At the bottom of this page is an account of the demonstration of the anti-feedback properties of the plastic acoustic guitar given to the (major) guitar manufacturer; also how they mysteriously suddenly dropped out of the deal, reinforcing my belief that the Freemason connection with my dad (deceased) has been a lead weight to my career.

This was an e-mail to a friend in January 2002.

Regarding the concrete tiles, working with just two rubber moulds is slow and I'm considering a "lost wax" method to make a multiple disposable system which should speed things up considerably. In town, a friend has agreed to have her garden borders laid with them so I can do real photographs for the site and mail shots when I'm happy with the finished product (which I'm not yet).

Your idea for a front page index is something I've actually done a few times in the year that my site's been on line. I change things around most days somewhere in the 650-odd files in the folder and the front page gets "attacked" by me on a regular basis.

Right now, I've completely given up with trying to talk sense to scientists about sonoluminescence and the plausibility of the thing being done inside a music string. 

In my experience they all, without exception, "read straight from the card" and don't seem capable of a sideways glance, no matter how rational and ordered the argument ~ especially from someone without letters after their name. They just won't go there. Then there's the complication of risking reputation(s) lost by being seen to be talking to anyone who even so much as mentions UFOs. So I've decided to just open up and not pretend to anything but the status of curious observer. My site is being methodically turned in that direction and the more surreal it becomes the better as far as I'm concerned. The bizarre addition of Celtic Scroll & Knot concrete tiling to the front page lends a rather cute air of Zen, I believe.

If I ever talk to a scientist again it will be to shake his hand and accept my Nobel Prize!

You mention that "Freemason" thing...

Without anybody actually taking positive action, that organisation has caused me more grief than any other on the planet in my 55years, simply because of my surname. Their very name and the use of the pyramid in their "front page" symbology would suggest that they hold some secret knowledge pertaining to pyramid construction. Bollocks they do! Any such knowledge they may once have possessed has surely been long lost.

Any fully invested Freemason will tell you (whilst fervently believing it to be true) that they are an organisation dedicated to all things good, positive and helpful. That may be true if you are inside their circle but certainly not if you happen to be, as I am, through no fault of my own, firmly placed on the outside. 

This came about some time in the mid 1950's when my father was actually a fully-fledged member that organisation. He had been, like his father before him (and his father before him), an active participator of all things Freemason. In practicle terms, the idea is that they can arrange good business contacts within their circle. Before the days of globally linked domestic computers, word of mouth was obviously a much slower and infinitely more corruptible medium for lateral communication. 

Again, any fully invested Freemason will tell you that (1) you cannot be thrown out of the Freemasons ~ and (2) there is no "black list" but the truth now is that a "take no further action" default setting applies if you happen to be numbered among the dis-favoured. 

I was never given the full story but it is certainly true that my father was thrown out of the Freemasons. By averaging out the threads of the various versions that have been "whispered" to me down the years, I was able to work out roughly what actually did happen: in those days any form of abortion was illegal and it appears that my dad was caught out by trying to help in the procuration of one such event. As a direct result of this he was ejected from his "Lodge" and the name "Acworth" has ever since been as black as the ace of spades in their eyes (not that they would admit it); the chances of my ever joining their organisation (not that I would ever want to) are slimmer than those for me getting oral sex from the Pope. 

There have been many times in my life, simply because of my name, that this curious and frustrating foible has stopped me dead in my tracks, preventing me from proceeding with projects of intellectual property and I'll just give one glowing example here. 

In the early 1990's, when I was still running a busy guitar workshop I was experimenting (like many before me ~ most notably by the Maccaferri company) with the idea of producing a workable plastic acoustic guitar. As I have said, many luthiers have tried but abandoned the project ~ the thing can't be approached from a wood-worker's perspective at all. Wood has a grain direction and the timbers that are specifically chosen for soundboard construction are lightweight and stiff ~ the very properties of those woods are used specifically in the design and construction of small areas of the soundboard, divided by an arrangement of bracing struts; each area exhibiting discrete resonant properties ~ and this concept (for a steel strung instrument) was perfected by the Martin Guitar Company in the mid to late 19th century. It has been shown that the X-bracing system cannot be improved upon (when working with wood). All subsequent luthiers have bowed to the superiority of this format. Here's a crude sketch of the basic idea:

Consequently, those luthiers who have tried to make a plastic flat-fronted acoustic have tried to apply this format and failed. There is no grain direction in plastic unless you go down the very expensive road of carbon fiber lamination, which does work (and has been commercially available for some years). There are no claims made by those makers for any advantage in respect of howl-around feedback when amplified. 

Playing around with Formica(™), the kitchen worktop laminate material, I discovered (one of those Friday evening whimsical ideas), that an exceptionally resonant soundboard panel could be made by simply building a multiple X-bracing latticework of thin plywood on-edge, glued to the back of a piece of Formica(™):~

 

What I discovered was that as I cut material away, the sharp corners generated their own individual musical notes (like a tuning fork but obviously without the sustain characteristic). Next up, cold empirical logic suggested that, same as in a conventional (wooden) design, the bracing became more and more redundant approaching the edge of the table:

(I'm coming to the Freemasons bit yet, don't worry).

  

I'd got to be pretty sophisticated with the bracing shapes (as above) and had, as you'll see, begun to incorporate "Chinese Pagoda" style end pieces to each brace, individually tuned to discrete notes, as I thought, merely as a means of making the thing generally more "musical". Like Leonardo said ~ "nature's designs are the most efficient; nothing is wasted ~ everything serves a purpose" ~ and I could not have predicted what the actual effect of this modification was to be. The Chinese put these shapes on their roof corners to "ward off devils" and "ward off devils" was exactly what they did in my plastic guitar... 

The next part of the story was a genuine accidental discovery. It was time to actually fit a transducer bug into the bridge so I fitted one: just a cheap six-crystals-in-a line-type; about $25 worth of kit. In my workshop I kept a small practice amplifier and I plugged the plastic guitar into that. It sounded OK so I took the instrument through to the front of the music shop and handed it to the manager to test out through a big sophisticated stage amp. The result was hair-raising. 

It sounded fine (well, great, actually) so we just kept turning it up louder and louder in an attempt to get it to "honk" (howl-around feedback in the soundbox body) ~ & it wouldn't! 

When the amp was turned up full, there was absolutely no body-honk at all. Mind you it wasn't a good idea to let go of the strings at that point because they would have literally gone crazy but you could play as loud as Hendrix if you wanted ~ unheard of on an acoustic guitar. Everybody present was acutely aware of just how important a discovery this could be. The problem of body-honk has limited the sound of country music right from the beginning and a band would always have to employ a solid-body guitar player for any shit-kicking volume; the acoustic guitar player could only strum the rhythm. At any power level beyond what you'd use in a small bar-room gig, the typical singer / rhythm player would be swamped by the drums for a start. His playing would merely contribute something akin to a quiet ride-cymbal. 

Not only that, this potential new ability meant that a typical songwriter, writing stuff on acoustic (who has always had to adopt a completely different playing style on electric solid body because those acoustic tricks just don't happen on nickel-wound strings through a magnetic pickup system) could now compete in the sound spectrum of a very loud band without having to adapt his composed parts at all. 

Most amplifier manufacturers produce dedicated acoustic guitar amps with notch-filters and the like to limit feedback. Using a notch filter is obviously a compromise - that's got to remove part of the tone by its very definition. Killing the whistling type of feedback is simple and that is not the relevant problem here. The conventional luthier depends for tone and volume projection on the natural resonance of sections of the wooden sound table between the bracing struts and is effectively making a thing that is almost designed to honk. 

I have previously briefly touched upon this subject on my web site at: how_to.htm . The reason why it works is that any potential resonance that starts to build at a particular frequency has its energy drained away by all of the other potential resonances as built in. You can probably imagine the sound you'd get if you dragged your finger tips across such a structure: it's very close to "white noise" (the sum of all audio frequencies): No howl-around can settle.

~ but this is where we get to the axial and crucial point of this page ~

The Freemasons...

Doors quickly close at the mention of my name in the business world at large. It's happened in the music publishing and recording business and in territory surrounding intellectual property upon many occasions ~ and it isn't paranoia; there just are too many coincidences. 

As you might expect, I was really fired up at this discovery of the anti-feedback electro-acoustic guitar and immediately contacted all of the major guitar manufacturers, hoping to demonstrate my prototype (with non-disclosure clauses written in, of course). One of the largest (and I won't name them here), with a UK office was keen to see what I was on about and a meeting was arranged to coincide with a visit by their Japanese, European and USA marketing representatives. The rest of the big name manufacturers either wouldn't respond at all or stated that they had a full catalogue of designs (!?). 

At the meeting, in a large demonstration sound stage suite equipped with a 4,000 watt P.A. rig, they brought out their top of the range electro-acoustics for comparitive testing. Their in-house engineer set up an input channel on the desk and plugging in their best (very expensive) guitar, gingerly moved the fader up a couple of notches. Of course their instrument sounded really fabulous, even more so with a bit of E.Q. tweaking; but he knew the limits as far as volume was concerned and would not turn up the juice beyond what he expected to be that limit. Then the big boss-man insisted that he did just that and we made a note of the decibel level at which the 'orrible and inevitable howling started. 

Next up, we plugged in my prototype at the same volume. The slider was set to about three out of a possible ten. It sounded fine. 

"Turn it up", I said. He said it would be a bad idea. "Turn it up", I said again and he gently and quite apprehensively moved the slider up half-a-notch. No feedback, of course; I knew there wouldn't be. 

"Excuse me", I said and moved over to the desk. "What power do we run at with the slider full up?", I asked and he said it would be about 2½ thousand watts RMS. I immediately pushed the fader right up to the top and he ducked (visibly), expecting my guitar to explode into uncontrollable honking. Nothing. Then, to put the cherry on the cake, I held the sound box right up against the speaker stack. Nothing. Silence. Then I played a power chord which of course would have sustained forever (or until the power cut or the speakers gave up). It was deafening, like a million cathedral organs but when I stopped the strings, total silence again. It was like holding a cocked weapon. 

The look on the faces of the marketing team when I turned around was truly fabulous. There ensued much warm hand shaking and congratulatory responses all round and we held a small party to celebrate something which all present agreed had the potential to utterly transform the music industry. The US director was going back to the States the following day and was very keen to relate the experience to the MD. Going back home myself I wore a grin from ear to ear but I should have known better... 

The silence that followed was as profound as the silence of my guitar feedback at 2,500 watts RMS. The letter I got from the USA MD was about as irrelevant as it could have been; it made a squirming attempt to suggest that I combine my development with that of another inventor who'd made a wooden-fronted guitar with no bracing at all and no mention was made of feedback whatsoever. The UK sales director was acutely embarrassed at first and stated that he could not understand what had gone wrong but then all communication ceased; no messages left in either country were subsequently answered and no relevant person would ever come to the phone. 

They didn't steal my idea because it hasn't been put into production but I attribute the completely bizarre breakdown of communication directly to my surname. Nobody could acquire a patent now for sureanyway: I sold several of my prototypes.

You can hear a short sample mpeg sound file of one of my plastic acoustics if you download this 20kb strum_mpeg.wav to your hard drive or open it with winamp or whatever it is you use on your system. It's in glorious mono and sounds wonderful loud or quiet. Even if I do say so myself...