After School, I chose to attend an art college rather than pursue academic goals. I had a great time there learnign a lot there, I favored 3D design and working with materials timber being one of my favorites to work with after the first year we specialized in a subject and I chose to concentrated in the second year on 3D Design as it fitted best with the way I think and work.

As my time at college was coming to an end at college and we were all getting ready for our exhibition I began to think about my future life in more detail. I had already got my place at a university and I was pondering the future viability of this decision. I knew at the time the creative industry was hard to get into so was on the lookout for something creative to do with myself that I would find fulfilling.

To be honest the thought of building instruments had not occurred to me although I continued to design a few guitars in my sketchbooks, one day I shall build some of those designs, it was coming to the end of college and everyone was getting ready for the final exhibition. I had finished my work well ahead of time and the tutors were busy helping others get ready for the exhibition so I took a walk around the college campus and found the woodworking shops were empty except for the technicians who were still there. The next day I popped back and asked if I could use their workshop and build a guitar and thankfully they said yes. I gathered the materials got a hold of a guitar neck and set about building a body for my instrument.

The tutors never really saw any of this going on as I just popped by in the morning said hello and disappeared for the day checking in occasionally. Once I had it all done my dad took it away and applied the finish and it was ready for assembly I returned to my class to assemble the guitar. I can still remember this clear as day, my tutor passed my desk and said, "That looks nice you know you can do that for a career" and then tootled off as he was very busy helping those who needed the help. I tracked him down later on and got him to expand on what he said and that's when I went into hyperdrive as this was it this is what I wanted to do!

I completed a National Diploma and 1998-2000 and a Higher National Diploma in 2000-2002 in musical instrument production at Leeds College of Music. It was a great experience, at the time we were taught how to build a guitar, since then this has now become how to build vintage musical instruments as this was just how you did it at that time.

I built a bass in my first two years and learned a lot of repair skills in the second two years I managed to build a few things by staying late and taking advantage of the free desk space while the evening classes were going on, I liked how the course was set up so you could do this although it was just myself who decided to do this with my free time. It also gave me the chance to help out a bit with the evening courses, if I could help by explaining things if anyone looked a bit lost and needed a push to do something after the tutor had done his rounds. So I managed to get a couple of guitars built and a lot of stuff started in addition to building my guitar of the course and learning about more in-depth repair work

Oddly enough there is not a great deal to say about learning to build guitars as it is exactly that learning to build guitars. The things that I learned were more vintage-based than the modern guitar building most common today I just feel that has helped me with a larger understanding of the subject. To bring the time perspective I did this into view, it was not like today and the internet was only just a fledgling thing and was only just making waves in the world, yes it was there although it was a completely different landscape than it is now. The tutor's knowledge base was from the 1960s onwards so now this has become a vintage style building of instruments.

Whilst on the HND I did manage to land a job at a local music store as I have always enjoyed working and felt this employment offered me the most opportunity within my chosen field. Over time I got to help out more with shop setups and also assisting the repair guy booking in instruments and taking them across to him and occasionally getting one or two of the small jobs done before I headed back to work increasing the turnaround speed for a few customers that had brought in small jobs. The music shop was a good place to be as it taught me a lot about retail and helping customers, I only worked there a couple of days a week yet was able to learn a lot about all the new and upcoming music equipment and instruments.

To be honest many things I was taught at Leeds have stood me in good stead over the years and all in all it was a great grounding in musical instrument construction. I was taught vintage guitar building and how all the main brand's instruments had been constructed through the years, today most people teach themselves modern guitar building and have no idea how the old types of instrument were constructed. I think being a well rounded guitar tech helped me imensly when it come to sorting out problems with musical instruments. I am eternally grateful for the tutors who passed on their experience for us to learned from.

I traveled from Stockport to Leeds in my first two years of the course and needed something to do on this journey and we had well stock liberty at college, a reading list had been provided by the college so I set about completing the list while traveling to and from college. It was whilst re-reading one of the books that I had my breakthrough idea for the design for a new construction style for musical instruments.

 
When I was taught to build instruments this was a time before two-way truss rods were readily available yes there were very similar designs in the dual bar single-action truss rod I have witnessed the dawn of the two-way truss rod at the music shop with the rise of the Yamaha EG112, what a fantastic instrument. Similar style truss rods have existed in the form of the slim line truss rod found in thin neck guitars from the 1980's onwards and must have existed on some instruments getting close to the rise of the Yamaha EG112 it is just this guitar that shook up the guitar world. One year you are selling Squire and peavey packages where the guitar and amp left a lot to be desired the next year you were selling the Yamaha EG112's that were a far superior instruments and could be paired up with any amp so for not much more you where able to get out a starter package that was far superior. There is nothing beginner guitar at all about the Yamaha EG112 with many professional musicians even choosing them to be their gigging instrument a quick pickup upgrade and you had an instrument that was comparable to a much more expensive instrument that had a wonderfully thin neck.

I am very gratful for the education I received at Leeds and made the most of it while I was there and it has helped me get through life in a way that I feel has been very benifical to other people as I have served and created a lot of wounderful things. I have help many people along the way with my instrument repairs and instrument constructions as I am able to guid you through how things can be done and present the aray of options for you to choose from.

Philip Porter Guitars was set up in 2002 with help from the prince's trust. I got my first workshop in Hallam Mill Stockport and worked from there from between 2002-2008. My goal at the start was to build my own unique construction of guitars and basses. I did very well with the Princes Trust receiving the full loan and a grant from them to help me fulfill my dream.

I always look back to the Hallam Years fondly, this is the time before things got complicated when I was at my personal happiest. I came into the working world very open and wanting to help everyone, when I compare myself now to the fresh-faced kid starting I would like to tell them a lot of things although I understand this will spoil the journey of learning, growing in the game of life, with hindsight I would have done things a lot differently in-fact I would do everything differently to be honest. I understand that would bring me to a different place as the decisions we make that lead us to the life we now have.

I cherish the memories from this place and still think about the great times I had and the people I was able to help. Every '60s musician that told me their story every guitarist in a band either famous or up and coming that I was able to help and every individual I got to meet along the way. I did some truly great work at this place and had a fantastic run there.

Famous Clients

There was a rehearsal and recording studio on the top floor of Hallam Mill, Moulin Rouge there were many passing musicians I could work for, some highlights being The Doves Badly, Drawn Boy and Cherry Ghost there are many more who I simply can not remeber as it is a long time ago now. It was here that I first met one of my longest standing customers Colin from Janus UK a 1970s rock band that are still making records to this day! Link to build! Slightly off-topic, I used to rehearse at Hallam Mill when it was Crazy Face Rehearsal studio on the top floor.

I did some of my best work at the beginning of my career, there was so much I had yet to learn and I did not realize at the time and dilution helped me through. It was the beginning of the internet age, myself and one other person Steve Robinson ?Manchester Instrument Repairers?, had websites. Instrument repair people have always existed although at this point in time generally we were hard to find if you could find one at all. I have no photos of the early jobs there and limited photos of the work I did due to digital cameras being quite expensive at the time and I only got one after a couple of years. So the Hallam Mill photos are missing photos of the first couple of years unfortunatly.

The mill was a nice place to be with many friendly people and the older touring musicians were true gentlemen with great stories to tell who most likely, sadly are not with us today.

How did things go wrong for me, there is not one simple factor in what went wrong, there are several things combined that spelled the end for me at Hallam Mill. I will skip some of these in this account, please feel free to ask me about them I will explain all in more detail. I will just cover the major factors.

The main mistake I made was trying to follow my dream of constructing my unique instruments and investing far too much time into the idea without a good plan of action I took a loan to facilitate the completion of the project and unfortunately chose to work with individuals who let me down. The plan was ill-conceived so it was my own fault, I was trying to do far too much and dealing with everything became overwhelming for me.

I had always done very well with my repair work and that sustained me for a long while and I had added to the equipment I had available and began to spray a lot of guitars, spraying is tricky and I had to learn on the job. I invest a lot of time into the finishing aspects of the finishing to give people great hand-rubbed polished finishes. New competition emerged and I was unable to compete with their advertising and that made a great dint in my short turnaround setup work. I was doing alright and getting by until large bills were passed over to the mills tenants via the landlord for lift repairs as one tenant in the mill was constantly breaking the lift causing my eventual downfall at Hallam Mill.

I am very happy with everything that happened I got to build numerous instruments along the way and had a great time throughout meeting lots of great people and helping eveyone I could.

My Favourite Memory

One of my favourite memories of all time was this, one day brought in two carrier bags containing what was left of a 1960 Hofner Guitar that was in pieces. Broken neck the neck off the body and bits and pieces including a destroyed pickup. While the body was in rough shape it was not that badly damaged, apartently this had belonged to their father and he had toured it around europe when he was a lad and they wanted to restor it. So I set about doing that for them. I was fourtunate as hofner had just moved factories at the time and a lot of the missing parts I could buy. So I did all that and reasembled the guitar for them. None of that would stand out for me as this was somthing I did quite a lot what stood out for me was when the guitar was when the guitar was collected. The two brothers cane down with their whole family and I found out the story of this particular guitar. It had had a headstock break and had been tucked away to be fixed one day the two lads by their own admission where a bit of tearways and had found the guitar and smashed it up one day taking the neck off the body. The father was upset about this and threw the guitar out, they had rescued it from the bin and over the years moved it from house to house keeping what was left safe until they could fix it.

When they came in to collect it it was all laughs and jokes and for the first time round he did not believe that this was his guitar, he thought it was a replacement once they explaind where it had been where it had been moved to how they had found me and how they had put this plan togehter to get this fixed for his birthday, he began to belive it, I went through the story again how I had fixed the guitar brounght all of the parts together to make it look brand new again and thats the day I made grown man cry, yes that is your original guitar from the 60's that broke and then your kids broke it even more and you thought got thrown away. No they saved it from the bin and have held on to it for 20-30 years before finally finding myself and getting restored. Best day of my life still to this day. This was the beauty of my early career and happened on more than a couple of occasions and those memories are the most cherished for me.

This was not the best of times to be honest, after my failure to keep my business going in Hallam Mill I ended up moving to Pear Mill to work within a music shop, this shop was an internet trader so a very volatile business, 1p price differences could make all the difference to sales although that was none of my business really, I was just there to help customers, to be an independent voice about the quality instruments, I could even get someone to buy a guitar that was a bit unsatisfactory upgrade it into a fantastic instrument that was always a good one to do and I did make some well-constructed instruments with below average sounds into truly great sounding instruments.

I did very well here financially working through lots of repairs and modifications and also did refinishing using the spray booth across the road, the only issue was I was dulling the pain of my failure to keep my own workshop at this point in time. As I said I did do well. Perhaps to well with this becoming an issue for the owner later in my time there and there were incidents between me and him that caused me to want to leave as soon as possible. The one good thing I can say about this place was it was always at a constant temperature, nice and warm due to some computer servers being located in the next unit over the place. I worked for a lot of individuals and families sorting out numerous instruments.

I had a very small space just barely enough to do the work that I did, it was defiantly a squeeze with all of my machinery as I did not want to work much on the shop floor with my work as the danger of leaving tools around could be hazardous so I just tried to keep myself out the way do my work keep my head down and get on with my days as best as I could, to be honest, I did not like one individual in that worked in that place at the end of my time there. It is just part of my history and as such must be recorded.

At the start, there was plenty of work for myself to do and I did bring in a lot of customers to the shop that must have helped them out. I worked well and completed so many jobs, the photos are a bit light on the ground as I only really recorded a few of the guitars that passed over my desk as there simply was never enough time to do anything properly there, I did my work to the highest standard just everything else was done at a bit of a rushed pace.

Famous Clients

I did get to build a few guitars at this location, so it was well worth retaining the wood working equipment. I worked for many artists one of note would be the 1975 there are others that I just can not remember and never recorded the details of.

To get myself out of the music shop I decided to open the guitar building school, myself and a couple of my customers had always spoken about this after witnessing the rise of the Baileys school, in-fact I remember seeing him build a guitar at one of the 3 days guitar shows that where done at that time. I think this was just after the bus building and just before his school opened and it was very inspiring.

This time I was determined to make a success of the business and gave it my all perhaps giving it too much of my time. I kept my head down and concentrated on my new endeavor, it was far more popular than I could ever imagine I just thought it would be a bit of fun that would last a couple of years, then some years later I was still at it full throtal, in 2017-2019 I decided to slow down a bit, do less courses and do more customer builds to allow me the time to build the workshop up better and to spend some time getting into CNC, as that is the future of instrument building as I could see many builders coming through utalizing this technology, we were doing lots of CNC touches on guitars, outsourcing the work and I really wanted to learn the skills to do more with this technology myself.

In the yearly years I had a lot of customers from all around europe coming to vist my workshop and build guitars with me and this was fantastic and lasted until we decided to come out of europe and that then ended abruptly, it was a bit of a bad moment in time as I had chosed the buisnesses location close to Manchester to attract customers from abroad.

Throughout this period of time I was involved with many repairs for the touring musicians and also a number of vintage instrument repairs. I also completed a lot of builds for customers inbetween the courses. I just ended up working flat out with this large workload for far too long without any breaks.

Famous Clients

Customers that I have worked for during this period were, Airbourne and The Vamps and one of the best Manchester Bands The Chameleons that one of the head tutors Ted Lee from Leeds College of Music had worked for. Mark Burges is a top bloke and I thank him for spending time with me after my mother passed. I can not forget my good friend Richard Vernon of the Ricky Warwick and the Fighting Hearts who is another amazing person.

Thoughout the years I upgraded the workshop as much as I could do and reinvested a lot of the money along the way into getting new and better equipment. One thing I needed in the workshop was a better teaching area, in 2019 I stated work on this, unfortunatly I started to have a really bad run of luck building the workshop and trying to make new jigs to make the guitar building courses easier on my customers with a large number of things going wrong, mainly due to having zero experience building and trying to build jigs far too fast and taking the majority of the work on myself with a little bit of help from others, my energy must have been off due to the fatigue of running the buisness and working constanly and I was becoming more difficult to be with. In late 2019 I lost my mother that had a major impact uppon my happiness and soon after we entered into the lockdown pandemic period.

I greatly enjoyed the pandemic, I had a plan of action that I did not achieve wich is unfortunate as I was unorganised and pleased myself learning new skills in 3D CAD skills and I worked on some difficult projects whilst also doing some builds for people, just trying to do as much as I could do to cover the rent of the workshop as I had invested a lot of the money into the workshop and times were tough at this point in time.

After the lockdown I did not recover well as I had not followed my plan action and failed to reopen the school as I did not feel well enough. Rather than working on the tasks I knew I needed to do, I became very undisaplined. Nothing seemed worth it after my mothers death and making sure everyone else was ok was my main priority rather than concentrating on myself and the difficult tasks and builds I needed to complete. the break has been instramental to me allowing me to reset and refocus and feel ready to move forwards and take on the chalanges that you face running a buisness again.

After this wounderful break and sorting out some person issues I feel I can come back stronger and better than before, and I am looking forwards to the challanges in the future. Things I should have done and will do as I move forwards!

I found it hard to relinquish control, employ staff and took everything on myself, running and organizing the courses doing repair work and completeing my builds for customers even going so far as to do my own accounting at the end of the year. In-fact it has been a relief shutting down for a while and smothing I needed to do to help me readjust and refocus.

Now as I write this so that I now with the experience and knowlege I have had I am in the best place I can be to move forwards. Find a new workshop set up my master plan for guitar building courses, build the best guitar building workshop capable of doing a vast range of tasks to bring you the best instruments you could desire. Weather you allow us to build them on your behalf or you come in and build your own under out supervision!

I know I can improve massively upon what I did first time round and I can not wait to meet you there.

Over the years I have worked though some of the most volitile periods of time. Its been tough being a self employed instrument repairer and maker, I found something I love doing and will contiue to do it to the best of my abilities. I am looking forwards to adding a new chapter on here in the coming years and letting you all know how things progress!

It is my firm belief we are merely the current custodians of the instrument we play and that at this point in time, the enjoyment that instruments bring to you will be enjoyed by another and who knows how long they will survive, I have brought them back from desturction many times, if there is enough of it left then it can be rebuilt.

No one individual will ever know everything about the subject, those that choose to specialize their knowledge to a particular brand can tell you amazing things about that particular subject and I can always find something new that amazes me. There are people out there doing amazing things creating wonderful instruments that all serve a function, showing the best of nature with the finest figured timbers, it seems to be a human endeavor to constantly re-imagining musical instruments we love and create new things, sounds as a ways of accessing new musical styles.

With the rise of machine building many more people are getting into instrument building can get into this. Anyway, I diverged there a little bit.