Adrian Bertram

Here it is. Completed.

After inital testing i discovered that the springs needed to be much, much closer to a pickup and so i had to relocate the central pickup. By using the central pickup i still have the option of including the springs in both the 2 and 4 positions on the 5 way selector, which is nice.

So now i have to learn to play the thing. It seems very good at generating extreme noise (surprise, surprise) but is also capable of some really tasty slide styles where the amount of metal things involved is lending a resonator-ish quality to the sound.

There has also been significant progress with the other instrument as well.

This is a real protoprototype, it’s currently an ergonomic disgrace and made me feel quite light headed after playing only a few notes. It is exactly what it seems: a clarinet missing a bunch of keys with a few metres of extra tubing inserted along the way. It still sounds like a clarinet, just a very, very low one. As in lower than a contrabass. As in you can almost count the wave form oscillations. Of course the extension of the overall body without a proportional redistribution of the keys means it only really has quartertones (or closer) at each keyed section with overblowing only really working on the lower segment. When amplified it sounds somewhat terrifying.

About a month ago i had a strange and unusually vivid (possibly lucid) dream in which i was constructing a bizarre sort of guitar hybrid. Unusually i managed to retain almost all of the detail regarding the construction and mechanics of the design and so now i’m going to build the as yet unnamed thing. In essence it remains a normal electric guitar, but with the addition of a three keyed system of levers or pins to strike the strings instead of normal right hand techniques, and a keyed damper system to function in the style of a sustain pedal on a piano.The original also had a pair of long drone strings constructed from springs running from a bolt running out of the headstock down to the body itself which were played with a separate key system to be thumb operated. However whilst this idea provided great opportunities for getting some serious strangeness and the ability to tune said springs, the tension placed on the truss rod and neck would be so extreme as to make tuning the regular strings redundant, and there’s also the small matter of getting smacked in the face by a spring stretched out far beyond it’s intended limits, and having to reposition a pickup. Instead i’ve decided on a pair of smaller springs running across the body from the upper horn, still to be played by a system of thumb keys.

Of course the instrument in the dream was a beautifully machined, fully realized production model that will bear scant resemblance to the brutally ugly prototype i’m planning on assembling. So far i’ve bought myself a cheap guitar and am about to buy a cheap clarinet for the key system (and hopefully have enough bits left over for some sort of weird Roland Kirk drone instrument/brown noise generator). I’ve pretty much completed my planning/thinking stage - i’ve got an acceptable plan for the main keys, a good plan for the springs and associated keys, and a rough idea of how to implement the damper - so it’s almost time to get going.

First step will be cutting some bits off the scratchplate for better access and then attaching the springs. Then once i have the clarinet i can add the key systems and prepare for mayhem.

Pictures and updates will follow once the carnage begins.