Having overseen Trace Elliot’s rise to fame as manager and chief engineer the previous decade, Mark Gooday set about starting his new bass amp company, Ashdown Engineering, in 1997. Named after his wife’s maiden name, the company’s logo was modelled on the Austin-Healey motor badge.
Speaking to Bass Guitar Magazine back in 2012, Gooday said: “In the early days at Trace, my wife and I would lay up all the power boards at home. We’d be building all the power modules and preamps for all the early amps, and then we’d take them into the factory and assemble them.
“I still get involved with that side of things at Ashdown – when you’ve done it for so long you come to understand what goes inside an amp, what goes wrong with them and what they should or shouldn’t do.”
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Ashdown’s list of artist endorsements, past and present, reads like a who’s who of bass-playing royalty, from Paul McCartney and Guy Pratt to the Foo Fighter’s Nate Mendal and Mark King of Level 42, to name just a few.
But there’s one player in particular whose support was pivotal to the company’s early success.
“Without John Entwistle it would have been so much harder for me to start the company. He immediately got behind what we did, and even today we are still selling bass amps because John used our gear.”
As it turns out, however, the amp guru’s first meeting with the Who legend didn’t exactly go smoothly.
“I remember going down to set up his first amp. John was getting ready to go on tour and had called to say that the amp was sounding terrible.
“So we went into the studio with his tech, Dan, a lovely bloke who’d known John since he was seven or eight years old, and we stripped the amp down and retested it, but we couldn’t find anything wrong with it!
“It was two in the morning when John came back, and he plugged in and started to play but immediately jumped back from the amp, holding his ears, shouting, ‘Whoa! What have you done?!’
“It turns out that two days prior he’d had digital hearing aids put in, which compress everything, so he’d been playing away, and the moment he hit anything loud, the high-end especially, it would collapse it, and he’d just forgotten he’d had the hearing aids in.
“So we had been ripping everything to pieces – and these racks are like skyscrapers. We’d taken everything apart, changed all the tubes in the preamps, and he’d then taken his hearing aids out and nearly blown his head off!”
An avid bass collector, Entwistle used a ‘Fenderbird’ for years, which was a Fender Precision-necked Gibson Thunderbird. He was equally fond of a huge Warwick Buzzard (later made in carbon fiber by Status Graphite).
His quest for tonal power also lead to the development of roundwound strings, which he worked on with Rotosound in the ’60s. It’s argued that he also invented the 4×12 speaker cab while using Marshall amps.
When it comes to Ashdown’s signature sound, Gooday is unwavering in what he is trying to create. “For me it’s warmth. It still needs some highs so there’s a little edge to it, but I don’t want total clarity, I want a nice, round low-end.”
