Could you describe any of the instruments you’ve built? What is it made of? How does it work? What does it sound like?
I was doing fine thinking about some of these questions while at the laundry mat until a lady pulled up in her brand new S.U.V. talking on her cellular phone and sat there spewing out thermal pollution, engine on for air conditioning while she sat in her cubical and gabbed away. Why build instruments or do anything expressive if it’s not to show something of a truth, to try and show a good direction, a beauty, a feeling, something different than the worm is always good.
This could have been an informal conversation between me and Eric except that I don’t have a phone and besides I lay low anyway, a hermit living in the midst of eighteen million people so... still contemplating these questions, U.S. bombs terrorist centers in Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Africa! Never trust a corporate chicken farmer! In this situation and because it makes me feel sick that some of my tax dollars went towards these attacks, I demand that the idiot Rhodes scholar president dress up in rough burlap sacks and roll around in hot ashes for three days and three nights. It feels like the sparks of a holy war “God Help Us.”
One of the instruments I built is a baritone scale electric sitar. It is a complex laminate acoustically designed solid body. It has an inner space filled with spruce, lined with aircraft aluminum, a thirty fret rosewood fingerboard with mother of switch cover inlays. What makes the sitar sounds is the buzzing bridge. The sound has a natural chorus effect caused by the string buzzing against a block, right at the harmonic adjustment point (the saddle). It has an inclandestine electro-mechanical string bending device that bends one string a full fifth kicking some tight a.
Any sort of modified instruments you’ve done? What did you change and why?
All my stringed instruments are modifications from scratch, courses of strings made to be tuned in fifths, which requires that each string in the course (pair) have individual harmonic adjustment when perfected a course tuned in a fifth allows power chords to be played with one finger and multiple stacking of seconds.
As far as instruments already made and changing them, it’s the old Hammond tube chord organs and conn organs that I like to experiment on. If you make the octave dividing network variable and run it with a foot pedal it makes great foot pedal operated arpeggios from any note you play. I have an early sixties chord organ and an old 54 chord organ with the large envelope pre-amp tubes. They have bright tone generators and are based on the design of the first synthesizer that was even touch sensitive. Designed by John Hannert who was Hammond's chief engineer, called Novachord back in 1932!!! I use the old chord organs on a series of songs I’ve recorded called “Prepared Hammond” and there’s one done with wood (MITB Bastard Noise) called Prepared Hammond for four hands. The way they are prepared is to take a few alligator jumpers with large high voltage capacitors in between and criss cross the dividing and pre amp circuits. For the original “prepared” designation it was when John Cage took nails and tacks and shoved them in between and around the strings of a piano thus it was called “Prepared Piano.”
How did you get into electronics and making instruments?
Some, providing for their gluttony and greed and excessive comfort and laziness, find it necessary to murder Mother Earth selling out to the best rationalizing all the way (organic memory molecular implant), I need to try different things and experiment in the only frontier left, our imagination, to try and feel like a somewhat fulfilled prolitariate American clone.
I was in an Acid Rock band called AXEWINCI and shared a 63 Strat with my friend Marz who played guitar while I played bass, and visa versa sometimes. The Strat was one of those magical ones that almost sounds like it has a soul, it got heisted by a jiver from me and Marz’s cardboard three track studio. Being broke, I decided to make a vintage Strat and so my first three instruments were me trying to capture the vintage Fender magic. I started experimenting with laminate designs and sound pots, based on a show I saw about the physicist Dr. Frye’s in depth study and some conclusions bout Stradavari. Marz took four years of color TV repair at JR college and started building amps out of old tube TV parts. Sold one of them to some early punkers called Bad Attitude. I started experimenting with pre amps or guitar, I built one for Harold Clemments The Dull. Pretty soon I started making power amps and stumbled onto the outrageousness of oscillation and pulse generation about a year later I auditioned for and started playing with Wood and Connell and we started Man Is The Bastard. After that most experimenting was to get sounds and effects for the band. I turned my twin reverb head into an eight poer tube all triode monster D.C. voltage applied to the cathodes of the power tubes, it had tons of rich subsonic overtones that wasn’t all that audible of a force in the band but added a lot of subliminal power.
What’s your favorite instrument to play? What was your favorite to build?
It goes in phases. For a while in MITB I would only play the “Deccatone” two bass courses tunes in fifths with six normal guitar strings below them. The neck is very wide like an original eleven stringed lute, this has ten. The courses are tuned in fifths so you can play a fifth with one finger and thus do very unique sounding power chord runs. Sounds sort of like a harmonizer, but since it’s mechanical it sounds more real.
Hearing an instrument that you’ve made yourself from scratch for the first time, the first pluck of the string is always extremely exciting and if it’s a prototype it tells you if you’re imagination was correct on what would happen with the design. lately i’ve been building a series of stereo electric/acoustic stringed instruments that have two acoustic chambers with spruce tops and rosewood removable backs. Everything comes apart, they’re completely modular and look a bit like a weird tuning fork. I enjoy building this style of instrument quite a bit. I haven’t gotten bored with the design yet!
How do you choose to record, generally?
I do the best I can. It’s a high art and I hate the term “demo.” Marz and I had a three track studio which was a great “dead room.” It had five foot thick walls with an air space on the outside that was for control booth and living space. The roof of it also was super thick and it had a cement floor with about four layers of carpeting. Now to get that effect where I have to be very quiet because of close neighbors I built a 2x2x4 boudle walled and carpeted box opening lid on the top and inside is a good 8” speaker and a mic on a permanent mount pointing at it. Run the speaker on a good sounding small amp or use a powersoak with a Marshall, plug the mic into the input of the recorder, close the lid and you get a great loud sound that is barely audible outside your headphones.
On Thorny Path I used to get a 64 oz. plastic soda cup with a headphone speaker in it’s own compartment at the bottom, run a line out through a mic impedance adapter modified for a dual 1/4” phono out (female xlr to female 1/4” phono adapter) with the line out fully cranked it had enough juice to run the headphone speaker. Then a small tie clip condenser mic strung across the top of the cup pointing at the headphone speaker. It’s a fairly odd unique sound. Another attempt at making tiny sound huge. I tend to like the extreme ends of audible frequency the best and pretty much all of A.F.C. noise oriented tracks will have a full spectrum from as low as I can get to as high, 60 hz to 17hz or so. One track I did for Bastard Noise had such intense lows with intense highs that it burned up the cutting head on the lathe at the mastering lab.
Unfortunately that range and the lack of predominate mids means it doesn’t sound very good on cheap stereos, but fortunately it also means that cranked on a great stereo it sounds king. The old “it’s gotta sound good on all stereos” thing hasn’t totally got me yet, although I’m bringing in a few more mids lately. I wrote a track called “Fuck the Mids.” I still like good pro quality tape dynamics better than even high bit digital for the multi track part of recording.
Any ideas for future projects or releases?
Only a small mountain and first is something that I was very flaky on but is now at completion, the Jalopaz/A.F.C./Hermit collaboration. A 7” which Hermit is putting out in Europe seeing as he lives there now and Jalopaz is touring there right now!
I just sent the master of a split 7” with AFC and _____ to Dave’s label, Amendment Records in Portsmouth, Virginia. There are three tracks on the AFC side. He’s pressing it immediately.
Then there’s a bulk of material that I just edited that was recorded with Tara T. Tavi on vocals and hammered Chinese dulcimer and Connell (MITB) playing tablas and drums. There are only eighteen songs total. I’m hoping that Vermiform will release it.
Then the rest of the mountain is to fulfill the Innerspace comp track promised and also Shrimper to release a double CD(!) as soon as I get it finished. It’s over half way done now. It’s over three hours of edited material that I’m working on and it has quite a lot of variety and electric-ness.
There is a totally pissed Bastard Noise double full length double CD that Vermiform is pressing right now called If It Be Not True which involves all of us original members of Bastard Noise equally. Straight Noise of all shapes and sizes.
Where do you get parts?
Electronic surplus stores are quite awesome for strange items. The strange Euphoria and vibe of seeing the USA when we were tops, still unused, new but old and dusty on the shelves. I got three of my old tube organs at thrift stores for very little cash. The other old Hammond chord was my friend’s grandma’s and they were going to give it to a thrift store. I saw a Hammond M, tone wheel organ but passed it up (kick kick) and then finally got my first Hammond tone wheel, an E-133 about a month later. Just make sure it’s got tubes in it and it’s under $50.
As far as new parts, there’s some small electronics stores around here and Radio Shack is good for a lot of things. The Electronics Supply Co. in Tempe, Arizona has a catalog for all their antique tube electronics stuff, (new tube sockets, Hammond catalog, reverb tanks, tubes) output transformers. It’s totally great for tube electronics. I’ve been 100% tube, high voltage for so long, that’s why I call it “Caveman Electronics.” As far as guitar parts, the Stewart MacDonalds “Guitar Shop Supply” in 1-800 directory for Athens, Ohio will send catalogs out!
The thing that good patriots don’t realize is that our greatest weapon and security on Earth as a nation is to STOP ABOMINABLE UNJUST KILLING. If not, God won’t keep his promises!
Don’t let the beast get you down. Support DIY and noncorporation!
[end]