The name John McLaughlin needs no introduction to music followers we believe, especially jazz and fusion followers. In case he does, a pretty detailed one shall be given in our Gods of Guitar section soon enough and we don’t want to kill the suspense right away! This article would rather deal with an instrument made specially to his specifications, an experimental guitar which he christened the Shakti Guitar.

The idea for the Shakti Guitar struck McLaughlin early 1971 after he started learning Veena, a South-Indian stringed musical instrument, under Dr. S. Ramanathan, then a teacher of South Indian music at the University of Connecticut. When McLaughlin formed the fusion band Shakti with Zakir Hussain, L. Shankar and Vikku Vinayakram, he started looking for a Veena-like articulation in his guitar which led him to Abraham Wechter, a consulting luthier for Gibson guitars. In collaboration with the Gibson R&D team and helped by the ideas from the Sarod(a North-Indian stringed musical instrument) maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, McLaughlin took his first Shakti guitar to stage for the Shakti concerts in the 1975-1976 timeframe.

Coming to what a Shakti guitar is all about, it mainly differs from the normal guitar in terms of its 13 strings, made up of seven drone strings in addition to the standard six. The seven sympathetic drone strings are placed beneath and diagonal to the standard ones. Another innovation was the scalloped fingerboard, ie, the area between the frets were shaped concavely similar to that of a Veena. This ensured that the fingertips didn’t touch the fretboard while playing, and also enabled pushing down

The scalloped fingerboard of a Veena

and pulling of strings across frets. What resulted from all this was a radically new sound that had never before been heard from a guitar.

The Shakti guitar was used extensively by McLaughlin during his Shakti concerts till late 1970s. In 1978 however the band got broken due to various reasons, and that unfortunately was the last that was seen of the Shakti guitar. In 1997 when the band was reincarnated as Remember Shakti, he could not use the Shakti guitar as it had been previously lent to a musician and was returned in a totally unusable condition. McLaughlin instead went for Gibson Johnny Smith, a hollow bodied acoustic-electric guitar that he had been playing in between. The Shakti guitar was not seen to return even in the subsequent concerts of Remember Shakti, the last one being in 2007. Here is hoping that John McLaughlin decides to use the great instrument in the near future so that the current generation gets to see it live in action.

John McLaughlin playing his Shakti guitar at Shakti’s Montreal concert in 1976

We kick off this series with an instrument recently used by A R Rahman in the soundtrack of the movie Delhi 6. People who listened to Rehna Tu from the movie might have noticed a different-sounding instrument towards the end of the song. This is the instrument of our concern in this article.
Developed by Lippold Haken, a professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Illinois, the continuum fingerboard is technically a music controller as opposed to a proper instrument, in that it cannot generate sounds of its own and works in conjunction with an instrument like a synthesizer. The continuum provides sound control in three dimensions, ie, three directions of finger movement. The x direction, ie, finger movement across the instrument provides continuous pitch control. This is considered one of the biggest advantages of continuum over the keyboard, ie, it allows seamless transition from note to note like a violin or a wind instrument. The y direction, ie, width-wise movement along a single key, controls the timbre. The z direction which corresponds to changing the finger pressure on the key helps vary the strength and intensity of output, providing for effects like tremolo.
The continuum fingerboard first hit the limelight in 2005 when Dream Theater’s keyboardist Jordan Rudess used it in the album Octavarium for a couple of songs. Subsequently he played it during the 2005-06 Twentieth Anniversary tour of Dream Theater, one of the first occasions of the Continuum being used live on stage. It was also used in the background of the movies War of the Worlds and Superman Returns, but only for creating special sound effects. The first full scale usage as a musical instrument in a movie OST came with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull scored by John Williams. A R Rahman started using it as part of his Third Dimension North American tour in 2007, giving a verbal introduction of the instrument at the start of each of his concerts there. After his return to India, he used it in a piece he composed for the Changing Notes Concert held in Chennai as part of Times of India’s Chennai edition launch. And now comes this song from Delhi 6 where it has been used extensively for close to 2 minutes towards the end (4:48 – 6.30). A comparison of the playing styles of Rahman and Rudess clearly brings out the range of sounds that can be produced using this instrument. Other famous players of this instrument include John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and Terry Lawless.
It is good to see the efforts of the professor bearing fruit, as the continuum has now overcome the image of a freak contraption and has grown into a full scale orchestral instrument. And given Rahman’s penchant for having a difference in his music, we surely are going to hear more of the continuum fingerboard in lots of future albums. The continuum fingerboard is being sold by Haken Audios.

Rehna Tu from Delhi 6

A R Rahman’s composition for the Changing Notes concert in Chennai

Jordan Rudess introducing the continuum fingerboard among his other instruments prior to Dream Theater’s concert in Rome