Peter Kienle's

Equipment (just the facts)

Like with most unusual instruments I have bought over the years I didn't quite know what to actually play on it once I got over how beautiful it looked. I also had no idea what clef to use when writing stuff for the baritone tuning. Eventually I settled on bass clef which proved to be more difficult than I thought. Somehow, when I read music on the bass my brain seems to automatically decode music in bass clef and when I play guitar it feels hardwired to treble clef.

To me this instrument sounds very 'americana'. Open chords sound so full and gutsy. The first recording project with this guitar was a handful of acoustic guitar tunes - well, kinda 'instrumental americana' where the baritone replaced bass and rhythm guitar. As of this writing, July 2010, I am wrapping up the preproduction of 'Griffy Lake Suite', a nine-part through-composed piece for baritone guitar and string quintet. While I am still struggling to play any of my normal guitar stuff on this thing it is very inspiring to use it for composing.

This used Framus popped up at Musicland in Germany one day for a ridiculously low price. I thought I couldn't really go wrong. Well, while the guitar has twelve strings and the famous Framus laminated neck it soon turned out that it really didn't sound too good. For some reason the pickups were not only very low output but also actually picked up when you talked into them - I guess you call this feature 'microphonic'. Since other parts of the electronics were compromised too, I rebuilt the wiring and put in new pickups which of course needed custom made frames because, just like on my other Framus guitar, the measurements are not quite standard. It sounds better now but I rarely play it, although the fake, glued-on F-hole is a hoot.

Since this was my only electric guitar for many years it saw a lot of use and abuse. Luckily the neck on this thing is laminated and could probably be used as a baseball bat without taking damage. After about a year I exchanged the stock Framus neck pickup by a DiMarzio. Of course the DiMarzio pickup was too big for the Framus cavity so I had to enlarge it somewhat using crude tools and build my own pickup mount from molten plastic - all on mother's living room table.

This guitar has experienced a lot. When I was about 16 I traveled to the US visiting my dad. I took the guitar in a very cheap bag. The trip to Louisville, KY went fine. But on the return trip, after I was done with the passport controls in Frankfurt, all my luggage had come out on the belt, except for the guitar. I spent a long time looking all over the place and was close to tears when I saw a guitar leaning on a wall on the other side of the huge hall. It was my Framus SG copy - without a bag but in one piece and in tune. I never found out what happened (and maybe I don't want to).

After I got my George Benson GB10 the Framus SG copy became my experimental guitar. It was four-stringed, with a minor seventh tuning, for a few years. After I bought my Chapman Stick in the early 21st century I used the Framus to fool around in 5th tuning - half of the strings were bass strings. The neck is still as straight as ever.

My very first guitar had been a smaller sized acoustic with nylon strings which I had bought from my friend Klaus around 1974. Clearly, as a beginner (and teenager) I didn't know how to treat a guitar. I put a cheap magnetic pickup on only to discover that you need steel strings for that to work. So I put steel strings on. Not good an a non-reinforced neck. At one point I painted the top of the body black with some left-over plastic paint I used to paint my Revell airplanes with. When I moved out from home my brother took it and I don't know what became of it.

But after a few years of only electric guitar I started playing classical guitar music and needed a cheap classical guitar. Until around the mid nineties most of my own music was composed on this guitar. And it did appear on a whole bunch of recordings. As with my other Giannini classical the action is very low which makes some of the strings buzz a little every once in a while. But since I am not a classical guitarist by any means that has never bothered me.

Admittedly it is a very nice looking guitar. It has the same neck shape as my George Benson GB 10. But the piezo pickup doesn't sound very good and the instrument is very hard to play. On top of it it doesn't stay in tune very well. Consequently I haven't used it very often and in 1995, when we moved to a new house, the headstock broke off. I was almost ready to give up on it, when a friend glued it back together with super glue.

I guess I wasn't very experienced back then as a player or guitar buyer. But I bought it a the music store, played it, plugged it in, and thought I could play beautiful music on it. Maybe in somebody else's hands it would be the perfect guitar.

As is so often the case new projects can be very energizing - especially if they take off. In this case I noticed I didn't own a decent acoustic guitar. Since around that time I taught guitar and worked at the recording studio in Musicland Albstadt I had access to new instruments. Unfortunately I also never had a lot of cash. In the case of this Ibanez Ragtime it was a good thing. It was the least expensive of the series and is just a very simple instrument. No pickup. No frills or fancy inlays.

My friend Manfred bought the slightly fancier and more expensive Ragtime model to play in our duo and it didn't play or sound as well as mine. This guitar has appeared on many records and gigs. It has the same neck and body shape as the black Ibanez AE410 and one would expect them to play the same but the difference couldn't be bigger.