Grasshopper (musician) - Instruments and Musicianship

Instruments and Musicianship

Grasshopper is nominally the group's lead guitarist, credited in the band's peculiar vocabulary with "guitar shapes" and "single-exhaust clarinet" in the See You on the Other Side liner notes, and with "guitar reels" and woodwind on Deserter's Songs. The Secret Migration's 'Moving On' features prominent singing from him and Jeff Mercel, though 'The Hudson Line', on Deserter's Songs and 'Blood on the Moon' on Lego My Ego feature Grasshopper's only lead vocals with Mercury Rev. He also sings backing vocals live.

He is credited with playing - and inventing - the Tettix Wave Acumulator on various Rev releases, telling Cokemachineglow:

The Tettix Wave Accumulator is basically a huge bank of oscillators, high and low pass filters, and wave shape manipulators. It can use any sound source to manipulate sounds. It also can then sample the manipulated sound and then store the sound on discs. It is still a very wonderful instrument. In 1994, when it was developed, we threw together a bunch of existing technology that hadn't been used together in quite that way before. Now of course, you can achieve many of these sounds with computer programs like Reaktor. The Tettix Wave Accumulator is now housed in the basement of a bar. We were trying to develop a smaller version, but the funds have recently dried up. You could say that Tettix Inc. has been acquired by the Carlyle Group.

"I started out playing clarinet and, I think when I was younger, a lot of my influences were horn players - like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, or John Gillmore, who played with Sun Ra," Grasshopper explained in 2001. "Then as I started playing more and more guitar, as a kid I liked The Allman Brothers and Neil Young's guitar playing. Then I got into, obviously, Sterling Morrison of The Velvet Underground, and Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd - I love that stuff. I like Robert Quine, who played with Richard Hell, and Lou Reed. I've also got some jazz and punk rock influences, but Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd ."

On the 2005 Secret Migration tour, he provided additional harmonica, clarinet and electric piano during guitar-less moments. For the creation of Snowflake Midnight, the band bought Macbooks and experimented with various software packages. "I was very interested in the Native Instruments programs Absynth and FM8 after seeing some demos about them at an electronic music conference I attended in Miami," Grasshopper explained to Cokemachineglow.

His record The Orbit Of Eternal Grace, recorded around 1996 with a loose group dubbed The Golden Crickets, features Grasshopper's vocals, electric, acoustic and bass guitars as well as a Micromoog, Casio PT-30, ENL Synkey, Vox Continental, Mellotron, tape loops, turntables, guitar synth, tone generator, 'rex', alto and tenor saxophones and 'Scotch 201 (1.5mil acetate)' - a type of analogue tape.

He has tended to favour Fender Telecasters since the See You on the Other Side tour, often with customisations such as double humbucker pickups and tremolo arms. These have been decorated with NASA stickers, the logo of the American Revolution Bicentenary (used frequently on album artwork)and stars on the headstock. A Fender Tele-sonic made its appearance on the All Is Dream tour, later acquiring a Bigsby tremolo unit. As the band's sound changed radically with the release of Snowflake Midnight, Grasshopper switched to a hardtail, double-humbucker Fender Jaguar and Yamaha electric guitar.

He and Donahue both used Fender Hotrod DeVille 4x10 combo amplifiers since 1998's Deserter's Songs tour, but switched to comparable Peavey models to tour Snowflake Midnight in 2008. A Boss GT6 was added to the already-extensive array of assorted pedals in 2005.