Recording Jasno: more than one trick

The hunt, and the let-down

Guitarets are rare, and the people who own them keep them. The search wasn't really mine. My wife took it on, working through the corners of the internet where these things change hands, including a Guitaret fan group on Facebook (yes, that exists). She found one in Germany.

It arrived in beautiful shape, in its original leather case: cream and chrome and a row of little tines. I've wondered since whether the name is part of why it flopped. It sets you up for the wrong instrument. "Celestet" would have been closer to the truth, and wouldn't encourage people to plug one into an amp (which sounds terrible). None of that mattered once it was in my hands. Easy to play, easy to understand, and it sounded as good as I'd hoped.

And that was the catch. Guitarets have drifted into collector territory, well past what one sound is worth. Because that is what you get: one sound. A very nice one. I'll admit I was a little underwhelmed. So I made a quiet deal with myself to get more out of it.

Getting it all warm and cosy

In the room, the Guitaret is barely louder than a whisper. The tines are small. But there's a pickup under them, and that's where the real sound lives: the faintly electric tone that pulled me in.

From there it went into the same preamp that gave Lekko its body: a handmade Analogue Addicts unit, a copy of the REDD circuit from EMI's old Abbey Road desks, built around vintage valves by one person in the UK. I commit the character while I track, so the weight is baked into the files. There's no clean version underneath. That doesn't make Jasno dirty. It makes it smooth and classy.

Past that, I sampled it the way I sample everything: imperfectly, on purpose. Nothing is quantised, tidied up or noise-reduced to death. Play the same phrase twice and each repetition sounds different.

There must be more to it!

I can never leave an instrument alone. Playing it the way it was designed is the start; then I go looking for whatever else is hiding inside it. A celeste keeps you out, sealed under its lid. A piano throws the doors open, its strings right there to prepare and strike. The Guitaret sits in between. The tines are exposed, but they barely stick out, so anything you try has to be careful.

I took a bow apart to play the tines with it. I ran a length of fishing line across them. None of it worked.

The a-ha moment came with the mallets. I played the tines with felt and with rubber, and the felt ones are my favourite sound in the whole library. Soft and round, almost a celeste, without the wizardry a celeste drags along. You could never do this live: the tines are packed so close that it's far too easy to catch the ones on either side, and each has to be struck its own particular way to speak cleanly. It took take after take. This is where sampling shines. It takes a sound almost no one could play reliably in a room and hands it to anyone with a keyboard.

Four ghosts

The other side of the instrument is the four Afterglow patches, and they all come from the same approach. In the musique concrète tradition a recording isn't a finished sound but a place to start. So I treated the Guitaret as a starting point and the whole studio as the instrument.

Echoes began with a reverb used as an instrument rather than a space. A convolution reverb captures a real room, a hall, a church, a stairwell, then prints whatever you feed it into that room. I wanted the Guitaret ringing through itself, so instead of a space I loaded in the Guitaret played with mallets. The source feeding it was tape noise, pushed through an East German Vermona graphic EQ until it was all colour, its volume drawn in by hand so it plucks and fades. It comes out soft and not-quite-there. It sounded better still through the modular, so I sampled that version too.

Becoming Ocean is named after John Luther Adams's Become Ocean, and reaches for the same slow tide. I ran the Guitaret through the whole studio until only a ghost was left, then modulated its volume with recordings of real ocean waves, each a different length. Press harder and a longer wave rolls through. It's my favourite pad in the library.

Piano Drop owes its name and its spirit to a Tim Hecker track. Two pieces of the same filthy, heavily modulated loop crash into each other on a tempo-synced wobble, so the halves drift and collide. Lean on the mod wheel and the dirt floods in, along with a brassy pad I found by running the tape echo through the middle of the chain.

Disperse is the strangest, borrowed from tilt-shift photography, where shifting the plane of focus creates odd relationships between objects. Two layers hang in the same space and the mod wheel pulls focus between them: a pad that runs from filthy to feather-soft on one side, short loops of Guitaret plucks on the other. Each layer rides its own digital tape machine, so you can sharpen one while the other slips loose in speed and direction. It's the most abstract thing in Jasno.

An instrument you can't place

What still gets me about the Guitaret is what hooked me on that film score: it won't tell you what it is. A piano arrives with a century of associations attached. So does a celeste, a guitar, an organ. This doesn't. It sounds familiar and completely its own, and that blank space is where the ideas come from. You're playing something that could still become anything.

That's why I kept pulling at it, and why one rare little instrument with a single trick turned into plucks, mallets, loose tremolos and a whole side of textures that have left it behind. An unfamiliar sound is a door. It kept sending me somewhere I hadn't been.

The trial lets you play most of the patches, free, with no time limit. Start with the plucks, the way the instrument was meant to be played. Then go looking for the rest, the way I did.