Welcome !
For more than 30 years, my creative power concentrated on playing the guitar and inventing new amplification and sound tools. Immediately after I received my masters in electical engineering, Rolf Spuler and I started our own business, which we named Paradis Guitars, developing piezo pickups as well as analog polyphonic effects - pioneering work in 1984! In 1985 I abandoned rock and started to build sound on delay units and in 1992 I built the first dedicated live looping unit.

Then I moved to Salvador Brasil and learned to collaborate over internet and implement my ideas in software...

November 17. 2008 my first son Icauê Andrade Grob was born! (he has his own site now)

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...

LOOP

I am trying to finally accept my role as initiator of the Live Looping movement. Years ago we started the Liveloopin.org site to explain to the public and producers what we are doing. Then I did not want any leading position since I was a manufacturing party. Now I still think this is correct thinking, but it has hold us all back.

Video is big on the internet now. More even to "explain" music. So I started with a collection of Livelooping videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Amazing how much I found! And there is more..

After 13 years, Gibson stopped making the ECHOPLEX DP due to lack of parts. What made it sell up to date is our unique software: LOOP. In the past years I translated it to C++, made it a VST plugin. Possibly, it soon will be built into new hardware...

LiveLooping
The comunity of the loopers (users of live looping tools) grows. 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...

Polyphonic Guitar Effects
The well established 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. It made such a big success at NAMM that we want to offer it to other guitar manufacturers! Some of our guitars even have a built-in FireWire interface. They can be connected directly to a computer where each string can be processed separately.

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 other such plugins will come out soon. Recently, we mainly worked on the worlds first plugins for polyphonic (hexaphonic) guitars. For those the note detector is even more usefull because it allowes to select the loudest, last, highest, lowest,,, notes and treat them separately.

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...