The members of the Shadow Puppies—Nick Didkovsky, Hans Tammen, and Kurt Ralske—are bold experimenters at the frontiers of electronic performance, appearing individually in a myriad of settings in addition to the project that brought them to RPI.

According to iEAR Professor Neil Rolnick, “The other evening I saw Kurt Ralske perform with Joan La Barbara at NYU. He’s one of the hottest video performers in the City—he does very interesting stuff. And I’ve worked with Nick Didkovsky a number of times. He sometimes performs with the ensemble known as Dr. Nerve. Nick is great!”

The third member of the trio, Hans Tammen, has an international reputation as well. His unusual methods of preparing guitars is mentioned on http://www.allmusic.com/ and many other authoritative sources.

Shadow Puppies is a cutting edge trio which conjures rich, complex, and entrancing worlds of electronic sound and vision in real-time. Didkovsky and Tammen stretch the boundaries of the electric guitar with an arsenal of objects, electronics, and homebrew computer software, while Ralske interactively captures and processes video using digital technology of his own design. The result is an uninterrupted journey through sonic eruptions, video hallucinations, and aggressive, entrancing mediascapes.

They’ll be performing using a unique instrument called the GuitarBot. It was invented by Eric Singer, Kevin Larke and David Bianciardi.

Singer explains, “In designing GuitarBot, our goal was to create an electrified slide guitar that was versatile, responsive, capable of fast and slow playing, easy to control, with high-quality sound, modular and portable. We also wanted to extend, not simply duplicate, the capabilities of a human guitarist.”

According to Larke, “To achieve these objectives, we went through three design iterations to create the final instrument. We created the first prototype experimentally, crafting the basic design of a single-stringed unit from aluminum and experimenting with various mechanisms for the slide and picking systems. We then modified and recrafted parts until we had a working ‘proof of concept.’

“We modeled this unit in Vectorworks, a 3-D CAD program, and made adjustments to the design. From the CAD model, we crafted a second working unit. After testing this unit, we decided that a few further changes were needed to improve the musical qualities of the instrument. We made these changes to the CAD model and crafted the third and final design.”

The final instrument consists of four independent single-stringed slide guitar units. The slide is controlled by a DC servo motor driving a pulley and belt that moves a sliding bridge. Positional feedback is accomplished by a potentiometer on the opposite (non-driving) pulley.

The pick mechanism consists of four guitar picks mounted on a block that rotates on a shaft. The shaft is also belt and pulley driven by a DC servo motor. Pick position feedback is by means of a photosensor reading dark and light patterns on a wheel at the end of the shaft.

A “clapper” solenoid is used as a damper which, when activated, closes on the string and stops vibration. On each unit, a microcontroller with custom electronics and software receives MIDI commands and controls operation of the electromechanical components. Each unit is independently controllable using a simple MIDI protocol.

The program on each unit’s microcontroller does the work of interpreting MIDI commands and translating them into playback control of the instrument. This allows the musician or composer to control the instrument using standard tools such as MIDI keyboards and sequencing programs with no additional computer or special software required. This ease of use criterion was applied to all the LEMUR instruments’ software.

Bianciardi adds, “Each unit is independently tunable and has a two-octave range with microtunable pitch resolution. The bridge can move from one end of the range to the other in one quarter second, which we felt was an important design feature. Each has an electromagnetic pickup also of our own design.”

“We designed the picking system on the instruments to be interchangeable,” said Larke. “In the future, we plan to create several different actuation systems that can easily be swapped in and out. Other possible mechanisms for playing the string include bouncing, bow-like action, rubber and glass wheels, and electromagnetism (i.e. EBow).”

According to Singer, “By making the units of the instrument modular, we will be able to place them into different sculptural and aesthetic contexts.

“The artists have several ideas for future designs in which to incorporate the guitar units, including a pyramidal structure with integrated speakers and amplification, and an anthropomorphic humanoid ‘Guitar God’ robot.”