Member Since: 5/10/2005
Band Website: myspace.com/solponticello
Band Members: Killick and Tatsuya Nakatani at Flicker, Athens GA, 2.18.08
Add to My Profile | More Videos
This is the H'arpeggione, a.k.a. the devil cello. It is a one-of-a-kind, built by my good friend Fred Carlson of Santa Cruz, California, and has been my main instrument for almost a decade. The H'arp has six strings that I play and twelve that resonate in response. It is made of redwood, black walnut, maple, and ebony. The tuning is similar to a modern cello; the fretting is equal temperment quartertones and, further up the neck, conventional half-steps. Inspiration came from an Italian bowed guitar called the arpeggione and a sympathetic stringed violin from Norway called the Hardanger fiddle. Needless to say, it took me quite some time to figure out how to play it! I can't even begin to express how much I have learned from the tremendous energy in the H'arp: the ancient stump from which the top was harvested has recently begun visibly growing again.
Here is Big Red, also built by Fred Carlson. Using the H'arpeggione as a starting reference, Big Red pays homage to the harp guitar, a popular parlor and performance instrument in the early part of the last century. Big Red’s body is constructed primarily of Alirecel, or aliphatic resin cellulose laminate, a fancy way of saying papier-mâché. Antonio de Torres, luthier of legend, once fabricated a six-string guitar via paper and glue. He reasoned the top is what most contributes to the tone of a guitar, so he used for that aspect fine wood; the instrument still exists more than 100 years later, and is said to rival in sonority any conventionally constructed guitar of the period. Following de Torres, Big Red’s top is salvaged redwood (from the same stand as the H'arp), the main neck and sub-bass extension are reinforced maple, and the fingerboard is fretless in the lower regions, with conventional fretting on up from the 7th fret position. The instrument also has a zither-like super-treble section and resonating sympathetic strings in the manner of my H’arp. Big Red is played upright on a spike, though at heart it is a baritone classical guitar with piano on the brain.
Influences: music: all the shamans; reading (the lone wolfman against the elements type-thing); watching; listening; silence; thinking; barking; being; harnessing the sun; body modifying (I'm sleeved and throated); brain modifying; any pre-1990 video game- Mappy's a good start; pinball; gluten-free living; hiking; organics and biodynamics; 100% cacao chocolate; health care for everyone; workers owning the means of production; hero myths 'n' realities; unqualified human rights; deep ecology; yoga-ing; lover-ing my D