Hugh Manson: Bass Tech for John Paul Jones

For the last 30 years or more, Hugh Manson’s daily life has been resolutely dominated by the rather welcome dilemma of what hat to pop on his head next. The highly innovative electric stringed instruments he’s been designing and building since the 1970s are championed by everyone from Muse’s 21st-century guitar hero Matt Bellamy, Jethro Tull’s top guitarist Martin Barre, through to Led Zeppelin’s multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire John Paul Jones, who is Hugh’s longest standing customer. For the last 15 years, Hugh has also co-owned and co-managed Manson’s Guitar Shop in Exeter, which is now arguably the leading guitar shop in the South West of England. And when Hugh isn’t managing staff, designing new instruments, luthiering and repairing guitars or, of course, manning the Manson’s shop floor, he still finds the odd spare week or two to head out across the globe with John Paul Jones whenever he feels the need to tread the stage boards once again. One recent happy development has been a big increase in the company’s export business.

As far as the luthiering side of Hugh Manson’s business goes, he is perhaps most famous for the 13 unique and technologically unequalled axes he’s made for Muse’s main man, Matt Bellamy. The guitarist and singer, who grew up in Teignmouth, Devon, had been a regular visitor to the Manson’s shop throughout his teenage years, and as soon as Muse scored a record deal he asked Hugh to build him a guitar. This first instrument they designed together, the ‘DeLorean’, broke the mould from the off and included the eye-catching ‘MB’ shape, a built-in Fuzz Factory effect, a Roland MIDI pickup and an aluminium-covered wood body. Since that time, Manson and Bellamy have worked on 12 further guitars, which not only look incredible, but also push the limits of what’s gone before with regard to onboard electronics and effects. Hugh’s innovations have included multiple mirrored lasers that increase in intensity the harder the guitar is played and, perhaps most significantly, the installation of first MIDI controllers and then X-Y MIDI controllers, something that had never been done before.

“The whole project started originally by putting a Fuzz Factory in a guitar,” explains Hugh. “It’s a fuzz pedal, and Matt Bellamy wanted to adjust the parameters of that while playing. Obviously, it’s not practical to bend down and turn the Stab and Comp pots — which are the two that we fit to the guitar — while playing, so we thought we’d put it in the guitar so it’s obviously much easier to adjust them. Then we thought, ‘What about other pedals?’ So we came up with the solution of a MIDI controller. And the first one we did was a sort of a black ribbon, which actually came off the side of a keyboard, for want of a better word. It’s a linear pot and we made a microprocessor for that, and that controlled a whammy pedal. So by running your finger up and down it, you could go into dive-bomb mode or whatever you set the whammy to, because the whammy pedal has a MIDI input, of course.

“Really, the advantage of having a controller in the guitar is that you do not have to rely on your tech to change settings or bend down and do it yourself. There is a screen, and if you run your finger one way, it controls an ‘X’ parameter, and if you run your finger the other way, it controls the ‘Y’ parameter. The microprocessor in there sends out MIDI messages and will control anything that has a MIDI in. You can adjust distortion, flanging, phasing, delay, reverb, tremolo, vibrato absolutely anything. You can control the stage lights with it, you can use it to trigger sequencers. It’s only limited by your own imagination!”

“My interest was triggered enormously by my brother, who is five years older than me,” explains Hugh. “He was a busker and used to play in Marble Arch subway and all the usual things. He couldn’t afford to buy a guitar, so he made one and somebody bought it, so he made another one and somebody bought that. And that’s how it went. Later on, I’d started teaching and my brother rang me up and said, ‘I’m getting orders for electric guitars and I don’t really want to make them. I just want to stick to acoustics. Why don’t you come and join me?’ We started off in the garage in the back garden and made guitars and sold them — that simple!”

“It was quite amusing because Mum and Dad used to live up the road from [John Paul Jones], his wife, Mo, and their family,” laughs Hugh. “My mum said to my brother one day, ‘There’s a musician that lives down the road. Why don’t you go and see if he’s got any work for you?’ So he trotted down the road, knocked on this door, didn’t know who he was from Adam and said, ‘I understand a rock star lives here.’ And Mo said, ‘Well, my husband’s a musician!’ So he got an SG to repair or something, took it home, did the repair and so on built up a relationship with John doing pretty much just repair work!”

“On one of the songs John used three instruments,” says Hugh. “He used a six-string acoustic guitar, a 12-string and a mandolin, all in the same song. So my brother thought, ‘What he needs is a three-necked guitar!’ So without asking John about it at all, he just went home and made one, took it down to John’s and said, ‘Here, try this!’ It didn’t have any inlay on it at that point, but he took it to John, and John said, ‘Oh, great! I’ll try that!’ Later, Andy added all the inlays — silver, mother-of-pearl, abalone, ivory and so on.”

Since that time in the late ‘70s, Hugh and his brother Andy have built, repaired and maintained a whole raft of instruments belonging to John Paul Jones. Then, in the mid ‘90s, John asked Hugh if he fancied going out on the road with him. Unsurprisingly, Hugh jumped at the chance and has been John’s personal technician ever since, in addition to occasionally going out with Yes guitarist Steve Howe — another local Manson’s shop customer. Gigging highlights for Hugh since then have included that first tour with Diamanda Gal s, 1999’s Zooma album tour, 2004’s Mutual Admiration Society tour with Glenn Phillips and Nickel Creek, and 2004’s Guitar Wars in Japan with Mr Big’s Paul Gilbert, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt and Steve Hackett of Genesis.

Hugh enjoyed the Foo Fighters gig immensely, although there was a little technical problem as they kicked into the first of their two tracks. “We did have a few issues about volume actually at the beginning of the first song,” says Hugh. “For some reason, something had changed in the volume of John’s bass monitor after soundcheck and he was getting absolutely deafened! You can probably see that on the video; he’s looking a bit disconcerted. He did say it sounded like the best bass he’d ever heard, but it was a bit too loud. And that was an issue because the monitor engineer for that gig was under the stage, because they do it all by camera, which is not a lot of help if you want to transfer a message from stage right to the monitor engineer. You’ve got to run across the stage, go underneath and yell in his ear!”

“The O2 show was just the most stressful possible thing you can imagine,” Hugh laughs. “And, of course, it was compounded by the number of support bands. The stage was just littered in stuff, there were musicians everywhere, and the side of the stage was just full of people trying to set guitars up, which made it very, very difficult. But it all went well and, of course, they played an absolute blinder of a gig! But we did have a few technical moments. Actually, when they announced the tickets and 20 million people hit the website, I suddenly thought, ‘Bloody hell! I hope everything works!’”

The bass rig that John Paul Jones used for the O2 gig was both solid and simple. Guitar-wise, he played three of Hugh Manson’s instruments on stage: a normal-length four-string “called Eric”, a four-string built especially for the show, a 10-string, as well as a Fender fretless bass. Hugh was carrying a spare for each. As far as John’s amplifiers went, he was using his pet favourites: two SWR SM-900 heads, each running through a 4 x 10 cab and a 1 x 15 cab, one for the bass pedals on the keyboards and one for his guitars. In addition, when John was playing the 10-string octave instrument, the bridge pickup was wired into a Bad Cat amp.

“We had the whole keyboard confuse itself about 20 minutes before the show,” explains Hugh. “It was quite a complicated MIDI rig and it was sending a message to the bass pedals to give infinite sustain, so if you pressed one bass pedal, that note continued for a fortnight if you left it. But it was sending some garbled message to the upper keyboard that it wouldn’t work at all. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to get a spare keyboard. So I was standing there going grey and aging by the second, waiting for the first keyboard song to come in — which I think was song number three or four — just hoping that when he pressed the pedal it worked. And thank God, it did!

“That was also compounded by the fact that also about 20 minutes before they went on stage, I just thought I’d make sure the bass amps were working OK, and silence! Something had overheated for no apparent reason. Luckily, I had another two spares, but from my point of view it was a bit of a nightmare! But it all went well in the end, and I didn’t tell John before he went on stage that he was using the spare keyboard and that we didn’t have another spare, otherwise it probably would have ruined his evening! When he came off stage and I told him, he just said, ‘Oh man, well done!’ I’ve actually got a signed poster by him that says something like, ‘To Hugh, the real star of the show!’ which is quite good really! So my maxim for anyone going touring is, for Christ’s sake, take two of absolutely everything. And if you can afford it, take three!”

“I’m there to get the best sound possible, given the instrument that I’ve made and the amplifier that we’re putting it through, and that also involves the right strings and the right action for the piece being played,” explains Hugh. “Is it a high action? Is it a low action? Does John have to play it really fast? Does he need all the help he can get because it’s a ludicrously fast riff, hence he’ll need low action. Or is it a very slow piece where each note needs to be as articulate as possible? That’s why I’m employed, because I know how to do that, how to adjust an instrument. And, of course, people forget instruments have a truss rod in for a reason! If you play Oslo one night and three nights later you play Rio de Janeiro, well, Oslo’s as dry as a desert and Rio de Janeiro’s like playing in a bath! A neck on a guitar works like a barometer, and that’s why we have a truss rod to adjust!”

With the literal mountain of orders piling in for the new Matt Bellamy signature MB-1 axe in tandem with the company’s recent upturn in the export side of their business — not to mention their usual hectic schedule — 2009 is going to be another busy year for all working at Manson’s. But before Hugh leaves us and returns once again to the confines of his workshop, he has one more little gem of a story to share. “There’s a wonderful joke that Nuno Bettencourt told me about when Extreme were playing a festival in Portugal,” he laughs. “On the rider they’d written ‘The stage must be well earthed!’ and when they turned up at the gig, the stage had two inches of soil on it! Luckily, it didn’t rain!”

Choosing the right strings

One aspect of the guitar that Hugh Manson wholeheartedly believes every self-respecting guitarist should spend more time considering is string selection. Here, he gives us a valuable insight into the whys and wherefores of choosing the right string.

“We use lots of different types of strings for lots of different types of sound. People seem to think that a string is a string is a string, but there’s a massive amount of design involved in strings. For example, the stiffness of any guitar string, particularly the wound ones, relates to how big the core of the string is — the windings are purely mass! If you take a 105 bottom E-string, it has a core of a specific size and then it has two or three wraps over the top, and all the wrap does is create mass. If you can imagine a string without a core in it, it would have no strength at all; it would be ludicrously flexible and would be like a spring. It’s the core that creates the mass, and by designing different-sized cores you can make strings feel completely different.

“The actual material that the string is made of has a huge effect. Elixir strings are coated in Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is what they make waterproof coats out of, and there’s not exactly much musical about a waterproof coat, but they prevent sweat and last night’s pizza going into the wraps of the string and therefore the string lasts longer. They do also have the physical effect of making them feel quite slippery, so if you like your left hand (the hand that’s on the fretboard) to be very friction-free, using a set of Elixirs is quite a cunning plan. The other thing is, because they’ve got a Gore-Tex coating on, they sound slightly mellower. The Gore-Tex strings are just great strings for a long-lasting strength. Interestingly enough, we use them a lot in our store on acoustic guitars, because you never know how many times that guitar is going to be played until it’s sold, and you never know whether the guy’s just come out of Pizza Hut and not washed his hands That’s just going to corrode a string immediately, but with a coated string they last a lot longer!

“You also need to choose your string for a particular use. Stainless steel strings, for example, sound totally different to nickel strings — much, much brighter — and different strings have a different amount of nickel content. Nickel is not magnetic, so you need to consider what effect that will have on the tone. It gives a sort of crescendo to the sound. If you want an instant attack to your playing, you use a string that has less nickel so you get more of an instant clack as you play. I think people should really experiment more. D’Addario sound completely different to Ernie Balls, which sound completely different to Rotosound. They all are different!”

Train those techs!

Manson’s guitar shop in Exeter, with several Muse guitars at the front.

One part of the world of live performance that worries and troubles Hugh Manson is the fact that there is no legal qualification in place as a prerequisite to anybody actually becoming a live technician in the first place.

“It is absolutely unbelievable the amount of technicians on the road who have no idea about a lot of stuff. A lot of techs get employed because they’re mates of the band. In fact, we actually have trained technicians down here at the shop and some of them have no knowledge whatsoever apart from the fact that they happen to know the musician they’re working for. It’s unbelievable that there is no qualification available or anywhere you can go to train to be a tech, which is just bizarre, because how big an export is music for this country? The Leeds College of Technology course closed down, so where do you go to learn to be a technician?

“You can earn a bloody good living being a technician if you’re good, but I’ve done festivals where you’re surrounded by eight or 10 other bands, waiting for their line-up to be rolled on, and you’ve got techs doing the most unbelievable things with equipment. You just wouldn’t dream of some of it, like Supergluing valves into the back of a tube amp and stuff like that! A neck breaks on a Les Paul and the fella goes to the local hardware shop and buys some screws and screws it back on! I find it just astounding!”

Hugh Manson: Bass Tech for John Paul Jones

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