Was approached a while back about contributing to the electronics of one of these very unusual "harmonic" guitars that "New complexity (http://www.newcomplexity.com.au/index.html)" builds. The instruments have extra strings, pickups behind the bridge as well as in front and certainly generate some strange and haunting sounds. I've always been a sucker for weird and wonderful, and remember a great sound page (those are plastic 45's you'd get in the middle of magazines) Mid 80's there was one I really liked that featured homebuilt instruments- name of the dude escapes me now, the name of the tune I do remember "Legs Akimbo" (named after his dog, shame on you! dirty minded folks:P )...Anyway, it won the Hottest New Player or whatever competition, and really was great stuff and SO unique.
The instruments Lewis builds I think work in a similar way. What he asked me to do was build tremolos that would work on one half of a humbucking pair to create a kind of phasing sound when combined with the other coil. Both the fore and aft pickups have these. Apparently there's a mythical Sonic Youth guitar that does something similar too. I also designed a custom buffer system to make all this work too- mercifully, I left figuring out how to wire it all up to him! Anyway it works, check it out! Best sounds are at the end IMHO. I never got to play it, but would sure liked to have a go.
Dang that is some out there stuff. I really like the Trem sounds at the end. That would be super fun to mess with. Never heard of putting pickups on the other side of the bridge. Pretty clever!
Pretty out there :o, pretty clever and well executed...!
That's pretty cool. It makes me want to go out and abuse a guitar. There's so many things you could do if you ran the four coils of two humbuckers out independently to a mixing and effects box.
Was this the song you were thinking of?
Yes! thanks, been lazy coulda googled it- actually still will have the original mag and disc somewhere.
Nuts, but hard not to love , don't you think?
I think the B-side had some more "atmospheric" stuff, might have been the runner up..I 'll have to dig out the mag now .."91 I see too!
Quote from: Guitarmageddon on October 13, 2014, 08:58:33 AM
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Nuts, but hard not to love , don't you think?
Yep, it's pretty mad, but there's definitely something about the way it works. I first heard of it about 10 years or so ago on a forum for fretless guitar. Interesting stuff.
Hey Ben, you know if Ken made anything similar again?
If so I wanna hear it :)
Loving this. Pretty unique.
What a cool guitar and great project to be a part of! Congrats!