Music Before the Money

In the mid-’70’s I shed my electrics and began my first foray into acoustic music via the pub circuit. I bought a Yamaki 12-string but to mike the instrument was a pain because you had to stay close to the mike and even minor shifts changed the sound.A new product (new to us) was in the music store called a Barcus-Berry transducer pick-up. This device, unlike a standard pickup that you could clip to the sound hole and made it sound “electric” - captured the acoustic vibrations of the instrument. It was fastened to the saddle of the bridge by a sticky putty just below the treble strings. The pickup was then put through a battery-powered preamp before going into my Kustom 200 head.

The Barcus-Berry piezo crystal transducer was not invented by a guitar player but a violinist, John Berry, and electronic technician, Les Barcus. This discovery ultimately led the first electric violin and the first piezo transducers for guitar, piano and concert harp.

I had several Barcus-Berry pickups until I finally had one permanently installed under the bridge. The sound was thinner than I wanted but beefed up a lot with a 10-band EQ. After ten faithful years I tried a new Ovation 12 -string and retired the Yamaki. It still hangs on my wall with my other axes and gets played a few times a year. But the Barcus-Berry has been dormant for a long time.

If you know anything about horses you’ll know that foals are born in the night. Not only is this inconvenient for the stable manager it would also be a burden on a veterinarian who would rather be home during this time. However, unlike human babies, horses are born at this time for a purpose that goes back tens of thousands of years or more. The youngster has to be strong enough to travel with the herd in the early morning.But you don’t have to go to a stable to see this for yourself. Before a cat lies down it always circles and tests the area as if there was grass that had to be tamped down to make a mattress. On closer inspection there probably isn’t any grass in the livingroom but the cat does what it has always done.

We have instincts that have followed us from early man as well. ‘Fight or flight” is the most common and it serves to protect us, even in situation where embarrassment, and not your life, is the only casualty.

However, we have lost many of our ancestral traits over the years simply by the way in which we live now. The spiritual senses are crushed under schedules and deadlines. Our hearing is so desensitized that, most of the time, we speak in decibels far greater than our great-grandparents. If you want to test this out go camping in the mountains for a few weeks and when you come back, for the first few minutes, you’ll notice that the noise is uncomfortable.

Like our foods and pets, which have been modified over the generation to to be exactly what we want, our lives have been altered into schedules that did not exist a hundred years ago. Now, instead of it coming naturally, we have to read books and take course about how to experience being human.