GOACOUSTIC PICKUP SYSTEM places where the standards for audio quality were set by people who treated the signal chain as a serious engineering problem. When Belmont acquired the Nashville location of Ocean Way, Greco came with it, and Shaw spent four years learning under him, developing the kind of ear that comes only from sustained immersion in professional-grade audio: learning to hear the differences between circuits, learning to identify frequency ranges by sound alone, learning what the components inside a Neve or SSL console actually do, and why the engineers who built those tools made the choices they made.
He also found himself attracted to broken vintage equipment, figuring out what failed, locating a discontinued component, reverse engineering it, designing a replacement circuit board, and bringing the whole thing back to working condition. He would take a mixing console built in the 1980s and convert it to the specifications of a 1960s design, chasing a sonic quality that the newer version had traded away for convenience.
When Shaw turned his attention to acoustic guitar electronics, the category looked, to his trained eye, like a problem that had simply stopped trying.
■ Picasso model in Malaysian blackwood, with an end grain sapwood.
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