A very much younger Paul in his Bethnal Green workshop

It’s now approaching forty years since I made my first musical instruments.  I started by making myself drum kits and various bits of hand percussion whist I was still at school.  Actually I remember repairing and correcting my toy xylophone when my age was still counted in single digits.  Obviously at school, the career advisor thought a life in music was preposterous and pushed me towards getting a proper vocation.  The irony is that in my experience, I am very unusual in that I do now have a true vocation.

The journey to becoming an instrument maker started in earnest in the early nineties when I was in my early twenties; going to evening classes then part time courses, before studying full time on an excellent course for two years in London, at the Metropolitan University which is now long gone.  No percussion related course was available, so I just had to study everything I could.  Starting with making folk instruments and classical guitars and ending up making violins at university as well as various other evening and part time courses in woodwind and bow making.

In the last year of my studies I got a job in a specialist percussion shop.  This job took me back to my days working in the equipment hire industry, but this time it was percussion instruments being sold, hired ad repaired.  I was the workshop manager and it was my job to continually repair the hire fleet and fit in customer repairs.  It introduced me to the acceptable industry standard of repair.  This standard increasingly became a problem for me and by 2000 I had set up on my own, with a workshop in Bethnal Green, East London.  It was a success and I broke out from under the shadow of my previous employment attracting many more high profile clients as my reputation grew.

Following a sabbatical to regroup, which also saw my life turn upside down, I relocated to Kent, just outside London, in 2007.  This period saw the first of my major shifts in the way I thought about percussion instruments, and how best to undertake repairs.  In the first decade I was learning about how to fix these instruments, now I was correcting and improving them at a much deeper level.  My workload when I was in London was just insane, but so was the cost of living.  In Kent, I had more time to focus on specific aspects of the repairs, but the work was much more complex and if anything, even higher profile, so I was just a busy.

In the winter of 2013, the new landlords of the marina where I was based in Kent, evicted what was a whole community of small businesses, so I was on the move again.  This time however, I decided to move back up to the North of England to be closer to my parents as we all just get older.  I bought a house and built a workshop at the bottom of the garden freeing myself of the whims of landlords and this is where I am to this day.

The move North took a long time, so I had plenty of time to reassess my methodology.   This resulted in another major shift in my thinking.  These changes are about getting the results that I demand.  This list of demands arise from the playing knowledge accumulated from discussions with musicians combined with my observations and experience.   It is about raising the bar to produce better sounding instruments.  Instruments that are more reliable and actually address the problems that players encounter.  If one player has experienced an issue, others will have also.  So the repairs today address more problems than they did when I started out.  Those instruments still give reliable service twenty five years later, but the modern iteration does it much better.  This is because the solutions that I design have twenty five years of development behind them and have all been tried and tested in the field, in environments where they get constant use and abuse.

Now I am in the midst of another seismic shift in my approach.  Everything as gone quiet on my website for this very reason, because this time, I am looking at things from an entirely new perspective.   Change is forced upon oneself; life has a habit of doing that.  In the recent past there has been a global pandemic which changed everything.  Also during this period, suddenly the demands on my time grew exponentially.  Technology seemed to jump forward and my physical capability started reducing as the after effects of all the work my hands have done, fixing thousands of instruments, start to cause problems which age exposes.  However my specialist subject is turning problems into opportunities and it was all of these things plus more, that shifted my thinking.  I am proud of the results, the work I am producing now, is the best yet I just apologise that I am not in a position to be able to fully share it.

Thank you for taking the time to read.