Course Description

Each class is divided into part lecture, part demonstration, and part hands-on workshop. We encourage students to bring their own instruments to class where they can be worked on and used for class demonstration. Students will have the opportunity to work on their own instruments and receive feedback from the instructor during the class. Useful handout materials will also be provided.

This is the ideal seminar for anyone working as a guitar technician, roadie, music store employee, touring musician or for anyone interested in working on instruments. A Certificate of Completion will be awarded to all students who complete the course as well as handouts covering the topics discussed.

Seminar Description

This seminar will be divided into part lecture, part demonstration, and part hands-on training. Over the duration of the two days, students will watch a complete re-fret and then execute the process on their own instrument under the assistance of the instructor. The methods presented in this seminar are those used by Ian Schneller who, over the past 25+ years, has re-fretted hundreds of instruments.

If anybody recognizes any of the images or artists that we haven’t listed, we would love to hear from you and flesh out the roster on this work of art.

Each neck pocket on a Specimen Aluminum is machined to precisely fit the neck heel of the actual neck going on the instrument. This arduous procedure may be somewhat superstitious (as opposed to using generalized templates) but it ensures a perfect fit and superior assembly on each and every guitar.

This guitar model is my Specimen Aluminum Esquire. With the neck block machining safely behind me, I can now embark on fitting the bridge and then “honey-combing” the frame to reduce weight and create a secret, internal beauty.

]]> http://www.specimenproducts.com/machining-the-neck-block-of-a-specimen-aluminum-guitar/feed/ 0 http://www.specimenproducts.com/pop-matters-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pop-matters-2 http://www.specimenproducts.com/pop-matters-2/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:39:41 +0000 nadine http://www.specimenproducts.com/?p=7390 Andrew Bird’s ‘Sonic Arboretum’: 21 December 2011 – Chicago
By Michael Ritchie

The only item that looked like it didn’t belong in the MCA this late December Thursday was the small black stage set up on the museums main floor. After all, it blocked the main entrance atop the “rocky-like” climb of stairs one usually takes to enter the building. A kind of little step-brother to Chicago’s grand Art Institute, tucked off the top of Michigan Avenue in the Magnificent Mile neighborhood of Chicago, the MCA is the more conceptual and smaller of the downtown museums. But other than this stage, the MCA was filled with a multiplied group of the similar crowds I’ve noticed with past trips, although never for a concert. Hipsters and professor types alike, but most had a somewhat artsy look to them, as if they had been through at least one painting class in their years. It wasn’t a normal Andrew Bird crowd by any means though. Because behind the front rows of college art girls, sculptors, audiophiles and sound engineers gathered, all interested to stand within this Sonic Arboretum and hear it come to life.

This was the Arboretum’s second city after the initial success of the installation at the Guggenheim in New York. And it’s interesting that it didn’t start here in Chicago since both Bird and Ian Schneller, craftsman of all 75 of the Specimen Product speakers now housed in the MCA, are from the Chicago area. But after hearing Bird speak during his set, you realized that this was still a very new idea and growing itself. New York just happened to be where it began and neither had been sure where it would go to next.

Now I did start this by saying the stage (and a few extra lights) was the only object out of place compared to a normal day at the MCA. But the stage was positioned right where it needed to be. Placed between two “fields” of about 20 Specimen speakers varying in heights between 12 inches to 4 feet, and flanked by a pair of mammoth orange horns that faced back toward the stage. Each of the speakers held a similar shape that consisted of a square wooden base with an elongated, gramophone-like horn rising from the top. But other than the shape, no pair looked the same. Bases were stained and polished individually, and the horns, which are compressed material made of newspaper and dryer-lint, were painted and glossed in a variety of rich tones, giving them a beauty easily appreciated without the presence of the multi-talented Bird. From Bird’s view, he looked down the main gallery hallway over a larger field of similar speakers running down the center. Another giant, this one with a dual-horn that spun above the room, lay at the end of the hallway. And intertwined in each field, connecting it all, were countless lengths of high-end cable and beautifully built Specimen tube amplifiers used to power it all.

Most of Bird’s compositions sneak up on the listener. They are composed in an organic fashion, building upon themselves until each song is surrounded in music. Simple guitar strums and whistles become layered soundscapes that would float and circle around the room. Between Bird’s sonic offerings and the arboretum of speakers around the MCA, was a 48-channel mixing board carefully set up and tuned to control the forest of speakers below. It also allowed Bird, and his sound engineer to a larger degree, complete control of when and where different parts of the performance would be projected. The simple act of closing your eyes to focus on the sound let you hear the music circle around you from room to room as new sounds started faint and soon would draw closer with increased volume and change of position. It was a complete sonic experience that the audience also felt as certain notes shook and hummed through the air. It was an unbelievably crisp and pure sound that I’ve never heard, or felt, through any other sound system.

Bird played to the crowd for a little over an hour with a set mixed of previously released material as well as pieces composed on-site during the exhibition’s installation. Bird had even stopped in some mornings after the arboretum was complete to play to that day’s gallery attendees, perched above them in a lofted balcony as they freely milled about. It was during these morning sessions that some of these new, exhibition-specific pieces were composed which added to the exclusive feel to their sounds.

I have to say, this was a truly amazing experience. Never have I felt the vibrations of a violin encompass a room or nor have I been in the middle of a three-dimensional field of sound that arrived at your ears from all directions. I would never expect anything less from the MCA, but this exposition and the two nights of live performances were flawlessly executed. I imagine that this will exist again soon, in a new city, in a new space, with new songs and compositions to fit within those confines, and I urge you to go experience it. Audio components have never looked so beautiful or come alive with such vibrancy than with Bird at the helm. Ian Schneller and Andrew Bird are complete artists and the combination of their offerings is a sound (and sight) not to be missed. I hope this arboretum can continue to grow, flourish and be heard in installations across the globe.

If you’ve ever been to an Andrew Bird show, you’ve probably noticed there’s something a little different happening onstage. Not just with Bird himself, who stands in a circle of instruments and creates sound loops meant to resemble the wind in his Western Illinois soybean fields. Transfixed by Bird’s world of sound, you might also find yourself asking: what are those giant horns up there?

The answer, as it turns out, lies in an inventor and luthier named Ian Schneller in Chicago.

Schneller started out as a sculptor, studying fine art at Chicago’s Art Institute. Afterwards, he opened up Specimen Products, which is now celebrating its 25th year, and began building and repairing musical instruments. He got his first idea for a speaker that is reminiscent of an old gramophone horn about fifteen years ago. He describes the horn as a “byproduct” of his interest in sculpture and the discipline of luthiery.

This December, Schneller and his team will install 96 horns along with tube amplifiers at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Bird will compose music just for the space and two special concerts will be held on December 21 and 22.

Schneller says this unusual amplification system will serve as a “compositional tool” for Bird. “What I’m trying to create is a gigantic 48 channel playback system so he can compose into space the same way an orchestra composer would compose for a viola section or a timpani section,” says Schneller.

Schneller is master builder, though he admits he’s been called a crank and conspiracy theorist by some in the mainstream musical products industry for his contrarian views on luthiery and electronics. But most of his designs recall a simplicity from earlier eras.

He says the tube amps that power his horn shapes are an equal player in the MCA installation. Based on technology from the 1930s, the amps have eight watts per channel and marry traditional tube design with high-end digital technology. (One of Specimen’s tube amps can be yours for only $2,450.)

As for the horns, Schneller says they are ideal for amplifying hard-to-amplify instruments like Bird’s violin. “Their transient response is startling. They give you back what you put into them very, very quickly,” he says.

Visitors to the MCA this month will encounter 72 horns on the floor, including two that are eight feet high and one six-foot-wingspan “Spinning Janus” horn, akin to a Leslie speaker, which Schneller says will be placed right by the entrance.

In August 2010, Bird and Schneller created a similar Sonic Arboretum at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Recalling Bird’s live performances with the horns at those shows, Schneller says, “It’s like a circus of inanimacy being brought to life.

“My horns get to enjoy membership in that pantheon on inanimacy and also themselves become animated.”

Posted by Laura Barton

Andrew Bird’s sonic arboretum reminds me of the natural music we are losing

The music of the fields and the woodlands, the lapwings and bunting, is giving way to the sounds of the city, the new housing estates, the motorways

Loops ‘that fit with the landscape’ … Andrew Bird.

In Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art this December, there will sprout up a peculiar kind of forest: 50 horned speakers, each standing between 19 and 26in high across the atrium, their bells upturned like blackbird mouths. This “sonic arboretum” is a project dreamed up by the musician Andrew Bird and the sculptor and instrument-maker Ian Schneller, the product of a long friendship and a shared fascination with sound.

It is Schneller who makes the speakers – or “hornlets and hornlings”, as he calls them – using a combination of recycled newsprint, dryer lint and baking soda, impregnated with shellac. They are wonderful beasts: most handsomely shaped and exquisitely burnished.

Bird provides the sound. He will record compositions on-site at the museum, then send different musical information to different groups of horns through multiple loops. Subsequent changes occur off-site – layering and looping and transmitting the resulting sounds to the museum by computer.

This is not the first time Bird, Schneller and the hornlings have stepped out together. In late summer 2010, they were unveiled at the Guggenheim in New York. Bird explained to PBS how he was inspired by time spent at the farm he owns in Illinois. This is where he writes music, crafting loops that “fit with the landscape, with a field of soybeans in the wind, the way the wind will blow through and make this pattern. What we can do with these hornlets is create that movement of wind.”

It also encouraged him to think of how sound falls in the landscape, of the way it is echoed and absorbed in a way that is tangibly different to a concert hall or gig venue. “Usually you think of acoustics in closed spaces because sound bounces off of things,” Bird said. “But if you’re in Zion National Park or the Sandstone Cliffs, you create this acoustical space with different textures of the plants in our area … And that’s what we’re trying to appropriate.”

Music in the landscape is something I think about often: not just the seasonal acoustic spaces of the summer festivals, nor only the landscape references that crop up in song – the sycamore of the Mamas and the Papas’ Dream a Little Dream of Me, say, or Van Morrison’s Redwood Tree, which “smells like rain, maybe even thunder” – but the music the land itself produces, the wind making patterns in the soybean fields, the rain falling heavy on broad green leaves, the sudden stir of a branch as a bird takes flight.

One of my favourite places in Britain is a real arboretum: Westonbirt, in Gloucestershire. Though it has no hornlets or hornlings, it owns its own sonic charms. I first visited there in late autumn, when the light faded early, and the rain pattered on the soft earth of the pathways, on the smooth, dark rhododendron bushes. And there was music, too, in the scent of wet bark and damp soil, in the caramel smell of the katsura, and the deep, mulchy fragrance of the fallen leaves; a song in the sudden flames of colour on the branches; in the dark and the shadows and the birdsong, clinging to the light.

It reminded me of Vaughan Williams’s first composition, a musical interpretation of a poem by William Barnes, Linden Lea, which pined for the woodland of his Dorset home: “By the oak trees’ mossy moot,/ The shining grass blades, timber-shaded,/ Now do quiver underfoot;/ And birds do whistle overhead,/ And water’s bubbling in its bed,/ And there for me the apple tree/ Do lean down low in Linden Lea.”

It made me think how the sounds of our landscape are changing. The music of the fields and the woodlands giving way to the sounds of the city, and the new housing estates, and the motorways; of how the streetlights make their own kind of song, and the high-speed trains dance faster than their steam-powered cousins. And as we gain these new sounds, I wonder about the patterns, the rhythms we are losing, the songs of the lapwing and the wagtail, the bunting and the barley field. “Translating mistakes, and the trees and the stake,” as Bird once sang. “And the trees for the woods and the sound of the trash/ For the sound of the blowing leaves along the Southfield Freeway.”

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

This workshop will be divided into part lecture, part demonstration, and part hands-on training. Over the duration of three days, students will observe stages of the kit building process and then carry out the work on their own amps under the supervision of the instructor. While this is not a design class per se, students will obtain a foundation level understanding of the way a vintage tube instrument amplifier functions, stage by stage. Students will also learn the craft of point-to-point wiring and how to modify a circuit to shape its tone by changing component values. Moreover, by building an amplifier, students will begin to develop the diagnostic skills necessary to troubleshoot and repair other amplifiers.

This is an ideal seminar for those working as a guitar technician, roadie, music store employee, touring musician or for anyone interested in working on instruments. Useful handouts will be provided and a Certificate of Completion will be awarded to all students who complete the course. Enrollment is limited to 8 students.

Students have the choice of building one of the following amps: Tweed Champ (10-watt), Tweed Deluxe (15-watt), Tweed Bassman (50-watt), 50-watt Tweed Twin, 100-watt Tweed Twin, Marshall Combo (18-watt), or Marshall Head (18-watt). For first time builders, we strongly recommend the Tweed Deluxe kit. It is the perfect level of involvement for the three day seminar. If you are a first time builder and have your heart set on one of the higher-powered models, simply bear in mind that some additional hours may need to be logged to complete the build.

Back before the Sonic Arboretum opened, Time Out Chicago Kids ran a nice feature in their December/January issue. It gave Ian a chance to talk about how his childhood, specifically working alongside his Grandfather, influences his work.

We were delighted that Time Out Chicago Kids reached out to us. The feature turned out very nice and Erica Gannett, who came out to photograph the shop for Time Out, took a series of lovely photos of the shop. Check it out!

By Zachary Whittenburg
Photos: Erica Gannett

The Chicago School of Guitar Making at Specimen Products

Using skills he’s happy to teach you and your kid, Ian Schneller builds a “Sonic Arboretum” for the MCA.

As a kid growing up in Memphis, Ian Schneller loved hanging out with his grandfather, a master auto mechanic who “thought everything had to be engineered, up to and including how he kept squirrels out of his pecan tree. His shop off the garage, with all of his tools, was a real haven for me.”

Schneller created his own tinkerer’s wonderland in Chicago in 2000. During our recent visit to Specimen Products in Humboldt Park, guitars in various states of completion lie on custom-built work tables. An eight-sided, corkscrewed horn shape, framed in wood and about four feet long, hangs from the ceiling, spinning as a fan blows. This is where musical instruments are lovingly created and repaired, and where teens and grown-ups learn to build their own in classes. (Middle schoolers are welcome, too, with an adult. For details, visit specimenproducts.com.)

In neat rows in an adjacent room sit dozens more horns in three sizes: hornlets, hornlings and leader horns. By December 6, they’ll be dispersed throughout the Museum of Contemporary Art’s lobby and central atrium, playing music by Andrew Bird composed specifically for the “Sonic Arboretum.” “It’s not mono, it’s not stereo, it’s not quadraphonic,” Schneller explains. “It’s 48 tracks and upwards of 72 horns,” a symphony orchestra that little ones can roam, using their ears to hunt down which horns create which sounds.

Schneller’s eight-year-old daughter “has been privy to a lot of the R&D,” he says, including the mingling of unusual materials to build the horns: recycled newsprint and dryer lint, “impregnated” with natural dyes and shellac. She helps out with the speakers’ mechanicals as well.

“She’s been drawing tube-amplifier schematics right alongside me for just about her entire life,” says the soft-spoken artisan—and he starts beaming. “There probably aren’t many children in Chicago who can identify resistors, capacitors, diodes and various types of switches.”

Holding up his black iPhone and calling it “black magic,” he explains that his students “come in not knowing what end of a soldering iron to pick up, and leave with the most amazing hi-fi they’ve ever heard.… There was a time when your average 11-year-old knew how to make a radio out of a Quaker Oats can. My school is really just a matter of trying to get the message out, and the Arboretum embodies that to some level. Technology is accessible.”

Experience the “Sonic Arboretum” December 6–31 at the MCA, including a live performance by Andrew Bird December 21 and 22.

Allison Cuddy, host of the WBEZ radio program Eight Forty-Eight, interviewed Specimen’s Ian Schneller at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago during the installation of the Sonic Arboretum.

LISTEN

Below is a video created during the taping of the radio interview.