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But the P-Bass came first.

Bertram

This solid electric baritone uke is entirely handmade from Australian timbers by Rob Dick of Jupiter Creek Music near Adelaide in Australia. Rob’s baritone ukes are each designed as from the ground up as a baritone ukulele and aren’t merely re-modelled children’s guitars. He also makes a range of other ukuleles, slide guitars and ukes, tenor guitars, dulcimers, stomp boxes, etc. He offers instruments in original designs as well as those derived from the Telecaster, Les Paul – and unusually – the Ovation Breadwinner.
His website says that he is struggling to catch up with backorders and won’t be taking any new orders for the time being, so it’s nice to know that someone out there is doing well in this time of recession.
G L Wilson

…for the sparsity of recent updates. I’ve been having some major computer problems over the last couple of weeks but hopefully will at last be getting my laptop sorted out this weekend. The problem after that will be to get the wireless router to function properly – that’s also been a major headache.
On top of all this I’ve been looking for work. Note to any publishers or magazine editors out there: Yes, I am available for any writing commissions. I have recently completed work on a book about guitars which will be published in December and am available to do further work like this, be it books, magazine articles, or whatever.
G L Wilson

But this post is not only about the guitar itself, but about the website where I found it – sovietguitars.com on which you can see a superb series of pictures of it. It was hard not to hack their whole Musima Eterna page and show most of these pictures, so you must go there and check particularly the trem and the bridge.DDR is often associated with rough and depressive design, but Musima guitars prove how untrue this is!BTW, the Soviet Guitars website is in Russian so most of readers will have to navigate blind, but that’s worth, and you will see some nice Jolana, Ural and this kind of stuff, all beautifully photographed.Bertram

A few months ago I discovered oud player and singer Kamilya Jubran. Though this is not the kind of music I usually listen to (and I listen to a lot of different styles), it just took one song on the radio to instantly order the CD, and it’s one of my favorite since.
Oud has a lot of shared DNA with guitar, and I wish I could find a singer / guitar player who would be so interesting, simple, sincere and still ambitious, mixing tradition and modernity (Jubran’s lyrics are taken from Arabic and African contemporary poets, she often works with real time computer treatment).
Anyway, I’m sure that the comments will offer some counter-examples! Actually that’s on this blog that I first read about Kaki King and she’s also some guitarist!
Bertram

I’ve only just heard about this, but I’m sure you’ve all heard about Les Paul’s passing by now. This kind of sad news has an uncanny knack of happening whenever I go away for a few days leaving the blog untended.
G L Wilson

Recently I asked my friend Philo what was his trick to play guitar with a bow, something I know he does frequently. It’s been a few years since I met him and saw him on stage, so I forgot his “secret”, and I understood when he sent me this picture and a detailed description.

Recently I asked my friend Philo what was his trick to play guitar with a bow, something I know he does frequently. It’s been a few years since I met him and saw him on stage, so I forgot his “secret”, and I understood when he sent me this picture and a detailed description.
So he rebuilt a guitar to make this hybrid: he carved a bridge inspired by cello’s, just wider and shorter, raised the tail piece with a block of wood, changed the inclination of the neck, unfretted the fingerboard, moved the neck pickup and put a piezzo at the bridge. From the pic it seems that this guitar had also a little bit sawed off but I don’t know if it was part of this process! He mixes bass and guitar strings and created his own open tuning.
The mod looks a little bit rough, but Philo is a musician and not a fetishist, so once he has the sound (and the sound he has!), how it looks doesn’t matter (I hope I was so free minded!). Philo is a French guitar improviser, a hero of the shade haunting the impro noise free jazz French scene for two decades, he’s also an excellent photographer dedicated to impro, who shot the greatest musicians and dancers in a very personal way, and – nobody’s perfect – a clown. And he’s my friend, though it’s been years since last time we had a good dueling guitar concert together.
(I didn’t put any effort into identifying the guitar, it’s not so important, but I’m sure that someone will and tell it in the comments).
Bertram

OK, so the Kavkaz bass went down like a lead balloon. Don’t like Russian, eh?
How about a very nice vintage Japanese bass from 1972? I’ve not seen a bass like this Yamaha SB-50 before and I must say that I like it.
It has a National/Valco/Supro look to it, and if it weren’t for the grain of the wood clearly visible on the top, you could believe that that body with its german carve could be made from fibreglass.
This particular bass looks to be in beautiful condition, which isn’t bad for a 37-year old instrument. I’m not sure, but I’d guess it’s a short-scale bass – I’ve always had a bit of a soft-spot for the much maligned short-scale bass. If I were in the market for a bass at the moment I’d certainly consider this.
G L Wilson

Here’s one for all fans of Flight of the Conchords – it’s a Russian-built Kazkaz bass as used by Jemaine Clement in the TV series, and is currently for sale on eBay. It even has the green pickguard, just like Jemaine’s, although it seems to have an extra pickup in the bridge position – or possibly those two coils are wired together as a humbucker. I’m not sure what happened to tbe volume and tone pots and why the output jack is positioned where you’d expect to find the volume control. Also, it looks like someone’s had a go at earthing the tailpiece with a piece of wire.

Here’s one for all fans of Flight of the Conchords – it’s a Russian-built Kazkaz bass as used by Jemaine Clement in the TV series, and is currently for sale on eBay. It even has the green pickguard, just like Jemaine’s, although it seems to have an extra pickup in the bridge position – or possibly those two coils are wired together as a humbucker. I’m not sure what happened to tbe volume and tone pots and why the output jack is positioned where you’d expect to find the volume control. Also, it looks like someone’s had a go at earthing the tailpiece with a piece of wire.
It might look like a piece of junk, but as a big Conchords fan I was seriously considering buying this, although seeing as I’m out of work at the moment, now probably isn’t the best time to be spending money.

Hi, this is Bertram.

As GLW pointed out in the previous post, I’ve been posting regularly here in the last weeks and it’s been a very interesting experience, full of learning, sharing, exchange and – well – discipline; finding something interesting to post everyday is not always easy!

Anyway, I will keep posting once in a while when I find something worthwhile…

But I also have my own blogs, and I take the opportunity to advertise them to the Guitarz many readers.

First (and you will now understand why there is this bizarre picture on the right), I just started a blog about Kawai Aquarius guitars. This is not the greatest or most famous guitar, but I have a soft spot for it and it’s very difficult to find information about it on the Web. So I call for contribution and invite players and owners of Kawai Aquarius guitars (and bass) to send me pictures, stories, tracks, videos… to feed this blog.

But my main blog stays gUitarREN (it’s a mix of German, French and English for guitar – of course), a blog about guitar design and projects. From my background as a musician and a visual artist, I started one year ago to study thoroughly about guitars, first to master new aspects of guitar playing, then in the idea that I want to make guitars myself, then I got really involved (I mean even more than before) and went into drawing guitars every day as a creative design process and post them on my blog. I also started building my projects, but I have to learn everything while doing it, and have not so much time and will never have enough to actualize all my ideas…

So I’d love to meet a guitar maker who needs a designer and try a collaboration, if you are interested you can contact me via my profile (you know what? I contacted some companies already and Fender answered, they do have an office to receive suggestions from people like me, interesting, isn’t it?).

Thank you for your attention.