new pedal

Lucky me, I won an Empress Tape Delay at the weekly ProGuitarShop giveaway - and received it the same day I got my Supernatural back (the one I had was dysfunctional and had to be replaced). After having been busy lately with fuzz boxes, bit crushers and other noisy effects, I find myself with two atmospheric pedals whose possibilities I start to explore... 

One thing I like is that they force me to play slowly and be more careful about melodic and harmonic development - good qualities for improvised music... Their danger is that one can be easily seduced by ambient music clichés and let the pedals play on their own! Definitely have to shot a demo video!

more sketches

As you can notice I kept working on my last week's idea of wood + plexiglas + aluminium guitar... 

Music of the week: as strange as it may seem if you know my tastes in music, lately I really enjoyed Azealia Banks' video of 212, that I didn't know before (it's not so old, but pop music is so volatile...) 

I used to listen to rap a lot when it reached Europe a couple of decades ago, but my taste kept quite old school and after Run DMC, Public Enemy, Ice-T and such, it felt already quite exhausted... But nowadays' female rap brings a freshness and creativity that make it worth listening to again - and Banks is baffling! 

Another recent rap band I love is Die Antwoord from South Africa.

more sketches

Music of the week: well, it's actually music of last week... I didn't buy new CDs for a while but thanks to YouTube I discovered the great band that is Circle Takes the Square - another example of what you can do with screams and guitars...

Actually I started a new music project with screams on top of my guitar, that explains why I'm so interested in this kind of stuff lately - and have less time to blog!

Interlude

I didn't have time to post anything lately, so even if this picture is only remotely related to the object of this blog, it won't harm if I show it here until I have something else to post... 

I don't only sketch guitars, I also make drawings and illustrations for diverse papers and magazines, and I started a book for children with my partner writer Ines Birkhan. 

This lute and cute little animals drawing is just a try out - I need to figure out how to make drawings for children, and since I've been mostly drawing instruments lately, it felt good to  include one...