Matthias do you know if the MAX patches that Thomas used are
available?
On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 12:10 PM, Art Simon <simart@gmail.com
<mailto:simart@gmail.com>> wrote:
Thank you Matthias for documenting his legacy. I'm very much
enjoying Guiteros.
On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 9:03 AM, <matilists@gmail.com
<mailto:matilists@gmail.com>> wrote:
I update here a mail I wrote in 1997:
Thomas Diethelm is a Swiss nylon guitar virtuoso that
made some success in Europe mid 80ies using a unique kind
of LiveLooping:
https://thomasdiethelm.bandcamp.com
<https://thomasdiethelm.bandcamp.com>
He was rather of the individual kind, had his own strong
style (literaly, he was a champion in spear throwing,
before dedicating to the guitar!), a virtuoso as long as
playing his own compositions and using his AMS DMX 15-80S
digital delay and pitch
shifter.
He wanted to live on his music and tried to be popular.
He used to say that he needs to create 'liedli', little
songs - as opposed to the instrumental compositions he
would naturally create. Its a pity he neither made the
big success he would deserve for his ability nor do we
have the music that really came to him... but its still
very amazing and unique what he left us!
His main technique was to set up a pattern of delayed
pitch transpositions.
So each note he played turned into a short melody of 2 to
6 notes. For each
song, he used specific patterns and composed using the
delayed transposed
notes.
This may sounds trivial, but once you listen to his
records (about 6 of
them, “Valeys in my Head" I would recommend most) you get
impressed how far
he went with this technique.
From this album on he also used a Paradis Hexaphonic
guitar with Polydistortion effect he faded in to set accents.
Often he quickly alternated between chords and melody
playing and due to the
delay both were constantely present and due to the
pitch shift, there was no impression of repetition. The
limitation of this
technique made him creative in terms of composition and
gave his own sound.
Two of the records he made in team with one of the best
Swiss keyboarders
Santino Famulari, the others feature an always changing
good band. only the last album is almost solo I heard him
often play solo when we worked and always found it
sounded much more impressive than with the band.
He complained a lot about the failing (bad contacts)
expensive and sensible AMS studio
machine. since he completely depended on it, this might
even have contributed to the end
of his career around 1990.
For 10 years he was happy to sells dried spiced fish (he
was a brilliant cook, too!).
around 2005 someone created a special MAX software on a
WinXP Laptop and he tried a comback with the last
recording Guiteros.
then he lost his workshop and living place and had to
sell his instruments and lost the reason to live and died
in 2013 rather miserable.
--
Art Simon
simart@gmail.com <mailto:simart@gmail.com>
--
Art Simon
simart@gmail.com <mailto:simart@gmail.com>