2025 - Hardly any hope left!
73 - Damn!
Damn, I'll be turning 73 in June this year. I'm already the oldest person at many tables. It's a rather uneasy feeling, you're in a constant state of anxiety that something might happen to your health. Well, of course, at 20, you could just as easily be walking out of the house and a roof tile could fall on your head.
Les Paul & Tele - Bender
See you soon in Los Angeles at NAMM!
Trans Tremola
This tremolo now finally works extremely well over three semitones using string sets 010 to 046!
Anything else to say?
Les Trem on Dean Zelinsky!
göldo SL-Tuner
It's about time! Design, refinements, technology: here they are, our brand new, half-open, very own SL tuners. We hope they cause a stir at NAMM in Los Angeles in January!
A nice new arrival!
Delicate fragments of a 1962 Wandré Rock Bass. No frets, no binding, no bridge. But I'll get it back in shape, because it's the only model I'm missing in my collection. The body is made of padauk, the African hardwood that companies like Schecter didn't start using for Strat and Tele bodies until 20 years later. Mr. Pioli was always ahead of his time!
Marco Ballestri describes in his book about Wandré that Mr. Pioli was inspired to create this body shape when he observed his urine (very medically expressed!) for a while while peeing, as it passed the toilet seat and dripped into the toilet bowl.
Memphis-Design
Oh, how beautiful! Three designs by my friend Roland Hauke, Vienna – Memphis style. This has always been one of my favorite furniture designs. Take a look here: https://www.hauke-instruments.com/
And another new arrival:
Built 38 years ago and now bought back - a Duesenberg Starplayer from 1987, multi-color “dreadlook” sanded paint job. A real eye-catcher next to my Lady and the Di Donato-Custom!
Even more crazy - Bond Electraglide - 1985
Instead of frets, these ascending “stairs”, all made of carbon fiber and active with power supply and stereo cable. An innovation that was ahead of its time, but not absolutely necessary. I have it now. Who knows if that was the right decision? Definitely better: the Duesenberg James Bond Paloma!
My old dream is coming true after all!
As an old Les Paul Junior and P-90 fan, I've always wanted to reproduce this sound as perfectly as possible. There are replicas of these guitars, but unfortunately they are all too heavy. Here we have finally managed to bring this legendary sound back to life, with its incredible response and light weight. Our new Duesenberg (still a secret!) sounds even better to me, more open than the original. And according to various voices, this 57 here is one of the very best ever built!
Sitarizing
The time has come again, sitar sound on the Tele! Three tiltable, scale-compensated brackets made of ultra-hard, glass fiber-reinforced plastic. I'm certainly by no means the Indian master when it comes to producing this effect. But it rumbles and buzzes very typically, doesn't it?
Interestingly, the sitar sound can also be deactivated for each pair of strings by unscrewing the front grub screw and then tilting the trestle downwards. On the right are the two outer bumps without sitar function. And all three bumps down = Tele “normal” without sitar sound! And this super hard plastic provides excellent vibration transmission, see “graphtech”.
The civilized United States of America!
I love puns and have just come across an incident from 2014. This “Rob” spoke of the “civilized killing” below. It occurs to me today that Trump's seizure of power can very aptly be described as a “civilized coup d'état”. First mobilize everything to make people totally stupid, and then “strike”!
from 2014: Here's this incident that sheds a lot of light on the mentality of typical Americans:
We had dinner with Robert, one of Nathan's helpers, and told him about our upcoming trip to Mexico.
“Mexico? Are you insane? Mexico is super dangerous! They'll just kill you there!” Of course, we immediately countered: “Well Robert, the same thing could happen to you here in Los Angeles in a less affluent area!” Robert: “That's possible. But here they'll kill you in a civilized way!” Civilized killing, what a demented neologism! And Robert continued: “And how do you do that with the language?”
This hillbilly, who lives somewhere in Colorado, had simply failed to realize, due to a lack of schooling and his isolation in the deepest American Trump country side, that the Mexican national language is Spanish - Paloma's mother tongue, a beautiful language that I also speak well enough. We'll see what happens with this country!
And the latest: What borders Mexico and Canada? The stupidity!
Professor Heinrich Gesenius - Discovery of a delicate book!
I just happened to remember a funny story mentioned in the first chapter, “1964-1969: First Affinities,” about my parents and sex education at the time. I was looking for a specialist book written by to my mother's lover, which must have contained some “weird” things about sexual intercourse, including measures that my mother may have used to torment me. Unfortunately, I never got around to reading it, and after her death it was cleared out. Now I've found it in an antique bookshop and I'm going to investigate!
Here my story in the first chapter: Anyway, that was the time when the Stones, the Beatles or, a little later, the Spencer Davis Group or the Doors kicked my ass at night while I blasted their sounds into my ear canals with my transistor radio via small headphones. And I, uptight like most boys of my generation, had at least realized that as a musician you had far more chances with the girls. In any case, it was clear that music and everything connected with it seemed to open doors to other worlds (and not just to girls)!
And I finally had my first crush. But the girl didn't want me because I had no experience. I knew something, but not in detail, and my mother had only explained to me that the woman had a hollow between her legs. Then I acted like a stalker. Of course, it didn't help much, great misfortune with this girl!
My mother wasn't necessarily a prude. She had a relationship with a Professor Gesenius for years. He was the hospital doctor who delivered me by Caesarean section in Berlin in 1952. As she told me at some point, she always used to talk to him in third person (German polite form) - even during sexual intercourse!
This story must not have been easy for my father (a lawyer with the German Federal Railways). You always find out when things like that happen. But he wasn't a child of sadness either. After he left us, we found a notebook in which, among other things, it was noted “Negress - 25 pounds”. That certainly wasn't the lady's weight and at the time it wasn't politically correct to write “black” for a person's skin color. But back then, nobody had any objections to Negro kisses (these meringue-filled, chocolate-covered candy bombs) ... It was quite clear that the currency was the English pound sterling. And that must have been when I spent a short vacation in London with him. A father on the wrong track, while I was hanging around Carnaby Street taking photos of miniskirts.