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!

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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.

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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... 

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Musik of the week: I've been listening to several Radiohead concerts from the 1990s and 2000s on YouTube... Back in the 90s I wasn't listening so much to pop/rock, I was mostly into noise and experimental music, Japanese easy listening, cosmo-pop and electronic music, so I missed a lot of the mainstream music of the time. It's only a couple of years ago that I discovered Radiohead and some  of their songs are pure masterpieces - though listening to a whole album or concert is difficult since Thom Yorke's voice is a little bit monotonous - like Björk's (I also just discovered Portishead and Massive Attack, that I love now)... I also start to listen to Radiohead's more recent stuff and I'm about to be convinced...

miscellaneous

1.2.

1. So, I finally reinstalled my workbench and I little by little start to work again on my pedal enclosures.

2. I've been offered today a Hardwire Supernatural reverb - a fine piece of electronics. I will practice with it for a few days and record a demo, but I can tell already that it's a very promising pedal...

3. I was doing some computer maintenance and I found a piece that I made a few years ago when I was learning how to use music softwares - it's been uploaded on MySpace just before they sabotage themselves, and I forgot about it, it might interest someone...

3.

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Musik of the week: I just received a CD of György Ligeti's studies for piano and I could just listen to it once today but I really love this music, and Ligeti is one of my favorite composers. 

And I keep listening to Cult of Luna's Eternal Kingdom - I thought I would mostly watch the concert DVD because I often prefer live than studio recordings, but the CD is quite good - and it's great to discover a new band and listen to recent music!

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Music of the week: I just discovered the Swedish band Cult of Luna through a series of YouTube videos extracted from their live DVD (I ordered it right away to enjoy better sound). It's like I found something I was looking for for a while, that is partly in Archive, partly in Black Angels, partly in Metallica + Lou Reed, but that Cult of Luna makes perfectly: long, deep, violent, hypnotic, intense, progressive guitar-based songs... 

I need top see this band on stage, but though they are currently touring eastern Europe, they seem to  be avoiding Vienna! And I need to start a new band soon...

CD review: Dirty Primitives

If you follow this blog you already heard of Dirty Primitives - the band's guitarist is a old friend and collaborator of mines, and I built the planckaster for him. I received their first CD a few days ago and I've been happily listening to it several times, and enjoy its many qualities.

It is great to listen to fuzzy guitar-based music that is not just an accumulation of clichés or a laborious effort to sound like the great ancients of some rock golden age. Don't get me wrong, Dirty Primitives' music is rooted in blues - the harsh kind -, but they take it, together with the listeners, somewhere else. The references that come to mind are Captain Beefheart, the Gun Club, John Spencer or the Drones, but Dirty Primitives sound more southern and more cosmopolitan, if you see what I mean...

That's actually what I like in this album, that it constantly mixes contradictory things - dirty blues sounds and avant-garde textures, raging riffs and dissonant solos, ballads and noisy walls of sounds, hypnotic beats and elaborated arrangements, banjo and mellotron (there are not only guitars)... It's both simple and elaborate, unpretentious and ambitious, raw and elegant - like all music should be! The two guitars are truly complementary (I pay attention to this since I read Keith Richards' book and his description of dual guitars composition), and the voice is more elaborated than you'd expect for this kind of music, sometimes playing with complex harmonies and effects - I like this better that the emotional roughness you're supposed to display in 'authentic' rock or blues...

I hope that this band will find the audience it deserves, what they do is rare and valuable.

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Music of the week: Erik Satie's piano solo works - you know, these things so classic that you don't really listen anymore, or don't think you should own them because you will always hear them on the radio, until you figure out that you need to listen very carefully, at home, in a quiet atmosphere... 

I also bought the Gymnopedies scores, for the piano players at home (everybody but me...)   

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Music of the week: yesterday I went to a music school concert and one of the kids played Gershwin's preludes for piano - this music is just brilliant, I ordered the CD right away and looked at several video versions of it today - including the adaptation for classical guitar quartet I posted on gUitarREN's FaceBook page earlier (I wonder if any musician ever composed for the guitar something such as what Gershwin did for the piano...)

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Music of the week: the long expected last song of David Bowie of course - just the song a Berliner in exile needs...

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(right click to enlarge the picture)

My music of the week: can't stop listening to my 6-year old kid teaching himself Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C after just 3 months of piano class - it's likely that he's the best musician of the family by far, and a natural!

a glimpse of the planckaster

My friends from Dirty Primitives are back in studio, at the end of 

this short clip you will  see a few seconds of David B's planckaster...

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You may have noticed that this blog isn't as regularly updated as it used to be; sorry for that, but I've had some health issues in the last weeks, the kind that prevents me from practicing the very objects of gUitaREN: drawing guitars, playing guitars, building guitars and pedals. I'm confident that I can resume these activities in the next weeks, because I have like usually many projects, some left unachieved in the middle of the process, and some more that arose from my forced idleness...

Anyway, my music of the month is: the sound of a IRM brain scanner, that has something of Ryoji Ikeda's electronic music and reminded me of his performances with Japanese performance group Dumb Type, of which I've been an avid follower back in the 1990s when they where regularly performing in Europe. 

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Music of the week: I watched several times two excellent music videos - one is the brilliant cover by Neil Young of the Beatles' A Day in the Life, performed in Glastonbury in 2009, the other is Fast Enough by one-member band Gull - something that should remove anybody's inhibition to play music, however, whatever!

print version of Sustain

I just received the print version of the 1st issue of new luthiery magazine Sustain that had the good idea to publish an interview of yours truly as-a-guitar-maker - you can order it or download it for free on the website of the Fellowship of European Luthiers (you can see it here together with my customized Kawai Aquarius I mention in the article). It's not only because they appreciate my work, but I must say it's a fine magazine made by instrument lovers for instrument lovers - it's not burdened by advertisement and doesn't deal with trends and fashions but goes to the point... 

There are articles that I found really interesting about various subjects - from something really technical and concrete about how to precisely route a guitar neck pocket - I was looking for that info and will apply it very soon -, to something almost esoteric but fascinating on analyzing the geometrics behind a Stradivarius violin design, via the report of an attempt to scientifically test and compare the qualities of famous old violins and newer ones - that has universal outcomes. 

I found some elements that I already appreciated in Leo Lospenatto's book 'Electric Guitar & Bass Design' (Leo is behind Sustain), a deep knowledge of traditional luthiery applied to contemporary design and technology (there's much he can tell about the geometrics of a Les Paul) and a refreshingly skeptical eye on guitar making mythology - his book confirmed a few things I suspected just from logic, that the tone wood has probably less influence on a guitar sound than the cables you will use to plug it in an amp, or that a bolt neck provides more sustain than a set one, though human ear cannot tell the difference (it has been scientifically tested and measured and will probably keep being denied by those who prefer legends to facts).

Well, both the magazine and the book bring new and precious information, and this is not common, when most of what I read about guitar making is just the same things again and again, and a lot is questionable, when it's not just advertisement for major companies...

new alu pedal cases

Just received some alu cases to paint a new batch of pedal enclosures - more samurais and dragons and maybe a geisha... 

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Music of the week: a lot of jazz versions of J.S. Bach's music - by Jacques Loussier, Edouard Ferlet, Bobby McFerrin or Ornette Coleman - I've always thought that Bach is a great jazz composer - maybe that's a French trait! Also I just discovered the electro-minimal jazz Moritz von Oswald Trio, their last album will probably be my next CD.

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Music of the week: Parlement/Funkadelic live in Houston in 1976, and 200 Motels of Frank Zappa - on video then CD... Isn't it amazing how Zappa's rigorous approach to his music would result in such humorous freedom? Sometimes I wish I could just let go and make this kind of music, but though I love humour and comedy, when it comes to my music I'm so very stern!

Also lately while listening to 1970s jazz-rock, I was wondering why many of my jazz friends seem to be kind of stuck in naively brainy and cold compositions and cannot reach the vigorous sensuality and liberty of the previous generation who they claim are their inspiration... 

a video by Dirty Primitives featuring the Plankaster!

This is the first video clip of French band Dirty Primitives, in which you can see the plankaster I built for David B. in action. Quite a catchy song, isn't it? 

Album is due in a few weeks!

Another hand painted pedal enclosure

Another samurai-themed hand painted pedal enclosure - like for the previous one, I still need a Japanese friend to write the name of the samurai on it before adding the final layer of varnish. Also I prepared an Etsy e-shop that I'll launch once I have a few more items to sell - I'm waiting for new hammond alu cases to make a new batch after these tries out...

Feedback is welcome - and please spread the word to any DYI pedal maker you might know!

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Music of the week: live concerts on Youtube of David Gilmour and Roger Waters - I try to convince myself that it's not so bad to get old... And on CD, Bach's Golberg variations by Andrei Gravilov. But the main music of the week is me starting again to practice guitar and singing every day - recalling and upgrading songs I've stopped playing for too long after moving from Berlin, also upgrading my pedal rig for a new stage project that I hope will be performed this winter...

hand painted pedal enclosure

So here is something I had in mind for a while now, as I was trying to combine my appetencies with my competencies in a concrete project, that is to try to earn a little bit of money with my hand work - to fund my next projects. I want to propose hand painted pedal enclosures for sale, either with my own designs, or on order... 

Since I love 19th century Japanese prints, I started with a fighting samurai as a first try - I have other ones, also Kabuki actors, dragons, erotic scenes..., but people can ask me what they want; I never mentioned it but I happen to be an illustrator for some magazines (you can see some of my press drawings here).   

Is it a good idea? Is anybody interested? Feedback is welcome!