While my guitar gently weeps

I sing the electric aluminium. How Lou Reed found his preferred guitar in Milan Lambrate.

Fabio Novembre:

I have just discovered that the legendary Leo Fender, who is considered to be the Henry Ford of musical instruments, worked as an accountant and could not play the guitar. Here we have Renato Ruatti, who is an architect, Gianni Melis, who teaches English, and Mauro Moia, a foreman at Aermacchi. Shared passions and some lucky coincidences have brought them together to create a very limited craft edition guitar with an aluminium body, which is largely inspired by the historical Fender Telecaster.

Gianni Melis:

To be precise we wanted to combine the simple line of the Telecaster with the metal body of the National. Metal guitars have natural amplification and were used as forerunners of electric guitars to raise the sound level when playing in a band.

FN:

Your decision to readapt metal for an instrument which is already amplified is a theoretical short-circuit.

Renato Ruatti:

You know, it is hard to design an instrument, in the end instruments are what they are. So we began redesigning a classic, a bit like when you were at university and you used a compass to study classical architecture. Then you redesigned it, thought it over and slowly took control. The first experiments were carried out using brass, until we discovered that aluminium had all the properties we needed.

Livio Magnini:

Instruments reflect the musician’s intentions. Anybody looking to make rock music without breaking with tradition uses a dogma instrument. If, on the other hand, you feel like experimenting, you look for something else, which is not necessarily better or worse, it just makes different sounds.

FN:

Saturnino used to tell me that he has taken about a dozen bass guitars into the recording studio, but he always ended up only using yours. How can you create your own personal sound or tone?

GM: We have worked with musicians who have moved beyond the phase of the dogma instrument. It helped us understand our strong points. For example, the pickups on the hollow aluminium body got rid of that typical buzz.

RR:

The instrument was deaf! I showed it to a rather perplexed lutist asking him whether it was good or bad. The fact is it an absolute novelty: a noiseless single coil*!

FN: I read that aluminium is the third most abundant element on the Earth’s crust, but due to manufacturing difficulties it was more expensive than gold until the late 19th century... However nowadays, when looking for lightness, durability and resistance, it is almost obligatory.

RR:

Even so, you cannot imagine how opposed musicians were to the introduction of such an unconventional material. We only managed to get aluminium accepted through the Trojan horse of the Telecaster.

FN:

But is not iconoclasm at the very foundations of rock’n’roll? How come innovation has to camouflage itself to be accepted?

LM:

In music, if you are an innovator but you cannot disguise the fact you are ahead of your time, you will always just be the person admired by your colleagues without ever being popular with the general public. The fact you are ahead of time will be useless.

GM:

It took a great mainstream musician like Paul McCartney to discover Jimi Hendrix. And now Muti says Hendrix is comparable to Wagner...

FN:

In any case, I can see even the Telecaster being superseded on a design level. It is just like getting to the essence by removing useless parts. It is an interesting approach and I would like to see how you translate it into your job as an architect.

RR:

These are photos of a research centre I built on an abandoned quarry at a cement works. There is a parallelepiped-shaped structure which I wanted to make out of reinforced lime. Using lime for structural purposes seem to be heretical, but then I went over to my engineer who, by treating it like poor cement, helped me make it work. A simple object was created, which is old-fashioned in some respects but which still breathes. I recently came across a study by an American university into the proportions between the hips and waste of a woman’s body. There is an ideal ratio which varies according to race and which determines male attraction. The curves of the Telecaster, particularly in the elongated bass version, faithfully mirror those golden figures.

FN:

Lorenzo Palmeri is a young designer, who came knocking at your door with a project in which he tried to call into question the formal dogma ...

Lorenzo Palmeri:

I actually worked from female forms to design my Paraffina Slapster. I studied gestures. I ended up patenting an alternative solution to the lever that can be pressed using your forearm. Musicians tend to wear their instruments, and the unusual grip even caught the eye of Lou Reed, who bought one.

LM:

Here again, though, this is not an iconoclasm, the shape is actually reminiscent of a cither or lyre. The attempt to evolve took us back to an even more classical instrument. Although its blade makes it look rather like a sword, a katana.

RR:

In our minds, the musician evokes a number of thoughts when we pick up an instrument. This obsession with swords is not by chance, I remember that when the bass guitar for Saturnino was brought out we called it Excalibur.

Saturnino Celani:

Every time I come to the Noah workshop I feel like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, when she meets Hattori Hanzo to commission him to make her a sword!

LP:

Livio was actually a professional fencer.

LM:

To tell the truth, I was actually a world champion fencer ...

FN:

So can we see guitars as unconventional weapons?

GM:

In some respects we can, I think a guitar is often referred to as an axe, and in a certain type of music it is even held that way.

LM:

The solo guitarist is referred to as an axe-man. This cutting term is used a lot in music and can have negative connotations when the sound is too acid and irritates the ear, or positive connotations when the sound stands out from the bass and cuts its own space.

* Single coil: this is the fi rst type of pick up made of one single copper coil. Th ey are sensitive to any kind of electrical interference, producing a sort of buzz. Th e Noahs are silent, because interference has been cancelled out by the shielding eff ect of the aluminium body.