Birth of a new machine
Teaching Machines is owned and operated by Frank Naughton and Mat Wigley. They are two English guys who’ve lived in Wales most of their lives which actually makes them honourary Welsh men.
Frank is a talented Musician, Engineer, Producer, Songwriter and general polymath. He runs a recording Studio in Cardiff called Ty Drwg and has worked with such notable luminaries as Thighpaulsandra, Mike Paradinas, MC Mabon and Geraint Jarman to name just a few. He’s toured the world as a musician, playing with Theatre companies and bands. He’s a founding member of Rocketgoldstar and has a deep knowledge of electronics among many other interests.
Mat is also a musician, playing synth in bands for many years. He’s worked as a Photographer, Graphic Designer, Scenic Artist and Postman. He produces electronic music under the great name of DJ Dinnermoney and has a love for the finer things in life such as ping-pong, porridge and police procedurals.
They have been friends since the late 90’s when they met through mutual musician friends. They’ve worked together on and off over the years but they only formed Teaching Machines quite recently after spending a while talking about ‘the industry’. They realised they had a shared vision of what a good hardware business should be and a set of quite complementary skills.
As people and as a company they’re aiming to walk a narrow path between simplicity and functionality. They want their products to be intuitive and fun to use whilst giving as much control over the sound as possible.
The Wellspring
They saw a gap in the market for a stereo spring reverb with some nice extra features so they wanted to create one as their first product. Thus the Wellspring was conceived and Teaching Machines with it. It morphed through various different incarnations as features were added and crinkles were ironed out until they landed upon the beloved version that now exists.
The FuzzBillion
The FuzzBillion was conceived whilst Frank was playing with various different distortion circuits and wanted a quick way to swap between them, he ended up using a rotary wheel switch and found how effective it was. After an intense lucid dream featuring the rotary switches the concept of the FuzzBillion was born.
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