How to Prepare a Guitar

Chapter 2 - Prepared Guitar Techniques

2.1 – Third Bridge

The prepared guitar technique I’m mostly specialized in is playing with a third bridge. With this technique I mean you put in a pencil, screwdriver or whatever other suitable solid object underneath the string. I’ve allready written quiet some texts about this technique. A short introduction can be found in What’s 3rd Bridge?. In the article about the Moodswinger I explain what happens and which tones appear if you play the opposed string part at every possible 3^rd bridge position. With the third bridge technique you can create sounds reminiscent to a harp, piano, koto, clock, bell or woodblock, depending on where the additional bridge is placed. The third bridge theory became for me an eye-opener about the relation between physics, music theory and the development of the logaritmic Western tuning and Non-Western musical scales.

2.1.1 – Trumpetting Elephant Sound

I’m especially intrigued by pitch bending heavily low pitched strings while I play at the opposed part. Pressing the string up while strumming causes weird overtones at certain moments. Very natural sounding screams, reminding of the trumpets of an elephant. You can also get some kind of a similar effect on tailed bridge guitar when you play it with a slide and strum it behind the bridge. If the distance of the slide to the bridge is equal to the length of the tailed string field, the tone increases a lot in volume.

2.1.2 – Very Short Strings

Adding a third bridge is mainly altering the sound when you struck the opposed string part, it can also be used as a shortening of the string. Very short string pieces, like for instance 10 cm, cause a dry sound, which is close to the sound of wood blocks or other percussion instruments. This effect becomes more apparent at thicker strings. Tuning strings very low causes interesting results, changing the sound of the woodblock in almost the sound of a tom. John Cage often used very short string piece preparations at his prepared piano.

Pat Noecker of These Are Powers is playing a Jazz bass with a rod put between the body and the strings and he plays it very often on both sides of the additional bridge. Neptune also have employed their self built instruments likewise.

In texts about piano tuning sometimes the inharmonic sound of the higher notes is mentioned. This is equal to this preparation technique with the very shortened strings. At piano tuning this is an important aspect to solve as much as possible, therefore the grand pianos are being developed with longer strings. But inharmonic doesn’t necessarily mean it sounds bad. As long as inharmonic tones are very short we can handle them good. The sound of a woodblock is pretty friendly. A metal bar on the contrary sounds more awkward, because the sustain of the tone is much longer.

2.1.3 – Shortened scale

Like said, These are Powers is playing with a dowel in between the two pickups on their Jazz Bass. Besides what’s mentioned above their preparation leads to a shortened string length of the string field at the neck side. This leads to a distorted fret board scale. The 12-tone scale is no longer functioning as an equal logarithmic scale. The tenth fret for instance has become their octave position. This leads to all kinds of interesting intervals not present in regular Western music and might give the impression the played tones on the fret board are more close to Eastern music. The added rod is a third bridge preparation, but since he plays on the neck pickup it is a direct playing technique and has, in case he plays a this side not very much to do with changing the timbre with resonance, like happening on the Moodswinger. He also plays at the opposed side or with the bridge pickup on, which causes the Confusion is Sex link on their last album. In that case it is similar to the Moodswinger technique and the shortened scale is not what mainly causes the odd timbre alterations at those situations. Therefore his technique is for me as a builder very interesting, because it combines all kinds of 3^rd bridge options in only one preparation.

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