"My fascination with audio started when I was 14 years old, utilising my father's HMV record player, which had microphone inputs. I turned my headphones into a microphone of sorts by plugging my headphones into the microphone input and reversing their polarity. I then spread the headphones over the body of my nylon string classical guitar, creating my first electric guitar.
Another trick was stacking pennies on the record stylus needle, which would slow the record down. This enabled me to learn guitar parts, such as in the first song I learnt, Peter Gunn. But the song would also be driven into a lower key due to the changing of the speed, and hence pitch. So I had to then raise the notes by moving up the fretboard of my guitar with each penny that I took off the stylus, until the correct key was obtained.
Later, with the invent of portable cassette player 'ghetto blasters' with record functions, I would record to cassette tape some rhythmic chords. I would use a second ghetto blaster to record my first take as I overdubbed lead guitar parts, creating my first multi-track recordings. It felt like I had invented multitracking! As time passed, my father purchased a Minimoog synthesiser for me and from this I learnt through envelope modification the basics of synthesis and bending sine waves.
The next step was to create a recording studio. By the time I was 19, I erected a small garden shed in the lounge room of my rented house to make what is called a 'dry sound' when recording on my multitrack reel-to-reel system. In this way, I produced my first album on cassette entitled Hold On, and later my second album, Moods of the Didgeridoo, which was the highest selling album of any independent artist in Western Australia at the time- selling over 10,000 copies, mostly overseas, through an outlet called Creative Native.
After playing in many bands, and with members from other world-famous bands, I entered the festival scene as a solo guitarist. I was accepted to play at the Nannup Festival in Western Australia as one of the headline acts. There, the Fairbridge Festival director Steve Barnes heard me play, and approached me backstage to tell me that he thought that he had been listening to two guitarists playing. He asked me if I would like to play at Fairbridge Festival, and this led me to play at many other festivals, including Port Ferry Festival, Cabargo Festival, Canberra National Festival, Woodford Folk Festival, Cygnet Folk Festival, Illawarra Folk Festival, Folk By the Sea Festival, Tamworth Country Music Festival, Edinburgh Festival, and St Albans Festival, where I was one of the headline acts and placed on the front cover of the festival program.
The second festival I had played at, Fairbridge, was inspirational as I was placed not only as a solo artist, but also onstage in a concert called Guitar Heaven- with the likes of guitarists such as my fellow Scot, Tony McManus, and pedal steel guitar player Lucky Oceans. From there, I was offered two recording contracts; one in the Benelux, the other with Roustabout Records / Larrikin Records.
The rest is a convoluted mix of audio engineering, lecturing positions at TAFE, and a myriad of other jobs unrelated to music, which kept my passion for music flowing. Among these positions was providing music therapy for the profoundly autistic, along with running my own full-blown recording studio with all the benefits of acoustification, floating rooms, non-parallel walls, and so on. After recording hundreds of musicians, I learnt that my main goal in recording is to manifest the sound and expression of what the musician intends, along with my own input. Today, I run a recording studio named Big Ears Recording Studio, incorporating decades of experience along with such equipment as Universal Audio, Trident mixing consoles, Motu, Neumann, Avalon, and so much more."
- Marcus Sturrock
