Even if you having never held one of his eponymous instruments, you probably know that Les Paul designed one of the first solid-body electric guitars. Surprisingly, Gibson, the guitar company, feared that this radical new direction in instrument design would fail, and it didn’t even show prototypes to the public in years. .
But the Gibson Les Paul wasn’t the first electric guitar. In 1931, the first electrically amplified string instrument sold commercially was a simple, all-metal die-cast aluminum-bladed steel guitar nicknamed the “Fan“—And a certain Adolph Rickenbacker invented an electromagnetic pickup for it.
Now, 90 years later, Kassell, German-based industrial designer Robin Stummvoll, founder Verso . musical instrument, is going back to the basics and seems to be taking inspiration from the humble beginnings of the electric guitar. With no formal training as a luthier, Stummvoll decided to cut down on the electric guitar’s minimal parts, reducing the amount of material used to build each instrument.
“There was a guitar made by Allan Gittler in the ’70s” [held in the MoMA design collection] it’s basically just a steel bar with steel frets welded to it,” says Stummvoll. It’s really the bare minimum a guitar should have, but building it is complicated and very expensive. So my approach is that this can be built into a smaller store, but creates a new perspective on luthierie. “
Instead of a block of wood, CosmoIts body is a carefully curved powder-coated steel plate. This ergonomic shape not only contains the circuitry needed to make the guitar work, it also allows for an innovative approach to placing receivers and transducers that capture the mechanical vibrations of the strings and converts them into electrical signals that can then be amplified and played through a loudspeaker.
Pickups are usually screwed into place by the body of the guitar, but where they are placed affects the tone of the sound produced. This is why you see many pickups in different locations, such as the Fender Stratocaster or Les Paul. Stummvoll has made its pickups portable so that they can be moved and placed where the player chooses.
“This is a welcome accident,” Stummvoll explained. “That wasn’t intentional.” Because pickups are magnetic, they naturally grip the Cosmo’s metal body surface. Realizing the potential benefits of this in terms of sonic versatility, Stummvoll turned it into a feature. You can watch and listen some YouTube demo of this changing sound.
“It has its own character and sound, a very warm and resonant tone with a lot of harmonic content, but nothing strange or outlandish,” says Stummvoll. “I would say it falls somewhere between electric and acoustic guitars, because you get these extra overtones — but more electric.”
Photo: Verso Instruments
As well as Cosmo $1,781 (€ 1,710) and the brand’s Gravis bass guitar, Stummvoll has now released his latest, $1,935 (€ 1,860) Trajectoryone baritone guitar. In addition to showcasing Verso’s signature moveable pickups, Stummvoll says the Orbit’s 28.5-inch (720 mm) long scale gives the instrument a precise and powerful bass response in standard adjustments B to B or A to A, while that extra length also seems to offer a lot of sustain.
Stummvoll also states that “Orbit’s natural microphonic effect is less pronounced than on Cosmo, which makes it even better suited for distorted audio”. Metal fan, take note.
