Jonny Reckless

I love where art and technology come together.

I was born and raised in England, and I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last twenty years. When I was eleven or twelve, my father and I bought a kit for a Sinclair ZX81 and built it together, and that was the start of my love of electronics, music and computers.

As a teenager I built every mail-order guitar effects kit I could get: compressors, distortions, overdrives, phasers, flangers. I loved building them, and I always tried to tweak them to sound better, or more to my taste. As I gained experience I began designing my own pedals, starting with simple distortion and overdrive circuits and progressing to more complex designs and, eventually, complete amplifiers. I went on to study engineering at Cambridge University.

I began my career as an audio electronics engineer at Carlsbro, where I designed the award-winning GLX series of guitar amplifiers. I then moved to Trace Elliot, where I led an in-house R&D team developing a range of original valve guitar and bass amplification. Through the 1990s I moved into hi-fi and audio-visual equipment, working for TAG McLaren Audio and NXT, and then spent several years as head of R&D at ARCAM, one of the UK's leading hi-fi and audio-visual companies, where I designed DVD and Blu-ray players and video processors. After Arcam I spent time at Dolby working on digital audio for broadcast and consumer products. Since then I've worked for a number of Internet of Things start-ups, mostly on audio products: Bluetooth audio, DSP, neural networks and other signal processing. Along the way my work moved from circuit design into embedded firmware and software, built on a background in DSP, communications theory and electronics.

I founded Reckless Technology Ltd in England in 1998 to design hi-fi and pro audio hardware for clients. Today it's the label for my own work: the plugins, the pedal and amplifier designs and the chess engines on this site.

Music has been there all along. At school I played recorder, then clarinet, then saxophone, but the electric guitar was always my first love. My father played guitar in a band in the 1960s and built his own valve amplifiers, and it was he who got me started on the electric guitar. I've loved it my whole life, and I've picked up bass, organ and piano along the way; now I'm learning the drums.

I still love building valve amplifiers and playing through them. Software has become remarkably good, too, and today you can have a truly great guitar experience digitally: it's a wonderful time to be a guitarist. My band, Saint Wry, plays and records with equipment I've designed and built myself.