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Comment by 91bananas | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty damn cool. I haven't heard many stories of artists actually doing this work themselves.

You'd probably like It Might Get Loud. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229360/ It's a documentary of (and conversation among) the Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White. They show some of their methods for getting the sound they want from their instruments.

Only a couple minutes in, already in to it. Thanks for sharing.

Brian May of Queen built his guitar with his father while he was a teenager and used it for most of his career:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special

This is cool for an entirely different reason for me too. I've seen this cover band Queen Nation before that is shockingly good. They dress like Queen, act like them, and sound really good whilst doing it. I've often wondered what the guitar player was playing, it was unlike anything I've seen before. http://www.noozhawk.com/images/uploads/081413-QueenNation-63...

I appreciate that he is using a left handed clone as yet another tribute to the original.

Sonic Youth were also known for modifying their guitars to get different sounds. They said they couldn't afford lots of equipment when they started.

It is indeed pretty cool, but you probably have lots of these stories.

Les Paul is probably one of the more famous stories.

Most really good music technology innovations are from musicians themselves.

EHV is a world-class player, but the only reason we're reading this kind of story is because of that virtuosity-- lots of folks mess around with their instruments like he was doing, though most aren't as dangerously bad at it.

The stories you hear about folks making new music stuff are usually because the folks are good at making stuff, so it seems more like engineers/tinkerers who happen to play music, when that description might be flipped if we looked at how folks think of themselves.

One of my favorite things along these lines is this 1951 video of Les Paul explaining how he uses multitrack recording to produce his records. The first part of the video is great, mocking the idea of some sort of computer that generates the music itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rITJyZVTfy4

It's pretty unbelievable to think that this was almost considered voodoo at the time, yet now ANY recording is done in this way. Thanks for the link. Very cool as well.

Local H has always been a duo and so Scott Lucas has had some really cool setups in the past. At one point, he had replaced the two strings on his guitar with two strings of a bass and then ran different sets of pickups to different amps so that he could effectively play both traditional bass style parts and guitar parts at the same time.

Heres a video of him demoing his older setup: http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/video-local-hs-scott-...

I saw them a few weeks ago and he no longer uses the same setup, but I've always thought it was inventive.

I love the idea of the need shaping the tool. For similar reasons, I designed a 30-inch scale guitar that could handle the E and A strings from a piccolo bass, and had my luthier make it. So it's tuned like a guitar but with the low strings at bass register. Had to have two tension rods to handle the difference in tension. Works well for finger-picking.

I'm not a virtuoso, but was inspired by some others trying to get more range, especially Charlie Hunter (whose fanned frets are nuts), various metal guys, and the Chapman Stick.

That sounds like a cool instrument, would be interested in hearing what it sounds like, do you have any clips of you playing it?

I like the idea of a guitar that can easily reach lower registers. Whilst 7-string (and in Charlie Hunter's case, 8-string) guitars are possibly more versatile, I'm quite partial to baritone guitars. This sounds beautiful to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_06O8XnJQo

Talking of unconventional instruments, you may be interested in hearing these microtonal guitars, I think the second one in particular sounds pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsSjh5TTqI

The bass player from Rage Against The Machine is known for winding his own pickups. There's actually a substantial DIY guitar community out there; its awesome. I've been digging into guitar pedals building myself.

You can get kits like here: http://buildyourownclone.com/

Then you can just mix and match parts and build according to instructions to make your own unique sound. Very cool and fun.

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