Coming Up for Air...

2011 was the last time I made a record under my own name.

Four of us hopped in my beaten up VW transporter and drove north for a whole day. We caught the very last Corran ferry over to Ardgour and spent a few glorious days in the Scottish Highlands recording eleven songs of self indulgent, naval gazing, bedwetting folk music in the shadow of Ben Nevis.

The record was quick to make but to actually get it out into the world was a different matter. I was on tour almost constantly, mostly playing other peoples’ music. A lot of favours were begged and borrowed and finally the record was mixed, mastered: finished. I had designed and made some over-elaborate packaging for the CD involving magnets and letter-pressed discs. Essentially oversized chunky beermats. I had found a friendly printer on the Norfolk coast with a shed full of amazing Heidelberg presses who let me set up a little CD packaging production line over a few weekends.

2013 was a difficult time to put music out there. It turned out that CDs had basically died. Vinyl was on the up but was risky in small quantities and not nearly as many people had a record player as they do now. Streaming was not yet well understood - at least not by me or my label. The record appeared into the world and literally nothing happened. Years and years of hard work basically amounted to nothing. The tour in support of the record was not particularly well attended. It was depressing.

Around that time after a gig in London I got chatting to a man who worked for the PRS, the music collections agencies here in the UK. He double-checked my name and said he had some unpaid royalties for me. We swapped a few emails and I largely forgot all about it.

More touring, more gigs. Some to empty venues where I was top of the bill and lots to full venues when I was not. These support shows were great but I was struggling as one man and a guitar. I found I was really missing playing with a bass player. The songs from the record really benefitted from some big long low notes. I experimented with organ foot pedals, midi guitar and octave pedals and none of them were doing what I wanted. Eventually I realised that I could make a one string guitar pickup with some of the magnets (left over from my CD packaging) and some copper wire. The first very primitive version that worked was something of a revelation. Being able to apply an analogue sub octave effect to one string was transformative! I was hooked.

A few months later I was on my way back from France. When we arrived at Dover I was checking my bank balance trying to figure out whether to put in a whole tank of petrol or just twenty quid to get us home. I was not at all prepared for being richer than I had ever been before in my whole life. I had several thousand pounds in my bank account. The PRS guy hadn’t been kidding - he did have royalties for me! The shock of seeing those numbers without a minus sign before them was quite something….

Rather than doing anything sensible with the money I decided to spend six months developing the pickup idea. The money and time both went really fast, and at the end of the six months I had something to show for it, but nothing approaching a real product. I wanted to make something that was as easy to use as a guitar pedal and that didn't require soldering or alteration to the guitar. I wanted to make a real product and that target was still some way away.

I got a job as a touring keyboard tech that paid well enough to further develop the product, which now had a name. The Submarine was going to be crowdfunded through Kickstarter, which was pretty new and back then showcased projects that actually did need the cash to complete development, and people really bought into small businesses with big dreams trying to make a buck.

Then the worst thing happened. Three days before launch I received a cease and desist letter. This was a threatening lawyer’s letter from a company who claimed that I was infringing their patent and were going to sue me if I continued with the one string pickup idea. It felt like more than two years’ work had gone down the drain. Kickstarter had received similar letters as had other US crowdfunding platforms I tried. They’d even tried to get my YouTube account blocked.

But all of the preparations, press releases and build up was already in full swing. I had to figure out a way to launch on the day I said I was going to. As the patent was only valid in the USA, I decided that for the time being I would sell everywhere but there. A big risk, as the US is about half the global guitar gear market. I used a French crowdfunding site and asked favours from bilingual friends and the campaign was translated into as many languages as possible. We launched and the response was overwhelming. We raised eight grand in the first day or so. Then there was a big lull for around three weeks where hardly any pledges arrived. And then, true to form at the end of the campaign, there was a mad panic and we managed to scrape through and hit the target with a few days to spare. 208 people pledged their hard earned cash and on 16th July 2015 The Submarine turned from a dream to a reality.

A frantic nine months followed, figuring out how to actually make the thing. It’s one thing having a prototype of a pickup but figuring out how to make hundreds of them is quite a different matter. We moved out of our tiny one bed flat in Hackney in London, to a little house next to a tiny post office in Stroud, Gloucestershire. I set up a workshop in the attic. We had just scraped the target amount and that meant that it was possible but tricky to do. I was going to have to do all the assembly.

A few months later parts started arriving as did the emails from people asking were going to get their Submarine. Then disaster struck, the coils which together with the magnets are the crucial part of the pickup arrived. They were specialist, custom micro sized things with enormously thin wire wrapped several thousand times around itself. Of the 1,000 that had been delivered not even 10% worked. More holdups, more excuses from me, more scrabbling around for money. I took a job playing keys for an up and coming singer songwriter to bankroll the final stretch of production. But their label didn’t pay me. A major label with money coming out of their ears. They sat on the invoice for months. I really needed the money. I had customers who at this stage were becoming really unhappy and demanding refunds. Everything hung in the balance.

By now my dreams of outsourcing all the manufacture and assembly were long gone and I was in my attic with a soldering iron all day every day. In May 2016 the first batch was finished and was ready to send out to the world. it turns out the world is all quite far away and sending even small packages there is expensive. More credit cards, more debt. My Get-Rich-Quick scheme turned out to be a Maintain-Current-Levels-Of-Indebtedness-Quite-Slowly scheme.

But it was a beginning. I knew I was on to something. It’s taken a long time to really figure out what that is and we're still not there yet. In 2020 we finally managed to start selling in the United States after some expensive legal shenanigans. I no longer need to climb a ladder to get to work; the attic days are long gone.

I love my job. There are thousands of Submarine Pickups out there in the world. People are using Subs in many, many imaginative and enjoyable ways. And there’s plenty of good things yet to come.

Thanks for being part of the story,

Pete

 
17th July 2025