Science and music may seem like entirely different disciplines, sitting on opposite sides of a dichotomy that divides the world into two types of people: left brain / right brain, logical / intuitive, and so on. But in fact, they are more similar than one might think (as are the people who practice them). Both are founded on mathematical relationships, both can find profound meaning in the unfolding of patterns, and both reward those who exercise creativity within established constraints.
Even the instruments used draw on some of the same concepts.
As the Martinos Center’s Jake Calkins explains, more casually than the revelation seems to warrant: MRI scanners and electric guitars, those potent symbols of rebellion and individual expression, work in essentially the same way.
He elaborates. MRI relies on radiofrequency coils to detect the signals used to create images, he says. Electric guitars employ “pickups” — magnets with coils wrapped around them — to turn the guitar strings’ vibrations into electrical signals, which are then converted into sound.
And that’s not all. In both cases, the signals are amplified, and various methods applied to minimize “artifacts” in the signals.
“They’re similar types of problems,” he says. “You’re dealing with different frequencies, but the physics behind the two are largely the same.”
If anyone would know this, he would. Jake is an MRI research specialist with the center’s Imaging Core as well as a musician: a guitarist. And amazingly, his in-depth understanding of the physics of the guitar pickup isn’t the only part of his life where these two pursuits meet. In recent years, he has also applied his engineering and physics knowhow and his love of music to another, related pastime: collecting and restoring old guitar amplifiers.
Jake may well be genetically predisposed to these — let’s be honest — quirky interests. His family is very musically oriented, he says, but also very mechanically minded. His father and his grandfather were both machinists by trade, for example, and instilled in Jake and his two brothers a curiosity about how things work. “We were brought up in a way that we would look at something mechanical and seek to understand it. We were reverse engineering things as kids, before we even knew what ‘reverse engineering’ was.”
And that’s not the only trait underpinning his fascination with guitar amplifiers from long ago.
“I’m also a little bit of an ‘old soul’ kind of guy,” he says. “Having grown up with my mother and my aunt and their love of antiques, I find I also like old, used things. New things are shiny and pretty and pristine, and I like that too, but old items have a story. If you’re willing to stop and pay attention, every little ding or dent or mark or stain can tell you something about what an item has been through. If you open it up, you can smell what it’s like and what it’s been around.”
Jake’s relationship with vintage amplifiers began one day years ago when he was helping his now-wife and her parents in the attic and spotted, “literally sitting in the corner gathering dust,” a mid-seventies Fender Silverface Princeton Reverb amplifier, known in musician circles as a bit of a classic, with its warm, clean tones. Jake, who had played guitar since he was a kid, was intrigued. He asked how it got there and learned that, decades ago, his wife’s grandmother, Rita, played electric organ in groups at weekly events around the Merrimack Valley, north of Boston. And when she did, she played through this now-classic amp.
He offered to dust off the cobwebs, get the amp in good working order and make it sound like the consummate piece of equipment it was. The family agreed and he set about restoring it. When he was done he named it Rita, in honor of its owner, and displayed it with a photo of her playing through the amp way back when. He liked how this added a human element to the history of the amplifier, and indeed emphasized its history, imbuing in the dorm-fridge-sized, solid-pine cabinet a sense of its unique presence in time and space, of everything it had seen and done in its decades of existence.
Jake’s journey was now underway.
In the years since, Jake has collected and/or restored more than 20 vintage and modern vacuum tube amps. Each one, he says, has its own personality, and its own story to tell. To get closer to truth of its story, Jake gathers as much information as he can — serial number, photos, receipts, etc. — from which he can ascertain things like where it was made, who bought and used it, and even, potentially, on what recordings it might be heard. “I love the mystery of it,” he says. “It’s almost like I’m a museum curator.”
His most recently completed project was a “Tweed Era” 1954 Fender Princeton Amplifier, previously owned by Nashville recording artist Austin Skinner and rewired by Joe Capito of Nashville-based Magnetic Flux just prior to Jake buying it.
In this case, he actually knows who built it. Lupe López was an assembler for Fender in the fifties (almost all amp builders at the time were female) and has become known, indeed revered, for her meticulous soldering and layout work while wiring amplifiers during production. Like other assemblers at the time, she identified the amplifiers she had put together by signing her name or initials somewhere on the inside of the cabinet. Jake’s amp has a piece of masking tape inside with “Lupe” scribbled on it.
The small piece of tape adds value to the amp. For Jake, it also opens a door to its past, beginning with its assembly in a Fullerton, Calif. Facility and continuing through its Nashville rewiring and subsequent move to Massachusetts. Of course, there are quite a few open questions as to what happened in the interim: Who played through the amp? What style of music? Was the amp used in professional studios, seedy bars, someone’s cluttered garage? How many people heard the vibrations it produced and fell in love with music, or with the person standing next to them?
Jake doesn’t yet know the answers to these questions for this particular amp. One thing is certain, though: he aims to find out.
In the photo at the top of the page: Three vintage amps in Jake’s collection: from left to right, a 1965 Fender “Blackface” Vibro Champ (named “Ellie”), a 1954 Fender “Wide-panel” Princeton (named “Eleanor”), and his first vintage amp, the mid- to late 1970s Fender “Silverface” Princeton Reverb discussed above (named “Rita”).