The 21st-century guitar player does not lack options for manipulating electric guitar tone. Go into any music store the world over and the pedal cabinet is packed with all kinds of gizmos for taking your sound off-road.
But ADDAC has just come out with something a little more extreme, more transformative, and these are not pedals. It has designed a pair of clamps that you affix to your guitar to turn it into an engine for creating drones, ambient textures, and other strange and categorically unwieldy sounds, the likes of which would be nigh-on impossible to create by other means.
The ADDAC ADDAC006 Rotary Exciter and Resonator Clamps are the kind of thing that the great experimentalists of guitar – the Robert Fripps, Adrian Belews and Sarah Lipstates of this world – would no doubt get some use out of. You could even imagine these being used in the studio by Radiohead, even if it is hard to imagine Radiohead all in a recording studio together again.
The Rotary Exciter (which would be a great name for a band) can be affixed anywhere on your guitar’s fretboard, and uses a 7,000RPM brushless motor to generate a magnetic field that excites your guitar strings, causing them to vibrate, all at matching frequencies and harmonics.
There is a Speed knob for adjusting the motor speed. You power this thing with 9V DC from a regular pedalboard power supply, and it comes bundled with a five-metre cable for hooking it up to you pedalboard, whereupon further effects will yield more dramatic results. Adding reverb and modulation to this yield some interesting results.
As for the Resonator Clamp, this can be affixed anywhere on the guitar’s headstock. The standard model fits any headstock up to 20mm thick, but there’s another that will accommodate headstocks and surfaces measuring a 45mm thick. There are felt pads on the clamps to protect your instrument’s finish.
There are myriad ways to set it up. The Resonator Clamp connects to your guitar’s headstock, and receives a signal from the output of the Resonator Clamp Amplifier. Note: it needs a dedicated high-current 9–12V DC power supply that can supply 3A.
The amp can process any modular/line level signal and could be an audio source of any kind – e.g. a sample from a piano, as in the demo video – and the transducer on the clamp sends that signal through your guitar via vibrations that in turn make your strings vibrate, and are amplified via your pickup. The amp has an input gain control for setting the volume of the transducer.
How your guitar is tuned will “greatly influence” the tone and resonating harmonics, and you can mute certain strings for different results.
The demo video [below] is interesting. It sends a piano sample to the guitar and explains how the resonator effect becomes more pronounced when the pitch of the audio input – in this case a piano sample – matches the pitch of the guitars strings, or the fretted notes.
ADDAC says “short bursts of audio can decay into dense harmonics clusters, drones will excite complex reverb-like harmonics as they are ‘filtered’ by the strings tuning”.
You can set the clamp up to be a feedback generator, in which a volume pedal and compressor pedal allows you to control the Resonator. You can incorporate a mixer to make it easier to process the audio.
After a quick read of the manual, and watching the demo video, this definitely seems like the kind of experimental device that makes much more sense once you plug it in and integrate it with your setup, and just start making noise.
For ambient players, or for anyone looking for a cool studio effect, either of these two accessories/effects/gizmos could have a lot of potential. The Resonator Guitar Clamp is priced €200. The Rotary Exciter Clamp is priced €120.
Find out more over at ADDAC System.
