Find him: There's this guy in Santa Monica named Armstrong. You may not know it, but this guy has had something to do with the Yellow Humper, the Orange Squeezer, Billy Wyman and the Skunk, not to mention plexiglass guitars with roving pickups.

You would have to follow Dan Armstrong a long way. From 48th Street in New York to factories in England to the West Coast, Armstrong's abiding interest in guitars and amps has taken him on a long trip. Through deals with big companies and not-so-big" companies, from studio sessions to repair shops; yeah, through the valley of the shadow of Big Bucks, Dan Armstrong has pursued one thing: Sound, and the means to convey it.

Armstrong is one of those people you will never see on The Midnight Special, but chances are that those you do see are using something that Armstrong designed or modified in some way. He is an inventor, quite simply; a guy who spends his time building guitars and gadgets. Like many designers, Armstrong decided to try his hand at it after discovering that the advice he was getting from others around him, especially guitar teachers, was less than good.

"I lost two guitars;" he said, "because teachers told me the necks were bad when all they really needed was a string change."

By the time he reached New York in 1960, Armstrong had learned how to take care of his own guitars. He went to work as a session 1 guitarist, and fixed other people's guitars as a sideline. By 1965, Dan Armstrong was running his own music shop across the street from Manny's on 48th Street in New York.

There in his repair shop, such people as Jeff "Skunk" Baxter (later of Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers fame) and Bill Lawrence (a pickup designer now based in Nashville) worked on guitars. The atmosphere was right for experimentation, and the guitar boom that hit the states in 1966 put Armstrong in the right place at the right time. There were about seven good guitar stores on 48th Street then, and the competition was fierce, but stimulating. To try and stay ahead of the other guys, Armstrong improvised.

"I am sure I was the first guy ever to put a flat transducer in an acoustic guitar," Armstrong declared. "I found these things that hospitals were using to measure pulse. They were little copper discs; we called them 'penny pickups' and we installed a lot of them way back then." Today, several companies thrive on such transducers.

When the Ampeg Co. came to Armstrong for some advice, Armstrong suggested that since Ampeg was in the amplifier business, they needed an electric guitar. An agreement was eventually reached, and the clear plexiglass guitars that bore Dan Armstrong's name went into production in 1968, The modular removable pickups in those guitars were a distinct departure from existing pickup designs. There were a total of 3,000 guitars and basses made in two years. Production was halted because of contract disagreements involving Ampeg's V-4 and VT-22 amplifiers, which Armstrong had designed. Today, those Dan Armstrong guitars are a rare and treasured, prize for many guitarists.

By 1971, Armstrong decided to close his shop, which had since moved from 48th Street to Greenwich Village, and later that year he moved to England. There, for the next five years, he pursued his inventions. As the operator of a small factory in England, Armstrong designed and built guitars and basses with sliding pickups. Several English players, including Rod Price of Foghat and Bill Wyman of the Stones, started using these instruments. (Wyman used one exclusively on the last U.S. tour; he also used the old Ampeg Dan Armstrong bass earlier in his career.)

Curiously, the, sliding pickup design showed up on an American-made bass, the Gibson Grabber, soon after Armstrong's idea began to catch on in England. Dan insists that his instruments were better, although only 600 of them ever made it to the U.S.

"My pickups were low-mass, low-impedance pickups, with an impedance transformer built in, which enabled me to build a very small pickup. The pickup itself was only about a quarter of an inch wide," Armstrong said. "And my pickups could be adjusted the full length of the available area, from neck to bridge. I had two pickups on some of my instruments, not just one. By placing the pickups in just the right spot, some very interesting sounds could be made. For example, with proper placement, and the pickups out of phase, the fundamental tone was completely cancelled out, and the whole guitar would play an octave higher—chords and everything!"

While in England, Armstrong met George Merriman, an electronics expert. Together they designed a series of small effects units for Musitronics, Inc. Mutron marketed such Armstrong goodies as the Orange Squeezer, the Yellow Humper, and the Green Ringer—all super-compact sound modification devices: distortion units, compressors, ring modulators, and so forth. One of the favorite "hot-rod" tricks of several custom repair shops in the country was installing these goodies inside guitars, and using micro-switches to activate them, thus freeing the musician from more cords and footpedals. The Mutron Octave Divider now on the market was designed by Dan Armstrong and George Merriman.

Another Armstrong creation on the market is the "Z-Plus" humbucking pickup assembly currently offered by Schecter Guitar Research. These pickups are unique, according to Armstrong, "because the two coils are not connected to each other mechanically in any way. Only one wire connect? the two coils, so that when you switch off to the single-coil mode (by means of a pull-pot on the tone control), the pickup is not loaded by a transformer-like structure that weighs down the pickup. The poles in the base plate of a regular humbucker are like a transformer core, and if you blank off one side of the coil, you are still loading and weighting down the 'live' side of the transformer. But in the case of the Z-Plus, that load does not occur, simply because the pole pieces do not touch anything metal."

The magnet used in the Z-Plus is ceramic. The smoothness of the response is what Armstrong was going for in the Z-Plus, and he's satisfied that the pickup is superior in that respect. Schecter also markets a wiring harness for Les Paul guitars which has a pull-pot on each of the four controls. When used in conjunction with two Z-Plus humbuckers, the guitarist can split either or both pickup coils, reverse the phase of the pickups, and/or switch from a series to parallel wiring configuration.

Armstrong feels that his pickup is the best on the market, although he admits that the industry trend toward custom guitar accessories took him by surprise.

"I didn't see it coming," he said. "It didn't occur to me that you could take a stock humbucker, drop in a big ceramic magnet and have an entirely new product, as was the case with the early DiMarzio pickups. But if you think about it, the Guitar Market and the auto industry parallel each other very closely. For example, there are a number of companies now making non-factory replacement parts for cars; the same thing is happening with guitars."

Custom guitar accessories and parts is a big market these days, and Companies like Schecter, DiMarzio, Charvel and Stars Guitars have tapped into that market with much success. Although he may not have seen it coming, Dan Armstrong, through his long career as guitarist, retailer, repairman, designer and inventor, has helped shape that market. And as he sees it, there is even more room for expansion in this area.

"My partner and I have developed a modification kit for Music Man amplifiers," Armstrong revealed. "We have a 'Hi-Lo Gain Switch' which, when installed in the right place, will make a Music Man sound just like a Marshall."

Armstrong also said that he and his partner, George Merriman, have been working hard at developing a transistorized amp that sounds "right" for rock guitar. That task has evaded many major amplifier manufacturers for at least the last ten to fifteen years. So far, no one has been able to make a transistor amp that suited the ears of guitarists well enough to pull them away from the old tube-type amps.

Dan Armstrong believes he has solved this challenging problem. As he put it, "The trick is to make the speaker flap. That is what happens in a tube amp, because the, output transformer presents a 'spongy' load to the speaker; it's not a real stiff load, like a transistor amp. So George and I have figured out a way to do-it without using an output transformer."

After more than 25 years in the business, Dan Armstrong may be on the verge of another major design innovation. Buteven if his newest venture doesn't turn the world of music upside down, he has already contributed more than most of us. Atta boy, Dan!.