Welcome !
For more than 30 years, my creative power concentrated on playing the guitar and inventing new sound and composition tools. In 1985 I abandoned rock and started to build relaxing music on delay units. 2003 I moved to Salvador Brasil and learned to collaborate over internet and implement my ideas in software...

2011 we moved to Aracaju: Enough security, sand, water and peace for Icauê to play and for me to work and cure my spine :-)

The year 2012 I started with a new site to offer my old but stil very actual music.

LOOP

In 4 countries, 7 people are working for Evoloop, the successor of the Gibson Echoplex!

in 1992 I built the first dedicated live looping unit which turned into the Gibson ECHOPLEX Digital Pro. Gibson stopped making it because of a lack of parts and the factory burnt down in 2009! What makes it sell on eBay up to now for nearly its new price is our unique software: LOOP.
In the past years I translated it to multiplatform C++, being that the VST plugin Echoloop has been the most efficient platform for development.

LiveLooping
The comunity of the loopers (users of live looping tools) grows.
We also created a all new version of LiveLooping.org, a lot of text of mine which I mainly worote in Diogo with Frederike Holste 2009.
There are new meeting points at FaceBook: there are loads of videos showing the state of the art and the variety of styles and mastery. I started to collect them in playlists and want to explain better...

VST Plugins

At Mathons, Andy Butler and me develop audio plugins which detect notes in the music and trigger all kinds of effects with them. New sounds become possible and old sounds become more intuitive and musical. The idea grew from the Chopitch plugin which we first developed to create a big drum sound out of a small drum. Then we realized it can do a lot more, also for other instruments. Chopan uses a similar principle to place notes in space, and Chophilter is ready to be launched. Other such plugins are planned.

Polyphonic Guitar Effects
Immediately after I received my masters in electical engineering, Rolf Spuler and I started Paradis Guitarworks, developing piezo pickups and analog polyphonic effects - pioneering work in 1984! The partnership with Rolf Spuler was reactivated in 2003 and the new Paradis guitars with the sculptural design are available with the PolyBass effect built in. 2008 it was a big success at NAMM. Some of our guitars even have a built-in FireWire interface to connect directly to a computer.

The big work for the series of Mathons Polyphonic Plugins did not have any response yet. We are hoping for the success of our friend Keith McMillens StringPort for which the plugins can be used as well. For this application, the note detector is very usefull because it allowes to select the loudest, last, highest, lowest,,, notes and treat them separately.

November 17. 2008 my first son Icauê Andrade Grob was born! (his story is on Icaue.com)

His mother Daniela got her diploma as Journalist on December 15. 2009!

He also animated me to clean out a lot: I emptied my electonic workshop, changed my acountant, found a new guitar/electronic parter here in Salvador, found a new Echoplex partner in California... and now I have some nice videos at YouTube, Vimeo, but also sound at MySpace, FaceBook, Ubedoo...

Electrorganic Instruments
Its time for a movement towards the instruments with acoustic generators (strings, tongues, skins,,,) and electronic resonators (pickups and electronic modeling). The principles developped for the modern electric guitar (Roland VG-8...VG-99, Line 6 ... guitars, Godin, Parker, Mathons PolyPlugs,,,) are just as interesting to other instruments because it makes them smaller, eliminates mics, stands, sound checks, feedback and the frequent suffering of enduring bad stage monitoring...
Electrorganic instruments sound cooler than acoustic instruments but never as cold as electronic instruments!
The problem with electronic instruments...
The first manifesto for this Concept

Improvisation Groups
Improvisation has always fascinated me, and since 1984 I stopped interpreting and composing. But the music keeps growing and changing anyway... a great experience!
In the past years, I formed improvisation circles with amateurs and people who never played music before. The only rules are: "play in a way you can hear the others" and "don't play songs". Every time some meaningful music grows out of chaos and keeps changing for hours, it is cleaning the body and soul...
I also play once a month at the contact dance jam here in Salvador. Its marvelous to see he effect of music and feel the spirit of imporvisation in flow naturally between several forms of art!

My own music

Enjoy hours of recordings - for free! Most of them bring the feeling of freedom and harmony, where some will guide you through deeper processes; call them therapeutic or spiritual or whatever you believe in that moves you...
Some recordings tell my own story, and some are historic from the times when the first live looping analog polyphonic technology inspired me. You may agree that many of my recordings of the mid 80's go further in the complexity and development of the loops than any of the actual live loop recordings found on the net. Especially my brasilian partners helped a lot to create groovy loops!
My newest music has yet to be recorded: In the past years I studied a lot of polyphonic playing techniques and music which does not repeat at all, but bases on similarity: A theme exists, but it is never well defined. It returns in all kinds of variations, inversions, transformations,,, so there is a "red wire" to follow, but no repetition to become tired of. I haven't recorded such music yet, I stopped playing on stage, I want to wait until this music is ripe...