The Avonator

The Background

The whole mad-science trip started in the mid-90s with a £50 lawsuit-era Avon Les Paul copy I scored off a mate. It looked the part but weighed about as much as a piece of balsa wood. My first act of vandalism was to rip the guts out of a Rocktek Phaser and hardwire it straight into the body right below the bridge. Somehow it actually worked. The DIY bug bit hard, and that poor Avon was permanently in the crosshairs.

A few years down the road I got a wild itch: what if the guitar just strummed its self? Free up both hands to attack the fretboard and pull off impossible chords without shredding my fingers.

The Process

So, I went full Frankenstein. Ripped out the neck pickup because I only cared about that biting bridge tone anyway, and literally took a hammer and chisel to the body. Carved a massive, ugly squarish hole straight through the wood to mount an 80mm PC case fan. I grabbed one with blue LEDs because that was the early-2000s vibe, and strapped a zip-tie to the fan blade so it would physically thrash the strings as it spun.

To rig the controls, I gutted the old pickup switch and threw in a power toggle, then swapped the dead neck knobs for two speed-control pots: one for broad strokes, one for fine-tuning the chaos. I wasn't about to let 9-volt batteries die mid-set, so I built a custom 12v power supply for my pedalboard. Snaked a shielded XLR cable around my electric blue signal cord, drilled a new XLR input right next to the standard jack, and fed this monster straight from the floor.

A splash of matt black paint, some unnecessarily large control knobs (sourced from Maplin and intended for a cooker), and a cut-up sink strainer to cover the gaps around the fan, and the job was done.

The Result

The Avonator was born. It looked absurd, but the noise was massive. When that fan spun up and the zip-tie started smacking the strings, it kicked out this huge, percussive swell of sound, with just a hint of motor-whine in the background. I tuned the whole rig to a droning D–A–D–A–D–D. It was a complete wall of noise. For Interloper and Pure Science Fiction, I just let it rip open and went at it with a slide. I didn't actually own a slide, so I found a metal tube that was part of my desk. It was brutal, raw, and perfect for bouncing off the strings to trigger sharp attacks against the drone.

The Response

When we finally dragged this beast on stage in 2006, people lost their minds. The crowd's reaction was a solid 50/50 split between genuine (justifiable) concern for my sanity and audible exclamations of "What in the fuck is that?!"

I’d flick the toggle, the blue lights would flare, the fan would scream, and suddenly the madness made some kind of sense. Best compliment I ever got? Walking out of a venue to load the gear and hearing someone yell, "Look! It’s that crazy guitar guy!" I’d never felt more seen.