COVER FEATURE WILKINSON
month would have been impossible. Someone had to be first. I’ve been in meetings with investors who know a little bit about rock n roll and their first comment is always: ‘We need to sell it to Fender’. But my call has always been, Fender can have it with pleasure – but I’ve worked with companies like Fender and Ibanez in the past and what they want is exclusivity. Why would I want to give it to a company that has 20 per cent of the market and thus alienate the remaining 80 per cent? If I offer it to the other 80 per cent, that 20 per cent has to have it anyway – or be left behind.” One can only imagine the wrangling
that must have gone on behind the scenes as Wilkinson sought to persuade fellow board members and investors of this point of view. And yet his logic is hard to fault.
“I’m not bad-mouthing Fender and
Gibson – they’ve both been good customers of mine in the past – but they don’t sell guitars any more, they sell nostalgia and they don’t have to try as hard as the other guys. You’ve got an awful lot of customers of my age who played guitar, never did anything with it, went into business, made a few bob and later in life decided they always promised themselves a Les Paul or a Strat. But they’re not looking at the guitar, they’re looking at the nostalgia. “The key to this has been developing a tool that the guitar player can use on stage with confidence, not to show how clever we are. It doesn’t take away from his art – that is our guiding principle. “As I say, we were never going to get it on everybody’s guitar at once. Somebody
30 miPRO OCTOBER 2010
will be first and after a few years of argy- bargy with various guitar companies, someone had to be willing to go first and it turned out that nobody – nobody – said ‘All right, Trev – I’ll have some of that’ except for Dennis at JHS.
As long as it’s black And what did happen was epitomised by the reaction of ‘a major guitar retailer’ in the USA who, while apparently loving the system, opined that no one would pay $1,599 for a Korean-made guitar. No matter that Korean guitars can be better made than US-produced ones, or that it featured a player-friendly self-tuning system that actually worked Which isn’t to say that the
aforementioned guitar chain was wrong. Guitarists, as everyone in the industry knows, can make the Women’s Institute look radical and edgy. “I’m not knocking dealers, because I know they’re having a tough time, but I sometimes just wish these two impediments to sales – dealers and distributors – would give the consumer some credit for making the choice. I know they see it as a gamble, but f we’d have thought making the ATD was too much of a gamble, I’d have gone fishing instead. If nobody takes a gamble, how the hell are we going to move forward? This attitude even hurt Leo Fender. He wanted to make a better guitar than a 62 Strat and he used to say to me: ‘Trevor, why do people want to buy my old guitars? They’re junk?’ Well, they weren’t junk, but I know what he was saying. His G&L guitars were, to him, better. He did till the day he died – tried to make a better mousetrap.“
The waiting game To bring things back to the present, the ATD system, for now, can be found solely on the Fret King Super-Matic guitar but that raises the question of Wilkinson’s initial caveat when offered the chance to get involved – wasn’t it supposed to be available as a retro-fit for a Strat? “It’s do-able now, but I learned early on – especially when I introduced the Wilkinson roller nut, which got me into the business in 1984 – if you put something in a box and put it on the counter, the first question is “Does that work?“ If you can’t point him to a guitar
“
If Wilkinson is right, the appearance of
the ATD system on a variety of guitar brands will encourage this preternaturally conservative market to trust the idea. That should translate into increased guitar sales as ATD becomes the latest ‘must have’. Beyond that, the market for retro-fitting the device to Strats and copies should also grow – another welcome stimulus for sales which the industry doesn’t currently have. Which takes us back to the point about the difficulty of raising investment. “There’s an awful lot more that could be done with the ideas we have here.
I’m not bad-mouthing Fender or Gibson – they’ve been good customers of mine – but they don’t sell
guitars anymore. They sell nostalgia. Trevor Wilkinson
on the wall where he can see it working, you’ll never sell it. So we had to get it out OEM first. We’re playing a waiting game and if you pressed me for a date, I’d say it will be available as a retro-fit by next year. It could go tomorrow, but I feel I mustn’t take my energies away from selling it to other guitar companies.” Will we be seeing an ESP, Ibanez or Dean with the ATD any time soon? “I’m pretty confident that by the time NAMM 2011 comes around there will be quite a lot of major guitar companies that will have a prototype on show with this system. “
“The frustration is the fact that you
can’t get any money to develop anything. We don’t look after our own people in this country. There is so much more I could tell you that we could do with this and yet, even with sales in hand, still you can’t raise money from a bank. That’s another huge debt of thanks we have – to Richard Whittall and his family, without whom none of this could have happened. “None the less, in the ATD the MI industry has a new opportunity for increased business. Let’s hope its own innate cynicism doesn’t prevent it from seizing the chance.
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