I started in the music business at a time (long long ago), a short while after electricity had taken over from steam as a major power source & ploughs were pulled by tractors instead of horses (factually - the mid 1970s).

For about six years I was employed by a large musical instrument retail chain (R.S.Kitchen), where I repaired electronic musical instrumets of all sorts from guitar effects pedals to Hammond tone wheel organs & Leslie speakers. When it was clear to me that the company was in financial trouble & wouldn't last much longer, I asked for & was given volountary redundancy. I then started my own business with a repairs workshop in the bedroom of a rented cottage & two years later I opened up a small retail music shop which I ran for a further 16 years during which time I made a few custom guitars and amplifiers for customers with very specific & particular requirments.

A love of motorcycles drew me to the Isle of Man for the first time in the mid 1990s (as a T.T. visitor) & from that moment onwards I was completely besotted with the Island - I knew that I had to leave England & bring my wife & children here to become a 'come overs' .

When our children were finished with school & college and I had closed the shop down & sold off everything apart from my tools, a few guitars & some vintage amps and a few old motorbikes, the move was eventually made in 2003. Now, I'm starting all over again - my initial intention to be 'semi-retired' and be able to spend time on some of the ideas for guitar effects that I had never got around to prototyping when I ran the shop, plus possibly a few repairs to help towards paying the bills and to keep an interest going in the music business, seemed to quickly disappear as soon as I posted a basic two line advert in the local freesheet "Courier" news paper and repair work started to come in. That was it almost back to full-time employment again.

But there's a big difference between struggling to earn enough to pay all the bills to run a small business in England, where rent, rates, insurance, crime, having to drive miles to get to a place where you can see a reasonable area of trees & fields, etc. all conspire to make life difficult and stressful. By comparison, just being able to decide to 'down tools' & go for a walk on the beach or with the dog whenever it suits me, or something as simple as looking out of the back window to see the tram go past at the end of the garden is so much more relaxed and far more conducive to creative thought. So, now I am operating from a very small workshop (in the cellar of my house), where I repair guitars and amplifiers, etc.

One day, I decided to make myself a good quality valve amplifer (I'd only done this for customers before) but this time I wanted something different and for myself, Knowing that this would very quickly become very expensive, I sold off my entire collection of vintage amplifiers (three old Marshalls, a Selmer & two Vox AC30s + dozens of vintage Coloursound effects pedals) to finance the project. The Buggane amplifiers came about when I was talking to a friend of mine (Jeff Lewis of MATAMP) who said I shouldn't spend daft ampounts of time & money on setting up orders for prototype parts - he suggested that I design an amp & have MATAMP make it for me (now this would have probably been the right thing to do if I wanted to operate a profitmaking business) but instead, I decided that I would (with the full blessing of MATAMP) use their parts - initially an un-finished prototype amplifier of theirs combined with a couple of their current production amps and a load of spare parts and I would modify what were already very good amplifiers to do exactly what I wanted them to do.

This arrangement allows me to spend huge amounts of time on re-designing, modifying & 'tweaking' to get the amplifiers just how I like them. It also means that I can sell the amplifiers for about half (or less) of the price they would be if I had sourced every single part myself & ordered in small quantities.

The main reasons that most hand made or 'bespoke' amplifiers are ridiculously expensive are: -
1/. Sales Hype - good product but not as good as the inflated price tag & the maker is playing the 'art / exclusive / high value because I say so' game to make a lot of money.

2/. They do actually cost many times more to build than any mass-produced item would (labour time is much greater for low number production, parts costs are much greater due to small quantity purchases, parts used are (hopefully) better quality then the mass-produced stuff uses).

3/. A much larger percentage of design, prototype & testing costs have to be applied to each item produced.

So, despite only making a few amplifiers each year the prices are kept to a manageable level by : -
1/. Using the buying power of a much bigger company to source good quality parts at quantity discount prices.

2/. Because I love doing these amps, & just want to get them out there & being used, considering the time that goes into each & every amplifier made, I work for peanuts - only a nominal fraction of the real amount is added as a labour charge.

A mass produced amplifier can be churned off a production line with a total build time (for the whole thing including the cabinet & finishing) of under 8 hours. One of my amplifiers takes a bare minimum of three whole days, usually 4 or 5 days & a new build / prototype will take up to 2 months and those times are all assuming that all the required parts are in stock at the right time.

All my amplifiers are kept as basic & simple as possible with the emphasis being on a 'vintage' quality product rather than modern multi -channel, multi -effect, multi-functionality. You won't find any digitally processed effects in a Don Audio amplifier .The most 'new fangled' item used so far in the amplifiers is a good old fashioned spring line reverb effect & I may go crazy soon & add a valve tremolo to the next model to be prototyped.

I like to collaborate with musicians when in the design & development stages of a new amplifier, other-wise every amp I built would be the same 'old bloke's blues amp' & that would be really boring. After initial design, & refinements in the prototype stage, a lot of live gig testing & recording studio work is by far the best way to find out if the amp is going to reliably perform the way it was designed to.

Davy Knowles of Back Door Slam was quite involved in specifying his requirements for the Buggane Mk3 15 watt amplifier which is the amp he has been touring the USA this year with. I don't believe I've ever met any other musician who devotes so many hours of every day of every week to playing & gigging. He must have given his amp at least 3 years worth of playing in the last year, (if compared to the average working band guitarist).

There are plans (subject to Davy re-confirming agreement) to make this amp available (to order) as a "Davy Knowles" signature model, so that the most ardent guitar playing B.D.S. fan can use the same gear that Davy does. We also intend to get together soon, hopefully some time in September, when he's back home in the Isle of Man, to discuss his requirements & bounce around a few ideas for the specifications of a new amplifier which will be tonally very different to the Buggane Mk3.

I take a great pride in my amplifiers, I enjoy making them but better than that, I really enjoy seeing & hearing them being used by someone who can play well.