The Different Strummer

I never really warmed up to headless guitars.  Oh, they were really cool looking and there’s no denying Andy Summers had real style playing a Steinberger for The Police.  But I guess I’m old fashioned.  I need a head to keep me oriented.  Still, present me with something made out of airplane material like this Modulus Graphite Flight 6 Monocoque, and I’m interested, even with no head.

Turns out this guitar is a study in contradictions.  I actually interviewed the man responsible for designing and producing this guitar—I’m pretty sure it was Modulus Graphite founder Geoff Gould, but it was so long ago, I forget.  Modulus Graphite was, as I’m sure you know, basically known for making hollow carbon fiber necks for basses and, occasionally, guitars.  Gould, who worked as an engineer in California’s aerospace industry, got the brainstorm that he could build a stronger, more uniform and more stable by using the tough and strong carbon graphite, which was employed in making lightweight but highly stress resistant components for aircraft.  This was around 1977-78.

Of course, Kaman/Ovation had already had that idea a decade earlier, but for guitar bodies (and tops), not for necks.  And, about the same time Gould was working out his neck ideas, Ned Steinberger was developing his headless, graphite basses and guitars in New York.

Gould’s idea was pretty good and well-received by bassists.  The company had a good long run, only closing down in 2013.  Modulus Graphite’s heart was primarily set on basses, but they did make a number of guitar lines, including the Genesis series and some interesting Blackknife models.  These guitars all had heads.  As near as I can tell, Modulus Graphite’s guitars were never as popular as their basses.  But then, bassists have historically been much more receptive to innovative technology than guitarists, who tend to be stuck in the wooden mud, as it were.

Probably partially inspired by Steinberger’s creations, Modulus Graphite decided to try its hand at a graphite headless guitar.  This effort resulted in 1983 in the experimental Flight 6 Monocoque guitars.  The Flight 6 name is obvious because the carbon graphite that makes up the entire guitar is aircraft material (“flight”) and it’s a 6-string guitar!  Duh.  Monocoque is a term used primarily in the aerospace industry basically meaning surface bearing structure.  In other words, the object’s “skin” provides the structural strength, like an egg.  There is no “frame” or internal structural support.

Basically this is a self-enclosed “tube” of molded carbon graphite.  I don’t really know how they made this thing, but the neck and body are all one and hollow.  There’s a brass plate at the end of the neck, to hold the strings and no doubt to provide access for wiring this puppy.  According to Gould, since this was a “high-tech” guitar, and so as to not take away from the novelty of the guitar design itself, Modulus Graphite equipped the Flight 6 Monocoque with basic guitar electronics.  The pickups are standard Seymour Duncans, a Custom at the bridge and a Jazz at the neck, with a threeway select and simple volume and tone controls.  The tuners are Gotohs.

If it was me I’d have tricked this out like a B.C. Rich, with as much tricky electronics and I could squeeze into this melted Steinberger.  How about a phase switch and coil taps?  And a preamp circuit?  I’m fine with the simple volume and tone, though.  I never could get into fiddling with micro-adjusting each individual pickup’s tone, but that’s just me.  Oh well.  Everything is, after all, a matter of taste.  But this doesn’t mean that any of this makes this guitar inadequate in any way.

This guitar really is a work of art, questions about electronics preferences aside.  It is really comfortable and, assuming you’re going to pump it through some effects, gets the job done.  Gould told me approximately how many of these were made, and it wasn’t many.  I forget the figure after all these years, but it was in the neighborhood of 20 or so.  Enough to qualify as pretty rare.

As I said, most guitar players would rather play a Les Paul or a Strat than a headless carbon graphite monocoque thingy.  Tastes for headless guitars and other oddities come and go.  One thing to consider, though. It’s been more than 30 years since the Modulus Graphite Flight 6 Monocoque guitar appeared.  It’s ultra-light.  Don’t know about you but 30 years on from my prime, I appreciate anything that’s lighter rather than heavier to schlepp around these days.  Prepare for take-off!

Seat-backs straight. Prepare for Take-off. from MyRareGuitars.com

The Different Strummer

Blame it on disco.  I remember it well…as an observer, of course!  The excesses of early ‘70s hard rock inspired a vapid dance craze reaction toward the end of the decade with mirror balls and platform shoes and, well, you know, Studio 54, glitter spandex, and Donna Summer and all that.  The music was mostly played with keyboard synths and drum machines, fairly new technology at the time.  The guitar press predicted: It’s The End of guitars as we know it.  But was it really?  (Obviously, we all know the answer to that rhetorical question!)

I didn’t really pay much personal attention to disco.  I didn’t dance and I didn’t hear too many guitar solos to make me interested in listening.  I was working at a commercial classical radio station at the time and my greatest exposure was a somewhat satirical—and as it turned out quite successful, I might add—disco party for key advertisers, for which I had to obtain the music.  I was mildly alarmed by the press predictions regarding the demise of guitars, but I needn’t have worried.

Anyhow, the response of the guitar industry was to try to turn guitars into synth controllers.  Keyboards are ideal synth controllers.  They are immediate and precise.  You hit a key and you get a clear electronic connection that is instantly, easily, and unequivocally recognized by the machine and its software.  They’re perfectly polyphonic.  And once you eliminate the need for anything but the keyboard—no strings, no soundboard, no pipes—they can become quite compact and portable.

Guitars…well, not so much.  A good clean note is obtained with good clean contact between the string and the fret, but you know how often that doesn’t happen!  We bend notes, even when we don’t intend to.  We move our fingers around to put “English” on the tones.  In short, despite the best efforts of brilliant engineers at Roland, Korg, Yamaha and elsewhere, guitars make lousy synth controllers at best.  To play guitar synth you’d best possess pretty darned good technique.

Don’t get me wrong.  I really admire the synth guitars that were created during the period from roughly 1977 to 1987 or so.  But if you want to play some disco, get a keyboard.

That said, there were some interesting attempts to create a hybrid solution, notably by Casio, like this nifty little 1987 DG-10 Digital Guitar. Okay, I hear you sniggering about this toy guitar.  You might say it doesn’t even look much like a guitar, although, if you recall guitars from the 1980s, you remember there was some weird stuff that was popular, from minimalist headless Steinbergers and Kramer Dukes to Prince’s elaborate guitar sculptures.  All right, I’ll give you that it looks more like a toy than a guitar.

But let’s not focus on what it isn’t, let’s concentrate on what it actually is.  This juicy little “toy” is actually a full-blown amp-in-guitar and MIDI controller.  The fingerboard is a rubber touch pad with, presumably, articulated “frets” with 6 contact points each.  The nylon strings are all like 3^rd strings.  Yamaha did this same thing on its synth controller, by the way.  I suspect that’s to equalize the contact using identical string mass.  There’s a built-in battery-powered amp with 4” speaker.

You can play this like a guitar, or guitars.  On top you can choose from 20 preset sounds.  You can add automatic percussion rhythms.  Pick the tempo.  Punch in sustain and reverb, and change the key.  On the front you have an on/off switch, master volume and rhythm volume.  You can mute your guitar, activate or turn off the rhythm sounds, add in some fill.  Oh yes, and there’s a manual drum machine pad if you’re dexterous, with a choice of cymbals, low tom, hi tom, and snare drum sounds.

And if that’s not enough, you can send the signal out to an external amp.  You can plug in headphones.  Pick two MIDI modes, omni or poly, to coordinate with whatever gear you use.  Plug in a MIDI DIN cable.  And use an AC plug, should you be so inclined.

Yeah, any kid can figure this toy out.  Well, maybe a kid could.  I never got past the amp in guitar with automated drum machine and I hope my life never depends on knowing the difference between omni and poly synths.  Not that I mastered even just playing guitar.  I think I played at a couple of my son’s baseball games, sitting in the bleachers doing “charge” sounds.  But the Casio DG-20, in the right hands, might just be the guitar you need to do disco!

For the record, as it were, I did continue to peruse disco record bins for a few years—disco was LP music, before CDs—and found, to my great surprise and delight, that there actually were some disco disks that featured hot guitar licks!  Metal guitar disco.  Numerous disco-flamenco fusions.  Rasgueado goes great with the turn-around pump of “unh-uhh, unh-uhh, unh-uhh.”  They were never too popular, though.  Blame it on disco.

1987 Casio DG-20 Digital Guitar from MyRareGuitars.com