It’s not my usual terrain but now and again when the urge takes me I like to bust out my old Levin western style acoustic from 1951 that I’ve had for ages (here’s her dbTwang profile – you’ll need to be logged in to see) and spend an afternoon ‘bottleneckin’. It’s got a very flat wide neck and for the inexperienced in glass fretting such as myself it has a high action that flatters me with a cleaner sound than my technique deserves.

When it comes to the bottle neck itself for years I’ve used the little bottles from Magic Markers that used to clutter the bins of the various graphics studios I worked in during a previous lifetime. All of a sudden I’m down to my last one and it seems Magic Markers are no longer made in bottles but are now made with plastic barrels instead.

Harvest time in the days of yore and the Magic Marker gives up her hidden glassy fruit!

So in anticipation of the inevitable accidental destruction of my last pygmy bottle I’m pre-emtivly shopping for a replacement and have come across ceramic bottle necks from Paloma Stone Slides. From a scan around their website it seems Jay who runs the operation making these interesting beauties comes from a high end pottery background and has combined his love of music making with his trade secrets to come up with slides that he says have ‘a warm, organic tone with exceptional sustain’.

Ceramic bottlenecks and slides from Paloma Stone Slides, what a wonderful technological age we live in!

Interesting indeed. Any other unusual bottlenecks out there? Let us know about them, in the meantime I’m going to go ahead and order one of these babies anyway and will post again once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

–

Fintan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Guitars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.