30-05-2008, Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona 3rd Bridge Helix From Experimental Punk to Ancient Chinese Music & Universal Physical Laws of Consonance This article is a written excerpt of my lecture I gave at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona about my self built musical instruments. I explained what kind of instruments I make, why I make them and for which bands. I showed the audience my own copies and played a little on those instruments. Additionally I gave a deeper explanation about one particular instrument I have created, the Moodswinger. After finishing this instrument I rediscovered this instrument is not only a musical instrument, but also a educational measurement instrument which shows a universal system of consonant values based on simple physical laws. I discovered all musical scaling systems all over the world are derived from this basical system, inclusive the worst inharmonic deviated tuning system of all these variations, our Western 12-tone logaritmic equal tempered scale. - Yuri Landman The Beginning I bought my first guitar and bass guitar when I was 18. I always had a fascination for direct and simple punk rock structures instead of highly practised virtuose guitar playing used in symphonic rock and hard rock. In line of this estethical rule I refused to take traditional guitar lessons from a jazz or blues guitar teacher. I took notice of some chords and know where to put my fingers for a C7 or minor D-chord, but I have never practised long enough to play them well. I cannot even play Nirvana’s Polly properly for instance. I develloped my playing technique in a different direction. The band I appreciate the most for their color of sound is Sonic Youth, especcially their first recordings. Derived from the noise droning soundscapes from Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth developed a new way of experi- mental punk rock, mainly focused on untraditional playing techniques on customized guitars with drumsticks and screwdrivers put under the strings and heavily detuned string combinations. I knew Branca’s name from a short biography in the Dutch ‘86 Pop Encyclopedia, describing his guitar symphonies and mentioning his self created ‘mallet guitars’; table shaped string instruments with a large amount of strings with rods between the strings and hit with drumsticks. Unfortunaltely I have never seen close-ups of the instruments. For years I worked with prepared guitars placing objects under the strings and mainly play them on the other side of the string part where the pick up is not taking up the string attack directly. Like a tuning fork the op- posite string part resonates on the attacked string side. When placed on the middle of the string both sides have an equal tone and the resonation has it’s optimimum. When placed on another position however the tone is much more interesting, because the resonation is causing a strange clock-like sounding multiphonic tone. Drowned in sound kort.indd 1 19-06-2008 21:28:17 Zoppo & Avec-A Together with my school friend Cees I started a band called Zoppo. We re- corded songs on a Tascam 4 track and put out albums and singles. I played bass and odd prepared guitar arrangements and took care for the sound quality. Although limited in possibillity with only 6 strings during the record- ing proces this prepared guitar techniques gave quiet good results because of their sometimes unexpected aleatoric moments and it was just searching for a few hours and modify the tuning until it fitted in the already recorded guitar lines which formed the song structure. Zoppo, 1998 at the Noorderslag Festival, Groningen, Holland Originally we were a two piece studio band, but after two albums we started playing live and the reconstruction of the arrangements became a problem for me. Most of the time I remember how I prepare my guitars, but the moment of recording has besides the preparation many other pa- rameters too. Different from playing the guitar traditionally the sound can be 100% different and impossible inharmonic with only slight deviations of all this parameters like eq, distortion, tuning and third bridge positioning. And additionally when you stand up on the stage wearing the guitar traditionally on your shoulders the screwdriver slips off because of the gravity and moves while you are playing the song because of the string buzzing. Because of this increasing annoyance of not getting my sound un- Avec-A, 2004, at The End, Amsterdam der control with a normal guitar I started creating a custom built instrument. This was around 2000. I quited Zoppo because of a comic book store I then owned and started a less professional pressured band Avec-A with Valentijn. Because I was mainly focused on creating suitable instruments for sound enhancing at one moment I was not making music anymore at all. So my carreer as a musician dried up. The final and current result from my experi- mentalism has become not the music, but the instruments themselves to create music with. Building for other bands At one moment there were almost 20 wooden string instruments lying on my attic, not used at all. Then the idea raised to approach international bands for cooperating on my project. The plan: I created a string system for an experimental guitarist to offer him/her more sound possibilities. In return this would lead to an increasing attention for my work, maybe turning it into a commercial business. I first approached Liars who had just released Drum’s not Dead. After meeting them in Utrecht at a gig in Ekko they appreciated my offer and let me decide what to make for them. I had made a few third bridge guitars and decided to make for them an improved version of an earlier prototype. This became the Moodswinger. I made two exact copies, so I wouldn’t regret giving my instrument away. After Liars I approached Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and created The attic on some of his ideas a symphatetic 18 string biheaded droning guitar. For Jad Fair I created a 2 string instrument with 12 additional plucking thumbs. I approached Amadeo of Blonde Redhead, for who I still have to built some- thing, hopefully soon I will be able to fulfil my promise to him. Recently I made a 3-way stereo guitar for Blood Red Shoes. From left to right: The Springtime for Laura-Mary Carter, the Bachelor QS for Jad Fair, the Moonlander for Lee Ranaldo and the Moodswinger for Aaron Hemphill. Drowned in sound kort.indd 2 19-06-2008 21:28:20 Back to the Moodswinger Afterwards the Moodswinger had a strange side effect on my musical perception, which is the subject of this text. The instrument contains the most worked out third bridge scale until now. I’ve not seen any other third bridge in- struments with this string division scaling. One precedor though is good to mention, because it formed my ideas; the Pencilina made by a guy Bradford Reed from New York called Bradford Reed. Bradford’s Pencilina comes the most close to my instrument, but is more individual in approach. He can play the instrument very well, but trained a long time for it. My main goal was to create an instrument on which every guitar player could easily play a tune. I was trained as a chemical analist, studying maths, science and physics, so I quiet well understood what was actually happening with the third bridge technique. But for Liars I had to devellop a system they would understand too. My English was very bad around then, so it had to be in the instrument. This leaded to my current research on string reso- nance, physics and microtonal scaling. I didn’t know Aaron had studied microbiology, so afterwards it was pretty easy to explain him how the instrument worked. He immediately understood what happened. On in- ternet I found a site about a slide instrument called the Analude made by a mathematician named Steven Rowat which contained a color dotted system indicating microtonal harmonic positions. Around then I didn’t understood quiet well how Rowat had constructed his colored scheme. He based it mainly on the just intonation theory of Harry Partch, using commonly used ratio’s like 16/15, 9/8, 6/5, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 8/5, 9/5, 15/8, The Moodswinger 2/1, etc.. Later on I discovered these are frequency ratios instead of the string ratios. I work with mainly string lengths, because this is much more clear for relationship between the several string positions. The string ra- tios are the inversions of frequency ratios. For 6 months I develloped a sort like color dotted system which explained the tonal cohesion of all rich tonal positions on my instruments. This was more clearly for myself then the double colored system Rowat worked with. With the colors I Bradford’s Pencilina, which already mentions the 1/4, 1/2 created families of tones. So the 1/2 position is grey for instance. 1/3 and and 3/4 on the upper neck and 1/4, 2/5, 3/5, 2/3 and 3/4 2/3 positions are the red dotted family. 1/4 and 3/4 orange. 1/5, 2/5, 3/5 on the lower neck. and 4/5 yellow, etc.. Just following the colors of the rainbow. I discovered the left side of the octave middle was a mirror image of the right on the scale. So the idea rose to put on two more scales on the neck as well on both sides of the string division scale.