Blueprint
You’ve seen them in the hands of players as diverse as Pete Shelley, Billy Bragg and Dee Dee Ramone but one Gordon Smith model has touched the hearts of the world’s players more than any other – the GS1. Guitarist joins owner Doug Sparkes to talk about ev
Gordon Smith Guitars was founded in 1974 by Gordon Whitham and John Smith and its instruments were known for their basic no-nonsense looks and functional playability. If you wanted a mahoganybodied single-humbucker guitar with no unnecessary frills, finery and an American price tag then Gordon Smith was the first number to dial. But simple good looks weren’t the brand’s only asset; the guitars that the Partington-based workshop turned out back then could deliver the goods. John Smith’s design ethic was that he wanted a guitar to be made like a Zippo lighter – in that it did one thing really well, playing the role of a basic rock ’n’ roll machine.
Since 2015 the brand has been in the hands of Auden Guitars in Higham Ferrers, where the company is faithfully carrying on the tradition of the original models, with a few contemporary tweaks along the way. We spoke to Auden’s owner Doug Sparkes about one of Gordon Smith’s most enduring models, the GS1, going right back to the beginning…
How did you first came across the renowned UK builder?
“I guess my first introduction to the GS1 came way before I got involved with Gordon Smith because it was from watching Pete Shelley and the like in the late 70s, early 80s – straightforward rock ’n’ roll, punk-rock type stuff – and I would see these baby guitars. There was nothing flash about them, but they just created this massive sound. In my mind, it was as much of an attitude as it was about sound. They were the perfect guitar to go with the punk-rock movement of the late 70s.”
What were the basic design elements of the GS1 in terms of its construction, as built by John back in the day?
“In the early days it was a 44mm-deep body. He always used a two-piece or even a three-piece body and, certainly in those early days, he was using a South American mahogany. Later on he started to use an awful lot of Brazilian cedar, which reduced the weight of the guitar, really, and he also chunked it down from a 44mm body to a 38mm body, which meant it became a
“It was as much of an attitude as it was about sound. They were the perfect guitar to go with the punk-rock movement of the late 70s”
much lighter guitar. That was probably in the late 80s and through the 90s that he made that change. But it was a single home-wound humbucker that [his wife] Linda used to make in the workshop in Partington [that helped define the guitar].
“John wouldn’t just make the pickups himself, he would make the components for the pickup himself as well. He made his own bobbins – beautiful templates made from whatever Linda had in the kitchen. Be it yogurt pots, a margarine tub or whatever, he’d be melting it down and making pickup bobbins out of it. He’d be making baseplates by basically cutting up the frame of an old caravan, for example, so he had a real DIY attitude to putting those guitars together. Nothing in his workshop would go to waste, you know, even if there was a small bit of timber left on the floor, he would find a place for it on a guitar somewhere.”
What sort of changes have you made to the basic design of the GS1?
“We’ve changed it dramatically because we’re making a single-piece body and a single-piece neck. So we don’t have heel joints, we don’t have scarf joints, we don’t have wings on the headstock – we just cut it all out of a four-inch [101.6mm] piece of quarter-sawn timber. We’ve taken that design forward in terms of refining it for your more modern player.
“We still use the exact template that John used when he was making the GS1, though. The only thing we’ve changed slightly is the neck profile. Where John had eight profiles, we now offer a slimmer and a fuller neck profile, but other than that we’ve kept it true to the original GS1. John also used a fat and really low fretwire. It was actually a bass fretwire, certainly at the time when we took it over.”
Do you find that players have an enduring fondness for the original GS1 – a sort of loyal fanbase?
“There is a real love for the GS1. If I do a guitar show, or when I’m out and about, I’m always surprised by how many people say, ‘I used to have a GS1 and I absolutely loved it. I really regret selling it, I’m going to get a replacement.’ That conversation happens all the time, and it was certainly a guitar that, at the time, people undervalued a little bit and it was only when they didn’t have it they realised what a good and reliable workhorse guitar it was.”
“John wouldn’t just make the pickups himself, he would make the components for the pickup himself as well”
Have you kept the pickups basically the same as on the originals?
“I think a lot of it was just that we wanted to try to keep that original feel of a GS1, keeping that promise of a GS1 being a guitar that does exactly what it says on the tin and not much else. But at the same time, if we were going to bring it to a modern audience, we knew that certain
things that John had got away with perhaps weren’t acceptable any more. So we did upgrade every single component. We’ve got proper pickup bobbins, we’ve got proper mounting plates. It’s still a ceramic magnetic pickup, the split-coil GS humbucker, but we changed every part in it, from the bobbins to the wire.
“The other thing was that the GS humbucker used to be quite bright and brash, so we just played around with the windings a bit just to warm it up a little and give it a little bit more depth and more roundness. I think there’s probably a slightly bigger tone all round on the GS1 now than there was in John’s time because of the work that we’ve done on the pickup.”
Do you still have John’s original pickup winding machines?
“We’ve actually retired John’s winder now; it’s in the corner of my office as a kind of museum piece. We had to, really. It was held together by old sewing machine belts and it just wasn’t consistent enough. You could make 10 pickups on it and they would sound completely different because it didn’t gently sweep while it was winding; it sort of juddered its way across [the bobbin] and then juddered its way back again. So, in the end, we took the decision that, as much as we love it as a piece of Gordon Smith history, it wasn’t consistent enough to be part of the future in terms of its output.
“Also, because our annual output is much higher than John’s was, that single pickup winder just couldn’t keep up. To give you an idea, the original pickup winder took 15 minutes to wind one bobbin, 30 minutes for a humbucker. The new winder will wind eight bobbins in two minutes. We’re also starting to experiment with different windings and different sounds, so probably in the not too distant future when you order your GS1, it’ll be, ‘Which Gordon Smith humbucker do you want?’ because we’ll have a range.”
That’s more in step with how people like to buy guitars these days, offering alternatives when a customer is ordering an instrument…
“Customers are a lot more knowledgeable now because of the internet and because of YouTube and the brilliant work of magazines and things online. Everybody who owns a guitar now is a reviewer. People come to you armed with a lot more information and quite often we’ve had somebody from Devon ring up and say, ‘I’ve just been watching this guy in Glasgow who’s bought a Gordon Smith and it’s got this on it. Can I have that on mine?’ People will spend hours, days, just searching stuff out and looking at stuff that they’re interested in. So the customer is more knowledgeable and more refined and more precise in what they want now than they’ve ever been.”
Let’s talk about a few points from the original GS1: the brass nut and the finishing process, for instance…
“The brass nut is exactly the same now as it ever has been. We buy brass bars and we shape them and make the nuts ourselves individually for every guitar, and that’s one thing that, as long as I’m involved in the brand, will stay the same.
For me, that is a real signature of what Gordon Smith is. I think it gives a real clarity to the sound of the guitar. As for the finishes, John didn’t really have a spray booth as such. What he had was a hole in the workshop wall and he had an old lorry radiator fan mounted into it, and basically all he did was he sprayed a PU lacquer finish and it would just be taken straight out through the wall with this old lorry fan. He didn’t have a spray mask; he made himself one from a bit of flexible plastic and an old pillowcase. He put the outlet hose of a Hoover into this pillowcase and the fan from a microwave oven at the end of it blowing fresh air so he could breathe while he was spraying. I’ve actually got a picture of this. He used to have this pipe hole under his pillowcase and he’s smoking the pipe under his air-fed mask. The guy was just brilliant. An absolute character.”
GS1 guitars used to be synonymous with a very plain, natural finish. But now you do them in all kinds of wonderful finishes…
“We can offer everything from basic PU finish, right the way up to full nitrocellulose. Obviously there’s a lot more work involved in nitro, and it’s a more expensive option, but it’s there if people want it. But in terms of colours, we work with a fantastic paint supplier who can match any colour anybody wants. We have our stock colours, but equally we have people who ring up and say, ‘My first car was a 1976 Ford Capri and it was a kind of gold brown colour. Can you match that?’ and we try to see if we can match it. Then we have the various finishes in terms of matte, satin, gloss, combinations of both, depending on what people want.”
What other refinements are you making on Gordon Smith instruments, moving forward?
“We’ve just done a range of export semisolids, which are like the posh end of the Gordon Smiths. They’re £1,700 retail and they’re all in this lovely subtle satin sort of sparkle but it’s not like a real blast in your face – it sits back and looks really nice. The other thing with those that’s interesting is that it was the first time we’ve gone out with branded hardware. Rather than just saying it’s a GS bridge or GS tuners, everything on those is from the Gotoh 510 range, so they’re fantastic – you know, 21:1 ratio tuners, and they’re brilliant. We’ve got this agreement with Gotoh that they finish all of them with what they call an X Chrome finish for us, so it’s not shiny but it’s not vintage. It’s somewhere in between. We send our pickup covers to Gotoh and have them in the same coating, so everything fits into it.”
“The brass nut is exactly the same now as it ever has been. For me, that is a real signature of what Gordon Smith is”