A California Crank is a lowly plastic swivel for rotating the tuning heads on guitars. Since twelve-string guitars sprout twelve such heads, without a crank the poor soul stringing them must laboriously turn them--in the case of any guitar player who doesn't like playing on rusted strings--with his or her fingertips.
Change two or three twelve-string guitars three times a week--or if you're doing Off-Broadway shows, every day-- and the lowly little California Crank isn't so lowly anymore. It becomes a brilliant labor-saving device.
I own three California Cranks. They break routinely, like guitar strings themselves when they wear thin.
Phosphor bronze and steel, that's what the guitar strings I make my living with are made from. Plain steel wire for the skinny strings. Steel cores coiled tightly by phosphor bronze windings--those are the fat strings.
I can imagine the machine that makes them. Big spools feeding the core wire into some fast-spinning circular rotator whirring like the moon around the earth, wrapping it in moonbeams of phosphor bronze.
During The Little Shepherd, a story for young children, I scratch my pick along the windings of the low E string. Sounds like a creaky rocking chair, in which sits the witch who has imprisoned the three singing apples. It's a good sound effect. I rock back and forth in the chair, acting the witch's part. Creak. Creak. The audience wonders where on earth the sound is coming from. Sleight of pick, I guess you could call it.
12-string guitar strings usually don't break. They simply lose their shimmer and integrity. I miss both a great deal after a certain point, which forces me, as it did yesterday afternoon here in Bradford, to change them yet again.
Fresh strings shimmer. Their bass is deep. The midrange is cello-like. The high notes tinkle. They have not yet been bent and pushed a few thousand times by my fingers. No little trails of cutaneous oil have been lain along them, puddling and rusting in the windings, dulling their minute edges, which, of course, hammer the air as they vibrate and create the sounds. Sharp little windings produce the shimmer and the boom.
I'm a fool for fresh strings.
Plus, down at the sounding hole, where my right hand spends its time delivering strikes to the strings to make them sound, the strings actually begin to wear thin after a few thousand impressions. Maybe it's ten thousand, I don't know. Oftentimes I use an arpeggiated technique where the strikes come thick and fast. I've never counted them. That would be a totally pointless activity, much like trying to count raindrops in a downpour. In any event, old strings start to lose their integrity, won't stay in tune, and frustrate the artist.
Another reason to change strings often.
Now these intimacies regarding guitars, I imagine, hold limited fancy for the average reader. Yet, whoever is reading this is probably not the average reader, so I'll take my chances.
A twelve-string guitar's music hums in one's chest. I suppose all guitars do so, but 12-strings produce a particularly resonant hum in one's vital organs. Healing Harps, an organization that promotes the healing properties of harps, knows all about this subtle vibratory benefit to health and happiness. Playing the harp, even badly, reduces the symptoms of certain spasmodic neurological diseases, as I recall. The harp is the only instrument one truly embraces in the act of playing.
Guitars are held, rather than embraced. But still, one feels them.
Now these are rarified notions, you must admit. So highly rarified that they could only be thought up by someone who lives within a vast, protected culture of empire. An artist who benefits from the time it takes to think about such niceties. And who is actually willing to set them down, then send them out onto the world wide web.
Which is, of course, another perilously vulnerable benefit of empire, come to think of it.
