Pete Cornish

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Pete Cornish is a British designer of electric guitar effects and other electronic musical instruments. He has worked for The Who, David Gilmour, Brian May, and many others^[1].

[edit] History

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"I was in bed with one of those childhood illnesses at the age of eight or so," Pete begins," when my mother brought me a copy of 'Practical Wireless' to read. The stuff I read in that magazine seemed to be more interesting than playing football, keeping mice or tying knots in pieces of string- the usual hobbies of all young men - and I was hooked from then. My uncle was very good with radios, and other mechanical and electrical things, and he gave me my first soldering iron and encouraged me a lot - I used to go and stay with him and help him build radios and amplifiers."

The hobby of Pete's youth soon turned into the start of a career. "I was boringly keen on maths and physics at school and when it was time to move on my mother found an advert in the paper for apprenticeships with the Ministry of Aviation (a government department) as they were seeking people for training to inspect and evaluate military equipment. I went for the interview and was accepted - there were only 16 places available in the country and I got one of them."

Pete's basic training was in workshop technology and here he learned to torture-test equipment to determine it's suitability for field use." We were working in absolutes - firing things from guns and dropping them out of aircraft - it must work when it gets there! On reflection, that's probably why the equipment we make now can survive so well on the road; it's just the way I was trained: we were taught how to make things to those standards so that we could test the products being offered to the forces."

At this stage Pete was still unsure as to whether military electronics was to be his career when the genes took over..."I come from a long line of musicians; both performers and technicians; my father ran a dance orchestra and a violin repair shop all his life, his father was a music shop proprietor and piano technician as was his father's father, so I was destined to follow."