For more than 30 years, my creative power concentrated on playing the guitar and inventing new amplification and sound tools. Immediately after I received my masters in electical engineering, Rolf Spuler and I started our own business, which we named Paradis Guitars, developing piezo pickups as well as analog polyphonic effects - pioneering work in 1984!
In 1985 I abandoned rock and started to build sound on delay units and in 1992 I built the first dedicated live looping unit.
Then I moved to Salvador Brasil and learned to colaborate over internet and implement my ideas in software...
LOOP
After 13 years, Gibson stopped making the ECHOPLEX DP due to lack of parts. What made it sell up to date is our unique software: LOOP.
In the past years I translated it to C++, made it a VST plugin. Possibly, it soon will be built into new hardware...
PolyPhonic Guitar Effects
The well established partnership with Rolf Spuler was reactivated in 2003 and the new Paradis guitars with the sculptural design are available with the PolyBass effect built in. It made such a big success at NAMM that we want to offer it to other guitar manufacturers!
Some of our guitars even have
a built-in FireWire interface. They can be connected directly to a computer where each string can be processed separately.
VST Plug-ins
At Mathons, Andy Butler and me develop audio plugins which detect notes in the music and trigger all kinds of effects with them. New sounds become possible and old sounds become more intuitive and musical.
The idea grew from the Chopitch plugin which we first developed to create a big drum sound out of a small drum. Then we realized it can do a lot more, also for other instruments. Chopan uses a similar principle to place notes in space, and other such plugins will come out soon.
Recently, we mainly worked on the worlds first plugins for polyphonic (hexaphonic) guitars. For those the note detector is even more usefull because it allowes to select the loudest, last, highest, lowest,,, notes and treat them separately.
Electrorganic Instruments
Its time for a movement towards the instruments with acoustic generators (strings, tongues, skins,,,) and electronic resonators (pickups and electronic modeling). The principles developped for the modern electric guitar (Roland VG-8...VG-99, Line 6 ... guitars, Godin, Parker, Mathons PolyPlugs,,,) are just as interesting to other instruments because it makes them smaller, eliminates mics, stands, sound checks, feedback and the frequent suffering of enduring bad stage monitoring...
Electrorganic instruments sound cooler than acoustic instruments but never as cold as electronic instruments!
The problem with electronic instruments...
The first manifesto for this Concept
Improvisation Groups
Improvisation has always fascinated me, and since 1984 I stopped interpreting and composing. But the music keeps growing and changing anyway... a great experience!
In the past years, I formed improvisation circles with amateurs and people who never played music before. The only rules are: "play in a way you can hear the others" and "don't play songs". Every time some meaningful music grows out of chaos and keeps changing for hours, it is cleaning the body and soul...
My own music
Enjoy hours of recordings - for free! Most of them bring the feeling of freedom and harmony, where some will guide you through deeper processes; call them therapeutic or spiritual or whatever you believe in that moves you...
Some recordings tell my own story, and some are historic from the times when the first live looping analog polyphonic technology inspired me. You may agree that many of my recordings of the mid 80's go further in the complexity and development of the loops than any of the actual live loop recordings found on the net. Especially my brasilian partners helped a lot to create groovy loops!
My newest music has yet to be recorded: In the past years I studied a lot of polyphonic playing techniques and music which does not repeat at all, but bases on similarity: A theme exists, but it is never well defined. It returns in all kinds of variations, inversions, transformations,,, so there is a "red wire" to follow, but no repetition to become tired of. I haven't recorded such music yet, I stopped playing on stage, I want to wait until this music is ripe...