Workshop: Gordon smith Guitars
After 43 years at the helm of British guitar-making institution Gordon Smith Guitars, founder John Smith finally retired. We meet Doug Sparkes, the man who’s taken on the challenge of guiding the company into a brand-new era…
The story of Gordon Smith guitars is a very British one. Founded in 1974 by John Smith and Gordon Whitham in Partington, near Manchester, the company’s electric guitars became a bit of an institution on the British guitar scene.
Known for no-frills styling that belied the instruments’ superb playability and impressive reliability, Gordon Smith guitars found their way into the hands of everyone from punks to jazzers through the 80s and 90s and represented a genuine alternative to US guitars at a time when the likes of Fender and Gibson dominated guitar stores. As longtime Gordon Smith player Pete Shelley of The Buzzcocks puts it: “I’ve been playing Gordon Smith guitars since 1977 and got my first custom model in 1979… You pay for the guitar, not the hype.”
But time waits for no man and, after 40 years of hand-making guitars, largely with self-built tooling, John Smith decided to pass the company on. Enter Doug Sparkes, who loved the brand’s heritage and wanted to train a team of young British luthiers to take Gordon Smith to the world stage – while still proudly making everything in Britain in the spirit of the original instruments. We journeyed down to Northamptonshire, the brand’s new home, to meet Doug and find out more…
How did you come to take on such a long-running British brand?
“I had Auden guitars – the acoustic brand – and we’d just moved into this new workshop. We had double the space we needed, so I was looking for something to do with the rest of the space in the workshop, and just sort of Googling around, found that there was an advert for a guitar business for sale. I’d read the advert and worked out it could only be Gordon Smith.
“I grew up loving the bands that played Gordon Smiths, and it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss, and it was a chance to make sure the brand kept going and kept true to its heritage. So I contacted John and Linda and went up and met with them. And, over about 35 cups of tea – because they chain-drink tea – we came to an agreement to move it into the workshop here.
“I’d got together a team of lads. They went and based themselves up at the Manchester workshop for, probably, six to eight weeks, working with John and learning the ways that John did things, learning the DNA of Gordon Smith, so that when we brought it back down to here, we weren’t just here on Day One going, ‘Right, what do we do? How do we start?’ They’d already spent a couple of months getting to know the processes, getting to know the models, getting to know the wiring diagrams, and all that sort of stuff – so that we were ready to start with feet on the ground. That was three years ago now.”
What features did you feel were essential hallmarks of the original Gordon Smith guitars?
“I think the first thing that struck us was what a clever guy John Smith was, in terms of the way that a lot of the parts were made on machines that he’d invented. For example, the top carver was built onto an old bed frame, and stuff like that. So he was a really clever guy, and always looked at a problem or looked at a job that needed doing with a completely unique way of finding a solution.
“The way that he put truss rods in using a gun drill, that was unique, too; but we now use two-way truss rods so we have updated some methods. But the brass nut is very much a Gordon Smith signature, so we still use the brass nut on every single guitar. There are also things such as the coil-tap humbucker – Gordon Smith was one of, if not the first, makers to be coil-tapping humbuckers back in the early 1970s.
“So obviously, we kept the original pickup winder. We still wind all the pickups in house, and we still follow those original wiring diagrams. There’s a unique tone circuit on a Gordon Smith – I won’t tell you exactly what it does, but it gives you a more usable roll-off tone than you get on a standard two-humbucker wiring diagram. So they’re all little bits of Gordon Smith DNA that we’ve carried forward. It’s really important that we keep them as part of the brand, and keep them as part of the product.”
“I grew up loving the bands that played Gordon Smith guitars – and it was an opportunity that I just couldn’t miss”
When he handed over the business, did John give you any advice on getting the formula right?
“He told us lots of things, some of which will never make it into print! But there were loads of great quirks. For example, the mounting plate on the back of the humbucker was like something cut from an old sweet tin. Every one was slightly different. They were slightly different shapes, slightly different lengths, slightly different thicknesses, and he was just sort of banging them into the potting resin, and there they were. John then shaped them down to mount them into the guitar later.
“I thought I’d ask John where they came from. When we were having a cup of tea later I said, ‘John, the mounting plates on the humbuckers, where do you get those from?’ He took a drag on his pipe and he looked across at me, and he said, ‘Well, it’s an interesting story, that. If you look out in the yard, there’s an old caravan…’ Basically, what they were doing was gradually stripping the aluminium frame off the caravan, cutting it up, and bending it into mounting plates for the humbuckers. He said, ‘If you look, there’s about half a caravan left. You can take it with you, if you want!’
“In the end, we bought some proper mounting plates instead. But there was a lot of that sort of recycling or reusing going on, which was great.
“They had a really cool attitude to what was essentially a cottage industry. I don’t mean that in any way disrespectfully to them, because they are very clever, fantastic people.”
How about tonewoods? John Smith typically used a lot of cedar...
“The main woods that we use now are African mahogany and Brazilian cedar. We also use poplar, which is really cool, perhaps underrated, but a really good wood to work with. We cut everything from a single billet, so your body is a single piece – there’s no two-piece or three-piece glued-together bodies here. The same with the necks – they’re all cut from a single four-inch-wide length of timber. So there’s no scarf joint and there’s no winging on the headstock. It’s all a single piece.”
One of the things we’ve always associated Gordon Smith guitars with is fast, very playable neck shapes. Have you kept the same profiles?
“Yes, we’re using exactly the same neck shaper that John was using. It’s the same bit of kit. We just moved it from Manchester to down here, and put it in a safety-compliant box. But it’s exactly the same profiler. We offer two profiles of neck. There’s the classic Gordon Smith neck, which is the one you’re referring to, which is quite a wide and slim profile, but it is very playable. Then there’s also a chunkier neck profile that maybe some of the older punks prefer. It’s a 12-inch radius on the fingerboard, which is what it’s always been with Gordon Smith. But again, if somebody wants something different, they can talk to us and we can adapt to what the customer wants.”
How about pickups?
“They were stripping the aluminium frame off the caravan, cutting it up, and bending it into mounting plates for the humbuckers”
“There is a standard spec for the pickups, but equally, because we’re winding them all in-house, if somebody wants something special doing, we can mod. So, for example, we’ve just done some work for one particular customer changing the number of winds on the coils, so that when it is coil split there isn’t any volume drop. So there’s lots we can do. The next stage of development will probably be widening the range of pickup options.”
What key things were you trying to achieve with the new generation of Gordon Smith guitars?
“Well, some of moving forward has involved going back. So, for example, John had stopped using mahogany – he was only using Brazilian cedar. But we’ve found a good source of African mahogany, and it’s a great timber to work with, so we’ve reintroduced that. We’ve also reintroduced proper binding. John had dropped proper binding a number of years ago, and was only offering the scrape bind. The scrape bind is great, and it looks really good, but some people want that proper bind on there, so we’ve reintroduced that, too.
“We’ve also looked at finishes so we can make some more modern colours available. You’ll see that on what we refer to as the GS1000 range, which is a range of electrics with natural-finish cedar back and sides but with a coloured top. They’ve been hugely successful since we launched them.”
Are all the new Gordon Smith guitars built specifically to order, or do you keep stock?
“Well, we have a range of what we call the Gordon Smith Heritage range, of about a dozen guitars, and they’re always available in stock. So they’re your classic GS1s in natural, in tobacco burst, and in cherry. There are a couple of P90 GS2s in there. There’s a white, single-cut P90 guitar as well. So the classic heritage models, which John was making back in 1974, that range is always available in stock. Then we always have a range of specials on the go as well. At the moment, it’s the GS1000s with the coloured top.
“But then, on top of that, there’s the full custom-build option, where you can specify what you want, and we’ll build it within the established style of Gordon Smith. For example, it will always have a brass nut. It will always have the Gordon Smith wiring loom in it. So it keeps the Gordon Smith DNA in whatever you specify.”
Finally, how have long-standing Gordon Smith fans taken to the new guitars – and new ownership?
“There were, maybe, one or two that said, ‘This isn’t a real Gordon-Smith,’ but actually, they’ve been really supportive, which is great. They’ve bought guitars from us. They’ve been here and seen the workshop. I think because we kept manufacturing in the UK, and because from day one, we said, ‘Look, it’s an open door on the workshop. Come in,’ and I think because we didn’t, on that first day, radically change everything.
“We wanted to keep that heritage and make more of the heritage. I think a lot of them were relieved to see the brand was going to continue, and that the guitars that they loved weren’t just going to disappear and become part of guitar history, really. So yes, they’ve got a place in guitar history – but they’ve also got a place, now, in guitar future.”
“The scrape bind is great, and it looks really good, but some people want that proper bind on there, so we’ve reintroduced it”