2024 - A gloomy perspective ...

First news ...

Climate change, wars everywhere, corrupt, incompetent politicians, senseless consumerism, mental disorders, cooking competitions, plastic packaging, old men - and life takes place almost exclusively virtually on the screen.

Alarm in Nazareth - Nazareth - from the police radio:

So really! Following the tail of a comet, three supposedly holy kings arrive in Nazareth at this stable where a virgin Maria has just given birth to the baby Jesus. How can anyone believe that?

Two policemen, police control center and patrol car J44:

Jota 44: "We are on the scene. The situation is Dantesque. Over!"

Central: "Report Jota 44!"

Jota 44: "There is a baby in deplorable hygienic conditions. This is full of cow shit. There's a donkey here too."

Central: "Let's see, one thing, is the baby abandoned or is it with the parents?"

Jota 44: "Well, there is a cria here who says she is the mother, Maria, she doesn't want to give her last name. We're going to try to get her and the baby into an ambulance, but it's very complicated, because this place is full of people. Over!"

Central: "But let's see, Jota 44, how complicated? What kind of people are there?"

Jota 44: "Let's see, central, don't take it out on me! There's a guy here, he's a carpenter, he says he's the father of the child, he's undocumented. Then there are three clandestine people, who are carrying suspicious substances. They say they have diplomatic status and act in the name of God. I think this is an Al Qaeda or ISIS operation, please send reinforcements at once! Over and out!"

J44: "Central, do you hear me?"

J44: "Yeah, go ahead, J44. Let's see! We're with the little teenage girl Maria. We've brought her to the hospital in Belen. They just finished a gynecological examination and the midwife says that she is a virgin".

Central: "But how is she a virgin? She has given birth and is a virgin?"

J44: "Let's see, Central, I'll tell you what the nurse-midwife tells me. They are going to send her to psychiatry because they say she is delirious with a pigeon, I don't know what they have told me."

Central: "Well. And what about the three diplomats?"

J44: "The substances that we have intervened say that they are for their own consumption. But they come with three camels."

Central: "Take them their rights and bring them to the command pulling shavings."

J44: "Wait, central, there are more. They say that a man with a white tunic and two wings on his back has tricked them and forced them to follow a comet or something."

Central: "J44, a man with wings on his back? (laughs) Save me some of that pacharan you're drinking!"

We are not alone ...

And another one ...

Trans Trem

Season's greetings ...

NAMM 2024

Wow, in just over two weeks many people will be driving / flying to NAMM - but from now on without me! And not because of my age, but for fear of being arrested at the airport.

The following happened: The last time (2020) I was forced to go to the hospital by my colleagues because of a ridiculous trifle (see 2020 - my slipped disc). I didn't want to, but they gave me a wide berth.

So you arrive and practically the first thing they want to see is your credit card. $1,200 is the paltry entry fee. Then you wait a good hour and are asked into the treatment room. 7 minutes of conversation, then a blood test, and that's it. No further findings, nothing! Well, at least my health insurance pays the bill.

About three weeks later, however, I received another bill in the post for six hundred dollars. Those Americans, those robber barons, scandal! I didn't pay, of course. The first reminder came two weeks later, and the second two weeks after that. And then: the phone rings - Orange County Hospital! These sons of bitches are actually calling me and demanding those $600 again. Of course, I refused to make any payment and insulted the jerk on the phone about the "American healthcare system etc.".

That was it, but I'm afraid these controlettis have me in their data and it could end badly at LAX airport. Besides, I've totally disliked the USA since Trump anyway. What kind of country is this? I won't come to you anymore. And it's a real shame, there are so many really good people there!

P.S. The woman on my left is one of the nurses who enthusiastically visited us at the stand.

Split/King Land

I haven't tried it yet: Splitting the Split/King in two different ways. Sounds enormous? (The neck pickup visible here is not connected!)

Carnaval in Cádiz

Here everyone goes crazy again, chirping guitars, mandolins and kazoos, four-part choirs and lots of masquerade! And the Carnaval de Cádiz is the most impressive in the world, it's the moment of anarchy: once a year you can say or sing what you think! Politicians get their comeuppance and all kinds of grievances are denounced.

That Cádiz does not sell itself! ...
Unfortunately, however, this spectacular carnival - as is happening all over the world - is well on the way to turning into a silly, cultureless folk festival.

Recycling in Cádiz

You are a good citizen and recycle your garbage. Plastic and empty cans etc. are always put in a blue plastic bag and at least once a week you make your way to the plastic container about 6 minutes away. Once there, however, you realize that the Cádiz city council has treated itself andus to a new container and the plastic bag cannot possibly be pushed past these rigid rubber flaps into the inside. The only solution: anarchy! I grabbed the box cutter, cut away the rubber flaps on the right-hand side and disposed of them effortlessly and properly in the container. Yay!

Photoshop

For those who don't know, I still do all my design drawings in Adobe Photoshop. That's a bit crazy, I should actually get myself a program at least like Illustrator or even better a CAD program. But I'm just too much of a dinosaur. I also have various recording programs on my Mac, but it's exactly the same: I can't get to grips with them, or I'd have to spend weeks getting to grips with them, which I'm absolutely terrified of. And when in doubt, Toño, the ex-bassist of the Dooros, a graphic designer by trade, or a José "3D", who lays out everything three-dimensionally, helps me with certain files.

Besides guitar ...

So the glass is closer! Perhaps soon to be a hot new Duesenberg promotional item alongside our corkscrews and champagne caps!

Cádiz - Madrid - Bilbao

A Split/King for Ramón Arroyo, guitarist of the group "Los Segretos" and a few days in Bilbao with Iñaki Antón, former guitarist of the Spanish No.1 rockers "Extremoduro". Such super people!

Taylor Swift

The little I knew about this lady was that she is incredibly famous and has sold tens of millions of CDs etc.. I was thinking more of something like a super hyped pop star like Shakira or Brittney Spears. Now I had to realize that she firstly sings great and comes from Nashville, secondly is more on the country wave, and thirdly is an absolute Trump opponent. What's more, her guitarist Paul Sidoti is a passionate Duesenberg player. What an honor! What could be better? That's exactly how it should be!

Tennis heute ...

Ach je, kaum einer versteht meinen Witz! Der Mevdeved heißt doch „Medvedev" und der Alcasar ist doch Carlos „Alcaraz"!

Something new for 3 strings - String Threes

Not much to do at the moment. So I can think of things like this - a simple and effectively designed string tree for three strings!

Spain's big day!

Sitarizer - the end ...

They did not sound like intended - that is, in the garage for discarded inventions...

Frustration!

Jed Hughes (Nashville)

Have a look here! Jedd Hughes playing our collection, super presentation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPMAb5Qpkg4

David Arnold & Hans Zimmer

I have already expressed my enthusiasm for the South African director Neil Blomkamp (District 9). And he has now made an equally excellent new film, “Chappie”, about a robot that can think and feel better than a human. And who contributed the music? Hans Zimmer, who, like David Arnold, has provided music for James Bond movies. See here Hans playing together with David Duesenberg: https://www.duesenberg.de/en/guitars/alliance-james-bond/

INTRODUCING: THE ALLIANCE SERIES JAMES BOND 007 - SIGNED & NUMBERED BY DAVID ARNOLD

Duesenberg has teamed up with James Bond and long-standing partner and five-time 007 composer David Arnold to create a unique guitar. Strictly limited to 75 pieces, each individually numbered guitar is handcrafted and personally signed by David Arnold.

The limited edition was inspired by a custom-made Duesenberg guitar that was developed together with David Arnold for the Sound of 007 in Concert in October 2022. It was played by David Arnold and Hans Zimmer and subsequently sold at Christie's for £32,760.

Hocus-pocus...

From the early 60s, I had stored a contingent of all the screws used in Gibson and Fender guitars at the time in a drawer labeled “secret”. These were original Fender and Gibson screws for pickguards, control plates and jack plates, screws for adjusting the height of the pickups, etc. In addition, the grub screws for adjusting the height of the individual blocks, octave screws, etc. I had sanded the nickel-plated surface of all of them a little and realized that all these screws had been made from a certain brass alloy. So I let a chemical laboratory in Hannover do analyses of the screw material.

Following an intuition, I then took my old Japanese Squier Strat and swapped all the screws for my 60s screws. The difference in sound was amazing. An incredibly good response, more compact in the highs, crisper in the lows and rounder and meatier in the highs, with actually better string separation. I can only attribute it to the special material of the screws, which move more favorably with the string vibration and have breathed new life into my Squier. I even think that the pickguard screws had the most influence because they are the last link in the transmission chain “pickup, pickguard, wood”. With my footswitches, the Squier now sounded more compact and defined, with the speakers also coming across much more conciliatorily. The tones formed themselves as if by magic.

After a long search, I finally discovered the company in a suburb of Chicago that produced all of these screws for Leo Fender at the time. And now they are making exact replicas for me, using exactly the same material and some of the same machines from back then. And this company already had freezing chambers back then, to tighten the molecules of this special brass alloy at minus 188°. They will use that for my production too! It's an expensive business, but I will be able to offer you my super exclusive range soon.

Guys! Don't let anyone tell you bullshit!

But this is real!

How about an endpin extension for top-heavy guitars?

Trans-Tremolo – finally!

I have been working on this “Trans-Trem System” since the 80s, a technical innovation that I personally don't need at all because I'm not into country music and those super harmonic lapsteel sounds.

But then in the 80s along came Ned Steinberger with his headless trans-tremolo that could be adjusted in various steps. I was simply fascinated that someone had an idea and was actually able to implement it technically.

It all started 1984 with this abstruse construction of a two-part body, the two parts of which could be swiveled towards each other, with the rear part acting as a tremolo lever to change the pitch. “Push the horn down or pull it up, chord up and down!” The ballends of the strings were seated in small holders attached to six tongues under a bracket with six grub screws, with which the exit height of each string could be adjusted. In addition, a rotatable, turret-like stop for different rest positions in semitone steps. Perhaps not a bad idea, but off to the garage for discarded inventions! “Nobody's buying that!”

However, my idea led me to find a simpler technical solution that could be applied to many types of guitars. Over the years, I kept coming up with a new prototype, coupled with intense frustration. Either the tone deflection of the six strings did not work perfectly enough in relation to each other, or it even worked technically when the height of the outlets was adjustable, with the strings running over grub screws that could be adjusted in height. But the thinner strings kept breaking. Useless!
Or everything was too stiff and there was no defined zero point, lever pulled up, everything about half a tone too high, lever down, everything a lot too low. Damn friction, but where? The tuner disillusioned me every time. Everything was just like in Gyro Gearloose's garage for discarded inventions.


And bear in mind: From then until now, this was a real pain in the neck, practically every time a component was replaced it meant “down with the strings and up again”! Cranking and cranking, hours and hours, days and days, and that's not necessarily fun.

In about 2016, I came closer to the matter again: no hard edges for the strings to run over, predefined exit points for a string set from a 46-low E-string to a 10-high E-string. All mounted in our Tremola tremolo with a shaft of 14 millimeters in diameter and notches that dictated the horizontal movement of each string when the lever was operated. But even that was only halfway perfect in a small range of up to about a semitone, and for me, not perfect enough. Again, frustration, everything put aside – garage. As an unfit German perfectionist, I didn't consider the idea that for many guitarists, this could have been sufficiently correct for harmonious tremolo.

A few years later, I came back to the realization that this “problem” could simply not be perfected without the ability to adjust the heights of the string exit points. But the strings were not allowed to run over sharp edges because of the risk of tearing.

Our Tremola tremolos have a shaft with a diameter of 10mm, just a bit larger than Bigsbys. Moreover that we have more precise bearings and better springs, which allows for a precisely defined zero point in the rest position.


Above this 10mm shaft, it was now necessary to mount small round saddles (string saddles), over which each string runs smoothly. However, the higher the strings are above the center of the 10mm shaft, the greater their tension on the shaft. So I milled off about 3mm of the top of the wave and mounted the 3.5mm-high semicircular saddles above it, with the height above the wave being adjustable using grub screws.

The tension of the string naturally causes the saddle to move forward and also to twist. So to avoid twisting and in case of a string breaking, I mounted a thin screw with a diameter of 2.5 mm for each string, which holds the saddle and the grub screw in its position. This way, each saddle can be perfectly adjusted in height, with the ball-ends of the strings threaded through the holes of a block at the front to run up over the saddles like a wrap-around bridge.

Another problem was the high E-string, which requires a much higher excursion to harmonize with the other strings. To position the nut so high, I had to build a small height extension into the shaft, in which the adjusting worm sits.

Due to the higher exit points of the six strings, there is physically a higher tensile load on the central shaft, so that the spring used in our Tremola tremolos did not provide the necessary counterforce. A stronger spring could have solved this problem, but it would also have made the function much stiffer and harder.

So the only solution: a softer spring on the right, where the “normal” spring is otherwise located, and a second softer spring on the left - like on a Fender tremolo, which also uses several springs. So the central shaft had to be extended by about 12mm to the left to create space for the new lever part on the left, which we otherwise use for our left-hand tremolos. In doing so, a pleasant side effect arose under all these new, more difficult conditions, namely that this trans-tremolo works all the more smoothly, with both sides countering the string tension, absolutely perfectly and, in addition, pleasantly softly.