Marion High alum has created an accessory that may change the way people play the guitar

MarkEnglerDisplay106

MarkEnglerDisplay106 MarkEnglerPlay107

Some three years after ending a successful decade-long run with the band he created, Marion native Mark Engler may be on the verge of making his most significant and lasting impact on the music world.

The 1995 graduate of Marion High has a patent pending on a guitar accessary he has developed called The Engle. He and his backers believe it has the potential to add a whole new dimension to the way people play the world?s most popular musical instrument.

Though it has the potential for significantly more financial success than he ever experienced as a performer, Engler?s goal reflects his artist heart: ?I would be happy just to see it used widely.?

Resembling a miniature pickaxe, The Engle?a play on the name of the creator and the angled shape of the tool?s head?is to the guitar what a drumstick is to a drumhead. It enables the musician to strike all six (or 12) guitar strings simultaneously; reverberation on the strings creates a unique musical effect.

 

?It?s a simple idea,? Engler said. ?It allows more precision, accuracy and speed than you could possibly get with a pick.

?You ask any guitarist of any genre anywhere, would you like to play with more speed, better precision and rhythmic accuracy? They?ll say yes.?

A late starter

Engler?s history with the guitar is relatively short. His instrument of choice in middle and high school was the trombone.

?When I was 17, a friend of mine was taking guitar lessons, so I started fooling around with his guitar, and my uncle had given me a broken guitar,? he said.

Illness proved to be a godsend.

?I got sick for a few weeks, and the old broken guitar was sitting around the house with three strings?and it was a 12-string,? he said. ?I started messing around with it, kind of inspired by my friend. It was like, ?This is fun.?I?d like to do more of it.??

By the time he graduated from MHS, Engler knew he wanted to start a band.

He moved to Colorado, where he posted notices in two nearby towns for additional musicians. He linked up eventually with two brother to form The Mind at Large and started playing open-mike gigs in area clubs.

Shortly after, the group added a bass player and began touring cold-call clubs and ski resorts along the Front Range. Even?tually, the group moved to Fort Collins, and expanded its touring area to include Mon?tana and New Mexico.

As part if its first national tour in 2001, the band performed in New York City and Canada before deciding to relocate to Philadelphia so they could play original music.

?We did that for two more years, touring around the Philly area mostly,? he said. ?At that point, I decided I was done with the band life and was ready to move away from that.?

Rethinking the guitar

That was in 2008, when Engler and wife, whom he met shortly after the move to Philadelphia, decided to go back to school. Mark pursued his undergraduate degree in speech pathology and currently is a graduate school at Temple University.

He assumed he was done with the guitar.

?I had been playing cello for about five years and had just given up the guitar because I wanted nothing to do with rock for a while,? he said. ?We had played something like 350 shows. I was just burned out on that.?

But his mind returned to the guitar shortly after a family vacation in March 2009.

?I was sitting down on the couch just thinking about guitar and how I hadn?t played in a while,? he said. ?I started going down a mental list of everything that irritated me about guitar.

?One of them was that it?s a real pain that you can?t hit all six strings at once. I mean, with a piano you can hit 10 string at once. That?s a really neat aspect of a piano. It allows you to go a lot faster, and the way the strings are hit provides a lot better tone.

?I started thinking about that same concept for guitar.?

As Engler tried to imagine what the tool would look like, he decided first to check to see if he could buy one on the Internet. During his futile search, he reviewed some 5,000 guitar-related patents.

?That?s when I really started thinking about the patenting process, so I educated myself on what that was going to take.?

His first step was to hire professional patent searchers, who searched the records all the way back to 1750.

?I came up with the top 25 closest things?but the closest they came was door chimes with little balls that bounce off the strings,? he said.

From there, Engler created a rough prototype?inspired by drumming a coat hanger on his guitar strings?to a patent attorney, who encouraged him to look into plastic manufacturing in order to reach a mass market.

?I met with plastics engineers and paid them for a design that incorporated all sorts of features I had essentially taken out (of the prototype),? he said. ?The patent is based on tons of features, so I?ll be able to incorporate those features later on.

?I ended up doing two prototypes in plastic, and then doing some wooden prototypes that were a lot higher quality than what I was starting with.?

Marketing moves

With a product designed, Engler went in August 2010 to Mark Duey, an adjunct professor in the marketing department of his undergraduate alma mater, the College of West?chester.

?He was good enough to recognize it as an innovation when I presented it to him in his office,? Engler said. ?But I told him I wanted to work with the marketing department because I needed get some help.?

Duey was so impressed with the product?s potential that he eventually become Engler?s partner in the venture.

?One real valuable thing I was able to do through the marketing department was multiple focus groups,? Engler said. ?So we had the opportunity to present the product and allow guitarists to try it out. We sent them home with the product and a real thorough questionnaire, then had them send it back with their impressions.

?From those focus groups, I?ve had guitarists who have now been playing with it for six months or more, and are into it. It?s now their thing.?

The next step, Engler said, is to schedule some promotions of The Engle in guitar stores.

?The idea is to encourage people to come in and give them the demonstration,? he said.

Interested musicians will be invited to audition for a videotape performance using The Engle. The videos will be posted on the product website at the Engle.com as free promotion for the performer as well as the product.

Another key marketing goal is to secure the endorsement of a high-profile performer, possibly in exchange for a percentage of the company.

About two months from now, Engler said the partners will release the first 100 pieces to the public. Then the idea is to manufacture 1,000 and sell 500 before they approach music companies about the possibility of buying marketing rights.

More than money

The Engle, which comes in a wooden case with magnets inside to secure the tool, initially will be priced around $25 to make it easily accessible to the playing public.

Engler said although he hopes to recoup the $15,000 he personally has invested in the project so far, his biggest aspirations extend beyond finances.

?I would really like to see it change the way the guitar is played,? he said. ?I can see this being something people pick up midway through a song, because one of the big advantages of it is that you can put it down and pick it right back up.

He also hopes The Engle will allow him more exposure to the music world.

?To me, the greatest pleasure I?ll get from this product, if it is successful, is getting to hear musicians who are more talented than me use it,? he said.

?I?m sure there are people, out there who are going to do things with it that I?ve not even imagined, and are going to ask things from the product that I?ve not even thought of.?

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