TUNING UP
Fly Your Freak Flag High BY SHAWN HAMMOND
Just prior to finishing the issue you’re holding in your eager
hands (or reading on your favorite digital device), most of the
PG staff had put in several long
days at the Summer NAMM
show in Nashville. We hate to
brag, but we won’t lie, either—
when it comes to gear coverage,
we absolutely dominated the
show. No matter where you were
on the floor, you could pretty
much turn your head and see
one of our eight editors in their
highly visible black PG T-shirts,
cruising from one booth to the
next to snap photos and shoot
HD videos. If you couldn’t be
in Nashville to visit the show
yourself, all you had to do was
keep an eye on our Facebook
wall throughout the day to see a
continuous string of posts—with
specs and a nice picture—on the
cool new guitar and bass goodies.
And by nightfall each day, we
had several video demos from the
show up on premierguitar.com
and on our You Tube channel.
It was a grueling trip, to be
sure. But that’s because we’re
sort of the freaks of guitar-media universe. No other guitar
outlet gets you pics and info
in virtual real time, and then
provides you with video demos
on the latest gear as fast or as
professionally as we do. (We
usually get you reviews of that
new gear before the other guys,
too.) That’s why our You Tube
channel is at 15 million views
and counting.
For me, one of the most
enjoyable videos of the show
was a demo we shot of the
Teuffel Tesla Prodigy guitar.
I’ve known of Ulrich Teuffel’s
gorgeously futuristic designs
for years, but I’d never seen
one in person, let alone heard
one played in front of me. We
asked Jamie Gale, Teuffel’s
North American distributor,
to demo the guitar. Though
Jamie had only been working
with the German company for
a few weeks and had hardly
played the rather strangely
outfitted instrument—which
has three momentary switches
for a 60-cycle-hum generator,
a kill switch, and a feedback
generator—he agreed to do
so. I felt bad asking him to do
it, because I knew it would be
daunting to come up with a
musical way to incorporate such
avant-garde features on the spur
of the moment, but I didn’t
want to let that opportunity
slip through our fingers—if
from the NAMM-show floor
to take home and mess around
with for a while, it probably
would’ve been the Tesla Prodigy.
And I stand behind the video,
too: Jamie did a great job under
such duress, and the audio from
the video speaks for itself. Even
if you think the three weirdo
switches are uncalled for, there’s
no denying that the guitar gen-
erated fantastic tones through
the tiny Blackstar combo blast-
ing into our SM57.
PG didn’t get a nice-looking,
well-mic’d demo of the Tesla
Prodigy, who else would?
It didn’t take long for the
traditionalist haters/trolls to
descend on Jamie and Teuffel
after we’d uploaded the video to
You Tube. The comments sec-
tion was filled with predictable
shots about the unusual looks
and not-for-everyone features, in
addition to a lot of over-the-top
jackass comments from people
with closed minds and/or inse-
cure egos. Several people were
sure that I, as the interviewer,
shared their sentiments. They
couldn’t have been further from
the truth: Though I felt bad for
putting Jamie on the immortal-
ized-on-You Tube spot with such
an unusual instrument—a guitar
I would’ve been scared to demo
on such short notice, too—if I
could’ve chosen one instrument
about his client’s wares being
slagged in the slums of You Tube
comment sections. Of course,
as a player, he also hated being
unfairly crapped on every bit as
much as you and I would. He
wondered if it would be best to
take the video down. I left it up
to him, but I told him my take
on the whole situation: “Fly
your freak flag high, man!”
Jamie agreed we should leave
the video up after we ruminated
on how the internet’s anonymity
can turn otherwise decent people
into know-it-all jerks—it’s a pas-
time for a certain element of soci-
ety—and after I reiterated that
there was really no other place
online where you could find a
video that focused on Teuffel’s
handsome guitar like ours did.
More importantly, though, I
reminded him that a lot of the
stuff we consider totally mundane
now—distortion, flanging, back-
ward effects, and radical pitch
shifting, to name a few—began
their existence as magnets for
society’s dung-bomb throwers.
Hell, can you imagine what
people were saying about Paul
Bigsby when he built that first
solidbody for Merle Travis while
everyone else was building acous-
tics and semi-hollow guitars?
Freakishly yours,
Shawn Hammond
shawn@premierguitar.com
