PAUL
VERNON CHESTER
Manouche Maestro
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Manouche Maestro |
      
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Django and the Stimer Pickup - The Quest for Volume!
Observations on Django's Volume Dilemma Regarding the Epiphone, I don't know the full extent of Django's use during the American tour and as you know there are photos of him with a Levin. a Gibson ES-300, and a Gretsch. The man was not taken with American Archtops and yearned for his beloved Selmer Maccaferri , which I believe Charles Delauney brought to him in the States later on somewhat damaged in transit. (Django expected to be presented with a guitar on arriving in the USA, which did not happen; the start of a somewhat 'broken' American dream.) The whole feel of an Archtop to a player of a Selmer Maccaferri is hugely different tonally and in terms of action, and approach etc. It has been said that, had he remained in the States however, Django would have influenced not only the development of American jazz guitar playing but American jazz itself! - Paul Vernon Chester Django was devoted to his acoustic Selmer guitar but was having trouble cutting through the sound of the larger horn led bands that he was now playing in post QHCF, He was given a magnetic French-made Stimer pickup to nest in the petite bouche soundhole which gave him a markedly better result than an Electric Archtop.. The sound created a new dimension in his playing, which was by then much infused with the Bebop phrasing he had heard in America. Grappelli - Django first heard an electric guitar in '46 or '47; I think it was at the Hackney Empire. Somebody brought in the guitar and it made a terrible noise - in those days electric guitars didn't sound as good as they do now. But Django was so impressed because at last he could play loudly. He played with such volume that I had to ask him to turn it down as it was drowning all of us. He was like a child with a new toy. Of course, to be fair, he didn't know how to handle it. We'd heard Charlie Christian, and although he would never play like Django, if you know what I mean - the electric guitar being easier than acoustic - Charlie Christian was a master of the electric guitar, Django was born to play acoustic guitar and the richness of Django was in his chords and he could never achieve the same dynamic effect that he could from his acoustic guitar. He never succeeded to in playing amplified electric archtop guitars and in my opinion he never was a good electric guitarist. Being Heard Above the Horns By the end of the 1920s the guitar was more popular than ever. But, because it could not compete in volume with the drums and horns of the jazz age, it was limited on the bandstand. Microphones were in wide use, and amplification was an accepted technology, particularly in entertainment. PA units with amps and speakers were used to add volume to vocal performances, phonographs, and radios. Many guitar players had stepped up to the microphone and had their playing amplified. But this setup had limitations, so guitarists looked at ways to combine microphone and amplification technologies specifically for guitar. They experimented with telephone mouthpieces, microphones, phonograph tone arms, and reverse-wired speaker coils. Alvino Rey, who became one of the first stars of electric guitar, recalled that during this period more than one person was busy experimenting with rudimentary electromagnetic units to achieve a breakthrough.
Photos taken in late 1945 with Gerard Leveque - Clarinet, Joseph Reinhardt - Rhythm, Jean Storne-Bass, Andre Jourdan Drums - shows Django with early amplification on his Selmer in a big band set. You can see the electric chord hanging from his guitar (perhaps using some kind of contact 'mic' given to him by a US serviceman) and the bulky amplifier on the chair in front of him. This appears to be mounted behind the bridge and could have been a DeArmond Contact Pickup wedged under the strings - alas Django's pick hand obscures all and the Amp may have been custom made from the States Focusing on his music after 1947 when he returned from the USA having played with Duke Ellington, we also enjoy a valuable recording made at the RDF radio studios possibly for a film soundtrack and skillfully re-mastered by AVID's own sound engineers. Django's music in the 1950's underwent many changes as witnessed among these tracks. We travel through small group swing to bebop influenced modern harmonic and rhythmically conceptual pieces, urgent, wild and frantic as detected in his amazing guitar playing!
DeArmond Archtop Bug
style pick up. This is a rare vintage pick up from the 50's. The small
attaching bracket which two screwed is missing but no one wants to damage a good
guitar anyway. Guitarists found that it great to just slip and
wedge under the
strings between the bridge and tailpiece.
It makes an archtop sound more natural than a
magnetic pick up. A very handy little bug.
Django & Pierre Michelot, Pierre Lemarchand at Club Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris 1951?
Between 1946 and 1949 Django's recordings alternated between electric guitar and acoustic guitar, but his overall musical style continued to evolve. Many of his compositions of this time - such as Diminishing Blackness or Micro - reflect the growing influence of Be-Bop. In fact the middle 8 to Moppin' the Bride could have been written by Charlie Parker himself! By 1949 the Be-Bop influence on Django's playing is obvious. Listen to any of the famous 'Rome Sessions' or the 1950 recording with Andre Ekyan - Reinhardt makes both Grappelli and saxophonist Andre Ekyan sound dated. By this time Django was going exclusively for an electric sound. Ironically it was during this period that he fitted an electric bar pickup to his Maccaferri, and was able to produce a cleaner more archtop type sound. Indeed he once referred to the electric archtop guitars in America (he toured with a Gibson ES-300) as "casseroles". But he wanted the electric archtop voicing and obviously went out of his way to find it.
Example of Django with Selmer Maccaferri and Stimer Pickup PÊCHE À LA MOUCHE
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The
later electrified Django achieved a fantastic and unique mastery of the electric
instrument. Perhaps he, unlike Christian, was too un-idiomatic, because very few
players have tried explicitly to emulate his sound. That sound was produced by
either the Electric Epiphone or a Selmer Maccaferri equipped with a Stimer
pick-up, and a small valve amp. It is claimed, and it may be correct, that
the Stimer was a copy of the DeArmond pickup that originated in the early 1940s.
However, even after considerable experimentation few were capable of reproducing
Django’s electric sound. The sound may (also) lie in the difference between the
Stimer and the DeArmond.
Today,
guitarists who play vintage Selmers—or their modern-day equivalents—again
only have one choice in magnetic pickups - the Stimer S.T. 48. Made by
France’s Maurice Dupont, the S.T. 48 is a beautiful unit that features a
built-in Volume control and a one-piece metal cover (which is nickel plated
and sports “Stimer Paris” engraved into its top). The unit features a r"
output jack, and it comes with a quality rubber-shrouded cord with r" and 1"
plugs.
You
simply slide it under the strings, and push it into place until it presses
against the end of the fretboard. Rubber pads on the bottom of the pickup
prevent scratching the guitar’s top, and the spring-clip retainer keeps the
unit snug. 
Preamp
Tube: 1 X 6AV6 & 1 X 12AU7 
Django
was able to create a method of jazz in four different styles. He began playing
traditional jazz during Louis Armstrong's era; became inspired by
Benny Goodman
and the whole swing movement, when he created his quintet with a clarinet and
played swing; and then translated the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy
Gillespie into guitar; and finally, in his later years, after hearing
Miles
Davis' cool, minimalist jazz, in his final recordings you can hear Django
moving in that direction, where he played fewer notes but with more eloquence. I
don't think there are many jazz musicians, or many musicians in general, who
transcend so many different genres of this style of music. 
