martin's music

My music inspirations

Hi! I'm Martin Paul Gardiner

Electronics and software development engineer and founder of GSA Golf simulators

While I'm not working on golf simulators I'll be working on my other passion - electronic and jazz music

Back in the 70s and 80s I used to run the London (UK) synthesizer studio in Denmark Street just off Shaftsbury Avenue

where I met and dealt with all the big time musicians of the time including

Yes, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, ELP etc, etc

Denmark Street is a tiny street in London but full of great music instrument stores and a mecca for all rock musicians in the UK.

My interest in electronic music started with the Moog modular system

The mighty modular Moog captured all my facination

The all time best original "Switched on Bach" album from 1967

Walter Carlos plays Bach on the mighty Moog modular synthesizer

How it all started and how GSA Golf came to be

After leaving school and in electronics and engineering college playing keyboards with local town bands in my spare time,
I started to get the feeling I have the talent of a rock star and so left college and moved uptown to London to seek my fame and fortune.
Alas, even though I looked the part with hair down to my shoulders and wearing a tailor made full leather blue skin tight suit like my idol Keith Emerson did,
it became increasingly apparent over time that I did not have the necessary musical talent to reach such rock star status.
So after a number of years of giving it my all, I decided to give up and sell all my keyboards (Hammond organ, Moog Synthesizers, Fender Rhodes etc).
And - as I sold them for more them I paid for them - that was the first time I ever made any money in the music business.
And then I thought, well maybe there's other poor souls like me that I have also given up their dreams of becoming a rock star and are desperate for money too.
As it turned out there was - many thousands of them in fact -
and so I started a super booming business selling used electronic keyboards in the UK to the next generation of rock star dreamers.
Everything was running just super fine until I got a knock on the door one day. It was the tax authorities (the UK IRS).
" It seems you've been a naughty boy Martin" the officer said. (Seriously, that is what he said. I'll never forget it)
Apparently a competitor of mine contacted them with a suspicion that I wasn't paying full sales tax on my sales.
Well, I was paying sales tax but only on the profits of the used products - like used car salesmen do when they sell a used car.
In contrast to used cars, the UK IRS wanted full sales tax on the selling price of used musical instruments and not just on the profit
- which was basically my margin - so they closed my business down.
Very unfair I must say as used cars businesses had a good lobby to stop this unfairness, while used musical instrument sales people didn't.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I went out to the Pub one night in London, met a German flight attendant, married her and moved to Germany.
After 25 years or so working in various banks as a computer programmer in Frankfurt Germany,
we decided to purchase a home in Naples, Florida to get away from the cold winters there.
The home was on a golf course and as the golf club membership was included in the price of the home, I started to play golf.
This is fun I thought and so when I got home to the cold winter of Germany, I started to look around for a device that would let me practice my swings at home.
Sure enough, there were plenty of devices on the market that would do this but all had a crazy high price.
Being an electronics and software engineer, I started going about developing my own golf practice device.
And that is how GSA Golf got started some 25 years ago.
From that first basic device (the initial PX2) , a whole full time golf simulator business started.
At this time we were selling 20 to 40 PX2 systems a month and life for us couldn't be better.
Note that this was the time before OptiShots and P3Pros so we were literately pioneers in low cost affordable golf simulators at this point in time.
The rest is history.
BTW. My passion for music has not dwindled in all this time. Just the dream of being a famous musician has.