This is perfectly awesome:
Luna Lee is playing a gayageum, a Korean zither related to the Japanese koto, Vietnamesese dà n tranh, and the Chinese guzheng. She’e got other fun blues and rock covers posted on her YouTube page. Lee’s version of “Voodoo Chile” is the internet hit, but I dig her “Bold as Love” because the canned backing tracks are less intrusive, plus it’s my fave Hendrix song. 🙂
Like many guitarists exposed to Asian zither players, I find myself envying the movable bridges they have on each string. By positioning the bridge relatively close to the center of the string (and not, as on guitars, near one end), they can pluck notes or generate vibrato on either side of the bridge.
Lee and Thurston from Sonic Youth achieve related effect by placing drumsticks and screwdrivers between the neck and strings of their guitars near the 12th fret. (It’s not like those guys are Asian music scholars or anything, but another similarity is their use of tunings with closer-than-standard intervals between the strings.)
But no one took the notion further than the late Hans Reichel, whose beautiful, handmade instruments used center-positioned bridges to elicit eerie sonorities and startling portamento and glissando effects. This video is a nice showcase for Reichel’s radical re-imagining of the guitar. (Reichel also demonstrates his dachsophone — literally, “hedgehog-o-phone” — which, depending on your perspective, is one of the most expressive, amusing, or just plain irritating musical contraptions ever conceived.)
Anyone ever explored similar ground? (FWIW, I took a semester of koto back in the Triassic Era college. I sucked.)