Simon Law - Guitar Tech to the Gods!! On my first day in England back in January 2002 I visited what to me was the Holy Grail of guitar stores. It's only hard-core XTC fans who are even aware of the importance of this store but Kempsters and Sons in Swindon was the place where XTC's Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory bought their first guitars as kids. I wondered in to this unassuming but totally cool shop and met Jeff Kempster who was happy to tell me stories of having to boot the boys out of Kempsters on more than one occasion for making so much noise on busy Saturday mornings. While I was there I met Simon Law who was the shop manager at the time and had been working in the store since he was 17. My first impression of Simon was that he was rude and dismissive to the point of arrogance, needless to say I liked him straight away. He also happened to be the most knowledgeable sales guy I had ever met in a music store, or any store for that matter.
Over the years Simon has remained a great friend, and the more we talk the more I realise that his knowledge of guitars, amps and all things tonal is almost endless. 9 years since I first met Simon he is now regarded as one of the best guitar techs in the business touring with the likes of Robben Ford, Larry Carlton, Matt Schofield and Mike Landau. And he just happens to make the best new electric guitars I've ever played. Simon has graciously taken time out of his incredibly busy schedule to sit down with me and talk guitars, tone and teching for the Gods.
Daniel Steinhardt- Firstly I wanted to talk to you about the guys you've been working with recently. Do you find any threads of similarity that go between the 4 main players you've been dealing with over the past 12 months? (these being Matt Schofield, Robben Ford, Larry Carlton and Mike Landau)
Simon Law- I know that Robben, Larry and Matt all listen to saxophone players, more than they listen to any other instrument. I think it has something to do with the way that there's no visible limit on a saxophone, there's no fingerboard in front of you, even with a keyboard player, you don't look down and see a row of notes and think OMG, look at all those notes. When a guitarist looks down at the strings and sees 20 odd frets and you search for the music in there somewhere. Whereas the sax player's just got the thing in his hands and it just falls under his fingers, and if he can think it he'll probably be able to play it if he's of that sort of standard. One sax player for example, Cannonball Adderley that used to play with Miles Davis and his own quintet, his approach to music was completely melodic and made perfect sense to listen to. Even over crazy changes, and this is what I hear more than any tonal similarity is the freedom to play whatever they can think over changes be it just one chord vamp or something much more complex it's having no boundaries, buts its always going to be melodic and make musical sense, not just a big jazz wank.
DS - when you listen to the three of them tonally they're actually worlds apart but it's amazing how many people do group them together, so I guess it has more to do with that linear approach your describing.
SL - Yes, and it's that they're thinking about chords as opposed to scales or patterns or and ' I wanna play outa this box' approach. I think this is why sometimes people think the Matt is jazzy and actually if you listen to him he's not a jazz guitarist by any stretch of the imagination, it's the fact that he considers the chord he's playing over more than he does what type of music it is, so even if he's playing a real full on Albert Collins style shuffle he's going to be thinking about the chord he's playing over. So it becomes very tasteful. Some people think it's probably too tasteful, where as someone like Albert King for example who was a full on blues player would just be playing his pentatonic thing over whatever change it was and that was his style, where as someone like BB King was listening to the chord as well, although he might not have known what chord he was playing over he had a few nice jazz things up his sleeve when he wanted to, so I think it's the chordal thing, tone wise there approach is vastly different. Matt is still way more blues than he is anything else, he digs in like Albert Collins or Stevie Ray used to, Robben Ford is quite delicate on the guitar when he plays, but its sounds huge because his amps are flat out. Larry's pretty much in the middle, he will dig in but he has his amps set up in such a way that its always quite smooth sounding and a little compressed Larry uses a bit more gain than Robben, Robben uses volume, he's such a loud guitar player, and Matt is different again.
DS - Being on the road with as far as a tech's job is concerned, how important do you think it is to be a great guitar player?
SL - Having met a handful of other techs who are strictly guitar techs I think it pays to have somebody else from a players point of view who's ears you can trust as well as their technical knowledge of how to re-string a guitar properly and hand it to you perfectly i tune and ready to go. So like at sound check or on the gig you know that there's another set of ears tuned similarly to yours so if there's a problem or something can be improved or any of those aspects. Certainly from my point of view I'm always thinking tone and improvements rather than just, 'I'm using the right gear so it's gotta sound good'. There's lots of people out there who use the most fantastic gear and as you know it doesn't always sound great so it's being able to put all of those elements together to get the best results like we've spent the last couple of years just going through speakers. On paper what looks like a good speaker, the way that you play, the amplifier you put it with, the mid changes, the top changes, the bottom end's boomy on one thing. 'Oh but so and so sounds great with it?', but for example , Matt Schofield has a picking style that has way more bottom end and low mids than anybody else I know, just from his picking. I can pick up exactly the same pick, same guitar, same rig and I've got less bottom end and way more top than he has. It's just the way that I pick the string in comparison. So a lot of the time he has to dial a lot of low end of his sound because there's so much low end in his playing, so you need to try and choose speakers to complement all those sort of things. So if you just have a tech that knows how to restring a guitar and plug into your amp and change a tube or a fuse they might not necessarily realise recognize the tonal elements that are being creayed by the player, they might just think that's how you want to sound and therefore may not want to say 'great gig tonight but it sounded really boomy, or there's so much top coming out etc. They probably wouldn't want to hear that just from a tech. It'd probably be the last gig they ever did. Sometimes its just having the balls to say, 'great gig, sounded a bit shit though'. I call it the silent but.. 'How was the gig tonight?', 'you played well.. but'. So I do think that's really important, just being able to trust someone else's ears, not just your own, because the guy out the front is listening to the whole band whereas the guitar player is probably just listening to himself.
SVL Guitars
DS - What's your philosophy on gear?
SL - You've got to start at the beginning, and you'd be amazed at how many guys I've worked for who have very badly setup guitars. These guys may have the best amps, pedals , cables, and then they've got a guitar that's just kind of strung up by their tech and the action is too low, in fact the action being too low is a really over looked problem. Gone arethe days where people wanted to get their action as low as possible. When someone says that to me I feel like saying, 'oh, so you want a really bad guitar tone!'. It's a misconception that if you have a low action it's going to be easy to play. Most guitars play and feel better if the action is a little bit chunky, especially if you have slightly larger frets which so many guitars nowadays have. I think I probably found that out more with Matt than with anybody else because till then I'd never really worked with anyone who came from the Stevie Ray Vaughn style of thinking - big frets, big strings, big action = big tone. I always thought those three things would equal big pain in the hand but in fact it doesn't. It's a little harder to play but not to the extent that you'd think, and the difference in tone is massive. So I always try to encourage people to creep their action up just a little bit more. Set it up till it's comfortable then take it just a tiny bit higher, then just get used to that because the tone benefits are massive.
DS - Why is that?
SL - It's the way the string comes off the fret. If there's that little bit more clearance the string has nothing to hinder its vibration, and you get a little bit more tension into the string as well because of the angle its coming away from your finger so the note can just sing out. You can hear it in the live recordings of SRV in the 80's. he can just shake that string and it sounded like a sizzling frying egg or something, it's so fantastic, and that's just big clean frets, big strings and big action. I think the action is as important as any other piece of gear.
Simon giving some love to an SVL SIXTY ONE
DS - This leads us on to your guitars. A handful of devoted fans of the aforementioned played will know that you actually make guitars. How did it start and what separates your guitars from any other Fender based instrument?
SL - I used to make guitars years ago before I started working in a music shop. I'd made a few for myself and a few for other people, but they were really just chucking necks onto bodies, not really caring about any of the dimensions or specs . The first real break came when Matt wanted to get a replacement for his 61 Strat. I'd been working on Matt's guitar exclusively up to this point, I knew what it felt like, the weight of the body and the neck, the effect the frets had on it, what made the neck different to other Fender necks, so Matt and I over the course of about 4 or 5 years experimented with different necks and bodies. Matt said at the start, 'I love my old Strat but I'd like to try something with a different radius fingerboard, a few more changes and bring it up to date'. So the first guitar we built, albeit it a great guitar we soon realised that those minor tweaks were taking it away from why he liked his vintage guitar in the first place. So we scrapped that idea, now that guitar is my main guitar. He didn't like it but I loved it. So it was perfect for me. I then made him 2 more guitars, again with his choice of a couple of things and the common thread with all the problems that arose through those guitars were they were things he'd chosen that were diversions from his old Strat. So the last guitar he just said, 'I'll leave this one up to you, just build me something you think I'm going to like'. After all the work I'd done on these old guitars I had found out what made these Fenders sound good, like the difference between an old Fender that sounded OK, and his that sounded particularly good, and it's all in the neck, almost none of it in the body. Some people might argue with that but I've experimented with good sounding necks on good sounding bodies, average and even bad sounding bodies, and if you have a good sounding neck that sound carries through all of those guitars. It's different on a Gibson Les Paul because that's a different sort of sound all together but the whole resonance of a Fender guitar with a bolt on neck, and some of these old necks, the maple is so bullet hard. It's also about the tension in the truss rod. If you have to have a lot of tension in the truss rod it kills the tone of the neck. If you can find a neck that is set up correctly with almost no tension on the truss rod, just with it nipped up to take the rattle out, that's going to be the best sounding guitar you can find.
DS - I must admit from personal experience when I've played your guitar through my rig at the last London Guitar show the tone of it filled the room. I had 6 other guitars on the stand with me, really good guitars but the sound that came out of your guitar had an amazing depth that just seemed to fill the space, all the right frequencies and such a joy to play. It was like I had found the Strat I had been looking for ever since my 64 L series was stolen in the early 90's. I have played dozens of custom shop Strat's etc. but the SVL seemed to be on a different level again from any of those. So you're saying that it's all down to how great the neck is?
SL- A lot of it, I'd say about 80% of the tone is in the neck. Pickups are obviously important and I do all I can to avoid putting hot pu's in a guitar. You want to hear the sound of the wood rather than just the sound of a pu.
DS- So a hot pickup actually defeats the purpose of having great tone woods?
SL- yeah, if you have a really hot pickup your overdriving your amp so you're not hearing any of the acoustic qualities of the guitar at all. You basically want it to sound like the guitar unplugged, but louder. That's what you want to hear, if its sounds that much different when you plug it in there's something amiss. The best sounding guitars are the ones that sound great acoustically. So to this end I have my bodies and necks made by a company to my own specs and are all very very consistent. Then it's choosing a colour, and for example, I've always loved the look of the late 60's Ferrari Daytona's, so that's why I sprayed Matt's latest guitar in that colour which is now dubbed 'Daytona Blue'. It's a great looking guitar. Matt Schofield had it at NAMM in 2010 and has played it ever since. He bonded with it straight away. I fact since then I think he tried to use his old Strat on a gig once and hasn't used it again since. That's not to say that the old guitar isn't still the way to go, but the new guitar has highlighted a few problems that his old one has that we'll rectify at some point. Another thing is the neck to body joint. A lot of guitars have quite a lot of finish in the neck joint. My guitars have no finish what so ever in the neck joint and I have almost no finish on the heel of the neck. Its lacquered where you see it but actually in the neck joint it's bare wood to bare wood and dead flat as well. As far as hardware is concerned I use Callaham bridges but I make sure that there's no finish on the trem block whereas normally they're sprayed silver. I also polish up the joint between the block and underneath of the bridge, I'm giving away all my secrets here, but all of these things, and the way the nut is fitted into the nut slot are very important. I make sure the nut isn't a too tight a fit, it needs to glide in like silk and the base of the nut and nut slot is so dead flat its perfect nut to wood contact. All of these little things add up to making the guitar as loud as possible before its even plugged in.
DS- and this volume capability translate to the dynamic range of the guitar?
SL - Yeah, because if you start with as loud an acoustic tone as possible it means that the string is working as well as possible, if something is hindering it you're already cutting down your dynamic range.
make sure you check out www.SVLGuitars.com for some truly amazing instruments
