Glockenskull Guitar

The final stage of evolution of Soviet guitars, this Styeua-R was made in Rostov in 1989. We had the opportunity to borrow it for a few days, so instead of sampling every normal technique such as hammer-ons and harmonics, and sampling every note on every fret, we did things like hit the strings with a pencil and record three different kinds of muting. Though it's got more in common with guitars made in the rest of the world in the 60s, somehow this late 80s guitar works really well for early 80s postpunk sounds.

The guitar has four pickups, so of course we recorded the signal of all four pickups on at once. Some techniques are also recorded with a microphone. Every sound has at least two round robins, and the ordinary plucking and foam mute samples have four round robins and four velocity layers. The harder velocity layers have some noise and buzz, too.

Walkthrough video:

Feature summary:

• Ordinary picking
• Three types of muting: staccato, ghost notes, and foam mute
• Playing behind the bridge
• Noises: fingering noises, pick stabs, playing behind the nut, various incidental noises
• Pencil hits, pencil bounces, stick hits, stick bounces and bottle drags
• Accurate emulation of the tremolo tailpiece's effect on pitch
• Three different types of vibrato, plus humanization
• Feedback
• Doubletracking mode
• Attack and release time controls for pads
• Over 5000 samples, 2 GB extracted

And a few demos. First some shoegazey post-rock, with lyrics about glocks and skulls, and also featuring Secret Agent Bass and Big Rusty Drums:

Then, something funky, also using our Secret Agent Bass and a bit of the Torgbe choir:

And blues rock as the title says, also featuring our Secret Agent Bass and Big Rusty Drums:

The sound of some goblins preparing for a raid:

Requires Plogue Sforzando version 1.967 or newer, which can be downloaded for free from Plogue's website. All the samples are also included as unlocked WAV files, so you can also use them as one-shot samples etc. if desired.