETERNA
Yet another market purchase - a big £40 this one! Cool looks and heavy duty East German construction, but another one I never really warmed to. Sort of swapped it for the Egmond, expecting to get it back sometime.


If you want to see more guitars there are some great ones here, here, and here.