How to Prepare a Guitar

Chapter 2 – Prepared Guitar Techniques

2.6 - Motors

A well-known preparation trick is playing with a little hand van. By using the small ventilator at the headstock side of the guitar in between the open string and the first two frets, you can raise all kinds of overtones present there. If you move slowly up and down this region the drone has a gentle fluctuation in its overtone spectrum. It’s a nice meditation effect. Metal guitarists often play a left hand glissando at the same fret positions, using the similar physical phenomenon in a different way and result. If you want to incorporate droning fields in you music, this is a very convenient technique. Leading to very harmonic drones a bit similar in shape like a didgeridoo or the Tibetian throatsingers.

You can also use small electro motors bowing the strings. This is closely similar to the sound of an ebow, but can be less satisfying if you like clean sound. The motor rotation might interfere when the motor comes to close to the pickup. Play it near the bridge and put on your neck pickup solves mainly the buzzing interference. If you don’t have an ebow, this is a good cheap solution. I don’t use small electro motors, but use my Makita powerdrill for it with long drills functioning as the bowing rod. I’m not very fond of the ebow and actually prefer it imperfect result of the rotating electro-magnetic interference. Also the drill can cause very wild string vibrations, much more radical than with an ebow, causing a more wowowow! sounding effect, creating strange harmonic undertones of the fundamental. This technique is very exciting at bass guitars.

Lee Ranaldo used a power drill at their debut album. Not like I do, he didn’t actually hit the strings at all. The motor rotation was being picked up by the pickups when the drill was turned on and came close.

Afterwards the sound was altered with a distortion and a wah-wah if I remind well. It’s described accurately in Confusion is Next. This technique Lee used is the electro-magnetic signal I mention above as being an interference at the drill bowing technique. Using a drill machine might look dangerous, but still all can happen is breaking a string with it. Or you must be really clumsy and hit the body with the drill. I think I once saw The Ex playing and drilling in the headstock, which was quite a cool looking performance. I’m not sure it actually happened this way, I was drunk when I saw this performance in 1993.

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