TrePonti by Elliott Sharp

TrePonti is an instrument created by the transformation of an Arbor Stiletto headless guitar that was gifted to me into an electro-acoustic sound source. A new bridge made from electrical conduit was mounted between the pickups and a "gliss plate" was made by setting a piezo element inside a sandwich of 'pleather' and formica and attaching it to the body behind the original bridge pickup. Two additional bridges (for three in total, hence the name) were cut from aluminum tubing and mounted fore and aft of the gliss plate.The frets above the 14th fret were pulled and the fingerboard filled in with wood putty stained to match the rosewood. The mono output was replaced with a two-circuit jack with the magnetic pickup routed to the tip connector while the piezo element was connected to the ring. To cap it off, a metal spring was mounted to the gliss plate to add some percussive boing.

Each piece within this series began with an initial gesture and plan for the internal detail then improvised. The instrument was amplified with two guitar amps which were recorded with microphones into ProTools. A small amount of digital reverb and compression was used in the mix and mastering but the music is essentially heard as played in one continuous take and then divided into sections.

E# - NYC - December 2022

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors as well as new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art.