I am a Swiss born Brit who has been making and repairing guitars and other stringed instruments since 1973 when I was the tender age of 12.

 

My hero was Chris Squire of Yes and I wanted a Rickenbacker like his. I often went to Andertons of Guildford, the nearest music shop, they had my dream bass at the far end of the shop but the staff wouldn't let kids past the counter unless they were going to buy something so I couldn't get close enough to see the price tag.

 

I finally got past the counter by flashing £120 saved up for over a year, upon approaching the instrument the price tag materialised into £450!  

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I was totally devastated but something in my head said “Make one, make one” so in a trance I went to a local hardware shop and bought a roll of plain wallpaper, a carpenter’s pencil and a tape measure, went back to Andertons and asked in my then very posh accent if I could draw around the Rickenbacker the response was “Do you want a poster for you bedroom you little ++++?” 

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I responded I was going to make one. “You don't look like you could make your own bed.” Etc. I stood my ground and they relented so I went home with my plan not having a clue where to begin but I was determined to do this. If they hadn't been nasty I would probably have quickly given up this completely ‘Pie in the sky’ venture and on top of that I temporarily forgot I absolutely hated woodwork!

 

My best friends Dad, Malcolm Betteridge ran a timber firm and gave me a door panel and 3 x 1 plank of iroko so I went to work in the garden shed where my brother had left some woodworking tools so I taught myself how to use them and turned a fear and loathing for woodwork into an absolute passion which took the horrid reality I was going through as a child away. 

That passion remains to this day. 

 

Another chap who’s help was invaluable was Lawrence Ponder of the hardware section of Manns of Cranleigh. A former Colonel in the Indian Army who spent his war behind enemy lines in Burma causing havoc. His hobby was woodwork and he showed me how to get the best out of specific tools. 

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276 broken coping saw blades and a bumper box of band aids later I had the body cut out and then started planing the neck but didn't know where to source parts, ( I wasn't going back to Andertons) I came across a new music shop in Guildford, Dick Middletons Music, I went in and Dick was very welcoming, I told him about my project and he happened to have a very broken Gibson bass to forensically examine and he put me in contact with Sid Watkins of Watkins Rapier fame in nearby Chertsey. Sid gave me a truss rod, a rosewood fingerboard and some pickguard material and Dick let me have the hardware off the broken Gibson. Using the photo of Chris Squire in the booklet that came with Yessongs for reference I painted it eggshell white.. 

 

It took me 8 months to build, luckily it was fretless as it had a 33” scale length which was purely accidental. I put it in a big bin bag, thinking it might stay in it, and got on a bus to show Dick. He was very impressed and said I should go show it to Andertons which I was reluctant to do. 

 

Dick said he’d been doing some industrial espionage and they had an Ampeg SVT Bass amp, he would lend me this huge aluminium flight case which he carried for me most of the way and told me to ask to try out the SVT. I lugged the case into Andertons and asked about the amp cocking my lines up but anyway. I opened the case and the staff commented on it being a custom job and did I mug  Grannies to get the money for it? One of them asked if he could try it and I said please do. He said it was amazing, trying to figure out what make it was, then said “Hang on, are you the little ++++

who came in here a year ago to draw round that?” Pointing to the Rickenbacker still in the same place and I sheepishly nodded.. They were so impressed they bought me a Tizer, 1/2 lb of wine gums and gave me a set of Rotosound Swing Bass strings.. I was hooked and had to build another one. 

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Between the ages of 13 to 16 I stayed mainly in Switzerland where I met Yes who were recording Going for the one. 

I met my hero Chris Squire but he wasn't too happy to meet me alas, I got to know the other band members, particularly Rick Wakeman who was very kind to me. I saw Rick play the organ at St Martins Church in Vevey for the song Parallels, the telephone lines in Switzerland are so clear they used a phone connection straight to the studio 7 Km away. 

Rick stayed in Switzerland for some years.

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On my sporadic returns to the UK I got some maple and ash off Sid Watkins for necks and bodies.

I also looked into acoustic guitars and was given a couple of broken ones, a classical and a steel string to analyse their construction. I learnt about scale lengths and calculating fret spacings but my fretting was awful.

I was using a hammer method but the frets just wouldn't stay in so I sought the assistance of Stephen Delft who was a Master guitar maker and reviewer for International Musician magazine which was the go to publication for muso’s at the time. He had a monthly article, Making a solid guitar in 24 parts which was incredibly useful, he also advertised in the classifieds at the back of the magazine and was selling an air compressor and spray gun which I had a need for so I called the number. 

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The phone was answered by a woman with a German accent, we spoke about my fretting conundrum and my interest in the spray equipment, she arranged an appointment, my father, who resided in Switzerland was visiting so he agreed to drive me to the obscure area in the East End of London called Shadwell where Stepen Delft lived in a flat in Dellow House.

It was a very run down brick built council estate mainly inhabited by the Bengali community. 

I rang the doorbell which was opened by the woman I had spoken with on the phone, I first though she may be Stephen’s mother but she was Stephen’s partner Judith Piepe. See link. She invited us in, introduced us to a cat and made us very strong coffee, she said she had summoned Stephen who was in his workshop, Stephen arrived and I was in awe. 

A cheque for £120 was written for the spray equipment and placed on the coffee table. 

I had brought a fretted bass I had made to show him and he agreed the fretting was horrible so we went henceforth to his workshop opposite with the bass. It was quite dark inside and the smells were magical to my nose, a melange of woods, glue and varnishes.

 

Stephen made a space for me on his workbench, supplied me with a roll of fretwire, a pair of fretwire cutters and a weird looking hammer and invited me to take the frets out of my bass and do it again so I did, I had a block under the fret I was trying to tap in but it just wouldn't seat properly so Stephen told me to stand back and asked me to describe what I observed, I was quite nervous “Um, a bass on a workbench”  “Try a little further to the West “ he said, I didn't have a compass so was a little perplexed. I moved the bass with the block in what I thought was a Westerly direction until Stephen said “Stop there, now try again and tap more gently” I did and the fret seated perfectly. I was so happy! He said “Step back and describe what you see this time” His speaking manner was a bit like that of Sherlock Holmes with a slight Rochdale accent. I wondered what I was I supposed to say at what I observed and realised the fret I had successfully installed for the very first time was directly over the workbench leg. I had always attempted to install frets in the middle area of the workbench which was like a springboard… It took me another year to really master fretting in different fingerboard woods. 

 

I refretted the bass and we went back to the flat where Stephen started playing my bass, leant forward, picked up the cheque for the spray equipment and tore it up. “This bass is now mine, the spray equipment is yours. Any objections?”

I was happily shocked, he then asked Judith for the biscuit tin which contained cash and presented me with £170 to commission two basses and directed me to buy wood from David Dyke, Luthiers Supplies, who is still my main wood supplier, in deepest East Sussex. 

 

Stephen introduced me to various wholesalers of guitar parts, and Kent Armstrong pickup maker extraordinaire and his toddlers at the time Kadie and Aaron.

(Aaron now makes pickups)

 

Stephen and Judith had a branding iron made for me with Simon Pinder England engraved in it which I still use today on the back of every headstock.

 

I completed the basses and delivered them to Stephen who then took me to Ivor Mairant’s, a very exclusive guitar shop in the West End of London where he introduced me to the manager Stanley, Stephen persuaded Stanley to take one bass on a sale or return basis to retail at £350, if it sold I would get £175 and it was placed in the shop window. 

Within a week I got a call from Stanley saying it had sold and could he have another one on the same basis. Stephen called me and said if Stanley wanted another one he should pay cash on delivery for it which was duly done. That also sold quickly but I didn't want to continue selling to retailers at trade prices if I could get direct orders so that is what I endeavoured to do.

(Years later at Montreux Jazz I was helping set up the stage when a roadie from one of the bands going to play that night came out with one of the basses I sold to Ivor Mairants and put it on a stand, I picked it up not thinking, took it to the edge of the stage and sat down to have a dabble on it, someone yelled at me to “Put it back you ++++! How dare you touch my bass! Who the ++++ do you think you are!”  I thought he was going to kill me. “Um, I made that bass”.. 

“You’re Simon Pinder ? “ He asked and I showed him my pass. 

He gave me a huge hug and said how much he loved that bass. 

( I can’t remember his name or the band he played with but never touch someone's instrument without their permission.)

 

Stephen, who’s forte was acoustic guitars introduced me to Roger Giffin who specialised in electric guitars, 

Roger very kindly showed me all the tricks in setting up tremolos to stay in tune and wiring etc in his fascinating workshop in Kew Bridge. He left to work for Gibson Custom shop to help them make guitars properly again and passed me some of his clients.

 

I built some ‘demo’ models and took them to the Montreux Jazz festival where Yves Sonrel, the chap who ran the musicians bar let me put them on the little stage  where the musicians at the festival would jam together after their shows. 

I also inadvertently became the unofficial guitar tech and did on the spot repairs for BB King, Steve Miller Band, George Benson, Santana, Simply Red, Josh Sklair, Bobby Vega, John Schofield over the years to name a few.. 

I was there from 1978 to 1993. 

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I was 16 when I met Stanley Clarke who kept badgering me to give him a bass which was a great compliment “You make me a bass and I’ll make you famous” but my reply was and still is “Do you play for free ?” We’re still friends. ( I hope )

I also met the saxophonist Michael Brecker who became a great friend and introduced me to a load of musicians some of whom became clients later like Jeff Andrews. I met an English guitarist named John Woolloff who was a session musician at Aquarius Studios in Geneva owned by the keyboard player Patrick Moraz, 

John commissioned an 18 string guitar which was designed on a restaurants paper table cloth. It was shaped a bit like a Steinberger, had two truss rods and a tailpiece I had to make out of brass. It sounded huge. I later put body wings on it.

 

I would sporadically visit Stephen and Judith and bring my Scottish Terrier, Wuzzle who would always steal the cat food, there was always a standoff with Wuzzle and  the cat who had 18 claws. Sometimes when I visited there would be some megastar like  Rory Gallagher or Herbie Flowers casually nattering away, drinking very strong coffee, both of whom later became my repair clients. Judith was Mother Superior to everyone in the real sense of the term. 

 

Sometimes Stephen would ask me to bring a tool from Switzerland. 

On this occasion it was for a 4mm Bacho chisel. I was away for a few months and returned with the chisel and some flowers for Judith to find the doorbell had been vandalised and I looked through the letterbox and saw the flat was completely empty, I asked a neighbour what happened. “They went to New Zealand”.

I was devastated.

 

Years later when living in HK I re established contact with them, Judith died in 2003. Stephen is now Simcha Delft.  Such good people.

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Sometime in 1980 an experimental project I had spent all my money on went horribly wrong, all my neck laminations fell apart due to oily wood and my electricity was about to be disconnected when my best friend Nigel Betteridge found an advert in Melody Maker (which I never read ) for a guitar repairer at Roka’s in Denmark Street, London. 

I called them on a Friday and they wanted to interview me the following Monday but I had nothing to show them. 

I had one intact bass neck blank so I made a fretless bass in two days, went for the interview and got the job. 

Working at Roka’s was hilarious! 

 

They allowed me to bring Wuzzle to work and she became the store detective, successfully nabbing shoplifters. 

I was doing work for the top London musicians, one day, early in my time there, 

a tall Italian looking chap with a Welsh accent came in with a MusicMan Bass that needed fixing. 

On opening the case I remarked “Oooh, It’s a Pino Palladino job” or something like that. We discussed what he wanted doing to it and I asked if I could please have his name and contact details for the repair card. “Pino Palladino” I replied “You seem much shorter on the television”. I felt such a twat. 

We ended up in stitches of laughter.

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I got to know the guy in Paul Youngs band, Steve Bolton, Spear of Destiny. Joe Jackson, Ian Dury & the Blockheads, The Clash, The Damned, The Pretenders, Nick Kershaw, Alan Murphy, Go West, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmumds, The Stray Cats, John Catto of Canada’s first ever punk band The Diodes and High Noon, Clayton Moss, Ray Russell, Mike Batt, Tom Robinson..

 

I would call Nige and say “That bass I fixed is on Top of the Pops” 

 

Another memorable moment was on a rainy day when this entourage of strange people with shaved heads, dressed in sheets draped with chains, a girl who still had hair was pushing a pram, their leader was carrying a battered bass case opening guitar shop doors on the opposite side of the street to be yelled at  

“No! ++++ off! Go away!” by the store owners. 

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We waited till they got round to us as we were curious as to their quest. 

They had a bit of a struggle getting the pram, which did contain a live human baby, through the doorway and recieved a polite welcome.

 

 

Their leader, who had an Attila the Hun pony tail, was invited to place his bass case on the counter to reveal a Burns Nu Sonic Bass in a very sad state of disrepair and could something done to get it working, most of the parts were

missing and it needed a re-fret.  It just so happened there was a whole box of Burns bits stored in the basement workshop and I had everything to restore it.

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I was asked if I could please restore it to near its original glory and would I require a financial deposit on which a school satchel full of cash materialised from under the baby I said I that wouldn't be necessary.

The chap seemed extremely erudite and spoke with a Northern accent.

Could I please have a name and contact number for the repair card?

Genesis P- Orridge.

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It was a fairly straightforward job and I called him up a week later and said it was ready to collect. 

He was so happy to get his bass back, we became friends and he invited me to his

‘Temple’ and to his gigs which were pheomenal. 

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As a pious hardcore Prog rocker I wasn’t particularly open to any other genres. I hated Punk in particular ( I love it now) but when I went to see Psychic TV they were mind blowingly fantastic and I wasn't even on drugs.. never have been apart from years addicted to one of worst drugs legally available. Nicotine.

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I once tried to post an ad for my guitars and repairs as Pinder Guitars in Melody Maker by phone and was repeatedly told by the woman I was trying to speak to “No, Dear, its Fender not Pinder.. What don’t you understand” 

Then she hung up on me so it became Simon Pinder Guitars from then on.

 

I became a bit tired of the UK and wanted to move back to Switzerland which I always considered my home country, I was always much happier there.

Someone in Geneva had offered me a job to make guitars for their shop but that didn't work out so l returned to the other end of the lake and ended up renting a  beautiful chalet in the mountains in my fathers name while I was waiting for my residency application to be approved. 

I was helping local music shops, Mountain Studios where Yes had recorded and at that time owned by Queen, I was friends with Dave Richards and Justin Shirley Smith who ran the studio. They kindly let me leave my demo models at the studio.  I became friends with Roger Taylor and John Deacon and initially Brian May but we later fell out but patched things up when Queen came to Hong Kong in 2016

I met David Bowie in a local guitar shop and ended up fixing his collection of weird retro Italian and Japanese guitars, 

I met Peter Gabriel and his band who were absolutely lovely and went to work for Prince who wasn’t. 

 

I became the after sales service / warranty repairer for Yamaha, Fender and Martin

 

In 1990 I took a business trip to the US to deliver a bass to Jeff Andrews and I stayed with him for a couple of weeks before heading west with a list of musicians to contact introduced by Mike Brecker which accumulated around 20 orders. 

 

When I was in Los Angeles I took a trip to Annaheim and met Leo Fender whom I spent two days with. He was more obsessed with the electrics aspect than wood but told me his original idea was to use spruce for the bodies and maple for necks but the spruce kept splitting in the milling process and he was guided toward poplar and similar porous woods. 

Fender got his woods right and Gibson got theirs wrong for solid bodies. Mahogany is fine in thin sheets for acoustic guitars but is way too heavy and dead in lumps for electric guitars but that has become the accepted norm now.  

 

We bounced ideas off each other, since meeting him I changed my style of making electric guitars and basses, eshewing multi-laminated through necks with mahogany core body wings topped with exotic woods, which end up being battery dependent furniture reliant on active circuitry. 

Unless made of the same wood throughout such as Rickenbackers which are all maple, through necks just don't work. 

When I returned to Switzerland I found my father had been given 3 months notice to leave my chalet and my application for residency had been turned down because my father had deliberately failed to notify the Swiss authorities of my presence from 13 to 16 because “You are your mothers problem”. 

My world had collapsed. 

 

I had a years work with only 3 months to complete it, I managed to get an extra 3 months, completed the orders and got on a plane to see my estranged brother in the Philippines. (He’s still estranged ) 

 

I took 3 instruments to see if Titebond Original glue would cope with the tropics.   It does.

 

I met a local reggae band, Coco Jam, who saved my life and I met an Anglo Irish chap in Manila Immigration who looked a bit lost, Jerry Swaffield, an artist based on Lamma Island in Hong Kong who happened to be looking for a house in the same remote village where I was staying in Sagada, Mountain Province, 

Jerry provided me with a list of his friends in HK so I went to HK which was in the halcyon days of British rule and met a lot of nice expats and locals and was introduced to a bar, Club 64 

 

I found the Jazz Club and was asked what I did for a living and got offers for work but didn't have any tools so a chap on Lamma, Clive Keep very kindly let me use and stay in his workshop. I had a friend in Switzerland send my fretting tools over and was back in business but I was running out of money so I contacted Jeff Andrews who still owed me on one of his basses. He said he was going to play in Japan with Larry Coryell at the Blue Note Tokyo and would get me there which he did. A friend in HK had another friend in Tokyo who was willing to put me up. 

Thank you John Hutton and Rick Patterson.

 

I have always been fascinated with Japan, being a karateka into all things Samurai I really wanted to go there. 

I met Jeff and he introduced me to some Japanese jazz musicians and later David Rhodes of Peter Gabriel introduced me to some Japanese rock musicians. I was called up for fixing jobs by international touring bands like The Ian Gillan Band who’s guitarist Steve Morris I knew from my Denmark Street days, He had a wonky Floyd Rose with bits missing which got sorted. I hate Floyd Roses. They are a guitar roadies nightmare, I always preferred Kahler’s but one couldn't get that Floyd ‘wobble’ from them. Later I met Deep Purple in Hong Kong, Ian Gillan introduced me to Steve Morse, their new guitarist who I already knew from Montreux, he had a band called Dixie Dregs back then. 

“This is Steve Morse, the chap in Japan was Steve Morris. Steve Morse, Steve Morris. Morse Morris, Morris Morse. Slightly different names but exactly the same hairstyles..” Ian Gillian is a very funny and very clever man. 

 

One early evening I was heading to Shibuya across Yoyogi Park with my then girlfriend and I noticed posters advertising a Yes Concert at Yoyogi Stadium that night so we went to have a look. It was the Union Tour, everyone who had ever been in Yes minus Peter Banks and Patrick Moraz. 

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We were browsing the ‘merch’ when someone tapped me on the shoulder and said my name, I turned round to see Alex Scott, tour manager who I knew in Switzerland. What on Earth are doing here? I told him my story and he said you must come and surprise Rick.  

 

We were given access all area passes and tickets for the show and led back stage to meet the Caped Crusader, who was sitting at a table “Look what I found” said Alex Rick got up and gave me a hug, I almost burst into tears. I again told my story and Rick said “I left Switzerland with £1”

 

I stayed in Japan for about 4 years on and off. 

I went back to Switzerland in 93 to make a bunch of orders for Japan and upon my return the economic bubble had burst and the parks were full of salarymen pretending to be at work. 

 

I stayed for almost a year but absolutely no work was coming any musicians way nor mine so I returned to HK in 95 with a view of going back to Europe which was also bust, people started giving me work in Hong kong including the venerable Lo Tai Yau, Beyond, Ding Fei Fei (I made her an electric Er Hu) Chris Collins, Harry Llufrio, and other local musicians and some passing through like Rat Tat Tat, Kings of Convenience, Santana, Nile Rogers, Brett Andersen, Carl Barratt, Larry Coryell, the Ground Shaker and New Model Army. 

I never planned to stay in Hong Kong. Then someone gave me a dog….

I’m still here with another dog and two beautiful children.  

 

Even after 50 + plus years of doing this absolutely non lucrative profession I get diverted away from the horrors perpetrated by the follies of humankind by happily ending up knee deep in wood shavings and learning new things every day. Hopefully making other people happy down the line.