For his company, F Hole, Los Angeles-based musician Joe Berardi makes devices for manipulating, transforming or generating sound: effects pedals for guitars/etc., noisemaking boxes or circuit bent toys and instruments. They lean towards the outer edges of the audio spectrum, and are all hand made and attractively hand painted.
This is cute, but be sure to go to the website to see the devices played by humans.
Nice Noise: Modifications and Preparations for Guitar is a must have book for anyone into experimental guitar. If you enjoyed the post Extended Techniques with Roger Kleier (who is name checked in this book), and want to learn more about extending your techniques, look no further than this slim tome by Bart Hopkin and Yuri Landman.
Joe Gore at tonefiend.com hipped me to the fact that you can now get Auto-Tune for Guitar as a kit. Like him, I thought it was just to help keep guitars in tune—a problem some of us haven’t had for years. It seemed excessive to process the guitar sound through a hex pickup rather than just get a good, well set up instrument and learn how to string it and play it in tune. But this video shows other interesting and potentially creative uses. it also shows that you can still play out of tune if you want. What do you think?
Tim Motzer, profiled in guitarmoderne.com here, offers live video performances at the 1k Sessions site for $10 a pop. These are some of the best examples of modern guitar in various contexts you will see, and some of the best performances of any kind at that price. Here is just a sample. Check them out.
Tim Motzer, Anthony Tidd, Jeremy Carlstedt – 1k Sessions, Episode 9 Preview from Dejha Ti on Vimeo.
Guitars and distortion go together like hip-hop and hoodies. All the guitar-oriented software modelers offer astoundingly accurate emulations of classic and modern amp and pedal distortion.
Izotope’s Trash 2 ($249) can be configured to produce warm, tube-like drive too, but that is not what it is about. From its inception, Trash has literally pushed the envelope of all things distortion, and, as they say in advertising, much, much more.
The 2013 Winter NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show had the most palpable excitement of any NAMM in the last five years. Whether from the rising economy, or because with the death of record sales, musicians need more instruments to play live, who can say? The bottom line is: this show was alive with fantastic new technology, much of it of special interest to the modern guitarist. There was way more than I can cover alone, but these were the products I found most interesting. Read on for words, pix, and vids of this year’s extravaganza. Keep in mind that NAMM unofficially stands for Not Available Maybe March (or May), so check the company sites for shipping dates.
Oz Noy in the Seymour Duncan booth, with Steve Ferrone and Darryl Jones. Poor kid can’t muster up a decent rhythm section.
In the 1970’s, musician and pioneer Allan Gittler came up with a guitar like none had ever seen. With only 60 models released in the 1980’s, the guitar has become a legend of sorts in the forward thinking guitar and design world.
He aimed to dispel common misconceptions embraced by guitar players. Methodically stripping away all he considered unnecessary and redundant, Gittler pared the instrument down to its most essential elements.
Guitar Moderne is all about the amazing stylistic variety of guitarists practicing their art in the 21rst Century. The zine exists, in large part, to help expose these artists to an audience that might not find them otherwise. In that spirit, here is the Guitar Moderne’s first curated festival of modern guitar. These guitarists offer a wide spectrum of music that employs the instrument in personal and idiosyncratic rather than idiomatic ways. If you like the artists please purchase their recordings and go see them live—Enjoy!
An innovator from the German experimental scene.
Last year, Sonuus first showed the programable Wahoo Analogue Dual-Filter/Wah pedal at a NAMM show. Having reviewed their brilliant i2M audio/MIDI converter, I was interested in anything else they might have up their sleeve, and this new pedal, offering Moog-style filtering in addition to more typical wah sounds, looked promising. The fact that note tracking could modify the filter changes was particularly intriguing. Well, I finally got my hands on one. Does it live up to the promise? Read on…
Listening to the throbbing, minimalist soundcapes on Noël Akchoté’s record, Rien [Winter and Winter] did not prepare me for the bluesy, rooted, jazz guitarist I later saw performing with the Big Four (Max Nagl, Steven Bernstein, Bradley Jones) at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. That Akchoté straddled the ground between Derek Bailey and Freddy Green with aplomb, throwing in the occasional Muddy Waters raunch and Bill Frisell offbeat elegance where appropriate. Here, the French guitarist explains how he doesn’t hear the distinction among those legendary players that others might.