The Kitchen Sink
As the previously discussed implements
demonstrate, nothing is off-limits to
guitarists dedicated to extended techniques.
Frith uses a variety of tins—saddle soap, candy, etc.—and small
Chinese gongs. “They can make beautiful
sounds if you just place them on the
strings with varying degrees of force—but they can also be bowed and scraped,
or have objects placed in them while
they are there,” he says. “Piano tuning
felt is good for damping the strings—which, in conjunction with tapping,
produces a percussive sound. Or you
can use thin cloth for less extreme
damping. Clothes brushes and paint
brushes are great for stroking, caressing,
rubbing, or deadening the strings—and
for playing ‘drums.’”
At a 2009 performance in Seattle, Fred Frith
uses drumsticks to coax a barrage of sound
from his Gibson ES-345—which is outfitted with
a pickup at the nut. Photo by Aaron
Tammen has his own bag of similarly
twisted tricks. “I place a strong magnet
from a loudspeaker over a pickup and
bang it with a soft mallet. It creates the
most beautiful subsonic frequencies.
With a subwoofer it blows you away—it
may also blow the speaker away,” he
warns. “When used as a slide, a pocket
warmer with a soft metal cover sounds
much more percussive than regular
slides. It can also be smashed on the fretboard
hard, without damaging the strings
or the fretboard. I also slowly crawl over
the fretboard with a battery-operated
table vacuum cleaner to produce a drone
that is rich in overtones.”
Handheld electric fans are good for
exciting the strings, either with the blades
themselves or by just blowing air over
them. Playing prerecorded audio from tape
recorders or iPhones into microphonic
guitar pickups is also a great way to add
speech or ambient sounds to a performance.
Similarly, flipping through stations on a
handheld radio can create an interesting element
of randomness, too. Further, a quick
look around your studio or kitchen is likely
to produce a plethora of sonic possibilities.
Process and Processing
Though there is often beauty in the arranged
noise created with these found objects,
sometimes it is largely about the process
of experimentation and exploration itself.
And the limitless possibilities afforded by
the implements discussed here—as well as
the spirit of experimentation that you’ll find
inspiring you to pick up all sorts of other
tools—become exponentially inspiring when
you consider what can be done by warping
their mechanical tones with electronic gear.
For Westerhus, pedals are a huge part of
his sonic playground. “I have a few pedals,”
he says, referring to a collection that would
rival that of many small music stores, “but
I keep changing them. I tried going in the
computer direction, but to me it sounds too
digital. I don’t like it when I can’t control
my own gain structure and push components
into sounding different based on my
playing dynamics. You don’t get that in a
computer—it’s all in the way two or more
pedals interact with each other.”
As that statement implies, feedback is
an integral part of Westerhus’ sound—
and that feedback comes the good old-fashioned
way. “I guess I play [at a volume
that] most people would describe as [expletive]
loud,” he laughs. “It’s a way of sustaining
my notes without using the horribly
flat-sounding EBow.” He elaborates. “Using
distortion, you can easily control feedback
at almost any volume because of the compression
created, but it becomes flat sounding.
I generally don’t like to use anything
more than a mild boost from my Fulltone
Fulldrive. The big thing for me is that the
guitar drives the effects chain hard, and
that the amp has enough headroom to be
driven hard so that the guitar will respond
to the sound of the amp. This makes it all
one big instrument. I just brace myself and
hope I can control what sometimes feels
like a screaming lion between my hands.
It takes practice, and it’s different each
night at different venues, depending on
the room, acoustics, PA, etc. But it’s always
good to push your luck onstage.”
Hans Tammen plays manipulates a Steinberger Spirit GT-Pro Deluxe routed through Cycling
74’s Max
sound-editing software at the 2010 CeC Festival in India. Photo by Ashok Mehta
Tammen, on the other hand, has no
problem with computers. He uses Cycling
74’s Max software to merge laptop and guitar
into one instrument. “I do not use electronics
in the sense of an effect that you apply to
your traditional or extended guitar playing,”
he says. “The guitar creates all the sounds,
but it controls the software at the same time.
The software ‘listens’ to the playing, then
determines the parameters of the processing.”
Tammen has been known to use an iPhone as
a slide while enabling its accelerometer data to
control the parameters of his software—effectively
creating an extended slide guitar. “I also
use a proximity sensor to influence software
parameters,” he says. “If both of my hands are
working on the guitar, moving my body into
the sensor area allows me to control/produce a
third voice next to the other two.”
Kleier uses pedals during live performance,
but when he’s composing he often
radically alters sounds in the computer. “A
lot of my recorded sounds keep morphing
through plug-ins until they are unrecognizable
as guitar,” he explains.
Extend Yourself
But even if you’re more interested in traditional
guitar playing, extended techniques can
open your ears to new sonic possibilities you
can incorporate in any genre. “The future of
music relies on players expressing themselves
beyond the limits of their instrument,” says
Westerhus. Tammen agrees. “Guitarists have
always been open to new ideas, instrument
modifications, or other crazy things.”
Frith cuts to the heart of the matter. “All
the word ‘technique’ means is ‘doing what you
need to do to realize what you want to hear,”
he says. “In order to develop techniques, you
have to practice until you are in control of the
material. It’s as true when placing a tin lid on
the strings as when you play ‘All the Things
You Are’ in Eb. In the end, the ‘what you want
to hear’ is the interesting part.”
