2025 - Hardly any hope!

The Cádiz  video!

Here is the whole video, just almost an hour here with me in Cádiz. Everything is in German. But there are subtitles!

Opening music: “Domino,” a Van Morrison song by my Hanover band Duesenberg (2001 - vocals & guitar: me!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTmBoILHpmE

73 - Damn!

Damn, I'll be 73 in June this year. I'm already the oldest at many dinner tables. It's a rather unpleasant feeling, being in a constant state of anxiety that something might happen to your health. Well, of course, at 20, the same thing could happen to you: you leave the house and a roof tile falls on your head.

But: Oh, it was so wonderful back then! You went out on the town, met a woman, charmed her, flirted with her, looked into her eyes, she looked back, and very often I said that same evening: “Come on, let's go to my place and fuck!” It almost always worked. It even happened to me that I woke up to my lover giving me a blow job to start the morning. What wonderful details of long-gone eroticism!

At my age, of course, none of that happens anymore, especially since I've been in the tender hands of my Paloma for almost 15 years. No need for “foolishness.” But sometimes the memory of such “adventures” still lingers!

Les Paul & Tele - Bender

See you soon in Los Angeles at NAMM!

Trans Tremola

Les Trem on Dean Zelinsky!

göldo SL-Tuner

It's about time! Design, refinements, technology: here they are, our brand new, half-open, very own SL tuners. We hope they cause a stir at NAMM in Los Angeles in January!

A nice new arrival!

Marco Ballestri describes in his book about Wandré that Mr. Pioli was inspired to create this body shape when he observed his urine (very medically expressed!) for a while while peeing, as it passed the toilet seat and dripped into the toilet bowl.

Memphis-Design

Oh, how beautiful! Three designs by my friend Roland Hauke, Vienna – Memphis style. This has always been one of my favorite furniture designs. Take a look here: https://www.hauke-instruments.com/

And another new arrival:

Built 38 years ago and now bought back - a Duesenberg Starplayer from 1987, multi-color “dreadlook” sanded paint job. A real eye-catcher next to my Lady and the Di Donato-Custom!

Even more crazy - the Bond Electraglide - 1985

Instead of frets, these ascending “stairs”, all made of carbon fiber and active with power supply and stereo cable. An innovation that was ahead of its time, but not absolutely necessary. I have it now. Who knows if that was the right decision? Definitely better: the Duesenberg James Bond Paloma!

My old dream is coming true after all!

As an old Les Paul Junior and P-90 fan, I've always wanted to reproduce this sound as perfectly as possible. There are replicas of these guitars, but unfortunately they are all too heavy. Here we have finally managed to bring this legendary sound back to life, with its incredible response and light weight. Our new Duesenberg (still a secret!) sounds even better to me, more open than the original. And according to various voices, this 57 here is one of the very best ever built!

Sitarizing

The time has come again, sitar sound on the Tele! Three tiltable, scale-compensated brackets made of ultra-hard, glass fiber-reinforced plastic. I'm certainly by no means the Indian master when it comes to producing this effect. But it rumbles and buzzes very typically, doesn't it?

Interestingly, the sitar sound can also be deactivated for each pair of strings by unscrewing the front grub screw and then tilting the trestle downwards. On the right are the two outer bumps without sitar function. And all three bumps down = Tele “normal” without sitar sound! And this super hard plastic provides excellent vibration transmission, see “graphtech”.

Marco Nobach

Oh Marco, what would I do without you!

Marco works as a mechanic/precision engineer in a factory that manufactures connecting elements, mostly from stainless steel or titanium. Marco is also an old-school guitarist and, many years ago, not only had the idea of a trans tremolo based on the “Bigsby,” but actually made it a reality.

Last year, I returned to one of my ideas from 2017, a tremolo with a thick axis that has a notch for each string to modify its deflection depending on the string gauge (see here in chapter 2017). But even after several prototypes, the transification was still not as precise as I had hoped. So how could I determine the exact insertion depths for the E, A, D, G, and B strings, and ensure that it would still sound harmonious in a two-tone range, at least for strings 010 to 050 and 010 to 046, when the lever was pushed up or down?

This is where Marco came into play, whom I still remembered from back then and spontaneously called after a forensic search for his phone number. Of course, he still had the “project” on his guitar, basically the same technology as mine, but that was it, no further commercialization on his part. I described my specifications to him, such as axle diameter, string gauges, etc., and this ingenious precision engineering freak explained to me that he had calculated the insertion depths pretty accurately back then. Well, in a job like that, math is essential, but it's rather foreign to me.

So this genius Marco not only set about calculating all the values according to Duesenberg's specifications using his system, but also manufactured this shaft on the high-tech CNC company lathe (private botch job = outside working hours). We gave him a white Duesenberg TV-Phonic to work on, and the result was amazing. Wonderful tremolo harmony within more than 4 semitones, all built into our traditional tremolo housing.

And now we have a new project in the works, the first true wrap-around torsion tremolo. With Marco's help and ideas, it's going to be a really awesome tremolo!


Thanks to Trump, the Americans are losing money on the dollar, but they can continue to export their guitars etc. to Europe with zero customs duties, while our guitars are subject to 15% duty there. Thank you and congratulations, Ursula von der Leyen!

Guitar Summit

It was absolutely fantastic again! We had the best stand and lots of new things to offer. Göldo presented various new benders and tremolos, Duesenberg showcased the Chris Chaney Bass (AC/DC), a new edition of the 1996 Starplayer, the Starplayer CBR, and for the Brothers Landreth, whom I greatly admire and who were always present, a bass and a special Paloma with gold foil pickups, the Tom Bukowac “Session Man” TV and the new Paul Franklin lap steel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dier66QZfy4

One simply hopes that this event will soon replace the NAMM show. After all, who would voluntarily travel to the USA these days? They would handcuff me right at the airport and put me in one of their internment camps.

But here's a little anecdote about the summit: I decided late to fly from Madrid to Frankfurt to look for the trade fair. First, I stayed with my daughter Jule in Bad Soden for one night, then continued on to Mannheim in a rental car. My boys stayed in a relatively luxurious hotel right next to the Beethoven House, while I simply had to book a very inexpensive apartment a little further away due to a lack of available rooms. At Madrid airport, I had wisely purchased two bottles of decent Spanish red wine so that I wouldn't be stuck without a drink at my accommodation.

After the first day of the summit and an excellent meal at a restaurant called Vegana (very tasty, and from then on I had no objections to vegan cuisine!), I returned “home,” opened one of the bottles, and went to the small kitchen area to get a glass. Everything in this apartment was actually fine—the bed, the bathroom, the heating—nothing to complain about. But there were no glasses in the cupboard or anywhere else. No glasses, no plates, no cutlery, nothing! German abstinence. On the sink was only a yellow-green plastic bowl, which was probably intended to serve as a drinking vessel for "the dog I brought with me.” Drinking wine from the bottle is not an option for me. So the only option was to rinse out the bowl as best I could and drink the wine from it. What a decline!
I had breakfast the next morning, as well as all the others, with my boys at this luxurious Leonardo Hotel and let one of the glasses, which were intended for drinking various juices on offer, slip into my trade fair bag. The next evening was saved.

Kluson USA via Madinter, Spain here in Europe!

I had already dealt with the somewhat sensitive topic of “KLUSON” in detail, with all its nuances, in my 1995 chapter, see https://www.dieter-goelsdorf.de/en/story-2/1995-duesenberg-kluson.html ," namely (here again in brief) when two companies (WD-Music USA and Göldo Music Germany) had the clever idea of letting the trademark rights for the name of the Kluson company, which had been closed since 1976, be re-registered – WD in the USA and I here in Europe. A sales success, actually with the positive background of being able to offer all vintage freaks faithful Kluson copies to replace the rather inferior originals on their old guitars with replicas complete with the original “KLUSON DELUXE” stamp. WD started out with low-quality Asian copies, while I immediately ordered these copies in top quality from the Japanese company Gotoh, which even back then produced these tuners without the Kluson stamp in a much better quality than the originals – KLUSON-NO-LiNE. Because, as everyone knows, Gotoh is still top of the line today!

Since then, there has been trouble with court cases that we have always won, because we (göldo) are not allowed to export these tuners to the US due to trademark rights, and WD is not allowed to export its cheap stuff to Europe, etc.

By chance, we learned at the Guitar Summit that the US company StewMac, which recently bought the Madrid-based tonewood and guitar parts company Madinter, is offering Kluson tuners on its European website via these Spaniards, namely Klusons from the US company WD. Of course, this is completely unacceptable, because we have held the trademark rights for “Kluson” in Europe and other countries such as Brazil, Turkey, etc. since 1999.

It seems that, at least since the change of government, the Americans have been acting unscrupulously, recklessly, and in violation of the law. Our lawyers will sort it out again shortly.

Tito & Tarantula

Tito Larriva, everyone should know him, the singer of the vampire band in “From Dusk Till Dawn,” the spectacular thriller by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino from 1996. Tito, who meets his demise in every Rodriguez film but has since been touring primarily in Europe with his band Tito & Tarantula, was visiting Madrid and we had a wonderful evening with this super-sympathetic guy and his brilliant wife Janet.
Unfortunately, neither Tito nor Rodriguez are particularly well known in the US, whereas they have cult status here. 

Tito's wife is a native US citizen with a Mexican mother, but he has been living in the US as a Mexican for 50 years. He has all kinds of important papers, but he is missing some things that could prevent him from being deported from the US as an unwelcome foreigner under Trump's rule. The result: suddenly a life of fear and worry!

Tito and Janet have spoken Spanish since birth, of course. So what could be more obvious than emigrating? And because of the language, it's best to move to Spain! From here, Tito can organize and carry out all his tours, his band's equipment is stored in Germany anyway, and we (Duesenberg) have been supplying him with all his instruments for years, with his English guitarist (Markus Praed) from Osnabrück since 2012.

So right now, in September, the two of them are looking for the most suitable city in Spain to settle down in. I guess Madrid will be the winner.

Formentera (Guitars)

Formentera, still almost as paradisiacal as it was in 1988, when I founded our guitar-making school on this small island with Thomas Stratmann. Teaching wasn't my thing due to a lack of patience, and at the end of 1990 I sold my shares to Ekki, who continued the business with Thomas. But please! This school, which was revolutionary at the time, still exists today and will continue to exist. Because here, under the Balearic sun, you can learn from scratch how to build an electric guitar with all the trimmings!

Although air travel is a continuous humiliation these days, we are going back there for a week after a 7-year absence. Eckehard “Ekki” Hoffmann, now 73, still runs Formentera Guitars, has just finished a course and is currently training a new partner.

Simply the musical taste and level of education of his fellow human beings is, as everywhere else in the world, on the way to the abyss. In addition many white hairs, bald heads, and large bellies, including my own.

But thanks to their capacity for compassion, the Spanish are fully “Pro Palestina”! An effective demonstration with air raid siren audio on the church square in San Francisco:

The phrase of the day

When you do something forbidden that doesn't bother anyone, such as crossing a red light for pedestrians or vaping an odorless electronic cigarette, you can quickly catch the fascists around you.