Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
>> Just recorded this impro with my fretless electric + sustaniac: >> http://www.looproom.com/audio/Coastline.mp3 On 14 aug 2007, at 08.29, Michael Peters wrote: > wonderful again Per ... argh, I'm jealous ... my new sustainer > fretless > guitar is still being worked on ... maybe I'll get it next > weekend ... did > it take long for you to learn to play fretless? No. It's very easy actually, because you can slide into any micro tonal twist you long for. I think 1979 was the first time I tried fretless guitar. I got the idea from Philip Catherine who played with Larry Coryell. I did not like the way Catherine played it though, so I took off the frets from a guitar to see if it could be made to sound the way I wanted it to sound. It did not. The problem was way too short sustain and I left fretless to move on with other instruments. Then in 2002 I started to experiment with gaffa taping a tiny loudspeaker to the headstock and liked that mechanical sustain feedback very much. So when I heard from Ted Kilian, some years ago on this list, about the C model Sustainiac I though this device might be the ultimate solution for getting the fretless sound I had been hoping for back in the seventies - and this time it worked out fine. Before I slaughtered my Telecaster I read up on http:// www.unfretted.com/. Some things I discovered, that I did not know before, was that the action has to be set as low as possible,, at least for the sitar-like buzzing attack that I am going for. You also have to carefully plain the finger board and best is if you can cover it with some really hard material. So I'm hoping for making me a second fretless guitar in the future, with a finger board of some extremely hard wood, metal or glass. I like the combination of low output fender pickups on fretless because that typical dual-mic- telecaster-country-tone attack gets kind of perverted by the woody buzzing in a funny way. I've heard some fretless guitars with humbucker type pickups and really did not like that sound - kind of "too serious" sounding for my taste. Also, it seams as when playing with Sustaniac-C (the mechanical vibrator clamper thingy) I tend to like guitars that acoustically give vary short sustain, because they tend to go wilder (answer faster) to the vibrator. So I would really like to check out the Sustainiac with a jazz box some day. Hmm.... should I get a Gibson L5 and pop off the frets...? (sorry, just kidding ;-) Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international)