'Trying To Sell Soul To The Soulless' Why I Love Hand Built Analogue Metal Detectors

Lets us take a short written journey through the ages before I get to my main point

When I look around me at the world today, I guess you can call it the "modern age", everything seems synthetic, mass produced with harsh looking edges, streamlined and slimmed down to fit into compact spaces. I think the word I'm looking for is 'soulless'. The world we're living in lacks soul, mass consumerism is the new disease, people want more and more, right now, this very instant! and as quick as something comes, it's gone again, disposed of and thrown away like a useless prop from someones f**ked up life. 

Having lived in London for well over 25 years I've seen the skylines change and all the venues, rehearsal rooms, record shops and recording studios that I use to inhabit have all but vanished. Only to be replaced with cheaply built offices and premises that have zero character, usually consisting of a lot of glass, the old London that so many people loved truly is a thing of the past and it's never coming back ever again. 

It was the grit and the seedy back streets that made our capital city so interesting, when I first moved to London I was slightly wary of these places but it was amazing how quickly you got use to them and now many have been levelled to dust through gentrification, it's only now you realise just how much you miss 'the old way', any form of character has been erased. It's not just London that's being effected by this, it's pretty much every element of our existence. I can't help thinking everything is being dumbed down for a purpose. 

I don't live far from Greenwich and when I detect on the Thames I like to walk up through the park and down to the river, the architecture in the centre of town is nothing short of mind-blowing. Christopher Wren designed the royal hospital among other beautiful buildings close to the high street. The vision it took to not only design but build these structures was nothing short of genius, when you look at the fine details and the symmetry, it's hard to believe something so unique could've been built by hand. Not only that but they were built to last the test of time, the integrity of all these old buildings weren't diminished with profit in mind. The image below is the perfect example of what I'm talking about, here you have the fantastic hand built structures with such unique character and fine beautiful details.

Then looming in the background is an unoriginal, uninspiring set of buildings which express nothing, actually that's a lie, those buildings are Canary Wharf, the now de-funked financial district of London. The greed of the dirty bankers were their own downfall so those buildings express corporate greed and pretty much everything that's wrong with the financial system that we live in. Then we have blocks of high-rise flats, peoples lives are stacked upon one another in places barely the size of a shoebox. If you want to look at it in a very straight forward way, we've got the old created organically, so to speak and we've got the new which is basically cheap mass-produced infrastructure with harsh edges and no character .... which one is more pleasing on the eye? which set of buildings speak to you the most?

Now if we move the above viewpoint into modern society, what do we have? we have cheap ideas that lack soul and originality and are pretty much created for one reason only, minimal outlay with the viewpoint of maximum profit. Hell .. it doesn't matter if we're surrounded by dull meaningless shit as long as the money is lining someone else's pockets. It doesn't matter if there's a lack of choice or originality because being original isn't desired in this life, it's discouraged not only by the system we live in but by the masses of non-thinking sheep that crave the 'pack' mentality and shout the 'individual' down. Why Is It Like This? that's a simple question to answer, it's our one size fits all educational system that we're all fed into and spat out at the other end. All walking and talking with the same views and opinions that have been forced down upon us from the same books that millions before us had been threatened into memorising. We're not getting educated, we're getting indoctrinated. 

One of the most free forms of expression is art, be it painting, poetry, sculpture, the list goes on, years ago expression was universal, many things were created and excepted, you we're genuinely free to express yourself, if not at school, in private in your home. Many interesting pieces were created and eventually shared with the world. However, nowadays, art in all its forms has to fit within certain pigeon-holes or between certain brackets, otherwise it's not considered 'true art' or any good whatsoever. There's a hierarchy that feels themselves so important that it's their way or the highway. 

Does anyone remember the painter Vincent Van Gogh? everyone thought he was a crock of shit because his art didn't fit into anything, he got so frustrated he cut his bloody ear off. But since then his paintings have changed the way generations look upon painting as a whole. What about the poet Arthur Rimbaud, he was a young lad living in extreme poverty working crap jobs and he died very young in complete and utter agony, years after his death his poetry was discovered and it went down as some of the best and most surreal writing in history, he wasn't educated in poetry, he just had an inner voice which he listened to. Both of these characters had souls and they created their work with both their minds and their hands. 

What Does All This Have To Do With Hand Built Analogue Metal Detectors?

"Bare with me I will be getting around to it I think it's good to try and build context"

One last example I'd like to give is modern day music equipment, it's common knowledge that for decades bands have used amplifiers and analogue effects pedals. Theirs nothing quite like that warmth you get from burning hot values and a guitar amp turned way up, there's a characteristic to the sound that you can't quite put your finger on. Same goes for guitar effects pedals, you literally have hundreds of cool looking pedals and foot switches that have been built by hand to produce some very unique sounds. But ... most big touring bands have ditched the old school amps, cabinets and pedals for units called 'Profilers', this is basically rack mounted software that can take a midi sample 'profile' of real guitar amps and effects. 

To me it's a soulless piece of technology that has been produced in a factory, it's a very safe and convenient alternative to the real thing. Now lets look at it from a business sense, when you're selling millions of tickets and you're playing in front of thousands of people every night you can't really afford for things to break and go wrong, traditional guitar amps pose that risk, also it saves money in freight because you're not taking as much guitar equipment on tour. But what you're getting is a digital midi processor doing all the work, the wider audience won't be able to tell the difference, but the bottom line is, it's not the real thing and it just lacks both the character and soul of real guitar amps and pedals. The image below shows a mass produced Kemper profiler and a beautiful hand built amplifier - which one catches the eye? and which one do you think sounds better?

The amplifier above started as a vision is someones head and then it was made into a reality with the hands, it might cost more than your bog standard guitar amplifier but you're not just paying for the sound quality, you're paying for its uniqueness and soul. Now that's the best way that I can describe why I love my metal detectors, they're analog, hand built and they have a uniqueness unlike anything else on the market. They might be expensive but you're not just paying for the performance, you're paying for the fact that they've been made by hand, they started off as a vision in someones mind and then they were made into a reality with the hands. You're paying for the time and effort that went into designing them, the trial, error and the journey that was taken to make them perfect, none of that comes cheap, to put it bluntly, you're not buying a 'polished turd', you're buying something of substance. 

Having started metal detecting using an analog machine my foundation into the hobby was turning dials, switching switches and pulling triggers. I love how intuitive and sensory it is to do this, it genuinely feels like you're dialling into the ground and you can make micro adjustments in a way that just isn't possible on any digital platform. Also having been a musician all my life I've always been drawn to cool looking analogue guitar pedals that also have knobs and switches, dials and switches are in my DNA. So it was a very obvious progression when it came to the types of metal detectors that I wanted to use. 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we all see things different, for me digital machines look like mobile phones with a shaft on, they have the sharp edges and clinical look that I talk about in the first part of this blog. They're soulless mass-produced products that I'm not interested in and despite what many might think, I just don't feel they have the performance that we're led to believe. Taking into account my last blog post was about technology infiltrating every area of our lives, humans spend more time looking at screens than actually taking in the world around them. Clearly 'smart phones' are a new addiction, when I'm out in the fields I'm f**ked if I want to be staring down at yet another screen, I want to be looking at the world around me and taking it all in - listening !!

Life to me is a series of communications, be it what we hear, see, touch and smell, we're communicating with everything every minute of everyday. The skin is like an antenna, not every communication reacts with the five senses, we 'feel' a lot as well. Metal detecting to me is simply another form of communication, we're using frequency to our advantage to connect and "COMMUNICATE" with the world that has come before us. For me the most sensitive way to perform this is with turning dials, switching switches and using my ears, for me there are no numbers or screens or digital prisons in metal detecting, only sounds and feelings. I want to understand every element of my machines and be able to adjust and modify accordingly, I want to understand each and every function and understand it's purpose.

I never got that feeling from using my Equinox 800, I simply had 'metal detecting' printed, produced and packaged in the most convenient way possible. Let us take 'Painting By Numbers' as our final example, we can all go out and buy a painting by numbers book and a set of paints and start painting the numbered sections in with the allocated colour. Once the painting is finished, no doubt it's going to look pretty impressive, but what have we actually learnt? nothing, other than filling in numbers with paint. You don't have any concept of building the initial sketch from scratch, translating what you're seeing in your mind onto to paper and getting the angles and proportions right. 

You don't have any clue how to mix colours or use them in a way that brings out certain qualities and nuances within the picture itself. All you did was follow instructions and painted in the numbers. That's how I feel about digital mass produced metal detectors, I understand there's thousands out there that don't care about this shit. They just want to turn on and go and that's all cool, however, for me, I want something more than that, I want a little bit of soul. So whilst most around me fall further down the murky hole of technology and the incessant need to, not only surround themselves with it, but also pass the decision making over to it, I can't help but wonder what the answer is for me. I think what I'm going to do is try to live my life in analogue.