The story of the Angel Guitar is long and convoluted. In the early 70’s I became fascinated by Indo-Jazz fusion. I loved the idea of melding the sympathetic strings with a chordal instrument as John McLaughlin had in Shakti.
I also really liked reverberation on a guitar produced by using an echo plate or spring unit, so I set out to design an instrument which would allow me to have all these sounds in one instrument.
At the time there were no digital echoes, and Springs or Plates cost thousands of pounds or dollars and were very unwieldy, being the size of a fridge or blackboard.
One day I sat in front of a Lawrence Audio electro-acoustic piano that had a long pick-up that covered every string. I plugged in the piano, put the loud-damper pedal down and played a saxophone into the strings.
What came out from the Fender Amp was a heavenly sound, complex, fringed with a multi layered bouquet of tuned harmonics. I was hooked. The strings listened and reacted to every harmonic present in the sax.
I had to create that sound
The first Angel Guitar version I built had a conventional 6 string neck, and 26 sympathetic strings in two octaves, chromatic, tuned with a key, like a zither. Therein lay a problem, as fine tuning is quite arduous using a small lever key.
To further complicate the equation, I wound my own balanced pick-ups . I used rubber magnets ( a big mistake) and incorporated a 100 watt stereo amplifier into the back of the body. Two Bose speakers were – in my imagination – going to drive the sympathetic strings into oblivion. What I had not realised was the direct acoustic coupling between the speakers and the pickups created a perfect condition for feedback, and I found the adjustment of the volume of the amp was critical.
Butleigh Free festival 7 7 77
In the photo you can see me playing with a battery powered amp, at Butleigh Monument Free Festival on 7-7-77, a most auspicious day!. The amp is being driven by the harp pickup. At this stage I called it variously Harp-Guitar, or Zither-Guitar – and the sound was amazing. Mainly because it was all battery powered, and away from civilization there was no interference in the air… using the battery system helped me realise I didn’t need to have a speaker on the sound board unless I wanted infinite and quite intense sustain. The notes transmitted to the body mechanically were sufficient to resonate and vibrate with the sympathetic strings.
Atlanteans talking
This prototype created a really weird experience one night on the Welsh hills at an impromptu festival on an old stone circle site. The instrument picked up a local radio station and the strings transmitted the muffled speech with an unworldly singsong quality. This led to several inebriated friends insisting they were hearing aliens, or ancestors or possibly even Atlanteans talking to them during the night.
Later Steve Hillage came over to Sandridge where Ant Phillips and I were scoring Tarka and had a go on the Angel Guitar. Boy did he make it sing, until smoke started pouring from the body. The electric overdrive was no more. The instrument found its way to New York where the experimental musician Fred Frith experimented with it for a while.
Making of the Angel Guitar
In 1976 I helped Tony Andrews make the phase plugs for his original Turbosound speakers – a precursor to Function-one. In my spare time I made the body of the instrument (above)in his workshop at Ridge Farm. It accompanied me to Australia and in 1991 I finally completed it.
It comprises two ‘wings’ each with 13 strings tuned using zither pegs and violin fine tuners so I can quickly tune the strings in a common harmonic relationship. I have also experimented with micro tunings for both wings.
The central neck is from a conventional wide necked 12 string guitar. There are pick ups on all three ranks of strings. It features a built in active EQ, compression/limiting and a stereo line output.
Playing Methods
You can play the Angel Guitar like a conventional guitar in practice . The side wings produce the harmonic reverberation I had dreamt of with a decay time of about 10-20 seconds.
Alternatively, play the sides like a zither, or in many other percussive ways. With hands, fingers, metal objects and so on, to produce a huge variety of tones. If you sing or play a wind instrument into it, it sings your vocal/instrumental harmonics back at you. This is quite unusual, like having sympathetic strings on your voice/instrument.
I found that orienting the instrument to the wind at the correct angle produces an endlessly varying chordal effect (see above). I call this a fractal melody, where fragments of tune continually appear out of a lingering background drone, endlessly changing. In the photo I am playing the air currents and thus the chords of the two wings, driven by the breeze.
22 Meanings
Some years ago, Daevid Allen arrived very excited on one hot December night with a plan to record an album mainly of glissando guitar. I set up fans in the studio so a constant wind blew on the Angel strings at just the right angle and we stayed up all night for two nights recording backing drones for the new work.
This formed the backing for the CD of glissando pieces Daevid Allen called 22 Meanings. The title is a reference to the Archetypes of humanity as expressed in the Tarot.
Since then I have used the instrument in many experimental pieces, particularly on the album Migration as a melodic and drone instrument.
The tuning of the instrument is very stable because of the massive construction. This is fortunate, but there is a trade-off. I had to create a universal stand for it thus allowing it to sit easily at any angle. This is extremely convenient for live performance. But the heavy stand and boom arm do add weight!
You can hear the Angel Guitar here plucked, strummed, played with a metal bar, and as a drone.