The Circle Guitar is the most revolutionary new guitar in half a century – and artists are queuing up to be part of it
As much as we love it, and while guitarists themselves have continued to evolve, there’s no escaping the truth. The electric guitar is an instrument rooted in technology from the early 20th century, with a playing technique that predates the printing press.
But what if we took all the technological innovation the last seven decades have afforded us, and approached this wonderful thing of ours with fresh eyes? The Circle Guitar is one answer.
The Circle Guitar on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Andy Ford for Guitar.com
If you’ve seen it, you will no doubt have an abiding memory: the disc. The spinning wheel that gives the guitar its name, covered in tiny plectrums, strums the strings in a way that no human could – freeing both hands up to create sounds, effects and textures that even the greatest guitarist couldn’t create on their own with a conventional instrument. With the rhythm aspect controlled by the guitar (the rhythm and pattern of which is determined by MIDI), you can interact with the guitar in new ways: create impossible chord shapes, experiment with new types of string muting and string bending, work the onboard volume faders to precisely bring in each note at the right moment.
Creator Anthony Dickens describes the circle as “an electro-mechanical guitar that uses a MIDI-enabled physical sequencer to strum the strings”. Sounds straightforward, right? But to see it, to hear it, to play it is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced with six strings. It’s dizzying, confronting and exhilarating all at once.
Image: Andy Ford for Guitar.com
Pushing The Envelope
The man who designed this guitar from a cyberpunk future is an unassuming, down-to-earth chap from the South West of England. Anthony Dickens’ first experience of the instrument was some rapidly aborted classical guitar lessons at school. He didn’t give the guitar much more thought until he was flicking through his dad’s record collection a few years later. The 12-year-old happened upon a cellophane-wrapped sample single given away with Smash Hits magazine, celebrating some artist he’d never heard of by the name of Jimi Hendrix.
“For two years, I listened to nothing else apart from every single thing Jimi Hendrix did,” Dickens explains today. “I was just obsessed from that moment on with music and guitars.”
“The thought was a simple one really – what if I could strum a guitar, but that strum never ends?”
Dickens’ obsession expanded: Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Rage Against The Machine. Rave music was also everywhere in the UK in that period, but Dickens struggled to really connect with it until he heard the uniquely experimental sounds of Aphex Twin – it was like a light had been turned on.
“When I discovered Aphex Twin, the first thing about it was that he was sort of an enigma,” Dickens says. He adds, tellingly: “And then I heard that he made his own instruments, and I was like, fucking hell, that is cool! That is the ultimate freedom, isn’t it?”
Dickens’ cousin taught him the basics of sampling on his Atari ST, and he was off making his own ‘esoteric’ electronic music. The logic went: “I’m not in a band, so I’m gonna try and do it myself!”
Image: Andy Ford for Guitar.com
Design For Life
Dickens also had a passion for making things, and went to university to study furniture design. That said, he planned to pursue music as a career once he was done with his degree. But a final-year exhibit in London complicated matters.
“I ended up winning these awards!” Dickens explains. “Instead of going to Brighton with my three other mates, to go head first into writing music and probably set up a label, I had to ring them up and go, ‘I’ve won this design award. I’ve got to stay in London and I’m going to work.’ It’s a sliding doors moment because it started me on a design career… but the tension has always remained.”
As a designer, Dickens has since worked with everyone from Red Bull to Audi – but he never stopped thinking about ways his two passions could combine. Around 1996, he started to seriously contemplate how music could influence design and vice versa.
“For me, it’s always about: how can I find a new way of expressing myself that nobody else has done before? It’s about people exploring new ways of communicating, and progressing that historical lineage of creativity.”
“It’s almost like the guitar has been left behind. Look at the evolution of music technology – and yet the guitar is the way that it is, and that’s all it should be”
After considering and discarding various ideas over the years, true inspiration struck in 2018. “I was trying to think about how I could change the way that I interacted with a guitar,” Dickens recalls. “The thought was a simple one really: ‘What if I could strum a guitar, but that strum never ends?’ No matter how fast your hand is, there has to be a moment where your downstroke ends and you have to bring it back up for the next one. But I thought, ‘What if it never ended?’”
Dickens landed on the idea of sticking a wheel onto a guitar, putting a load of plectrums onto it, and spinning it by hand. So he made his first prototype – using a cheap acoustic guitar with a hole drilled into it, skateboard ball bearings, a laser-cut piece of plastic, the cheapest, thinnest plectrums he could find, and a doorknob off a kitchen cabinet.
“I started spinning it around, and it sounded amazing – you could make it sound like a swarm of bees, this incessant, endless thing. Immediately I thought, all right, there’s something there.”
Image: Andy Ford for Guitar.com
On Your Ed
Dickens began pursuing the Circle Guitar project in earnest shortly before the pandemic. At Somerset House’s Makerversity space, he connected with people who could fill in expertise gaps, such as the coders and engineers who helped develop the motorised spinning wheel and the MIDI control that could accurately and consistently keep time. Dickens eventually also added a hex pickup to enable each string to be treated as an independent signal, with onboard volume faders for each one.
As he continued to tinker, Dickens needed some validation that he was on track. “I thought I had to put some videos on social media. Just to see: are we being absolutely mad? If I’m finally going to put my love of design and music together into something, I need to find out if it’s really worth pursuing.”
Some thought the Circle Guitar was madness, while others thought it was genius. But one particular cosign pushed the project forward.
Dickens had watched a That Pedal Show episode with Ed O’Brien, where the Radiohead guitarist insisted that searching for new sounds and textures was more important than any kind of technical virtuosity. It struck a chord, and so he dropped O’Brien an Instagram message about the Circle Guitar. “Within an hour, he got back to me going, ‘Wow, this is amazing. I’d love to come and play it,’” Dickens remembers. “And a week later he was in my house!”
“Every single guitar hero was an agitator, because they were doing something that hadn’t been done before”
O’Brien would later characterise the Circle Guitar as “extraordinary”, telling Reuters it was “almost like playing a different instrument”. “It’s like learning a new language, really. I want to spend a lot of time with it.”
Chances are your first encounter with the Circle Guitar was a direct result of that meeting in August 2020. While at Dickens’ house O’Brien recorded a short phone video of him using the Circle Guitar to create some otherworldly sonic textures, and shared it on Instagram. It quickly went viral, and before long Dickens was fielding queries from artists and producers keen to try it for themselves.
In the five years since that video, the Circle Guitar has changed dramatically both inside and out – and Dickens is ready to share his vision with the world. The first batch of production instruments have been completed, each one custom-tailored to the requirements of the artists and innovators who ordered them.
Image: Andy Ford for Guitar.com
O’Brien will take delivery of one of them, Phish bassist Mike Gordon another, as will A-list producers Paul Epworth and John Congleton. True innovation doesn’t come cheap – the Circle Guitar costs £7,995 – but guitarists as diverse as Muse’s Matt Bellamy and Idles’ Lee Kiernan have been wowed by the Circle Guitar’s potential.
The faith these artists have placed in Dickens has empowered him to assemble a small team of investors and collaborators to help him achieve the Circle Guitar dream. US-based software engineer David Ashman is responsible for coding the guitar’s firmware and designing the internal electronics, while respected UK luthier Manson Guitar Works – which is owned by Bellamy – produced the necks and bodies for the first batch. [Editor’s Note: Meng Ru Kuok, Founder & CEO of Caldecott Music Group is a part owner of Manson Guitar Works. Guitar.com is part of Caldecott Music Group.]
Another key figure in helping the project move forward is Freddie Cowan, former guitarist in indie-rockers The Vaccines. When Dickens moved to the quiet Somerset village of Frome to work on Circle in earnest, he discovered that Cowan was his neighbour, and he became a hugely important voice in the development – if you’ve seen a Circle Guitar demo online in recent months, Cowan is likely the man playing it.
Image: Andy Ford for Guitar.com
The Future of Guitar
Even with a formidable team behind him, Dickens still toils away in his workshop to assemble each and every Circle Guitar. There are some who see his brainchild as some sort of technological interloper, transgressing on the pure and good world of electric guitars. It’s a position he understands, even if he hasn’t got much patience for it.
“It’s almost like the guitar has been left behind,” he argues. “Look how the evolution of music technology has exploded – and yet for some reason the guitar is the way that it is, and that’s all it should be. Some people get annoyed because they see the Circle as cheating, because you don’t have to play it like a normal guitar – but you can still buy the old ones! And the intention was never to create something to shortcut learning; it was about exploring new ways to play the guitar. But,” he adds with a wry smile, “it’s also quite fun winding people up as well.”
The unique venn diagram of Dickens’ interests made him the perfect man to conceive of the Circle Guitar. But it still comes back to that maverick creativity and expression that Jimi Hendrix captivated him with all those years ago.
“The beauty of innovation is that it’s deep within us – we’re compelled to find something new”
“For the purists out there, every single one of their guitar heroes was an agitator when they first came out,” Dickens explains. “Because they were doing something that hadn’t been done before, and it probably pissed off a load of other musicians too! This is what humans do. We are always pushing things. The beauty of innovation is that it’s deep within us – we’re compelled to find something new.”
With batch one completed and deposits for the second batch now being taken, Dickens is ambitious about the future of the Circle Guitar. He has plans for new devices, and intends to use feedback from batch one’s owners to refine the concept and better cater to the needs of artists – something that remains at the heart of the Circle ethos.
“The thing that [guitarists] always tell me is that Circle forces you to think differently,” Dickens says. “And for a musician, that’s their job – they’re constantly trying to reinvent themselves. They’re trying to find different ways of responding to their instrument. So that’s what I’m hoping that Circle as a brand is going to keep doing – giving these tools that allow them to open new doors of sonic exploration.”
Words: Josh Gardner
Photography: Andy Ford
Location: Distillery II Studios, Bristol
The post The Circle Guitar is the most revolutionary new guitar in half a century – and artists are queuing up to be part of it appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
