Gittler guitar

A Gittler Guitar is an experimental custom-made instrument created by Allan Gittler (1928-2003). Gittler handmade 60 guitars in New York in the mid 1970s to early 1980s (selling one to Andy Summers which he showed in the Police band Synchronicity II video). Then he emigrated to Israel, settled in Hebron, changed his name to Avraham Bar Rashi and licensed the design to a local company in Kiryat Bialik called Astron Engineer Enterprises LTD. They computer-machined around 300, BarRashi commented them later "they messed up the manufacturing, and added some bits of plywood body to his original design to cover it up". In fact those instruments are quite proper and precisely manufactured copies of the original construction, combined with a plastic moulding body containing electronics for simplified handling, which obviously corrupted the minimalistic original idea, but had no influence to sound or the style of playing. The first 60 are sometimes described as the Fishbone Gittler guitar. Three Gittler basses also exist. They were made in New York and numbered 1, 2, 3, respectively.

The Gittler guitar has 6 strings, each string has its own pickup. The later versions have a plastic body. The steel frets give the instrument a sitar-like feel. Six individual pick ups can be routed to divided outputs via D-sub-9-pin or be mixed to a 1/4" TRS connector. The built in pre-amps are quite noisy and supplied by a 9V-battery or via D-sub. The New York version came without pre-amp section, the individual pickups' signals were led into single cables, plugged into a mixing box or separately amplified each.

The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA has one instrument in their collection.

External links

* [http://www.guitars.greenbuddha.de/index_b.php?mod=gittler&lang=en pictures and additional information about the used techniques, serial numbers, owners, patents, etc.]
* [http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A2183&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1 www.moma.org Gittler guitar in MOMA-collection]