From: ElephantBlog at http://www.adrianbelew.net

This will be my next electric guitar purchase
if I can ever afford a next electric guitar purchse.

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The Odyssey (part 1)

no one can claim to be "The World's Best Guitarist"
that's strictly a matter of taste. which is why I
refer to myself as "one of the world's guitarists".
but I do claim to play "The World's Best Guitar".

Adolf Rickenbacker made something like an electric
guitar as far back as 1931. it was called "the frying
pan" since that's what it pretty much looked like. but
it was Leo Fender in 1950 who began producing his
legendary guitars (the first one was called "the
broadcaster") that would set the world on fire for
electric guitars. so much so that 2 years later Gibson
finally took the advice and design of a young whiz kid
and put out their own electric "Gibson Les Paul". you
could make a strong case that between these two
designs, Fender and Les Paul, all guitars since have
been sired. for nearly fifty years they reigned
supreme, forever emulated but never truly improved
upon. until Ken Parker.

if you go to parkerguitars.com and read through the
section called "fly evolution" you'll better
understand my bold claim but let me give you the short
of it. ken parker spent 20+ years designing the most
radical ergonomic masterpiece sculpted to a lean 4
pounds of beautiful wood and created to resonate
perfectly. (the way to tell the virtues of an eletric
guitar is to play it unplugged to see how well it
sustains). my favorite part, the neck, is so smoothly
comfortable it makes me play better and faster! it
would be impossible to have such a thin neck were it
not for ken's revolutionary idea of coating the back
of the guitar in a thin carbon and glass space-age
composite. thin as in the coating of an m&m. when
baked into the wood the carbon composite gives the
wood a tinsel strength 10,000 times stronger. you can
stand on the neck (not mine! stand on your own) but
even better you can depend on it having no funny notes
or dead spots whatsoever. meaning perfect intonation.
ken was also the first to use steel frets (duh) which
never need replacing.

I take it you've seen me play and you know the abuse
my guitars must endure through my reckless tremelo
abandon. recently following a show in long beach,
Rusty Anderson (guitarist for Paul McCartney) came
backstage.
"how did you do that!?" he asked.
"what?"
"through all of that smashing about you never once
tuned the guitar", he said.

the tremelo is for me the most important add-on a
guitar can have. it allows expression. but for years
players dreaded touching the twang bar for fear of
tuning problems. the parker fly tremelo can be set for
total freedom up and down. it has a beautiful spring
to it but in fact it has no springs at all. another
revolutionary design. when paired with Bob Sperzel's
brillant locking tuning keys (standard on parkers) you
have the well-tempered guitar rusty admired.

the neck plays like butter, the tremelo is simply
amazing, the body weighs a third of most guitars, it
stays perfectly in tune within 5 minutes of
re-stringing it, okay, but what about the sound? wow!
I'm glad I asked. most parkers come standard not only
with gorgeous sounding magnetic pickups to die for but
also a bridge piezo pickup which can be mixed together
or played alone for acoustic guitar sounds. the
sustain and juicyness of the sound is remarkable and
can only be explained as "alive". but even that wasn't
enough for yours truly.

it was 11 years ago on one of my trips to tokyo I
heard a knock on my hotel room door. I opened it to
find 3 young diminutive japanese men. "WE ARE KORG",
they said. I figured I was about to be abducted into
outer space! the nice young men had actually come to
give me a new korg pedal to try out while I was
visiting japan. and with it they gave me a new red
parker fly. well, I liked the pedal just fine (9
different distortions in one box), but I loved the
parker fly.

for the next 8 years I played the parker on and off
when at home in the studio. I have a nice collection
of guitars by different manufacturers, some of them I
treasure dearly. but nothing played like that red
parker fly. trouble was, I had painted myself in a
corner with my dependance on bells and whistles like
the Sustainiac, a pickup invented by Alan Hoover which
gives you constant sustain when desired, or the Roland
GK2 pickup which opens the universe of midi (guitar
synthesizers, keyboards, etc.), or the Kahler tremelo.
my onstage guitars were always customized with all of
the above. I could not imagine playing without those
as part of my arsenal, so much of my material relied
on it. but I knew the parker actually made me play
better.

so one day I finally called ken parker.


Thursday, March 1, 2007
The Odyssey (part 2)

ken parker and I had a fine conversation. I told him
how much I loved the parker fly. how much I adored the
way it played. I asked about the possibilty of
customizing a parker to my needs. ken graciously put
me in touch with Will resulting in my first phone
conversation with Axel Ruddich. what ken parker is to
guitars, axel is to wires. an electronics genius, axel
had already begun modifying parkers for customers who
wanted midi capability. he had his own company outside
san francisco called AR Design.

no sooner than axel and I had begun serious
discussions about the perfect parker for me, I learned
the company was being sold. ken parker was tired of
running a business. I didn't blame him, he is after
all an inventor. naturally he wanted to cash out and
get back to his real love: inventing. parker guitars
were sold to washburn guitars. they moved to chicago.
a fresh dialogue with new people ensued. happily I
found out they were fans and in fact they wanted to
produce my baby as a signature model! during all my
years of playing stratocasters I had hoped fender
would make an adrian signature model but they didn't.
now my dream was coming true. (I still love you,
fender)

I gained a great new friend in John Vitale who became
the artist rep and champion of my signature model. and
the odyssey began. axel was fanatically detailed in
his approach. along the way we decided to add in a new
wrinkle: my guitar would have the Sustainiac, yes, and
necessary midi pick-up, yes, but also would include
the electronics for the Line 6 Variax.

the Line 6 Variax is a remarkable new technology which
gives the guitarist a wealth of sounds unlike ever
before by faithfully reproducing the sound of 25
different instruments. Les Pauls, Strats, Telecasters,
Rickenbacker 12-strings, Martin acoustics, Gretsch,
Dobro, a plethora of Gibsons, you name it, the variax
even includes a Coral sitar and a Gibson banjo! all of
which sound and react like the real thing. (software,
phew! I'm in the wrong business.) if you had a
semi-truck and an unlimited budget you could carry
around all the expensive vintage instruments I now
have access to with one knob on my parker fly. and yet
axel's design would have fewer knobs (only 3!) than a
regular parker fly. an incredible feat of engineering
which took two years, a hundred e-mails, and endless
phone conversations and alterations.

nothing was changed about the actual parker fly which
was already revolutionary and perfect.
but the added electronics take the guitar far into the
future of guitar technology.

two Christmases ago, axel had a fender bender. no one
seemed hurt. no broken bones. just a slight accident.
but in the weeks to come axel began to black out. the
accident had in fact caused some strange neural
damage. over time he was unable to work more than a
few hours a day. eventually he could no longer drive a
car. his work days got shorter. couldn't use power
tools for fear of blacking out. it was taking longer
and longer for my dream to appear. axel fabricated
several keys parts of his design. he hand-made them.

january of 2006 was supposed to be our first face to
face meeting. me, john, and axel were going to meet at
the NAMM convention for parker's unveiling of the new
guitar. axel had made 3 prototypes that were nearly
complete. working at the parker factory outside
chicago I had chosen 3 colors. the paints were custom
car colors, 12-stage paint jobs that looked like you
could bite into them.

but axel could not come to the NAMM show. he was not
well enough yet. I was able to take home 2 of the
prototypes so axel and I could fine-tune them over the
phone.

I took one guitar to Joe Glazer. joe is considered one
of the very best guitar technicians in the whole
country. when he opened the back of the guitar his jaw
dropped open as well.
"how did he get all that stuff in there? that's
brilliant!", said joe.

we were getting very close now to having the guitar
ready for production when john called.
the unthinkable had happened.
axel had committed suicide.

I have the 2 prototypes. that's what I play when you
see me in concert.
the third parker prototype is in chicago where parker
guitars are trying to reverse engineer axel's miracle
working. remember, axel hand-made some of the parts.

and that's where the odyssey stands as of today march
1, 2007.
soon I hope to see the first production model Adrian
Belew Signature Parker Fly.
I hope you can see it too. I only wish axel could.
in my humble opinion it is "The World's Best Guitar".

Posted by adrian belew at 3:00 PM