When I Put My Headphones On The World Goes Away

I wanted to write a different kind of blog today, there's so much talk about operation, functions, comparisons and general performance. That's all well and good, these subjects need to be covered, however I'd really like to explain why I love metal detecting so much. I feel the simple process of enjoyment can be pulled under by all the technical talk, let's strip all that away.

So Why Do I Metal Detect?

When I was about 10 years old my dad mentioned in passing about how interesting metal detecting could be, it was this mysterious activity that you heard about but never actually saw anyone doing it. We took the plunge and purchased a cheap machine from the local electronics store, this thing was as close to useless as you could get but it sure as hell lit a fire inside that has never been dampened. I mentioned this in the very first blog I wrote, I wrote letters to all the main detector companies requesting their brochures. My letters were slipped into my local postbox and within a matter of weeks, a number of different booklets fell through the door onto my hallway floor. There was something strangely magical about receiving something in the post with your name on it, as I opened each envelope the world of treasure hunting suddenly became very real. 

I would sit for hours in my room flicking the pages of all these different booklets, each page had an alien like machine on them all with different functions and applications. Back then you had dedicated beach machines alongside units that were designed specifically for the fields, they were like nothing I'd seen before and I was desperate to get one of these things in my hands. A little time went by before me and my dad went to Joan Allen to actually look at these mythical devices in real life, I remember walking into the shop and being instantly mesmerised by all the different units hanging from the walls. 

After much conversation with the guy in the shop we left that day with a shiny new Fisher 1265x, for me at that age, this unit felt like magic in the hands. I'd spent so long looking at the Fisher brochure in my room, it was hard to believe that I finally owned one of the machines that sat there on the pages in front of me. I can say with confidence that no one in the town I grew up in knew anything about metal detecting, let alone owned one. Back then it was a fringe hobby, you could count on one hand the amount of detectorists out there and I can genuinely say that it makes me sad what the pass-time has turned into, it's so painfully commercialised now. In this day and age there are no secrets anymore, only instant experts shouting from the rooftops about their infinite knowledge and the treasures they've found, it's like that with everything nowadays. Lets make one thing clear, metal detecting isn't 'COOL' and it never will be, I saw the same thing happen with carp fishing here in the UK.

I instantly got down to learning how to set the 1265x up, there was no automation you had to understand each dial and switch, there were no short cuts. Me and my dad would go out to the local forestland, 'that we managed to get permission to hunt', and pretty much straight away, we started to dig old coins. I was utterly stunned when I placed my hands on the first old coin we dug, I had never seen another coin like it, it was an old penny from the early 19th century, it was magical for more than one reason. Firstly we'd actually found something, secondly, who dropped the coin? the idea that the last person to have dropped it was the last person who touched, it was a very strange feeling. It was from this point that I was hooked, over time we dug so many old coins of all different sizes, from that I could then set the dual discrimination correctly so the machine still picked up small coins but rejected iron. 

I remember the dreaded pull tab being a dream stealer because they sounded exactly like coins and old bullets gave the same sharp signal. The 1265x was quite a unique unit and I remember, even though it was a single tone machine, overtime you started to understand the slight difference in the audio on certain targets. I loved the analog sound and the modulated pinpoint function. It was at this early stage that I realised the importance of audio and this has remained an important thing for me to this very day. In my head metal detecting was never visual, it was all about the audio, this is when I started to understand that 'the art' of metal detecting was performed with the ears. There were a few machines starting to surface that had VDI and pictures of coins and pull tabs on the display but none of that interested me at all, and it still doesn't. 

Life Happened

From the age of 6 I knew that both music and drums were going to be my life and by the time I was 13 I was playing live shows in a covers band 3 to 4 nights a week and earning a really good living. School and qualifications meant nothing to me, I had to go where the music took me, my life was unorthodox, my existence was recording studios, rehearsal rooms and venues, normal life was so mundane. I've spent my whole life side stepping the mind-numbing nothingness of the  'everyday'. I've never been motivated by 'the job', 'the car', 'the house', 'the kids' and one holiday a year, all that stuff was, and still is, a slow death to me. So due to my ruthless attitude towards where I wanted to get musically, any type of hobby or pass time took a backseat. Metal detecting was always in the back of my mind somewhere but life had to be lived and certain things needed to obtained before any kind of stability came back into my existence. The system we're born into doesn't nurture anything other than a slow march into the inevitable slaughter house of nothingness. It's hard to find substance in a world where everything is so shallow and unoriginal, society isn't designed for anyone with a different life path other than the 9am to 5pm bullshit - it's a slow drain on the soul.

Fast forward through an existence of utter turmoil, beauty, depression and a genuine feeling of "what the fuck", metal detecting came back into my life and due to a major event that changed my path, little did I know that detecting would become my lifeline and a way to navigate through the shit of the 'everyday'. I got back into metal detecting in a big way because I initially wanted to hunt the River Thames here in London, I'd moved only a few minutes away from it, this is when I purchased the Fisher F19 with the small 5' inch coil. The moment I started swinging it was as if I'd never stopped, it became apparent very quickly that my mind went straight back to the 'audio', the screen and numbers meant nothing to me at all. It was initially overwhelming because the foreshore has a crazy amount of metal targets on it but due to the dual audio of the F19 I sussed it all out pretty quickly. 

From here I decided I wanted to get back out in the fields so I took a trip down to Joan Allen to have a look at some of the new machines on the market. It all looked very different to the detectors I saw hanging on their walls some 35 years ago and to be honest I didn't like the whole 'smartphone' approach with the digital interface. If they'd had a good analog for sale I would've snapped it up, I purchased the Equinox 800 on impulse, I knew nothing of Minelab and all this multi-frequency business. To me it was a pretty straightforward machine that had a lot of 'dross' on it that I had no interest in using because I genuinely didn't see the point. The 'advanced' settings didn't seem that advanced at all and it became clear quickly that metal detectors had now turned into 'user-friendly' devices that were packaged and produced for the masses, they were more like entertainment boxes than raw machines designed to find metal in the ground.

Don't get me wrong, I used the machine extensively and found a lot of good stuff but their was a huge disconnect in my mind, I didn't feel like I could truly tune the machine in to the ground that I was on. You literally worked within the ability of the software that the engineers had designed. Not only that but I wasn't taking any notice of the screen, the audio options were cool and machines have clearly come along way in that regard, but I wanted something different from the mainstream, it just didn't feel like metal detecting to me at all. It was at this point that I started looking elsewhere for a machine I could really connect with in a more intuitive way. This is when I found Nexus and 4 Nexus units later I can safely say that I've found a brand of detector that I absolutely love. Now add to that a couple of Tesoro machines, a Golden Mask 4WD Pro and a deep-tech Vista X, I can safely say that my desire to 'connect' in an analog way has been well and truly pacified. 

When I Put My Headphones On The World Goes Away

For me metal detecting isn't about what I find, it's about "the art of doing", it's a process within itself and a different way of communicating. I didn't pick up a metal detector to be a YouTube personality, shouting my opinions from a soapbox in the shape of a test garden. The metal detecting scene nowadays bares no resemblance to the one I started in all those years ago and I have no interest in being any part of what it has become. That's why I avoid clubs and group digs, I'm not a people person, hence why I started metal detecting in the first place, it's solitary, I feel comfortable in my own company.

When I venture onto the Thames or into the fields, when I put my headphones on the world goes away, I'm using frequency that communicates to me on an audible level notifying me of potential treasures in the ground. I can't see these items but I get alerted to their presence through a handheld device, this concept still blows my mind. The goal is to understand the units I use in such away that I'm not even thinking, you're simply being, meshed into the landscape. The items I find are secondary to mastering my machines, I know that if I master them fully then the treasures will reveal themselves. I love the fact that I'm finding possessions that were tiny fragments in someone else's life, some might still be living but I know many of them are long gone. What I dig is a small piece of evidence that these people once inhabited the earth and had their own lives, I wish the coins and relics could talk, I'm sure they'd all have a fantastic story to tell. Despite what the archaeologists think of us detectorists, I feel that the treasures we recover, in some strange way, gives all of the long lost souls that dropped their possessions, a voice.