Jim Dunlop
Would-be musician who became famous for his guitar gizmos
JIM DUNLOP, who has died aged 82, will be familiar to generations of aspiring Jimi Hendrixes as the maker of dozens of guitar gadgets and gizmos, from “picks” and slides to Cry Baby Wah Wah pedals.
A would-be musician who owned no fewer than 30 guitars, the Glasgow-born Dunlop poured his frustrated artistic ambitions into a company making some of the most widely recognised lines of musical accessories in the world.
The son of a housepainter from the Glasgow suburb of Maryhill, Jim Dunlop was born on April 7 1936 and attended North Kelvinside Secondary school, before studying to be a machinist at Glasgow Technical College. He went on to serve as an apprentice at the Glasgow optical engineering firm Barr & Stroud, but in 1959, aged 24, he moved to Toronto, Canada.
The following year he married Bernice and soon afterwards the couple moved to the warmer climes of the San Francisco Bay area of California, where he worked as a machinist and then mechanical engineer.
His guitar accessories business began as a sideline in 1962, when he developed the “Vibra Tuner” – a small device that attached to a guitar with a suction cup and displayed whether the guitar was in tune with the vibration of a small reed.
While visiting music stores to sell his new product, someone told Dunlop that anyone who made a good capo that could handle a 12-string guitar would make a lot of money. (A capo clamps to the neck of a guitar and is used to change pitch.)
Dunlop noticed that standard capos would pinch the end strings on a guitar, creating a buzzing sound. He also noted that all capos were flat, even though some guitar necks were curved, resulting in damage to the instrument.
Using his engineering background, Dunlop created the toggle capo, and then worked with a local machine shop to build the first capo dies, manufacturing what eventually became the long running “1100 series” capo.
For several years Dunlop and his wife, with two part-time assistants, assembled their products in Dunlop’s home. It was only in 1972 that he was able to give up the day job. He moved his family to Benicia, California and set up shop in an industrial park.
The key to Dunlop’s success was his understanding of musicians’ needs and an attention to detail which applied even to such seemingly simple pieces of equipment as picks, of which Dunlop developed hundreds of varieties after reading every issue of Guitar Player magazine and noting musicians’ comments.
“When you talk about picks, you get into these really minute details that are only meaningful to people who play guitars,” Dunlop explained in 1998. “A pick is a really small thing, but it’s really, really important to musicians. Did you know that Jerry Garcia [of the Grateful Dead] once said that the only thing standing between him and poverty was ‘this pick’, and he pulled it out of his pocket and it was one of ours!”.
In 1982 he bought the world rights to the Cry Baby Wah Wah pedal, which allows musicians to replicate the effects pioneered by guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.
His move into guitar effects led to collaborations with Hendrix’s family and artists such as Eddie Van Halen, Dimebag Darrell, and Slash, and to opportunities to hang out with the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.
But his heart remained in Scotland, an interviewer observing that alongside the signed photographs of rock stars and sales awards in his office hung pictures of clansmen in Highland dress.
Dunlop’s wife Bernice died in 2001. He is survived by his second wife, Linda, and by the son and daughter of his first marriage.