Day 4: Wabi-sabi
Be Imperfectionists – The Story of how James building his own guitar
[Guitar nerds, I’ll see you at the bottom of the page]
James here, who else?
Like every keen guitar player will admit, I obsess about guitars. To be honest, I am not that materialistic in my day to day life. But for guitars, I transform into some crazed addict. I want INFINITE guitars. All the guitars. It is a real burning desire that is hard to contain!
Sounds unhealthy but I assure you, amongst guitar players, this is behaviour well within the normal range. Back me up here you guys and gals.
But what is it about guitars that causes this frenzy? And why build my own one?
Well a guitar is a personal and expressive object. It is something which can influence how you feel and how you create. I find playing guitar a more direct way of expressing myself than using words. There’s just the notes – no trying to shoehorn your gut feelings into language. It’s immediate, like the messages from your heart and soul go straight out through your fingers and out the amplifier.
I built a guitar because I wanted it to be even more relevant to me and how I play than the ones I already had. I had a particular defined sound I was chasing, and none of the guitars I had tried in shops felt right.
Problem was. . .I am terrible at making things with my hands. Woodwork was a disaster for me at school. Numerous spectacularly failed projects meant I had pretty much written off attempting any form of craftsmanship, including instruments!
But. . .one day I had this intuitive feeling that if I couldn’t buy the guitar I wanted, I should just try making the guitar I wanted. Yes, I was inexperienced and not naturally good at it but, maybe I could beat my expectations? Maybe I was better than I thought.
So I did it. I watched YouTube tutorials galore, cut and burnt myself with a soldering iron, failed and started over. And over the course of 6 months I bought the parts, painted the guitar body, assembled it, did the wiring and…voila! Finished! I did it!
And it has since become the guitar I use the most, I love it to pieces. It was also a happy accident it was in Toucan Echo colours 🙂 !
BUT…I have to admit, the guitar is not perfect. One of the strings is prone to go very out of tune, the tremolo bridge sometimes gets stuck, it’s a little buzzy, a screw on the pickguard is missing…
But you know what? I love this guitar. I love it because of the HUMAN touch of it, the details, the journey I went through for it. You could say the guitar has a strong element of…wabi sabi. A concept very important to us in Toucan Towers.
Wabi Sabi – What’s that???
~~~~A Toucan Echo Unofficial Guide to Wabi Sabi~~~~
‘A worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection’.
That’s what Wikipedia says. Wabi Sabi is an Japanese view of beauty that centres around imperfection, the passing of time, the beauty of nature, the fact that nothing lasts and nothing is perfect. They would see a cracked teacup, for instance, as beautiful because of the story of the crack, how it got there, the fact it wears this imperfection as a mark of it’s age.
We’ve taken a fresh twist on this concept when it comes to TE.
So I’m gonna hand over to Harry to try and explain what Wabi Sabi means to us…
This is Harry now. Hello.
James and I are thrill seekers. Not in the roller coasters and jumping out of planes kind of way (I certainly won’t be jumping out of any planes EVER). We get hooked on writing and perfoming our music. The excitement of creating a new song, of playing to a crowd, of taking chances in a jam and finding some new cool territory to explore.
Performing live is my absolute favourite thing to do. I would say the same for James…but I reckon he prefers recording and fan-girling over vintage tape machines.
(Edit: James here – not just tape machines. Microphones too.)
I think our love for performing live is why we’ve morphed into a jam band, we improvise our songs now, we go on stage with almost no song structure, only the bare bones, a riff here and there and a chorus prepared. I can’t remember when we became a jam band, but now whenever we try and learn a song in the formal way we get bored and distracted.
By improvising, we’re not just accepting transience and imperfection, we’re embracing it, forcing the imperfection, creating things that we would have never thought of, had we approaching it in a calculated way. That’s our Wabi-sabi.
When we improvise and play our songs we’re teetering on the edge of something great or something catastrophic. IT’S AWESOME. That’s my skydive, that’s all I need.
I think this WABI-SABI-NESS permeates through all of Toucan Echo, we don’t come prepared to our recording sessions because that way, we might capture something great in the spur of the moment. We don’t let the pursuit of perfection stop us releasing our music, or stop us putting anything out there. We want to release an OBSCENE amount of music so we’re not bound to that perfection. The odd track the doesn’t hit…doesn’t matter.
Our version of Wabi-Sabi goes pretty deep within Toucan Echo and I don’t want to make this an essay… maybe we’ll do a podcast on it. That’ll be cool. Yeah let’s do that.
Without further ado, here’s some live versions of our songs!
~~~VIDEOS~~~
Here’s jam of our song roll call – but exploring some new territories along the way!
Here’s a live version of Weightless – with a small jam at the end!
Here’s a long, VERY chilled jam of our unreleased track tatami. Do you think the people of the picnic benches enjoyed it?
****Guitar Time With James****
HELLO GUITAR NERDS, my kinda people – some more details
Body: Swamp Ash; Hand painted with an orange Wudtone finish
Neck: One piece maple (Clapton Style ‘soft D’ shape)
Pickups: Bare Knuckle Mother’s Milk pickups (SSS)
Wiring: Normal Strat / 5 way switch, + Treble Bleed capacitor
Other unique features: Maple tone & vol knobs
Goes well with a Two Rock / Dumble style amp. What doesn’t?