Thank you, Harry (postscript)

As I was working through the above (or rather, below on your screen), it dawned on me that although this scheme leaves room at any time for either or both of the other instruments to articulate a contrasting idea, it doesn't leave room for anyone to play a long phrase. To borrow Stravinsky's remark about the organ, "the monster never breathes."

So, two modifications:

1) A fourth "instrument" joins the mix, viz., a rest (at least, in this strand of the composite texture).

2) Every instrument acquires "scare quotes." That is, rather than literally assign a given phraselet to the violin, that phrase is assigned to the violin's transposition ... and then, depending on the register, could be performed by the violin, or by the guitar, or by 'cello.

Thank you, Harry

I'm starting a new piece, picking up on ideas I abandoned almost a decade ago.

When my mentor Steven Stucky (1949–2016) died, I had recently purchased a resonator guitar (National M1, with a squareneck wooden body and "biscuit" resonators). My immediate response was to start sketching a memorial piece that would adapt Josquin des Prez's Nymphes des bois (a.k.a. Déploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem) for solo slide guitar ... or maybe slide guitar and voice, with the text adapted to a more modern, bluesy idiom? Alas, I felt creatively boxed in by the challenges of maintaining good voice-leading on slide guitar. 

This coming June, there will be a concert at Cornell to mark the 10-year anniversary of Steve's death, with works by some of his students from the 1990s. Because I've worked so slowly (and scarcely composed at all in recent years), my works list is small, with no works fitting the available instrumentation. So, I was inspired to revisit the Josquin-via-slide-guitar nexus, but as a trio with violin and 'cello. Voice-leading obstacles magically evaporate!

Full disclosure: I haven't actually found those sketches from 2016; I think I may have sent them along to my archive at Old Dominion University. But I remembered clearly that I'd settled on exploring a hexatonic open tuning < E2, A2, C3, F3, Ab3, Db4 >, and that I could achieve a nice paraphrase of the Nymphes de Bois roster of composers ("Josquin, Brumel, Pirchon, Compere") by moving the slide stepwise down strings 3 and 4 for the lower voices, with the upper voice alternating between strings 1 and 2.

The reason for the title is that before last week, I had a plan to write the piece in seven movements, with each movement paraphrasing a different detail of the Josquin. The plan called for paraphrasing the opening phrase "Nymphes des bois, déesses des fontaines" (shown below) and the guitar's open tuning above nudged me toward how to warp (ever-so-gently) Josquin's melody and transpose it ... starting in the 'cello, answered in the guitar, answered in the violin ... but that would last about 12 seconds, and then ... what?!?!?

The "?!?!?" denotes mild panic over the fact that my more detailed plan requires this music to span 144 seconds. I'm in a good mood today because while I was waiting during a service appointment for our car, I began to implement another detail of the current plan, which is to present that melodic material in the form of "interlocking mobiles, legato." (Interlocking mobiles was a central technique in the late Sir Harrison Birtwistle's (1934–2022) output. Mind you, I had no specific idea what that would mean when I decided that; it was just a necessary contrast to other textures in other movements. 

So, it turns out that if you subdivide those two opening phrases from Josquin in to four phraselets ("Nym-phes," "des bois," "dé-es-ses," and "des fontaines") and then allow them to occur in any sequence, that gives 24 permutations ... and because "interlocking" among the three instruments, then each complete set comprises 12 phraselets ... and to cut to the chase, by assigning each phraselet three possible duration segments (one of which corresponds to Josquin's original, with the other two as variations), at the tempo of 72 bpm (also arbitrarily decided in the detailed plan), each complete statement in only one instrument lasts between 14.167 and 18.333 seconds ... and so, each complete statement with all three instruments lasts between 42.5 and 55 seconds. So, I just need around two-and-a-half statements (which, thanks to the various degrees of variation, will sound very similar, but not identical) to fill those 144 seconds.

Yes, I knew perfectly well that I was aping Birtwistle ... and when I realized that I had gone from "?!?!?" to "!!!!!" in one sitting, I recalled his remark to the effect that "ideas are ten a penny," but then you need a method for proliferating them. After I visit random.org to permute the orderings along the various dimensions above, it'll be a straightforward matter to transcribe the results, and then figure out how other elements (from other movements) interact with them.

[please excuse the lack of illustrations; I'll add them later] 

 

Guitar quest (1b) -- My ES-335 era -- Postscript: Photographic evidence

After posting yesterday, I remembered that the second photo below was squirreled away in our basement; the first one also turned up in the same box. Both are from the summer of 1995.

Exhibit A: Avant Garage performing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. 

The photo is poorly lit, which accurately reflects conditions on the ground. (I'm in the shadows at far left, with the Gibson ES-335.)

The glaring inaccuracy of this image is the impression that lots of young people are having a good time while we play; the photo must've been snapped very early in the evening, before our audience figured out that they would better enjoy hanging around outdoors in the sweltering heat, rather than staying inside and enduring our music in air-conditioned comfort.

 

Exhibit B: Avant Garage performing at New Paltz, NY.

This was a wedding celebration for the families of our lead-singer/accordionist's brother and his bride, who had tied the knot earlier that year in the Caribbean. We were one of numerous bands that performed throughout the afternoon and evening.

When I first saw this image, I thought, how charming that those two little girls are sitting there listening to us play. Then I realized that my only turn on lead vocals at that gig was my "Body-Piercing Blues," in which the narrator is trying to bed "the sweetest hippie chick that you ever seen / A tie-dye shirt and peasant skirt and Birkenstock queen," who insists that he's too vanilla and really ought to get a body piercing. Subsequent verses work their way down from eyebrow to nostril to lip to nipple, culminating at the groin. (Our shocked protagonist cowardly refuses all.) Yes, that's what those two little girls are sitting there listening to.

[title revised Feb 20, 2026] 

Once more, yadda yadda redux: Guitar quest (1a) -- My ES-335 era

 Yow! Six years? Six years?!?

As the kids say today, it's been a minute.

And I'm in much the same sitch as back then, viz., needing to get back in the saddle of stringing words together in meaningful (and, if the stars align, occasionally elegant?) ways.

No, I'm not even going to try to recap everything going back six years (?!?). Rather, I'm going to go back almost half a century, because I've spent the past three months obsessing about six-string electric guitars, and my better half suggested that I really ought to share my observations in blog posts. (Of course, this is her tactful way of telling me that she'd rather not hear all the gory details of my current journey.)

So, here begins a series of posts, in which I try 1) to get my prose-mojo groove back, and 2) survey my personal guitar odyssey, culminating in my current psychodrama (spoiler alert: I want something so niche that Guitar Center stores prefer not to stock it).

1970s

I don't recall when, exactly, I first felt a yen to play guitar, but it was sometime in the mid-1970s. I made my parents aware, but they were slightly older than most of my peers' parents — and crucially, my father didn't much care for any musical styles that used the electric guitar. So, for my first 16 years (give or take) as a guitarist, the only guitar I played was a classical guitar.

(Okay, that's not counting the electric bass I played as a teenager, but again, I'm trying to stick to the six-string plotline.) 

 1990

At the end of my first year of grad school, I decided to take the plunge and buy myself an electric guitar. Most of my favorite guitarists (Steve Howe, John McLaughlin, Jimmy Page) played Gibson guitars, and on the occasions in my youth that I'd picked up a Fender guitar, the spacing of strings and frets always felt alien to me.

So, my choice at the Ithaca Guitar Works in (April? May?) of 1990 boiled down to two instruments in my price range, both Gibsons, and both previously owned: an ES-335 and a Les Paul Studio. Mind you, at this point I knew very, very little about electric guitars and their components, so my decision hinged on how the instrument felt in my hands ... and after a decade-and-a-half of playing classical guitar, the Les Paul body felt too small, but the larger ES-335 body felt more comfortable ... so, that's what I bought.

I played that guitar for a decade or so. (If you saw me perform in the band Avant Garage in 1995, that's what I played.) It mostly suited me; my only complaints were 1) it wasn't much to look at (plain top with a dark brown finish ... so dark that it looked black under ordinary lighting conditions), but more importantly, 2) it had a trapeze tailpiece, and in my search for maximum sustain I learned that I really wanted a stopbar tailpiece. And weirdly, sometime around the turn of the century, I realized that it was starting to feel awkward, and that maybe I should switch to an instrument with a smaller body.

So, right around the time I moved from Ithaca, NY to Cambridge, MA, I sold it ...

 2002

... and replaced it with an Epiphone Les Paul, thus ending my initial Semi-Hollow chapter and kicking off my Solidbody Era.

(per the parenthetical numeral in this post's title, there's more to come ... SO. MUCH. MORE.)

[title revised Feb 20, 2026]
 

Once more unto the breach

In 2003 and 2004, I struggled to hammer out a libretto for a music-theater piece. The experience was so nerve-wracking (because every additional day that I spent flailing with words meant one less day to compose the music under and around them) that I swore never again to play wordsmith.
Last year or so, I started hatching an idea for a new music-theater piece. Per the above, I resolved not to take it beyond possibly sketching a synopsis until I could find a proper poet to flesh it out in verse, and it's only last month that I started doing the barest of research to generate an outline, much less a complete synopsis.
Somehow, enough time has passed since my prior trauma that, instead of systematically completing that outline, and then a synopsis ... over the past few days, I started drafting the actual texts for an opening chorus and aria. I'm not sure what, exactly, nudged me over the edge. It might have been the realization a couple of weeks ago that the piece ought not to take the form of an opera, but rather, an oratorio. Or it might have been the realization that the poetry ought not rise to too high a standard (i.e., it will be much funnier as pure kitsch). And, weirdly enough, it might have arisen from volunteering to write music (not words) for someone else who previously has written about opera, and is now thinking of writing her first libretto.
But there you have it: words, words, words (well, 82 of them, anyway), in various degrees of rhyme & meter, at a level suitable to start creating music along the way, instead of waiting for a complete libretto. Here's hoping I can keep this rolling in the weeks and months ahead.

Bedated uplate

... wait ... strike that, reverse it ... or then again, maybe stet?

Long story short, the extremely low action of a tapping instrument renders it particularly susceptible to any change in the system ... like, f'rinstance, different gauges of strings. Yes, when I changed the strings, the difference in string tension requiree a slight truss rod adjustment (as in, just a 60° turn for both rods). Which reminds me ...

I didn't approach this as a professional research project, so I didn't take notes on where I read what. But somewhere along the way during my online research about Krappy Guitars, I encountered a complaint from someone who said he couldn't adjust the action on his instrument, blaming Kevin's "proprietary" hardware. For all I know, this might be true of that person's instrument, but it's certainly not true of mine. Here are some photos of the bridge:

Yes, the height of each string's saddle is adjustable (with a simple flat-head screwdriver), and each string is fully intonatable (with a hex wrench inserted into the end of the bridge screw that determines the horizontal position of its saddle). Best of all, when I removed the truss rod cavity cover, I discovered that adjusting the truss rods doesn't involve a hex wrench (as I've used on Les Paul copies by Epiphone and ESP), but rather, a crescent wrench (so, it's much easier to apply torque without slipping).

This should be all the functional changes for now, other than experimenting with different ways to damp the strings at the nut. I'm not convinced that simply stuffing felt under them is the best practice (and I see in at least one video that Trey Gunn has augmented the felt by wrapping something around the lowest bass string). And okay, I might need to adjust the intonation on a few of the strings (most likely the low G, which represents the single greatest change in string diameter: from .075 to .065, which is literally an order of magnitude greater than the changes on the other strings, all measured in thousandths of an inch).

On the fingerboard, I applied faux-abalone faux-inlay decals that are 3mm wide, thinking that 5mm strips would be too much. I was wrong, so 5mm decals are on the way. If I feel really ambitious, then I'll re-do the faux-abalone bulldog face on the headstock, but first I would need to figure out the genuinely best way to do it. (For now, my first attempt is adequate, especially when partially obscured by the strings that pass over it.)

So, bottom line ... the Krappy Touchstyle Guitar is not, in fact, a crappy touchstyle guitar. I take it for granted that yes, a Chapman Stick or a Warr Guitar provides a superior instrument, but for three figures instead of four, Kevin has made a thoroughly functional instrument.

Next step: learning to play the thing ...

Vertical, or horizontal?

I was alarmed to see that the marvelous touchstyle guitarist Trey Gunn (formerly of King Crimson) has suffered repetitive-stress injuries in his left wrist, such that his default position for playing his Warr Guitar is now horizontal, across his lap, rather than in a traditional guitar position. This leaves me wondering how much I should try to find a comfortable vertical playing position ... that is, maybe I should skip directly to the lap position.

The immediate hardware implication is that I might need to move the strap buttons (or simply add new ones) to facilitate using a Dobro-style guitar strap to secure the instrument while I play. The immediate software implication is that as I work through preparatory exercises in Emmett Chapman's Free Hands and Greg Howard's Stick Book, vol. 1, I will need to revise Every. Single. Left-hand. Fingering.

So, my initial progress might prove very slow indeed as I experiment with both positions, and especially as I try to find the optimal placement along four dimensions to minimize strain on my left wrist, as helpfully spelled out in a post on a Stickist discussion board: 1) how close to one's left shoulder the headstock is held; 2) the rotational angle of the fretboard relative to its long axis; 3) the fretboard's angle from the vertical; and 4) the elevation of the instrument relative to the player's body. Wish me luck!

Minor repairs

As I've gotten to know my instrument, it occurred to me that I ought to post some detailed description and photos, as a way to help people better understand what you get when you buy a Krappy touchstyle guitar. The tl;dr is that it is NOT a crappy guitar! Details follow:

1. The only significant problem I've encountered is that at the 19th fret, the 2nd string "frets out" to the 20th. This is probably a consequence of the guitar's journey from North Carolina to Massachusetts: that is, with the change in humidity, the neck's curvature has altered ever-so-slightly. And I do mean slightly: If I apply more pressure and push the string against the 19th fret more forcefully, then the string clears the 20th fret ... but of course, the whole point of touchstyle playing is not to fret with that much force.

Lest any skeptic cast aspersions on Kevin's lutherie skills, I will emphasize that none of the other strings "fret out" anywhere on the neck ... that is, everything is monkey-dory on all ten strings from the 21st fret right up to the 24th. And the delta-humidity hypothesis is supported by the fact that the guitar arrived ... slightly oily. I infer that before shipping the instrument, Kevin took the trouble to re-oil the wood, and surely wiped away the excess (because, seriously: who would be masochistic enough to pack an oily guitar?!?). Now take that wood with no excess oil on its surface, and ship it in a sealed carton during summer: the air warms, relative humidity drops, and the wood dries, weeping some finishing oil that it had previously absorbed.

Cut to the chase, I will take a fret file to that spot on the 20th fret to bring it back into line. I've encountered this sort of thing previously with mass-produced guitars by Epiphone and ESP, so really, this is no big deal.

By the way, Kevin posted a demo video to YouTube, in which he performs King Crimson's "Heartbeat" on the instrument prior to shipping.

2. Otherwise, the only other touch-up I see in the instrument's immediate future is to pick at the felt that mutes the strings at the nut (as piano technicians do when they re-voice the felt on piano hammers). That is, at present it seems to allow more vibration than is optimal, though I have to admit this may actually mean that I'm just not playing at sufficient amplification.

The journey of a thousand taps ...

... begins with a little trip down the rabbit hole of calculating string gauges. The instrument shipped with a first string of .008 in. diameter, which to my ear sounds sadly underpowered versus all the other strings. So I knew that I would want to go up to an .009 (or perhaps even a .010, eventually), but what about all the other strings?

There are multiple resources on the web to help a person calculate proper string gauges, and I tried several. When D'Addario's String Tension Pro calculator works, it works beautifully; the catch is that it doesn't really tolerate backtracking to tweak one or two pieces of information. If you want to change any detail of what you've previously entered, the site requires you to go back to the beginning and enter everything all over again — and for a 10-string instrument, that's incredibly clunky.

So, I created a spreadsheet comparing string diameters and string tension for various sets of strings, including the set already on the instrument, the set offered by Mobius Megatar for Chapman Stick tuning (with the bass in inverted fifths — that is, ascending in perfect fifths from the middle of the neck out to the near edge), and then played around with calculating the gauges that would achieve varying levels of balanced tension across the neck.

Lucky for me, before I placed any order, I found the Stringjoy site. I'd seen (and immediately bypassed) their ads in my Facebook feed, but when I discovered the generous informational videos posted in their blog, I knew I'd found the right people. I sent them an inquiry describing my needs, and within 24 hours their President, Scott Marquart, replied with his recommendations. I was happy to see that I had calculated correctly for all of the plain steel strings and some of the wound guitar strings, and I was relieved that Scott stopped me from ordering wound bass strings that would be too slack for practical use (that is, the bass strings need to be at a slightly higher tension). Those strings are on their way; I'll report back after trying them, though there is some work I will do while the strings are off (see next post).

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap ...

In this month's edition of potentially self-destructive behaviors, I bought a touch guitar.

I've been curious about these instruments ever since the mid-1990s, when I discovered King Crimson's music, especially their work on the albums Discipline (with Tony Levin playing a Chapman Stick) and Thrak (with Levin on Stick and Trey Gunn playing a Warr Guitar). However, as impoverished grad student, I couldn't even think of buying one of those instruments, or even a budget-priced Austin Douglas guitar [sorry, their website is no more]. Over the past 20 years, every couple of years or so I would check to see what's out there in the way of used instruments, but they always carried a four-figure price tag that I just couldn't see paying until, perhaps, after I were to become proficient and actually use the instrument in my professional work at least as much as I've used the theremin.

Last week, via one or another online discussion form, I found the site of luthier Kevin Siebold in Raleigh, North Carolina, who makes 1-, 2-, and 3-string guitars from reclaimed wood and sells them under the defiantly punk name Krappy Guitars, with a disclaimer that soaks the principle of Caveat Emptor in grain alcohol and then sets it on fire:

Our warranty: There is no warranty, expressed or implied. We fully acknowledge our product is crap, and your purchase signifies that you have entered into an agreement to buy a product that is lacking in quality, contains poor materials, and is worthy of much abuse and destruction. We will in no way provide any customer service, so don't even waste your time!!!

However, that manifesto doesn't apply to the touch-style instruments that he makes. I was intrigued to see that he offers an unadorned neck (with fretboard and tuners) for do-it-yourself-ers, and wrote him to ask about pricing. Strictly speaking, this must've been a nuisance e-mail, as within a minute of hitting "Send" I discovered his Pricing page that displayed exactly the information I'd requested (oops!) ... and I had to admit to myself that I surely don't really have the time to assemble another guitar from parts (back in the mid-oughts, I made a Tele-style Partscaster, but that was when my judgment was clouded by mind-altering drugs). Oh, well ...

... and yet, Kevin replied almost immediately, asking me whether I would be interested in buying a used 10-string instrument with a padauk fretboard and canary body:

This was too good to pass up. No, it doesn't offer all the functional amenities of a Chapman Stick or a Warr Guitar (e.g., there are no tone controls, the two truss rods are accessed and adjusted from the base of the neck, rather than its middle, there's no belt hook), nor all the cosmetics (viz., no fretboard inlays—those fretboard dots are plain white decals—and no multi-layer glossy finish). But it's well-constructed, the hardwoods look beautiful, and it shows virtually no wear and tear; I suspect the original user gave up when he discovered (as I'm discovering now) how much time and hard work it would actually take to transfer his previous bass and/or guitar experience to touchstyle techniques. And its price "used" was only a fraction of the cost of a used Chapman Stick or Warr Guitar, never mind the price of a new one.

I will post updated pictures after I've applied some faux-abalone "inlay" decals. I'm inordinately excited to learn about the latter, as they will also offer a much easier (and more easily reversible!) way to mark temperaments such as 31-EDO on the LTD EC-256 that I rendered fretless a couple of years ago.

But that's all for the near-ish future; right now, I need to start learning to play the thing ... well, right after I walk the dog. Did I mention that her visage may well wind up on the headstock, rendered in faux-abalone decal?

Kicking and screaming, into the 21st century

At long last: ca. 26 years after I first became aware of Max = ca. 10 years after I first purchased Max/MSP = ca. 9 years after I first became aware of Pure Data = ca. 3 years after I first downloaded Pure Data ...

Where was I? Oh, yes ...

I've finally created a new patch, rather than simply copying a patch from of a tutorial. In this case, I went to town on the Random Melody patch in Johannes Kreidler's tutorial, available at http://www.pd-tutorial.com/english/ch02s02.html

My patch isn't ready for prime time, but it works: It sets up simultaneous treble and bass tones, and the user generates randomized counterpoint, with options a) to move a randomly selected voice to its next randomly selected tone, or b) to specify moving the treble voice to its next randomly selected tone, or c) to specify moving the bass voice to its next randomly selected tone.

Next steps: 1. Replace the randomly-selected frequencies (with resultant random harmonies) with randomly-selected intervals in Just Intonation, 2. Add a mechanism to interject rests within each line, and 3. Add a mechanism to vary the volume levels appropriately. (The last will presumably require generating long strings of coin tosses in advance of each real-time event, so that the machine can anticipate when to make either voice louder or softer.)

As you might have guessed, the goal is to create something that's very nearly musically satisfying, that requires only a third, human-improvised voice to complete. (Did somebody say "theremin"?)

Tonight! Tonight!/ Won't be just any ... [zzzzzzzz] ....

Ich bin ein schreckliche Selbstpublizist: I've fallen into thinking of this virtual space as a place to confess to mutilating musical instruments, rather than advertising performances. So, to the latter:

Tonight, I will perform my Hundenschnarchenwiegenlied (2010) as a guest of Ensemble Pamplemousse, at Roulette in Brooklyn. Discounted presale tickets are available here.

You Will Believe a Bulldog Can Snore!

You know you're a cute little heartbreaker ... Epoxy!

One of the joys (and dangers) of my neighborhood is the proximity of Rockler's Cambridge store; all too often, I walk by, see an interesting piece of hardwood displayed in their window, and start to fantasize about buying it and installing tuners, bridges, pickups, ...

Luckily, last week this placement played to my advantage: While searching for a wood filler better suited to this project, I found a post on the Rockler website that explained the different kinds of wood filler, and identified what I thought would be the right product for this job. But in the store, when I described the project to someone on the staff (identified by his name tag as — I kid you not! — "Woody"), he pointed me to something else even better: Mohawk Wood Epoxy Putty Sticks.

The Mohawk wood epoxy both filled the narrow cracks more effectively than the garden-variety filler I used three years ago, AND it's harder when cured. (Win-Win!) The main drawback in practice is that, for this application, you must quickly resign yourself to wasting at least 50% of what you mix: As with any epoxy product, you have a limited time to use what you mix ... but it's well-nigh impossible to mix only the amount you would use to fill a single fret slot. Heck, it's well-nigh impossible to mix only the amount you would use to fill two fret slots, and even that's a race against time — especially given the putty's tendency to stick to the X-acto knife, and the palette knife, and the latex gloves, and, now that you mention it, everything except the surfaces in the fret slot.

Here are photos of the slots filled (but not sanded):

If you look closely, you can see the difference between the five slots closest to the neck pickup (which I filled more precisely, using only an X-acto knife) and all the others (which I filled more quickly, using a palette knife). The latter group resulted in more stray putty on the fingerboard, but that's not a problem: the process of extracting the fretwire slightly raises the wood along the edges of each slot; when you sand those down to the level of the fretboard, you simultaneously remove the excess putty. But don't take my word for it; here are images of the fingerboard after sanding:

... and finally, here's the newly fretless instrument, restrung:

So, there you have it: Phase 1 (making the fingerboard fretless) is complete; now it's on to Phase 2 (finding a way to tie frets around the neck). I've procured an ample supply of artificial gut, in the form of 1.75 mm ABS nylon monofilament (normally fodder for 3D printers). The good news is that it definitely seems hard enough to work as fret material (in particular, it's harder than nylon cable ties), but it seems to require some persuasion (most likely, by a soldering iron) to attain a proper fit to the fingerboard. When I find a practical solution to this problem, I'll share the details here.

We can work it* out

* where "it" denotes any individual guitar fret

Another Friday, another step forward in converting my ESP LTD EC-256 guitar into a fretless model. As advertised last week, today I applied painter's tape on either side of each fret, heated the fret with a soldering iron, and then carefully extracted the fretwire from the slot. Lather, rinse, and repeat 21 more times ...

The curtain is lowered for 30 minutes to denote the lapse of a half-hour.

Adjusting the truss rod to bow the neck slightly backwards resulted in much, much less splintering than in my previous effort (mauling an Epiphone LP-100; I'll have to dig around to see if I still have a photo of those ragged slot edges). Here's a close-up of the empty EC-256 slots; you can see some ribs (un-ribs?) where the barbs on the fret tang took teensy bits of wood with them on their way out, but the damage is minimal:

In another refinement of the process, rather than remove the frets in consecutive order from nut to body (or vice versa) as I did on the LP-100, this time I first removed only the odd-numbered frets, resulting (briefly) in a custom whole-tone instrument:

Removing the frets in this sequence made the work on the upper frets much, much less claustrophobic, especially on the second pass (i.e., removing the even-numbered frets). If nothing else, it simplifies applying the painter's tape, because on that first pass you don't have to clear all frets; rather, the tape can overlap and cover the even-numbered frets.

Okay, now the asymmetric placement of the fingerboard inlays in the above photo is starting to unsettle me, so here's a photo of the completely emptied fingerboard:

Ahhhhh, much better. Next week (schedule permitting), I'll fill the empty slots. Maybe I'm imagining it, but the clean(er) edges make the slots look narrower than the aforementioned LP-100 slots, which in turn makes it seem as though it will be even more challenging to fill the EC-256 slots.

The last time around, I discovered the hard way that the wood filler I used didn't offer a sufficiently fine resolution to truly fill the LP-100 slots. I haven't ruled out using wood glue instead: 1) I'm not trying to fool anyone into thinking this fingerboard was never fretted, and 2) the 12-EDO slot lines will provide a handy 100-cent reference grid for placing the "gut" (actually nylon) frets ... so, with that in mind, filling the slots in a contrasting color becomes a feature, not a bug.

Where angels fear to tread

Spring is sprung, school is out, and a young man’s thoughts lightly turn to thoughts of guitar surgery.

A couple of years ago, I undertook a wildly overambitious project to re-fret a solidbody electric guitar in 31-tone equal temperament. I failed miserably, and was ready to swear off any and all such radical modifications. But then a funny thing happened on the way to abject surrender ...

A few weeks ago, it dawned on me that, yes, I had failed miserably, but not utterly. No, I don't have the skills to saw new fret slots and hammer in new fretwire ... but I did succeed in removing the old frets, and I almost succeeded in filling the old fret slots and making the fingerboard fretless. So although I can’t realistically plan to refret a guitar, I could convert one into a fretless instruement, and then play it microtonally with a slide, and/or tie gut frets (or something gut-like) onto the fingerboard. (Which, indeed, some older, wiser voices encouraged me to do with the previous guitar —but I was too headstrong to listen, as a callow youth of 50.)

So, here we go again ...

... this time with a nifty little gem of an inexpensive Les Paul copy that I stumbled onto in Rockin’ Bobs Guitars, Davis Square, Somerville. Here's the “before” photo:

It's an ESP LTD EC-256. Highlights include a carved maple top and the ability to split the pickup coils; alas, there’s only one tone knob, but at $225 used, this instrument was practically a steal. (The covered humbuckers aren’t my first choice, but if all goes well, I’ll swap them out for some Seymour Duncan open-coil models, and replace the ordinary nut with a compensated one by Earvana.)

After removing the strings (and stashing away the stopbar tailpiece and Tune-O-Matic-style bridge for safekeeping), I removed the cover plate to access the truss rod:

Next, I adjusted the truss rod, reversing the fore-bow (a.k.a. “relief,” which prevents strings from buzzing against frets during play) to achieve a slight backbow. This is a pro tip I didn’t know two years ago; this step should reduce damage to the fingerboard when removing the frets. (If the fingerboard is under compression, then it tends to grip the fretwire; if it’s under tension, then it’ll more readily release the fretwire.)

Okay, that’s enough fun for today. Nest week, I’ll apply painter’s tape on either side of each fret (to protect the fingerboard), and then extract them, with the aid of a soldering iron to melt any glue holding them in place. Wish me luck!

A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again

... or at least, not any time soon.

This semester, my globetrotting friend and colleague Tony De Ritis engaged me to sub for his freshman Honors seminar in Comparative Arts on his days out of town. He therefore invited me to attend the first class meeting to meet his students, and the rest, as they say, is a Facebook status update:

(Yes, the same student thought of "working-class" and "yuppiedom" as synonyms. He'll learn otherwise today.)

My post prompted Michael Monroe (read his blog here, and/or follow him on Twitter) to mordantly witty action:

Formulating clues to Michael's grid would've represented the path of less resistance ... but no, I had to follow through on my original impulse, which was to craft a cryptic crossword based on the principal works from the course syllabus.

If you're new to cryptic crosswords, here are solving guidelines posted by Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who construct the weekly puzzle for The Nation. (Confessions of a Bad Liberal: I subscribe to The Nation principally for the puzzle.)

Without any further ado, here's the puzzle, my very first effort as a constructor. The grid won't win any awards, but it does follow the customary symmetry. Bon appetit!

Ways to ape an ape, drumming

(Oh, right. Blog. Where was I?)

At long last, this summer I finished the first fantasy-transition (Whew!). On to the next section ...

... which (as ever) seems as though it ought to write itself, as the master plan calls for a fairly simple, one-minute duet of the theremin imitating the sounds of a chimpanzee pant-hooting, and the piano imitating the sounds of same chimp drumming on a tree bole with his feet.

A less scrupulous (or simply less obsessive) composer might efficiently transcribe a previous instance of same from an earlier work (because, really, what composer hasn’t already written numerous such passages?). But, no ... I had to come up with something new.

The pant-hooting is easy enough, and offers a new twist in not sticking to octatonic collections (as I’ve usually done before); instead, the zigzag melodies derive directly from the harmonies dictated by the five-voice Ursatz.

The new sticking-point (over the past month or so) has been composing the piano’s “drumming.” The texture has been more or less a given: in the bass register, intermittent staccato dyads (mimicking < left foot, right foot > ). The difficult part (more precisely, the part I made difficult for myself) was finding the right harmonies, to supply enough intervallic variety to maintain interest, but so much as to push the sound across the boundary between “drumming” and “chordal harmony.”

Initially, I tried to map the opening four-note motto {Eb, F, E, F#} onto the five-note chord(s). But transposing the various dyads and triads in each hand led either to monotony (if both hands move in the same direction, by the same intervals) or jarring pitch duplications (if the hands mirrored each other) ... and avoiding pitch duplications led to a tightly limited set of harmonies (so, again, monotony).

The breakthrough (embarrassing, as it seems obvious in hindsight) is that the right kind of monotony can be achieved with surprisingly little effort by

1) committing to a single pitch-class pentad, with various voicings (as in the piano’s accompaniment of the motto at the piece’s start),

2) mapping a five-note extension of the motto onto the Ursatz pentad of the moment ... so, < Eb, F, E, B, Bb > as the soprano

3) partitioning the pentad into the triad < Eb, F, E > and the dyad < Bb, B >,

4) manipulating all of the above isorhythmically, to generate a series of 2 x 3 x 5 = 30 drumming dyads ...

... and given that each talea will comprise four dyads, the series will occur twice (probably spilling into the second, later section of simian mayhem, in which the theremin will also drum, and the piano will also pant-hoot).

Now, it’s just (!) a matter of placing these dyads with unpredictable rests between them, and selecting the appropriate pant-hooting and shrieking gestures from the theremin’s pitch tableaux. Onward ...

Errata (18 Oct 2015): Duh ... forgot to include the 8va indication under the bass clefs on the l.h. staff.

Grumble, grumble, grumble

For the past six weeks, my aspiration to blog more frequently has collided smack-dab with my disinclination to report failure ... or rather, flailing away at things without making clear forward progress. ("Flailure"?)

On the physical-assembly front, I've discovered to my chagrin that I simply don't have the means (and/or skills) to saw fret slots sufficiently precise to mount new frets by the traditional hammering technique. So, today I removed the botched frets; in the next week, I'll fill those slots, sand the neck to a smooth surface, and procure half-round wire (without tang) to glue into place. On the bright side, the loss of some sound conduction should be more than made up by greater precision of positioning.

On the abstract-assembly front, I've been wrestling with various arpeggiation patterns for the first "fantasy-transition" of Tapestry and Otter. It's a weird balancing act, trying to find a happy medium between What I Could Conceivably Play Myself, Molto Adagio (i.e., something too simple) and What Would Sound Utterly Awesome If Human Beings Could Learn to Execute (i.e., something too complex). And in characteristically amnesiac fashion, I've found myself circling back to rediscover patterns that I tried a week (or two, or five) ago, though now enriched by a bit of quasi-Schenkerian composing-out.

I've probably made things needlessly difficult by not paying enough attention to the transitional aspect ... i.e., the first section of the piece is firmly in place, and I have a very clear sense of how the third section will proceed ... so perhaps all I'm missing in the current sketches for the second section are more details from the first and third, suitably transformed (and/or transforming).

Stretching the canvas

Activities of the past fortnight have included:

1. Plotting (in Excel) the timings of five chromatic sinusoids, each sweeping from the midrange down to the low bass, then back up through the midrange to the high treble, and then back down to the midrange. But as in prior works, each traverses a different total span, and these different cardinalities cause the voices to change pitch at different times, generating a smorgasbord of suspensions.

2. Transcribing that numeric data onto musical staves. Given the close registral quarters, colored inks are essential for keeping track of which voice is on which pitch:

3. More or less concurrently with steps 1 and 2 above, deciding on an overall form of nine sections, in an approximate arch. The original extremes-of-the-piano-keyboard "frame" still opens and closes the piece, and will still push its way to the fore from time to time in between. From that, and from the tremolando chords that I doodled after Victoria's dry run for her performance at the Bulgarian consulate last month, I settled on an alternation between sections of irregular rhythm and those with a more regular pulse.

3. Changing my mind about the total duration of the piece; in hindsight, I ought to have delayed steps 1 (and especially 2) until I'd settled on the proportions of the various sections. Shameless Fibonacci fetishism leads to a total duration of 18:17, vs. my initial guesstimate of 17:30. Replacing the appropriate values in the Urlinien spreadsheet took 10 minutes or less, but then ...

4. Recalibrating the Ursatz. Rather than re-create the entire page, recopying hundreds of noteheads, it's a lot less work simply to relabel the x-axis:

And that brings us to today. This morning, I rewrote the Prelude (per my previous post, replacing the foreshadowings of a texture that is now destined for a different piece). Because I'm happy with the frame as is, the path of least resistance was simply to sketch directly onto the first page of the theremin part. First step was to add time indices (in orange ink) ... then to remember (duhhh) that I had previously disregarded the duration of the frame gestures ... hence the second layer of time indices (in red ink). Soon enough, I wound up ignoring the Ursatz for the Prelude, instead respecting the integrity of its pitches and composing a simple countermelody for the piano to interject during the theremin's sustained tones:

In compensation, the start of the first fantasy-transition includes quite a few embedded augmented triads, which simply aren't my cup of chai. I had originally imagined that I would need to add a sixth and seventh voice, hovering above and below ... but while playing with different arpeggiation textures, I hit upon one that doesn't resort to additional voices, other than a couple of octave duplications. The latter simplify the rhythm (vs. quintuplets or septuplets or what-have-you) and the harmony (ranging from four to five pitch classes, rather than five to seven), and (surprise, the surprise) contribute to a richer timbre.

Approaching monthly content

(sort of)

Hokay, it's done: Score and parts for the new, improved version of A field guide to North American car alarms are in the hands of Boston Musica Viva for their May 10 concert in Pickman Hall (see details here), following the usual spiral into madness brought on by parts editing (in which preparing the parts reveals errata in the score, which then bring on additional changes in the parts, rinse, repeat). Also, the opening fanfare, which I had intended to leave unchanged, on closer inspection called out for some teensy changes to reinforce the sense of parallelism among the various instruments swooping, honking, and chirping gestures.

Moving right along = returning to composing my theremin-and-piano extravaganza Tapestry and otter, for the pianist Victoria Tzotzkova. The title derives from Jon Carroll's brilliant and/or wacky description of precision theremin technique, from his review of a concert by Dalit Warshaw: "Her right hand looked as though it were picking lint off a tapestry; her left hand looked as though she were petting an otter.").

I originally imagined the piece as only 10 minutes long, and sketched an arresting introduction (about one minute long), followed by ... um ... an okay sequel (another minute or so), which I now realize belongs in another piece. Specifically, it's not pianistic enough; it's more of a texture for string quartet, or perhaps winds. And as I've played a bit more with improvising theremin melodies over tremolando piano harmonies, I've decided to open up the piece: the target duration is now around 17 minutes or so, with nine sections, ranging from one minute to three minutes in length, alternating free (or seemingly free) rhythm with more regular pulsation. And yes, there will be chimpanzee vocalizations.