2025 - Hardly any hope left!

73 - Damn!

Les Paul & Tele - Bender

See you soon in Los Angeles at NAMM!

Trans Tremola

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

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.

Let's Toggle

Interesting toggle switch, manufactured by a German relay manufacturer.

Marco Nobach

Oh Marco, what would I do without you!

Marco works as a mechanic/precision engineer in a factory that manufactures connecting elements, mostly from stainless steel or titanium. Marco is also an old-school guitarist and, many years ago, not only had the idea of a trans tremolo based on the “Bigsby,” but actually made it a reality.

Last year, I returned to one of my ideas from 2017, a tremolo with a thick axis that has a notch for each string to modify its deflection depending on the string gauge (see here in chapter 2017). But even after several prototypes, the transification was still not as precise as I had hoped. So how could I determine the exact insertion depths for the E, A, D, G, and B strings, and ensure that it would still sound harmonious in a two-tone range, at least for strings 010 to 050 and 010 to 046, when the lever was pushed up or down?

This is where Marco came into play, whom I still remembered from back then and spontaneously called after a forensic search for his phone number. Of course, he still had the “project” on his guitar, basically the same technology as mine, but that was it, no further commercialization on his part. I described my specifications to him, such as axle diameter, string gauges, etc., and this ingenious precision engineering freak explained to me that he had calculated the insertion depths pretty accurately back then. Well, in a job like that, math is essential, but it's rather foreign to me.

So this genius Marco not only set about calculating all the values according to Duesenberg's specifications using his system, but also manufactured this shaft on the high-tech CNC company lathe (private botch job = outside working hours). We gave him a white Duesenberg TV-Phonic to work on, and the result was amazing. Wonderful tremolo harmony within more than 4 semitones, all built into our traditional tremolo housing.

And now we have a new project in the works, the first true wrap-around torsion tremolo. With Marco's help and ideas, it's going to be a really awesome tremolo!


Thanks to Trump, the Americans are losing money on the dollar, but they can continue to export their guitars etc. to Europe with zero customs duties, while our guitars are subject to 15% duty there. Thank you and congratulations, Ursula von der Leyen!

Asturias

How can I relate this extraordinary story to the guitar? We simply fled from Cádiz to our apartment in Madrid because of the heat and tourist crowds, and from there to Asturias in northern Spain, at least because of the heat. At that time, Asturias was the only province without heat and fire alerts, while large parts of Spain were in flames, with forest fires everywhere. In Madrid, the thermometer read over 40°C, compared to 19°C in the morning in this tiny, high-altitude village near Gijón.
At least I had a Duesenberg Fullerton Hollow with me. Three weeks of lazy relaxation were on the agenda, with occasional trips in the area, lots of guitar design on the computer, watching forest fires on TV in the evenings, and searching in vain for watchable TV series. In desperation, we enjoyed “The Boys” for the third time. And the Spanish series “Sky Rojo” – well worth watching!

Bilbao - Iñaki Antón

Back to the guitar! Before heading back to Madrid, we made a detour to Bilbao to visit our friend Iñaki Antón, guitarist with the band Extremoduro, who were superstars in Spain and South America until they split up in 2019. Iñaki is the proud owner of a considerable collection of Duesenberg guitars.

And as well as being an excellent guitarist and composer, Iñaki is also a great lover of fish and seafood. So he took us to a very special marisquería on our last day.

Upon entering, you are greeted by an endlessly wide, glass-fronted counter displaying every imaginable type of seafood. You order what you want, pay immediately and take your order outside to the terrace, where you can enjoy a sweeping view of the coast and the choppy sea, along with a large, heavy loaf of top-quality white bread.
Soon, the first delicacies are served, all totally fresh, pure, top-quality ingredients.
The only things not from the sea were, of course, the bread and a plate of tomatoes of such intense color and aroma that they are rarely found. I'm raving about it and don't want to keep this experience from you!