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!