Riverside Green

I never tire of beauty, particularly in women and crafted objects, and I never tire of intelligent solutions to old problems. You won’t find any gorgeous chicks in the above-linked video, but there’s craft and thought aplenty. Tim Sway is a musician and artist who applies modern thinking and machinery to the traditional art of guitar making, and applies it properly. What I mean: Most of the mechanized guitar-building out there is designed to imitate hand processes: Gibson, for example, now uses a CNC to cut the body blanks that were cut by pantograph-style saws in the Seventies and sawn by hand in the Fifties.

Sway, on the other hand, doesn’t attempt to replicate human processes with a machine. He creates new processes that work the way the machine works. Here’s an example: Fretboards are traditionally cut with hand saws and chisels, then inlaid with mother-of-pearl or some other material that is cut in a separate process. This is never a perfect process so then you use filler to make it right. Sway uses a CNC end mill to cut out the inlay patterns, then fills the resulting holes with epoxy. This is messy, but running an end mill over the mess levels everything out and creates a perfect inlay.

That’s the craft of it. Here’s the art: On the airplane fretboard, the airplanes are oriented to create single overlapping side dots where a traditional guitar would have a separately inlaid side dot, and oriented to create double overlapping dots at the octave marks. This works because the CNC machine shapes the hardened epoxy precisely the way it shapes the fretboard.

It should be mentioned that the airplane fretboard is destined for a 29.6″ scale bass to be played by my son. That’s not the only piece of original thinking in this particular instrument, and I can’t wait to show it to all of you when it’s done. One interesting part: it’s almost entirely recycled, both in the industrial sense (the fretboard is Richlite, a post-consumer waste product) and in the local-craft sense (the wood is all sourced from existing doors, tables, and recovered flooring). That’s not the way I’d prefer it; I like my Paul Reed Smith Private Stocks with their mammoth inlay and woods that haven’t been legal to harvest for fifty years. But Sway has his own set of ethics that he applies to the process.

My long-time mentor, Edward Tomarken, has often written and spoken about his desire to reconcile the academic division between the arts and the sciences. What Sway is doing here, creating art with a soulless machine, is just the beginning of what can likely be done with such tools. It’s usually the case that the artist doesn’t appear until well after the tool does; the Fender Precision Bass existed for about fifteen years before anyone started to play it near its potential, and another ten before anyone could envision it as a solo instrument. The Avid CNC router hit the scene twelve years ago; think of Sway as its first James Jamerson.

Is it a cover if you’re just playing the music again with different people? When MTV used The Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star” to open the channel in 1981, very few people realized that they were hearing something between a cover and a remake. The original version was written by a trio of British artists and recorded in early 1979. Half a year later, two of the three got back together as “The Buggles” and recorded the definitive variant.

While looking for the lyrics of “Video” today for an Avoidable Contact column, I came across the above live peformance from 2004. Trevor Horn, the bassist and vocalist, is in fine form, as are the original backup signers from 25 years prior. It’s a true pleasure to watch, even if Horn commits one of the few mortal sins in music by playing the electric bass with a pick.

Were The Buggles a one-hit wonder? Possibly — but Trevor Horn was anything but. He produced everything from “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” to Seal’s debut album. Along the way, he was executive producer on Jeff Beck’s infamous “Emotion & Commotion”. Oh, and he also was the actual musician behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax”, playing all the parts himself after the band couldn’t quite make it work in the studio.

It’s easy to see Trevor Horn, the prototype of the inventive and technically flawless musician/producer, as a dying breed. But not only is the idea of the bass-playing producer alive and well (cf. Fiona Apple’s dueling bassist/producers, Jon Brion and Mike Elizondo), Horn is also partially responsible for the changes in music between his performing heyday and today. In the course of producing Poison Arrow by ABC, he learned how to program the Roland TR-808, then learned how to trigger it via MIDI. So in a way, Horn wasn’t just a prophet of video killing the radio star, but also an instrument of digital music killing the analog star. Oh-a, Oh-a!