I talked earlier about my fingertips being the portal between my inner and outer world in sound. It is perhaps obviously of great importance to me how my instrument feels to hold, to touch, to play and to look at, and I have modified my guitars to my liking accordingly. The specific guitar I have been using for my research at the RMC is modified in several ways functionally and aesthetically. The most significant modification is the addition of a hexagonal pickup that in connection with an external signal converter allows me to control an external synthesizer through MIDI, along with functioning as a conventional guitar. This means that I can run both the electric guitar signal and that a polyphonic synthesizer through my signal chain, which allows for a very broad tonal range and an even broader timbral palette.
Early on in my research I chose to tune the guitar so that the open strings form a low register C major chord, and stringed it with very thick strings made of some sort of compound between steel and nylon, which give the guitar a very full almost gut string quality to the sound. I wanted to tune the guitar lower than standard as I feel that it brings me closer to the timbre I desire, a more lush cello like sound. Also, the open tuning makes for some very nice symmetries on the fretboard, as it is mapped differently than when the guitar is tuned to standard pitch. The choice of tonality, C major, was an intuitive limited harmonic frame start working from at first, but I soon choose to stay with it, as I felt it was another inspiring limitation to work from.
- Building an instrument, literally and figuratively speaking.
I like to think of my instrument as an object. It's an object that consists of three major physical parts, connected through low currency electricity. There’s the electric guitar itself, it's vibrating strings giving birth to the sound at first. Then there’s a signal chain consisting of a careful selection of modules which allow for various ways of processing the sound of the plucked guitar string, while also being able to change the physicality of the guitar itself in various ways. Finally there’s the amplifier which boosts the small electric current and sends it to a speaker which then projects the sound into space and time. The modules in my signal chain are divided into two categories, the first are units that affect the timbre immediately, such as compression and distortion of the signal, and the second category is units with which I can shape the sound after the guitar strings has been activated, namely echoes and reverbs. I use 3 different echo units and 3 different reverb units in my setup.
I love and embrace all the natural limitations that the guitar has as an instrument, and even though I'm modifying and shaping my instrument in variuos ways, I’m not on a mission to change it, on the contrary I’m interested in embracing all it's limitations and explore their potential for expression.
The modules in my signal chain are divided into roughly two categories, the first are units that affect the timbre immediately, such as compression and distortion of the signal. The second category is units with which I can shape the sound after the guitar strings has been activated, namely echoes and reverbs. I use 3 different echo units and 3 different reverb units in my setup. One reason I work so much with echoes and reverbs origin from a desire to be able to shape the note from the moment I pluck it on the guitar until it ends, as for instance cellists or saxophone players are able to do. As for reverb, it relates to my general interest in spatiality. Being able to envelop my sound in an artificial space before letting the speaker produce that sound into the real space is an almost paradoxical thought when I think of it, but that’s also the very thing that makes it interesting to me. The use of artificial space in various degrees on music recordings and albums since the 1950’s plays a big aesthetical part of the sound and the history of my instrument too. When I visualize an echo, I picture a sound I produced that has been thrown out into the world and then comes back from the void in another tempo, disembodied, and wanting to play a part in whatever sound I play next. I like to think about an echo as a natural phenomenon that can be recreated and manipulated in a physical space, with a tape machine, or with analog or digital electronics.
I have gotten my hands on an omni directional speaker. It's a cube with six speakers pointing in different directions. It is built for use by acoustic engineers, and it’s original intention is for it to be set up in a space, and then project a sine tone into the space so the engineer can record the acoustic qualities of the room and use the data to determine what desired or undesired frequencies or resonances exist in the space.
As I have described more elaborately in the part of this exposition called Sound and Space,
my reason for using this speaker as part of my instrument is to be able to activate, not control, the particular space I'm playing in in a different way than a traditional speaker setup can offer. The Speaker can be placed on the floor, on a stand or be suspended by the ceiling, and finding the most interesting solution is the first task in any new space.
As I dug deeper into thinking about tactility during my research, I kept getting coming back to an issue that had been bothering me for years. The effect modules I use in my signal path consists of a collection of boxes from different manufacturers. They come in various shapes and sizes, and usually I would have them mounted on a wood surface and patch them together with cables. The units are originally designed to be placed on the floor and to be operated with the feet, out of sight from everyone but the musician using them. Hence the american word stompboxes. I, however, have for a long time placed the boxes at table height, as I need them to be within hands reach. I'm often shaping the timbre after I pick them on the guitar which means that at times I’m adjusting parameters on the different modules quite a bit. The look, and most importantly the feel, or the tactile experience if you will, of this collection of boxes in different sizes and colors with cables sticking out everywhere has for long been dissatisfactory to me, and I have wished for this important part of my instrument to feel more like a, well, instrument. So I decided to pursue making it into a singular instrument. One box, instead of a collection of different ones. A plane control surface so the knobs would all be level at the same height. Also, getting rid of 10 metal boxes and building a single one of wood and aluminum would save me some weight. For the same reason I chose to use smaller cables, as standard guitar cables actually weigh quite a bit when you need to use a lot of them. I wanted to be able to re-route the order of the units easily too, so I opted for patching in the style of modular synthesizers. Since what I was looking for is not something that is commercially available, I finally decided to design and build it myself and started out in November 2020. The designing and building of the thing was quite involved and required much research, as I had to make sure that the prototype build would be completely functional in the end, and that I wouldn’t damage anything along the way. I took a lot of design cues from vintage modular synthesizers like the ARP 2500, the Buchla 100 Series and the EMS Synthi AKS, as I like their aesthetics, not to mention how they can sound and their place in contemporary music history. I then bought some pine wood, some 2mm aluminum sheet metal, and went to work. I finished building the instrument in a few weeks time, and happily it turned out really well. As I started working with it I soon found that the experience of creating sound with it is much more fulfilling, wholesome and intuitive to me than before I did the conversion, it truly does feel like an instrument to me now. I can’t help but thinking of the term Morton Subotnick came up with for the instrument he had commissioned Don Buchla to build for him in the 1960’s, the Music Easel. That name really resonates with how I think of this new box as my timbral palette. I have yet to come up with a name for my instrument that is equally clever. Another very attractive factor to me in taking this decision is that I like the idea of committing myself to the 10 specific and carefully chosen units that have now become an instrument. It's another limitation that feels very inspiring to me.
