Genesis

Renaissance Beginnings: Guitar, Audio & The Polymath Path

The first in a series exploring a generative journey through technology, music, and human coordination

When you look around society at large, you’ll find that most people are specialists who do one thing well. In fact, society incentivizes and rewards such behavior, which in turn shapes people in its image. I’m not one of those people.

For whatever reason, I’ve never been satisfied doing “just one thing” and have a drive to transcend disciplines while including new skills. Such people are often called “polymaths”, “generalists”, “multipotentiates”, “pantologists” or more simply “renaissance people”. We’re a minority in what seems like a sea of madness, but historically the most curious cats out there seem to fall into these categories: Plato, Pythagoras, DaVinci, Maynard James Keenan, Ted Nelson, Robert Fripp, Steve Jobs, and Sylvain Richard.

The Guitar as Gateway

The first skill I remember getting reasonably good at was the guitar, though it’s also the specialty I’m probably least proficient in since I learned without any particular framework or discipline. What started as teenage fascination with rock music on an electric guitar gradually matured into acoustic appreciation, but I wasn’t content to limit myself there.

I started picking up a cornucopia of other instruments: drums, bass, mandolin, harmonica, didgeridoo, and just about anything else physically available to me. This musical exploration opened doors I hadn’t expected - like many creative pursuits, one thing led naturally to another.

The guitar led to a passion project that still makes me smile: building a replica Gibson Les Paul from scratch. It was a one-time endeavor, but the craftsmanship involved taught me about materials, precision, and the physics of sound in ways no textbook could. More importantly, it sparked an interest in home recording that would eventually lead to a Masters degree in Audio Technology.

Beyond Music: Physical Coordination

En route to that masters, I took what might seem like a detour through circus arts, dance, and object manipulation. Combined with board sports, these pursuits helped hone my physical dexterity and coordination in ways that complemented my musical development.

Juggling, in particular, fascinated me with its own symbolic language called siteswap - a notation system for describing types of throws. The intersection of physical skill and abstract mathematical representation felt like a preview of deeper patterns I’d encounter later.

The Recording Years: From Festival Stages to Creative Commons

After finishing school, I decided to take a year out to earn cash for serious recording equipment - a top-of-the-range MacBook Pro and a second-hand Digidesign 002 desk from a professional musician. This investment would prove crucial for what came next.

A peer and I volunteered to do live sound at a music festival and ended up running a small tent with no scheduled acts. So we took on stage management duties, recruiting anyone we saw moving between stages with instruments. While scouring the waterlogged plains of the ironically named “Solace” festival, we stumbled upon a local Cork band called Neon Flea Circus.

We invited them to play - they obliged with a blistering gig, and we offered to record them. This project took on a life of its own across various locations, and with whatever equipment we could cobble together, we recorded a creative commons album that absolutely bloody rocked.

Since we were releasing the art for free, I became deeply interested in the commerce aspect of music marketing. I decided to handle album promotion for my final year project, working with both Neon Flea Circus and another band we met at Solace called “Sons of Gingerbread”. Surprisingly, we managed to turn a profit from releasing a free album in conjunction with a national tour and merchandise. These efforts earned me a first-class degree and a scholarship for a masters program.

Masters Research: The Deep Questions

During my two-year part-time masters, I spent time investigating how we subjectively interpret sound, driven by the fundamental question: “What is music?”

This inquiry led me to prototype ‘musical’ distortion units in MaxMSP, tracking and manipulating fundamental frequencies. Surround sound recording techniques caught my attention too - I wanted to understand how we capture the sound of physical environments and reproduce such richness in our living rooms.

I experimented with various techniques leveraging head-related transfer functions: binaural heads, Hamasaki squares, and optimized cardioid triangles. All were different models for mapping acoustic terrain in various ways.

Eventually, my research culminated in the age-old debate of analogue versus digital - specifically tubes versus transistors. This investigation surfaced the inherent laws of vibration and what Pythagoras meant when he proclaimed “the octave never repeats.”

The breakthrough came when I discovered that tubes produce second-order (rather than third-order) harmonic distortion, leading to intermodulation frequencies (sum and difference) and giving rise to the Pythagorean musical scale at smaller and smaller fractal dimensions. The mathematics of music had revealed itself through technology.

Self-Indulgence and Sonic Depth

For my masters project, I decided to get self-indulgent, writing and recording a concept album in 5.1 surround sound. The production turned out well - lyrics, songwriting, musicianship, and recording all came together - though I’ll admit it wasn’t as life-affirming as the Fleas material I’d previously poured my heart into.

The more sterile “professional” spaces seemed to reduce the music’s dimensionality, even if the sonic depth was of higher fidelity. It scratched an itch for self-expression and let me wear many hats, but it taught me something important about the relationship between technical perfection and soul.

Lessons in Making and Meaning

These early years established patterns that would define my approach to everything that followed. I learned that curiosity could bridge seemingly unrelated domains - from guitar building to acoustic physics, from festival management to music marketing, from juggling notation to harmonic mathematics.

More importantly, I discovered that the most meaningful projects often emerged from necessity and serendipity rather than planning. The Neon Flea Circus project succeeded because we said yes to an opportunity and figured out how to make it work. The masters research yielded insights because I refused to accept simple answers to complex questions.

The polymath path isn’t just about collecting skills - it’s about finding the hidden connections between disciplines and using those intersections to create something new. Each domain I entered enriched my understanding of the others, creating a foundation that would prove essential as I moved from sound waves to light shows, from analog circuits to blockchain protocols.

What’s Next

This foundation in music, technology, and creative production would soon lead me into the world of live entertainment - running sound and lights for clubs and venues across London. But that’s a story for the next post, where the lessons learned in bedroom studios would scale up to nightclub sound systems, and where learning through necessity would become a defining characteristic.

The guitar had opened the first door. Many others were waiting.

*Next in the series: “From Sound Waves to Light Shows: Technical Theater Years” - where bedroom recording skills meet the demands of London’s nightlife scene. *