Hi & thanks for joining me once again on the blog journey. Since I’ve been living in Bristol it’s become wholly apparent that this city thrives as a legendary cultural powerhouse, globally celebrated for its rebellious underground music scene, theatre and even boundary-pushing street art! With every cultural city comes the need for musicians to practice, learn and develop.
When I record singers in the studio I always work with you to bring to best from your recorded voice in pitch, tone and quality. T-Bone Tunes has partnered with local Bristol singing teachers who can deepen your skills even further training you with warm-ups and perfecting the right anatomical techniques to truly excel in singing confidence in the studio and on stage.
Guy Hughes
Trained at the Royal Academy of Music, Guy Hughes leads www.thevocalstudio.co.uk. He offers expert singing lessons and vocal coaching for performers and adults across various genres, combining professional theatre experience with specialised technical training. Guy visits T-Bone Tunes regularly and uses the studio as his Bristol recording studio outside of his lessons.
Claire Groom
Claire Groom is a skilled vocal coach and former opera singer in Bristol. She runs her studio, focusing on safe technique, vocal health, and anatomy, helping all students build confidence. Claire lessons take place five minutes walk from T-Bone Tunes recording studio on Chesterfield Road BS6. www.bristolschoolofvoice.com
Jenna Brown
Jenna Brown is a leading Bristol-based singing teacher, vocal health specialist, and founder of www.bristolvoicecare.co.uk. Combining her classical training with expert knowledge in vocal rehabilitation, she offers a holistic, person-centred approach for singers of all levels. She also works locally as a choral coach and educator, helping students unlock healthy, confident, and expressive voices.
As I continue to share my journey through the music and pro-audio industry—from Melbourne to London, back to Melbourne, and now on to Bristol—I’ve met many colleagues with great stories who provide excellent service.
When I needed the studio bass guitar serviced, I came across Eltham Jones while he was still based at Mickleburge in Stoke Croft. I was pleasantly surprised to receive such a warm welcome—both personally and in his genuine interest in my Fender Jazz Bass (in Fiesta red, I might add).
Eltham suggested a change the pickups and on a gut instinct followed his recommendation. The result was outstanding. Although now semi retired he is still very, passionate, knowledgeable and connected. Take a read through our quick-fire interview it’s a great read!
Hey Eltham thanks for joining in my quick-fire interviews series. Can you tell readers what first got you into working on guitars, and how did that turn into a full-time business?
I’d been studying Psychology at University when my parents marriage broke up. I couldn’t continue studying so I ended up in the library looking for alternative careers. On my way out there was a notice up looking for students for a full time course in Viol making at something called the “Musical Instrument Technology Centre” located about a mile from my house. I’d always been fascinated by early instruments since seeing a Lute maker interviewed on a Welsh TV programme, “Hamdden” (translation: hobbies or leisure activities) and I’d followed all of the late David Munrow’s programmes like “Ancestral Voices”. So it seemed like an opportunity to good to miss.
I was too late to enrol for the course, but I was offered a place on a government job creation scheme based at the school which solved my immediate financial problems and studied guitar making at evening course during the first year while working full time on all sorts of other instruments during the day. At the end of the first year I transferred to the full time course as a student. By this time the finances had stabilised and I was able to scratch a living by employing my skills as a commercial sculptor and pattern maker, which I continued to do after I’d left the college, which had now been rebranded “The Welsh School of Stringed Instrument Making and Repair”.
I continued as a sculptor/pattern maker for a couple of years until about 1982, when Hohner bought British Music Strings in Bedwas and I was inveigled by a friend into becoming their on-site guitar tech for about six years before getting into the retail side of things with Cranes Musical Instruments in Cardiff; so I kind of tripped and accidentally fell into the business. There was never anything like a plan…
Eltham, what’s something most guitar players don’t realise about keeping their instrument in good shape?
The importance of regular maintenance and attention to detail. I spend my life fixing connections that have broken because pots and sockets have been allowed to work loose and chew up wiring inside. Tuners that break because the threaded ferrules have been left loose. Guitars that don’t stay in tune because the player has wrapped a yard of string on the spindle so the first time you tug it the tuning just collapses. For pity’s sake, get a spanner and learn how to use it.
You’ve worked on a lot of different guitars over the years—do any memorable or unusual repairs stand out.
There are several. The first one that comes to mind was a bass guitar – I think it was a Warwick, or a Spector – and the neck had broken, but it wasn’t a regular crack; there was a vertical rift running through the headstock and about eighteen inches down the line of the neck, in addition to a complex hinge fracture. “I’ve taken it to three people and they’ve all said that it can’t be fixed, but they’ve all said to take it to you”. My first response was “I’m very flattered but what makes them think I have any magic in my fingers that they don’t have” but I never like to concede defeat and it was a slow period, so I agreed to take a look.
One of my favourite tools is the Spanish Windlass. It’s basically like a tourniquet; a loop of cord twisted with a rod, which allows you to apply vectored tensile force to a joint, and it’s the sort of thing that works where compressive clamps don’t. It’s main use is to keep a hinge fracture closed or open while glue is applied before applying compression clamps, but in this case I was able to contrive a network of these that applied torque and pressure to the complex fractal break that allowed the whole thing to come back together rather neatly. The oil finish of the bass helped, because high gloss finishes are much hard to repair then low gloss oil ones. I’ve got a photo somewhere of it on my bench, with all the clamps and cordage attached, looking like the rigging of Renaissance era galleon.
For someone bringing their guitar in for the first time, what can they expect from a proper setup or service?
I’ve had people come to me expecting – even wanting – a level of service that they don’t need; sometimes because they’ve misdiagnosed the problem, sometimes because they’ve been led to believe – often by online ‘experts’ who haven’t seen the guitar – that this is what they need.
I lost one customer who insisted that I should just do what the customer wants rather than
second-guess their requirements. I take the view that if what they want isn’t going to fix the problem, but something else would, then it’s my job to advise accordingly. In this case he wanted to spend over £200 on a refret he didn’t need, when the only problem was that his guitar hadn’t been properly set up. There are sound reasons for wanting a refret, but this wasn’t one of them and, if I’d been unethical, I could have just taken his money, delivered a refretted guitar, included the set up that is standard with all refrets anyway and sent him away happy but with a guitar that was substantially no different than if I’d just done the set up for a quarter of the price; but I would have felt like a fraud.
My motto is “Don’t tell me the solution; tell me the problem. The solution is my department”.
If you could give every guitarist one simple piece of advice to improve their instrument or sound, what would it be?
Forget about trying to be someone else. Buying those strings that Tommy Emmanuel uses won’t make you into Tommy Emmanuel. A friend wrote a song called “Sounds like me”. The lyrics listed all the gear and devices he’d bought over the years in an attempt to emulate his heroes but lamented that in the end he “just sounds like me”.
One single, simple piece of advice though? Pay attention to your strings. I don’t mean just the condition or the gauge. The string is the interface between you and the guitar. It takes what you do, and translates it into a form of energy that the guitar can use. This is a huge subject, so I’ll try to condense it as much as possible.
Most people are accustomed to the idea of the scale length and the tension of the string being related, but it’s so much more complex than that. If you have a guitar with a trapeze tailpiece, for example, like an Epiphone Casino, the same strings you put on a stop tailpiece 335 will feel softer on a Casino because the tailpiece “harp” will absorb some of the stretch when you press the string down and the string will also vibrate with a wider excursion arc because this increase in what we engineers call “compliance” allows the string to move further before the increase in tension hits that point of dynamic equilibrium that allows resonance to occur. This will affect things like how much arc relief you need in the fingerboard and how low you can get the action.
The same top E string on a Les Paul will require less bending than on a Strat because of two things: the position of the tuner is closer to the nut on a Les Paul and the LP has a stop tailpiece while the strat has a floating tremolo bridge as well.
Make sure tuners are tight and stable and that your string wrap is neat. If your string wrap is sloppy and untidy this will pull top end sustain from your string, making them sound wooly as well as lacking pitch stability. Tone is subjective, but an unruly string wrap will always make it worse.
In 2009, when I moved back to Melbourne – the city where I was raised – I was reunited, by an incredible coincidence, with old friend Sebastian from my university days. Over the years, Seb had built himself into a high-end designer, producer, and international seller of Class A valve recording equipment.
We recently caught up at one of our favourite coffee spots in Northcote. We talk for hours from music to life and back to music. He agreed to answer five key questions for my blog readers – offering insight into what has made his gear and business the independent success it is today. T-Bone Tunes studio houses his dual valve preamplifiers from 2009 that gets used on a regular basis for that clean yet warm characterful tone.
Seb, your gear is often described as having a strong sonic character—when artists plug into a Sebatron unit, what kind of emotional or creative response are you hoping to inspire in their performances?
Naturally the aim is to get the artist to feel as comfortable and confident as possible so that the performance that is captured is closest to what the artist has envisioned. Once this is established the channels of creativity should be unobstructed so that the flow of ideas is unhindered. At no point should the sonics of the performance be a concern to the artist as that should all be taken care of with the gear.
When you’re developing a new piece of gear, how much do you think about the artist’s experience in the moment of recording, as opposed to the engineer shaping the sound afterward?
During product development it is important for me to maintain an objective approach with design so that the product can have a wide application. In regard to the artist we try to make the layout of the designs as user friendly and straightforward as possible to minimise any decision making that could slow down their work.
Our preamps have direct inputs on the front panel and all parameters easily accessible for quick adjustments. With the preamps the primary idea is to apply some mild colouration during tracking so that less processing is required in the mixdown and mastering stages.
By careful design and trimming the parameters so that the most musical settings are set closest to ‘default’ when the unit is used we get close. By this I mean adjusting the ranges of the relevant parameters so that it is difficult to make things sound ‘bad’…
Many artists talk about chasing a feeling in a single take. How do Sebatron designs aim to help capture something authentic and immediate, rather than something overly polished?
As mentioned, applying some mild colouration during the tracking process is part of the key. The average digital recording system has a dynamic range of around 90 to 120 db yet after real world adjustments and ambient noise the listening environment only facilitates around 60 to 80 db. That means that subtleties and sounds of articulation often get lost because of masking or simply drop out.
In earlier days when recording to tape one could rely on tape compression to knock down peaks so that the dynamic range could fit. Nowadays the tendency with digital recording is to squash it in mastering. By applying some mild colouration during tracking we can mitigate the amount of compression used during mastering which makes the sound more natural and authentic.
Seb, tell us do you involve musicians or producers during your development process? If so, can you share an example where artist feedback directly changed the direction of a product?
Where appropriate we try to include as much external feedback and input as possible. That involves getting prototypes out to various producers or engineers and making adjustments if necessary to suit their requirements. It also involves deep conversation about details in sound and sound manipulation.
In one example a producer mentioned the requirement of separate side-chain inputs for the compressors so that he could ‘duck’ vocal tracks when certain instruments were active. That made sense so we included them.
Some artists want gear that disappears, while others want it to add colour. How do you approach designing equipment that can support different artistic identities without getting in the way of the performance?
Moderation is important and a set of aesthetics that define the sonic strategy of the design have to be established early on. Generally speaking the two main categories that the artists usually fall into are experimental and non-experimental.
If we are designing for the experimental then something that can overly manipulate the sounds is encouraged. Rules can be broken in design and what passes through may have little resemblance to what was sent in. On the other hand , a non-experimental approach means sticking to the rules and referring to classic formats. By evaluating all these perspectives and approaches we get the Sebatron design.
Meet Jenna Brown, the founder of Bristol Voice Care Network.
The city of Bristol has a rich tapestry of creatives and there’s a certain supportiveness that comes with being in a compact city. T-Bone Tunes joined the Bristol Voice Care Network in 2025. The network is a specialist support circle of vocal, voice, singing experts. I sat down with founder Jenna and asked a few questions about the networks creation, how it operates and what the future is for singing, voice care and musicians!
Hey Jenna can you share what inspired you to start Bristol Voice Care Network and how your personal journey with voice performance and research has shaped the practice’s approach?
In my work as a professional classical singer, my colleagues and I experienced vocal fatigue, coughs and colds, and other ailments that made performing challenging. On top of this, the demands of travel and juggling a busy freelance portfolio were just exhausting, and that’s before you even consider the impact of non-work/non-singing life on the voice (we all know that feeling of a lump in the throat when we experience an intense emotion, like grief).
When I started teaching singing, my students also often reported these issues, especially those who sang as a hobby in choirs or at open-mic events, and children and young people going through voice change, as well as women experiencing hormone-related voice challenges. So, I was curious to learn more about how I could support myself, my colleagues and my students.
What are some of the most common misconceptions about vocal health you encounter from clients, and how do you help people overcome them?
There are many vocal myths out there. A couple that stand out are that you can’t eat dairy products if you want to be a good singer. It’s not true. There are very few people in the world who actually cannot eat dairy, and if you think about the anatomy, nothing we eat or drink touches the vocal cords, or it shouldn’t – it goes down the other tube!
Another one I hear a lot is that if you have a cold, you need total vocal rest. That’s quite an old-fashioned view, and often it is better to keep the voice going and moving. Obviously, you need to use common sense, and if something hurts, stop. But for most people, after the initial stages of a cold, it is safe and sensible to continue using your voice gently. To overcome any misconceptions, the best thing is education. I teach people about their voices and also look at the anatomy and physiology in a not too daunting way
A lot of musicians deal with performance anxiety — can you explain how voice-focused strategies and coaching (such as those in your referral network) support artists not just technically but mentally before a performance?
I think a key thing to realise with performance anxiety is that for singers in particular, the instrument – the voice – is inseparable from the body. The voice is both instrument and identity, so anxiety can disrupt breath, muscle coordination, resonance, and cognitive focus simultaneously. Voice-focused strategies, therefore, work best when approached at the level of the whole person. At Bristol Voice Care, support is grounded in this integrated model. Rather than treating anxiety as something separate from technique, the work helps singers understand how a heightened nervous system response affects their voice and how specific breath regulation, semi-occluded vocal tract exercises, and pacing strategies can restore stability and agency before stepping on stage.
When singers understand what is happening physiologically, anxiety reduces. In this way, technical preparation becomes psychological preparation and we can move from simply coping with anxiety to developing a grounded, embodied understanding of it as a part of performance that can make it exciting and full of possibilities. That can take time, but we have a range of practitioners and strategies available to help people find the best way towards that vocal freedom.
What practical daily warm-up or recovery routines would you recommend to musicians of different genres (e.g., rock, jazz, classical) to maintain strong, resilient vocal health throughout a busy rehearsal or gig schedule?
A warm-up or cool-down protocol doesn’t necessarily need to be genre specific (although there may be times, especially with extreme vocals, where you want to prioritise certain exercises over others). The general principles can apply to anyone. The first of these is to use your voice daily. Sometimes we need a rest, and recognising that is part of looking after your voice; however, most of the people I work with who have some vocal issues aren’t warming up regularly. Adding 10-15 minutes to the start of your day to for vocal warm ups is a great first step.
You might also notice I said 10-15 mins – yes! That’s all it needs to be. The other common mistake people can make is warming up for too long. Try out your voice for 10 mins of gently warm up, and if it is working, stop. If it is not working, stop (!) and come back to it later (I take this advice from Pavarotti!)
A cool down is a similar 5-10 minutes process – the simplest version of which is a reversal of the above process on descending scale patterns! One of the things we help singers with is to build bespoke warm-up and cool-down routines, so get in touch for more info!
Looking ahead, what goals or developments do you have for Bristol Voice Care Network in terms of services, research, or community impact?
Looking ahead, I see the future of Bristol Voice Care Network developing in three interconnected ways. The first is strengthening our research profile. Because my own work and publications sit at the intersection of voice pedagogy, vocal health, and performer wellbeing, I’m keen to further embed research into the clinic’s everyday practice. That means building stronger partnerships with universities, contributing to peer-reviewed outputs, and developing practice-based research drawn directly from the work we do with singers and professional voice users.
A second priority is expanding and refining our specialist client services, particularly around vocal massage and manual therapy. We’re increasingly aware of how much jaw, tongue, neck, and thoracic tension can affect both vocal function and performance confidence. My goal is to develop a more structured pathway for vocal massage within Bristol Voice Care — from preventative pre-performance sessions to rehabilitation support and longer-term maintenance plans.
Finally, I’m very committed to deepening our community impact. I’d like Bristol Voice Care Network to play a larger role in preventative education — offering workshops, screenings, and collaborative events for choirs, educators, conservatoires, and independent artists.
Solid State Logic SSL 18 Interface Enters The Studio
Pleased to announce the addition of the latest interface by Solid State Logic has been added to the studio.
This brings the total number of analogue inputs my studio offers to 32!! Why so many you ask?
With the advent and resurgence of hands-on analogue synthesisers, groove boxes and drum machines we can now set while productions up and record in one go!
Guitars, microphones, synth, effects and other new gear all ready to rock!
