Thinking Of The StringStation ::: 2008

The StringStation is all about fascination with music and uncovering new sound. Like many instruments, it cajoles great music... but the StringStation allows new freedoms providing a comprehensive and articulate new artistic expression. It’s a device that allows one to peer into sonic discovery at the farthest reaches of where music flows from. Well outside of the arms of industry and the grid of music that exists around us.

The StringStation is very much like building a space exploration craft. It’s designed to perform many intricate and specific experiments that allow us to view deeper into the science of what lies beyond. My ultimate wish is to professionally design and build the final working construction and then actually take it where its designed to go... exploring and evolving the mysterious power of music beyond known forms.

The StringStation is a sophisticated Surround Sound machine. It’s designed from the ground up as a custom surround music creation device. Its wide array of 40 strings are tuned in resonance- add to that its strategic surround pickups and it presents a totally unique and detailed 3D sound grid. Its huge harmonic resolution can be harvested and brought back into the mix as an integral interplay in the machine. It allows the performer to play the surround soundfield as an instrument. It will make a 3D sound unlike anything ever heard.

It introduces intriguing built-in functions that combine with the latest digital technology to allow enlightening expeditions into the sonic unknown. The layers of sound and music we could now summon with its maximized abilities is perhaps 10x deeper, wider and more dimensional. It’s a higher resolution of music’s powerful depth delivered within a widened scope of newer technologies.

When the finished StringStation, in its maximized versatility, finally arrives at its destination... it begins to reveal to us a new space, and we are always amazed at the beautiful vistas and truths that abound. We see and learn more with these future tools and it beckons us into a conscious evolution. As audio architects, we capture that data via sound and music and bring it back like pioneers on an expedition... for all to share. Everyone gets to explore it and maybe find new inspiration that will help us into a better world.

Beyond just evolving sound, the StringStation introduces a fresh and inventive playing surface allowing one musician to play in real time on a instrument that offers thunderous bass, compelling rhythm, 3-D orchestration and melody. It uses new ways to approach groups of strings that find amazing intertwined performance techniques. It opens and lays out new paths to evolve tactile music composition skills.

I was inspired as a young recording enthusiast by the Alan Parsons Project model... in that a recording scientist of sorts could assemble and record with a wide variety of other artists to make an ultra hi-fidelity music experience that kept advancing the frontiers of sonic and melodic possibilities. Although I didn’t have the good fortune to record Dark Side Of The Moon, I did get signed to a recording contract by Larry ’Synergy’ Fast of Peter Gabriel's band... and that was a nice way to start too.

My big dream with this completed new instrument is to set up recording sessions with a talented production team in a secluded rural area where you can view the stars of our galaxy strewn across the night sky... along side the Earth’s beautiful panoramas ...and then infuse that visual grandeur and awe into the music born in that moment with this new instrument. A natural way to make organic music that comes pure from the source and inspires a future thought.

It will be a beautiful release of energy to do this recording with the full function of this instrument realized in Surround Sound. It will be a recording that will be an expedition into deeper forms of musical expression and sound... It will speak of beauty to the spirit, heart and mind.

Jim Bartz 2008