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Experimental Rock Guitar thread at the Gearpage.

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showth ... p?t=201701

Anothe rsuggestion: stop listening to rock music and rethink the guitar as a really bizarrely constructed percussion instrument.

I remember reading an interview with Bill Laswell when I had just started playing bass - he talked about how he would have rather been a drummer, but didn't have the coordination. Since I'm always tapping and drumming on things, I could relate. One of the exercises he suggested was weaving a screwdriver through the strings of a bass, down by the pickups, and shifting it's position to hear the different percussive resonances you could get. I spent a whole afternoon doing that. It sounded awesome... and that was before I was into using effects. I can't imagine how cool it could be with modulation & delay. Haven't tried it since... but maybe I should look back into that kind of stuff, now that I'm finally in a band that could have a use for that.

My goal as a guitarist to make a Tri-tone sound joyful.

Yeah, I don't know, i never found much satisfaction in experimenting outside of effects boxes. However experimenting can really help a band collectively. My friends band used to be really experimental even on stage, which didn't tickle my fancy. But now that they know what sounds good and what works their music sounds really tight and with a direction to it.

There's always that fine line of doing something cool and doing something just for the sake of being experimental. Its sometimes hard to get the right message across to the listener/audience.

if you call yourself experimental, you probably aren't.

I always though rubbing an allen wrench on the strings sounded cool

Ahh shit we had a veeery long thread about mechanical effects in the old Devi Board, I dunno if it made it to this one. Basti Moon is quite the expert on them!!!

Any idea about that thread title ? I'd like to read that !

CB1 wrote:Anothe rsuggestion: stop listening to rock music and rethink the guitar as a really bizarrely constructed percussion instrument.

I 100% agree with this. This is why I asked the luthier who built my steel hoolow bodied Jazzmaster to put a piezo in it: it amplifies each noises made on the guitar and makes it a percussion instrument.

I still haven't recorded anything with that guitar (it's currently back to the luthier to have its pickups changed) but you can check out my new project.
It's free form improvisations using the guitar + pedals + objects as the only sound sources and the laptop as a real time looper. The tracks are unedited (so they are quite loong !) and they are not only made of weird noises: they usually start like this but everything starts to make sense after a while..usually.. I'm not interested in pure noise or experimental, what I like to do is staying on the border between experimental and more average type of music.
But this project is intended to be an experiment for me about "letting go" and a laboratory of sound research: it makes me discover sounds and playing techniques I can use in more constructed music.

Anyway, it's called "Le Principe d'Inconstance" ("the inconstancy principle") and the sounds are here:
http://www.myspace.com/theinconstancyprinciple

I'd be happy to hear what you think about it.

CB1 wrote:Anothe rsuggestion: stop listening to rock music and rethink the guitar as a really bizarrely constructed percussion instrument.

I've done that with a Les Paul, Strat copy and an SJM... Neither of them lasted too long. Damned fun, though. Damned fun.