Electric Guitar Review

Noise-guitarist extraordinaire Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, is apparently the happy recipient of this custom built Moonlander guitar from experimental luthier Yuri Landman.

The instrument, one of just two in existence (Landman owns the other,) is a bi-headed stereo drone guitar armed with a whopping 18 strings––6 standard and 12 sympathetic.

While the six standard strings are meant to be played traditionally, the twelve sympathetic strings produce a natural reverb (or drone,) that resonates in specific frequencies depending on how the instrument is tuned.

According to Landman, the standard tuning for the droning strings is a circle of fourths divided over two octaves. He got his inspiration from the Theorbo and other early European lute-type stringed instruments.

As if that weren’t enough, the Moonlander also boasts four output jacks corresponding with four hand-wound singlecoil pickups––one doing traditional bridge pickup duties, two of them rotated in order to isolate signals for the top three and bottom three strings (yep, isolated stereo outputs,) and a fourth to capture output of the drone strings.

And if you think the Moonlander is strange looking, wait until you see the Moodswinger.

You can read more about Yuri Landman’s instrument’s at his website, or check out the Moonlander page over on Wikipedia.

Can’t wait to hear what Ranaldo does with this thing…