Desu Drum Guitar

The past years I played on several occations with a few of the bars from my 2004 72 string drum guitar. The tuning pegs of those instruments are terrible and for a long time I had the desire to make a good one.

For The Dodos and Liam Finn I first made the Tafelberg Drum Guitars. These instruments have very short string sections are much higher in pitch and come more closely in sound to a regular East European hammered dulcimer.

Liam borrowed my proto and 2 movies can be seen on youtube.

This year I approached PRE, HEALTH and Lightning Bolt for a single bar drum guitar with only six strings.

HEALTH was the first band touring in Holland so I fixed theirs first. For PRE I have a slightly modified version in mind and Chippendale played great on the proto, so I’d like to propose him the same as HEALTH.

The instrument is tuned in one tone, divided over three octaves. High, Middle, Low, 2 strings for each octave. Because the six strings are never 100% equal in pitch this creates a warm natural chorus, even more since the harmonic series of the different octaves go wild in the higher octaves. Example: if one low string is 100 hz and the other 101. The eight harmonic is 800 and 808. Likewise if the high section is 400 and 401, it creates the same chorus in the fundamental. But their overtone becomes 800 and 802. So the higher overtones become more confused by eachother, which explains the strange spectrum when you amp it very loud and you get all kinds of beautiful LaMonte Young drones withing the played notes.

The musical scale is similar like on the Moodswinger, Tafelberg and Burner Harp Guitar. Again the color dotted serie indicating the harmonic positions. If you play with two drumsticks and use one as a slide and you hit on it, it creates a consonant two tone if it is placed on the colored dots.

Grey is the octave and creates the same tone on both sides.

Red is a two tone consisting of one octave difference. BB if the string is pitched in E.

Orange is a EA combination if the string is pitched in E.

Yellow a double octave if G# if the string is pitched in E

Green GB if the string is E

Cyan is GD if the string is E

Blue is F#E if the string is E

Purple is F#F# three octaves difference if the string is E.

This above is the serie 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/7, 1/8, 1/9.

Same story for the opposed serie 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 6/7, 7/8, 8/9.

On the other positions like for instance 3/5 of 4/7 the tones share in overtone with their other family color serie and often have a simple ration to those tones as well. G# on 1/5 is C# on 2/5 for instance. (2/5 is 3/4 of 4/5 so it has the same progression as the 3/4 related to the open string)

On the outside of the color dotted scale the regular logaritmic scale and an inverse one is present for people who are more connected with the regular guitar scale. On these two scales you can read out the tone for each pickup. On the Moodswinger these 2 crosslinking logaritmic scales were allready present so not very new.

The instrument has three jack holes.

The right one on the left is put in to allow the player to switch the instrument mono by connecting the right output to the other side. An odd interference occurred accidentally. There is something happening with the phase of the signal, turning off almost all low and creating a hollow overtoning sound. Almost like a ring modulator. I kept it like that since the effect was rather impressive, although I don’t understand quiet well what causes this effect.

The instrument has just on/off switches. No volume knobs, no eq.

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