The Elettrione
The Elettrione is a prototype “Electric Guitar to Arpeggione Modular Conversion System”. Devin Arne (currently an assistant professor in the Wells School of Music at West Chester University) conceptualized the Elettrione while he was completing his Doctorate in Music at Arizona State University. I collaborated with Devin on the design of this instrument and did all of the 3D modeling, fabrication, assembly, and setup of this augmented guitar.
The Elettrione is designed with a modified acoustic bass fingerboard and custom bridge to facilitate the bowing of each string individually. It also features a piezo undersaddle pickup, and a custom magnetic pickup that provides an isolated signal from each individual string, allowing for the application of differential amping and effects to further expand the versatility and expressive range of this instrument.
Future Strummer
This guitar started out, believe it or not, as a prop for a Halloween costume. I decided to go to the party as Joe Strummer (The Clash). The original concept was to reproduce the visual appearance of Joe’s famous primary guitar after all its years of passionate use and expressive amendments. I planned to replicate this highly weathered and layered look using only stained, bleached, and naturally colored inlays of wood. I quickly realized that this approach was overly ambitious in the time I had available, even with the benefits of laser cutting and CNC machining options, so I produced a temporary overlay (seen in the documentation of this build). I eventually reimagined this instrument , taking inspiration from a 5 string Mexican instrument that was owned and played by the gentleman I bought my table saw from. The title of this instrument embeds the history of its build and references Strummer’s statement, “The future is unwritten.”
Whistling In The Dark
Whistling in the Dark was my second guitar. I continued my exploration of the “T-Style” form factor, but in a chambered thin-line version. I was interested to hear and feel the difference between a solid body and this variant. My experiment was far from scientific, since I couldn’t match the pickups that I had found for my first build, but my impression was that this guitar had a richer, warmer tonality, and the reduction in weight was highly welcome. I also wanted to expand my technical pallet by adding the f-hole and binding to the mix. It’s very interesting to look at early photographs of this guitar. I see a lot of color bleed from the padauk onto the maple of the pickguard (this was later refinished, using a careful application of shellac to dramatically reduce this effect and increase the contrast between the wood colors). What is most striking however, is the degree to which all of the wood colors have mellowed and darkened to a rich, coppery tone. Frankly it feels like someone applied a sepia tone overlay to the whole body. I anticipated this transformation, but it’s wild to do a side by side comparison.
The title of this instrument comes from the song by They Might Be Giants, Whistling in the Dark. It references, in perhaps an idiosyncratic way, the joy I was finding working on this guitar.
Ghost Writer
Ghost Writer was my first “traditional” guitar build. Other experimental musical instruments preceded and followed this one. I built Ghost Writer while I was deep in the throes of writing my PhD dissertation. The process of building this guitar offered a much needed counterpoint to the intellectual research, thinking, and writing activities I was immersed in at the time.
Technically, this is about as simple as an electric guitar gets, which made it an appealing design. I was also trying to learn how to play bends that emulated the quality of pedal steel licks, requiring one or more open (or fretted) strings to ring out while another was bent. I found that the floating tremolo block on my my Strat resulted in all the notes shifting while I was bending, so I was looking for a guitar with a fixed bridge. (I need to get back to trying to learn that tricky technique!)
Tellucaster (Telluride Skitar)
