Kneebounce

While the prepared piano has had an illustrious history since John Cage first stuck screws and erasers into an upright back in 1938, the prepared guitar has always remained something much more home-grown. Take guitarist Jim McAuley, for example. On Gongfarmer 18, an album of original solos played on various instruments, he uses preparations on only one of the tracks, “Kneebounce,” for which he prepares the first guitar he ever played, a 1930s Marquette. While the resulting sounds are frequently quite un-guitarlike, everything used to generate them is at every guitarist’s disposal: picks, capos, tuning forks, albeit applied to the instrument quite differently than the original purpose for which these objects were conceived.

—FJO