And from the
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Meet the Pikasso guitar. Apparently, this was originally commissioned by Paid-By-The-Note ambassador Pat Matheny, not Rick Nielson as one might think at first glance. There are 42 strings. One would assume that once you got done tuning it, you wouldn’t feel like playing any more. I’m sure it sounds quite nice and all, as Linda Manzer is no slouch viz. making guitars, but the way I look at it, if Django only needed 6 strings, well, you get my drift. Product page is here.
35 comments
"Paid-By-The-Note ambassador Pat Matheny". That's absurd. Fine, you don't like his music, but you also don't know it. There are many, many, Metheny compostiions that are spare to point of ambient. LIke him or not, he's not Al Dimeola.
Yes, but if Django could do what he did with just 3 fingers and 6 strings, just imagine the possibilities with five fingers and 42 strings!!
I would think that the laziness benefits of having all your stringed instruments in one package would be negated by the obvious anti-laziness of having to carry that shit around all the time.
that thing looks like is was made by picasso.. or maybe wile E. coyote.
guitar people are so sensitive.
They are. I was listening to "Real Jazz" on Sirius yesterday, and Pat Metheny's rendition of "All Blues" came on, and I swear to god he fit like 35 solos in three choruses. There's a song that doesn't need that. I was embarassed for him.
If my choice is "like him or not," I'll take "not," thanks very much. On the other hand, I've always got a tickle out of his lambasting of Kenny G, which is available here:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/articles/arti0900_03.htm
But, to my ears, all fuzak sounds alike.
-CR
Needs to have a 5th neck made pointing downwards so Methany can play that with his wee-wee.
There is little real info about the instrument on the luthier's link, but it looks to me as though the two fat 12-string headstocks are securing drone strings which would vibrate sympathetically or perhaps be strummed as well, but not fingered. The luthier could have stopped after adding one set of sympathetic strings ( there is a precedent for such things: http://www.vishwamohanbhatt.com/veena.htm www.vishwamohanbhatt.com</a>www.vishwamohanbhatt.com</a> and <a href="<a href=" http://www.bazantar.com/instrument.html ). The fat strings at bottom are probably extra bass notes, but look too short to have decent resonance (even the doublebass, according to physics, is "too small" for what it is trying to produce frequency-wise...there were 19th c. experiments involving doublebasses so large that the player(s) had to stand on a ladder - I kid you not! Same deal with gigantic sub-bass saxophones). If the guitarist had 3 right arms, this thing could be justified...
okay chris very nice slam on pat.
pat metheny is probably the most dynamic and artistic jazz guitarist of the period 1980-now. he can move from milk-toast to abrasive so fast his audience gets whiplash, and his motivation for everything he does is completely internal.
yes he can be notey. he knows what he's doing, and he isn't notey for the sake of it. no not all of his notes need to be there, but they all belong there.
also, were you aware that Thurston Moore (i would go out on a limb here and say you probably are familiar with him) called Pat Metheny's Zero Tolerance For Silence "the most radical recording of this decade" and "a new milestone in electric guitar." Zero...Silence is about 70 minutes of unlistenable solo guitar feedback and noise. there's probably not one actual note-note on the entire record.
Pat does what Pat wants to do. if he wants to do a smooth jazz record, he does it. next time out he might only do 32 not harp guitar, and piss a bunch of new listeners he got with the last record off. he's Pat Metheny and he doesn't give a shit.
there's a whole world of guitar players out there who believe that more notes more faster is more better. that club does not include Pat Metheny as a member.
>> In 1984 Pat Metheny asked me to design and build a guitar with " as many strings as possible"
now THAT is absurd.
Hey Chris, could you design me a plugin with "as many filters as possible."
W
That essay dissing Kenny G was hilarious. I like the accusation that Kenny G is not only shitting on Louis Armstrong's grave, but shitting on every musician who's ever tried to do anything interesting.
Legend has it that when Pat Methany (briefly) taught at Berklee, he berated the class for being too dumb to understand his genius and stormed out because they were too far below his level. Uh Pat...isn't that why you're supposed to be teaching them?
Ah the great Boston Music School legends. I went to school down the road at the new england conservatory. We had one that Wynton Marsalis challeneged an student to a fist fight during a masterclass, supposidly the student took him to task about being a 'lil on the conservative side. Wynton responded by telling him to take out his horn and show him what he means. When the student declined Wynton then asked him if he wanted to step outside and rolled up he sleaves.
Of course this happened a "year or two" before anyone who told the story began throwing away there money in that wretched institution. Is it true, probably not, I love the idea of a mastercass master being overall menacing and threatening.
isaac newton was a TRUE genius. pat metheney is not a genius. people throw that word around a little too much. anything i've ever heard from metheney is just as sterile and ass piss inducing as kenny g. i'm sure the guy is wicked talented but i just dont appreciate his music. that's all subjective i guess.
you think pat ever sat in w/paul anka? ;)
http://www.noisetank.com/integrity/
anyway- ridiculous it may seem but i think people should build all the weird instruments they want for whatever reason.
The D-beam version is out 2007 NAMM!!!!
"pat metheny is probably the most dynamic and artistic jazz guitarist of the period 1980-now."
Are you fucking kidding me? The nice thing about the word "probably" is that there's room for "absolutely not." Not as much as if you had used "possibly," but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here. Perhaps you might want to preface statements like that with "In my opinion" or "To my ears" or "because I obviously have very little in the way of taste, I consider..."
And in any case, you can't say that shit while Kenny Burrell and Les Paul are still alive.
-CR
Uhhh... you guys don't know much about jazz guitar, do ya? Or else you just can't appreciate it. As much as I find all of his Metheny Group material disposable as hell, if you've ever listened to any of his trio recordings, you'd be aware that he is an authentic jazz monster. Just about the most complex chord voicings, dexterity, rhythmic and melodic sense of any jazz guitarist of any time. Yes, Metheny is a jazz guitar genius.
And if you've ever seen him play those over the top acoustics in a solo setting... you'd understand he has the ability to utilize it completely.
Django was good for his time... but he's no Metheny... there's not really a comparison to be made there.
I believe the song I mentioned in my first comment is a Trio tune, which I found just as pompous as that nasty reverbathon synthy shit he does with Lyle Mays. Not my cup of tea, but when it comes to jazz, I'm basically bop all the way. If someone's gonna do what is, for all intents and purposes, the "Stairway To Heaven" of bop, well, you gotta nail that shit.
As I've said, however, this is in my opinion. If Pat Metheny turns your crank, by all means do indulge. Just do so out of earshot of me.
-CR
i didn't say that pat metheny was a genius, and i didn't say he was better than Kenny Burrell, Les Paul, or Melvin Sparks (or Mark Elf or Joe Pass or O'Donel Levy or ad infinitum).
i would have expected you to infer words to the effect of "who came after" or "became popular during" etc. pardon me for not being as explicit as i can be sometimes.
so if my taste sucks, _who_ should i be listening to as far as modern jazz guitar goes? if Pat Metheny is the ambassador of overnotefulness and badtasteosity, then _who_ in the younger generation of jazz guitar do you think is good, or at least better than Metheny? Kevin Eubanks? John Abercrombie? Bobby Broom?
if you name any dirty hippies who sidestep their 335 copies through a pair of tube screamers i will be in stunned disbelief however.
Jeff Parker.
-CR
I love Jeff Parker... one of my favs. Him and Marc Ribot. But they aren't authentic jazz guitarists. Jeff strives to sound like authentic jazz at times. But that's where the difference is.
My tastes put Jeff Parker and Marc Ribot above Pat Metheny. But they aren't real jazzbos. Metheny is.
"But they aren't authentic jazz guitarists."
oof, there's that word: authentic.
Jazz is a bastard genre, and Metheny has done as much as anyone to bastardize it further. Where do you draw the line between authentic and inauthentic? bop? cool? modal? Charlie Christian? Eddie Lang and Lonnie Johnson?
Jazz used to be dance music that normal people actually enjoyed; no one dreamed of suffering through four Boston winters to study it.
"Django was good for his time... but he's no Metheny... there's not really a comparison to be made there."
Django may or may not have had the chops that Metheny does, but who the fuck cares? Django could consistently do the one thing music is supposed to do - elicit an emotive response. He was able to use his musical vocabulary to convey meaning, most of Pat Metheny's stuff is just gobbledegook. I'm not saying he's never done anything good - I'm actually glad that musicians like him exist, if only as a cautionary tale on how *not* to approach music.
Honestly, I think talent is overrated (I'll take poorly articulated music with real empathy over talented pap any day) and a lot of "players" need to cut their practice time in half and use the spare time to go have some life experiences worth making music about. I know Django did, Pat Methany just comes across as a pompous geek with no interests outside of his own guitar playing.
Amen to that. A-fucking-men.
-CR
Like I originally said, some people are unable to appreciate the difference.
A player that can play jazz AND combine it with modern relevance... John Scofield's new "Saudades" release with Larry Goldings and Jack DeJohnnette is some serious jam.
I think its cool when guitarists are actually REALLY fucking good technically, but don't let it lead them by the nose. I know he's not jazz, but I always thought Reeves Gabrels was awesome like that.
There's one big difference between Django and Metheny (make of it what you will): Nearly all of Metheny's recorded work is with him as leader or as a sideman with significant name recognition. The bulk of Django's recorded legacy is as a session player on everything from show tunes to radio dramas to children's records. Django's signature tunes are a puny fraction of everything he did.
Metheny has had the good luck to be essentially left to his own devices, whereas Django (despite his wild reputation) was a blue collar paid-by-the-hour music laborer who never saw a royalty check his whole life. He was never a band leader (perhaps by choice). Despite that, Django managed to make great and timeless music. All of Metheny's economic, social, and technical advantages seem squandered when you line the two up.
The only thing Metheny has going for him is that he isn't backing up that awful squeakbomb fiddler Stephane Grappelli.
"Just about the most complex chord voicings, dexterity, rhythmic and melodic sense of any jazz guitarist of any time." -and yet it still sounds like musical wanking to my ears. As far as my experience goes, jazz musicians seem to fall into two categories: the viceral and the intellectual. And honestly, if I can't feel the music I could care less about how awesome the technique and theory is. I'm not really a musician though, so maybe that's why none of that impresses me.
I agree with you, but there are certain artists that can combine the intellectual and visceral. For one example I posit X Mars X, one of Mars Williams' many projects. It's much heavier than NRG Ensemble, which I find to be a bit too much most of the time. (Between Mars and Ken Vandermark, there's a fuck of a lot of honking going on with NRG, and about as much math as you can put in any given song.) But that said, I've seen X Mars X live twice, and both times was blown away. I have a CD somewhere that Mars gave me, but I don't know where the hell it is.
In any case, it's possible to mix the two, but you're correct inasmuch as they rarely meet. The Chicago jazz scene tends to math these days, so it's nice to have something that is a little more about showmanship.
Did any of you notice all the strings on that guitar?
-CR
re: the Chicago jazz scene.
there's always Chris Foreman, holdin' it down like a mother hen in a chicken shack!
"Django was good for his time... but he's no Metheny... there's not really a comparison to be made there."
wow... I really don't know what to say to that, except that anyone who could utter such a statement thinks about music in a way that is so diffferent from the way i think about it that I can't even conceive of where they could be coming from. wow...
django made great, timeless music. (imho, especially the stuff he did with grappelli. but maybe that is because I am a "squeakbomb fiddler" too, though I don't play jazz. I have to say, though, that I detest everything that grapelli did without django.) I have only heard a little bit of metheny, and I found it all to be completely soulless. All of the fancy chord voicings in the world are no substitute for soul. I have heard a little bit of less notey stuff by him, but most of what I heard basically made him come off like the Yngvie of modern jazz. I can't think of any modern jazz guitarists better than him offhand, though, because, except for django, I really don't like jazz guitar.
Somehow I knew S&TG would bring up Chris Foreman. He's good, no doubt of that. I saw him play with Clyde Stubblefield and some sax player who's name escapes me at Elbo Room. Now, _that_ was a good show.
-CR
i wonder why you'd expect me to bring him up? other than possibly to remind me that i need to go see him again pronto. i would at this point say something like "i haven't had a combination plate and hummous at Pita Inn followed up by a trip to the Green Mill in months", but i'm willing to bet you will point out a superior chicagoland middle eastern restaraunt, because of my obvious lack of taste.
i hear that the Elbo Room gig Chris did with Bernard Purdie was quite amazing. being the star of the show, Bernie had set up his drums in front of Chris and George Freeman.
speaking of guitarists, George Freeman is always quite entertaining. he plays some cool lines, and at least 4 times a night he'll accidentally step on his cord during the middle of his solo, bend over and pick it up, then continue his solo. as he usually seems to do this during some tremelo picking when he holds the guitar up like a gun or something, it gives the impression that he's stopping his solo to reload.
oh btw, i'd like to nominate Allan Holdsworth as candidate for "Yngvie of modern jazz" in place of Metheny. i bought one of his jazz albums and it made my head hurt.
I admit that that "yngvie of modern jazz" comment was really not quite fair, I was just a little bit incensed by that dude putting down django.
It's sad that Pat Metheny is so missunderstood. Try to read Metheny Keynote Address at IAJ: http://www.patmethenygroup.com/iaje/methenykeynote.pdf
If you don't feel nothing while listening to his music... Sad! He can tell so much, but some folks are tuned to different frequecies. Nothing wrong with that. I'm not evangelist, and going round saying all of his music is great. But some is darn good and deep. He can talk through the jazz and notes like few musicians can. It might reach you or not. But sometimes we are so closed in our perception that, we simply don't get it. Saying that he has no life and soul in his music....
Yeah... I don't understand how anyone could listen to Lonely Woman from Rejoicing and not hear soul.
... unless... maybe you don't have any.
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