Yuri Landman: Experimental Luthier

I came across Yuri Landman several months ago while doing some online research into alternative guitar construction. At the time I thought information on Yuri was limited to a wiki entry on him as I somehow missed his official website hypercustom. So I was thrilled today to find a link on the musicthing blog to a pitchfork article all about this very interesting artist. The article describes the reasoning behind many of his guitars features and the logic he has applied to his instruments tuning and the materials he likes to use.

He has recently been creating unique guitars for a number of bands including one of my all time favorite groups Sonic Youth.

His guitars look amazing, I cant wait to hear the sounds these wonderful instruments produce. I love to read about other people exploring new possibilities in the realm of electro acoustic music as it makes me feel more positive about my own experiments in this area.

-J

Jeff Gburek - Musician

I recently had the good fortune of meeting Jeff Gburek an American experimental noise artist who currently resides in Berlin.

Jeff is primarily a guitarist although his techniques would seem quite unorthodox to many. Usually his guitar is laid flat on a table and plucked, played, interfered with using objects like metal files a cello bow and a whole range of different bits and pieces. He also utilizes a laptop during his performances for the live synthesis of electronic sounds the playback of pre-recorded samples and to effect the signal coming from his guitar.

We just saw him perform a piece called Myopia by Djamla Primordial Science that combines experimental movement theatre and live electro acoustic music here in Lyon. We came away from the show feeling eager to discuss what we had just seen. I love it when I'm challenged by by a piece of art or a performance and this certainly did just that.

He is currently touring France and a few other places presenting this and other works with Ephia who performs the bodily elements of the shows. A list of tour dates can be found here.


Samples of Jeff's guitar orientated music can be downloaded from the futurevessel site and you can listen to his computer compositions on his myspace. He also has several CD's coming out soon filled with track which I suppose would be classed as IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) so keep your eyes open.


He gave me some of his back catalog to listen to and I have been doing just that for the last few days. Here is a link to download one of the tracks I was given. Its is a composition comprised of recordings of radio broadcasts collected over several years and is part of a four disk set called Radio Wide World 1994 - 2004. The sound samples were collected using a shortwave radio and include recordings of Number Stations, background noise and random broadcasts that have been arranges to form complex soundscapes.



Below is a shorter but in no way less interesting piece uploaded for your enjoyment. Download here.

Downloads: Where to find all of our sound clips

I thought it would be a good idea to do a short post showing anyone interested where our sound clips can be downloaded. I use an upload service called in.solit.us from which we usually embed mp3's but if you want to download the files feel free to do so they can be found here. We release everything we do under the creative commons 3.0 license so you can remix, reuse and redistribute the files with our blessing.

-J

Cigar Box Electric: Sort of

This is a simple cigar box style electric guitar I made last year using the wooden box that comes with the Electro Harmonix Micro Synthesizer as the body. The neck and bridge were just lying around my workshop in Ireland and I had nothing to do that day so after several hours of work I ended up with this weird instrument.

The scale length is shorter than the fret spacing on the neck would like but it still sounds great when played with a slide or prepared or modified with a third bridge. The hollow body gives the guitar a rather unique resonating quality that produces really interesting tones. Below is a sample of some noises I created using this guitar and our latest electronic synth / effect unit, Fotosis No. 004 there is a picture of the equipment setup at the end of the post.

The pickups are good quality single coils that were replacements I bought for my first guitar. It was not being used anymore due to the fact that it had become so modified and broken normal music was impossible to play on it, but it looked and sounded totally cool. I removed the pickups from the old guitar and cut slots into the EH Micro Synth box through which I pushed the pickups and then secured them in place wit four screws.

This instrument was a gift for Connie as was the little Danelectro Honeytone pocket amplifier that we use all the time now as a preamp.

Design: Fotosis No. 005

Fotosis instrument No. oo5 will be a hybrid guitar / synth, but not 80's keytar style. Actually it will have everything our previous instruments had with a special sort of experimental guitar added to the control panel. That means square wave noise maker section, optical theremin, passive ring modulator and a weird stringed instrument all in one. The picture on the left is my first drawing of the proposed device. I suppose it'll look and play a bit like a lap steel guitar.

The guitar has two rails running parallel to and just below the strings. These allow the player to insert a third bridge at any location they like or place a platform / fretboard under the strings on which the can mount objects to play the instrument as a prepared guitar. There will be two handmade high output pickups (similar to the ones I made for this instrument) located at both bridges. Each pickup will have independent volume control and its own 1/4" mono output to increase the experimentation potential of the device. The instrument can be played into the ring modulator and made to sound nothing like a guitar at all.

We will be starting construction in the next week or so after we catch up on our current orders and will post images of the design and construction process here.

The sound clip below was a test I did a while ago to determine what sounds would be produced by such a device. I simply plucked the strings with one hand and adjusted the controls on the square wave section of Fotosis No. 002 with the other. The embed is a bit slow give it a few seconds to get working but the file can be downloaded here if you still have trouble.



This picture is of the setup used to produce those sounds, notice the chop stick rammed under the strings. This acts as the third bridge.


-J

For Sale: DIY Electric Guitar

Just listed my much cherished homemade electric guitar on on Ebay. You can find the listing here.(This item is now available for purchase at our Etsy Shop)

You might be wondering why we made this and why it is on this site that deals mostly with the electronic synthesis of sound but I assure you there is a good reason. You see I used to play guitar quite a bit, I used to be pretty good. But I found that as I got older I had less time to play and more exotic sounding devices started to appeal more to me.

Before I came to Lyon I built a guitar from scrap, just for the hell of it one weekend. To my surprise it sounded pretty good and people seemed to like its quirky design. So my initial plan was to build guitars for a living here in France from reclaimed materials. I built the one that is currently for sale but events conspired, one thing lead to another and we ended up with the Fotosis line of electronic instruments.

But my dream of building electro acoustic instruments isn't over. I plan to take aspects of my guitar building past and apply them to future Fotosis style instruments. They will be a fusion of guitar and synth, but not in that cheesy 80's guitar synth way, they will be very very different:-)

-J

Handmade Electric Guitar

Just finished building and setting up this electric guitar. The body is a solid block of Indian Teak which was once part of a DIY boat project that was abandoned in the 60's, the wood had been sitting in a shed in Ireland until my dad rescued it and I then took it to my workshop in France. We found the sheet of aluminum that is the rear cover outside our flat late one night on the way home from the brasserie. The neck was an Ebay find, all the other little bit and pieces were scavenged from here and there.

The really interesting thing about this project is that I made the pickups from scratch. The bobbins were hand carved from the same wood as the body and wound with the same type of wire originally used by Fender. Each of the two scatter wound single coil pickups have six high quality AlNiCo magnets in them and the wire was wound to 5.5k on the bridge pickup and 6.7k on the neck pickup resulting in a very warm and powerful vintage sound that distorts extremely cleanly.

I really enjoyed making this instrument and will be very sad to see it go.



You can see a slide show of the instrument at various stages of construction if you follow this link.

This instrument is going up for sale tomorrow evening (my time France) on Ebay, if anyone is interested in buying it before then, contact me.

-J