The instrument

I’m a guitarist, and I practice a lot for pleasure and grounding. A couple of years ago, I found myself tired of hearing the double-course steel strings I’d been playing, and realized I was enjoying listening to the nylon-string, or “classical” guitar more than any other plucked string instrument. I started dreaming about a sound where the dividing lines get softened and mystery is present. When the classical guitar is played to my taste, it moves between light and shadows like an elegant thief.

When we talk about instruments in the guitar world, we seem to talk about materials and playing techniques in connection to genres or approaches. The expression “nylon string guitar”, for example, may conjure up a series of associations in a guitarist’s mind such as flamenco, Brazilian, or romantic Spanish music. I’ve always had a lot of time for practitioners of this instrument who operate in the cross-section between improvisation and composition, using its potential for discreetly powerful music. I’m referring to performers like Zsófia Boros, who moves in a quiet, intense space where she interprets music by contemporary composers, Derek Gripper from South Africa who connects his classical guitar training to West African kora harp music, or Ralph Towner, whose soft, but complex music I've held dear for many years. 

During the early spring of 2018 I gradually conceptualized the idea of a nylon-strung guitar that could connect to my earlier work for guitars tuned to fifths. This tuning emerged to let guitarists approach music with the same left-hand fingerings as the fiddlers. The instrument group has grown and branched out since its beginning in the 1970s, and today people use several tunings and a variety of string courses. One of the essential lessons I’ve learned over the years is that instruments in fifths tuning need to be shorter and smaller than regular guitars, because the ring and pinky fingers on the left hand can start aching due to the strain. After the idea presented itself to me, I proceeded to order a cheap, mass-produced ¾-size six-string guitar (with a 58 cm scale length) and asked my guitar technician to convert it into a four-string. As this was a simple prototype and a low-cost experiment, she simply used the existing bridge (cutting two more holes in it), and the existing nut (cutting two more string slots) to facilitate four evenly spaced strings:

String tension turned out to be a slight challenge. I decided to stick to my preferred tuning of (top to bottom)

D-G-C-F, using stock nylon strings, and ended up with a slightly unbalanced setup:

I described this problem to American web-order company StringsByMail, and discovered that they could calculate the required string tension for every scale length and pitch. That in turn led me to realize that nylon strings are made in many more varieties than the ones that belong inside a conventional six-string set for conventional tuning. Following this consultation and personal epiphany, I ended up with the following configuration, which turned out to stick: 

I now had a small, very playable instrument with a good bounce to it, and over the following months the ideas for the “Eon” album coalesced. My preexisting repertoire, taken from five albums, also got a revision for what I now call “nylon-string tenor guitar”. As a first example, I recorded a wedding march and got an immediate reaction through social media – my small audience and I seemed to respond to the sound of this instrument in the same way:

This experiment, initially conducted in a jiff, opened up several other possibilities:

• Though the majority of nylon-string players use their fingernails, I can continue my practice of using a flatpick, initially intended to imitate the bowing of Norwegian folk fiddling. This guitar seems to work best when I give it a gentle sideways pick shove, much like mandolin players coax sound out of their instruments. 
• Classical-guitar-style, horizontally moving vibrato became relevant for me on this instrument. This may connect romantic European music and Norwegian folk music in the listener’s ear.
• The video “Norian” (see below) is one of two examples on this record where I use partial capo. The clamp isn’t used on all the strings, but leaves the bottom one open. This is a mirroring of the Baroque practice of theorbo-ing (prolonging the fretboard on the bass string[s] by the flick of a lever, or even extending the fretboard itself for one or two strings), and it yields a different tuning than just fifths. 
• For live performances as well as in the studio, I gradually introduced a range octaver, a simple effect pedal that doubles the lower register of my guitar, but one octave lower. To my ears, it creates a more natural sound when used with nylon strings than with steel strings. My music seems to work fine with or without it, and it is not essential to me.

I also want to mention the very low price of this instrument as an ethical factor related to teaching and performing music. Guitarists, as I tried to describe earlier, are very often focused on specific types of equipment in connection with specific types of music, and the quest for versatility can become costly – sometimes even depressingly out of reach – for young people. I have seen many surprised faces when I explain that the guitar I used to conceive, compose, arrange and record “Eon” had a list price of only 130 euros at the time I acquired it. I’m at liberty to recommend this modified entry-level guitar to my students, and I can even afford to keep a few specimens available for them in my office – nobody goes bankrupt from this experiment.

I’m also convinced this can become a practical instrument for many other purposes than mine, given its playability and affordability as well as its connection to instruments that already exist (fiddle, octave mandolins etc.). The morning of writing this, I’ve discovered the work of German artist Charlotte Posenske, whose DIY approach to assembling square metal tubes encouraged people to cross the line between “spectator” and “artist” and try her methods for themselves. I would encourage the same here – never mind what I did with this little guitar, go ahead and see what you can do with it:

 “You can proceed according to a set program or you pick individual possibilities according to your personal taste,” she explained. “After all, there’s enough of them. Don’t worry if you’re never ‘done,’ because the re-combination could proceed in perpetuity without ever becoming boring.” Unlike many of her 

minimalist peers, Posenenske refused to philosophize about the work: “What else they are or can mean (art and stuff like that), will not be discussed here,” she wrote. “The main thing is that you can change things.” At the end, she added: “Have fun!” (Vogel, 2009)

As an epilogue to the “Eon” project, and to see how far this instrument idea could go, I reached out to Swedish luthier Tyko Runesson, and described my setup for him. In his own words, Tyko doesn’t really care about what names or definitions already exist in the world of guitars, he is happy to go with an idea and combine sizes, string configurations and woods into original instruments, and he produced a top-of-the-line specimen for me in Swiss moon wood, Swiss flame ash, Swedish alder, and plum tree (the guitar also features a cheeky imitation of Antonio Stradivari ‘s Baroque guitar headstock). I ended up travelling to his workshop in Winterthur, Switzerland, to pick it up.

(My own cell phone shots)

(Photo: Tyko Runesson)

(Photo: Arne Hauge)

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(Photo: Tyko Runesson)

(Photo: Tyko Runesson)