Thomas Diethelm is a Swiss nylon guitar virtuoso
that made some success in Europe mid 80ies using a
unique kind of LiveLooping: https://thomasdiethelm.bandcamp.com
He was rather of the individual kind, had his own
strong style (literaly, he was a champion in spear
throwing, before dedicating to the guitar!), a
virtuoso as long as playing his own compositions
and using his AMS DMX 15-80S digital delay and
pitch
shifter.
He wanted to live on his music and tried to be
popular. He used to say that he needs to create
'liedli', little songs - as opposed to the
instrumental compositions he would naturally
create. Its a pity he neither made the big success
he would deserve for his ability nor do we have
the music that really came to him... but its still
very amazing and unique what he left us!
His main technique was to set up a pattern of
delayed pitch transpositions.
So each note he played turned into a short melody
of 2 to 6 notes. For each
song, he used specific patterns and composed using
the delayed transposed
notes.
This may sounds trivial, but once you listen to
his records (about 6 of
them, “Valeys in my Head" I would recommend most)
you get impressed how far
he went with this technique.
From this album on he also used a Paradis
Hexaphonic guitar with Polydistortion effect he
faded in to set accents.
Often he quickly alternated between chords and
melody playing and due to the
delay both were constantely present and due to the
pitch shift, there was no impression of
repetition. The limitation of this
technique made him creative in terms of
composition and gave his own sound.
Two of the records he made in team with one of the
best Swiss keyboarders
Santino Famulari, the others feature an always
changing good band. only the last album is almost
solo I heard him often play solo when we worked
and always found it sounded much more impressive
than with the band.
He complained a lot about the failing (bad
contacts) expensive and sensible AMS studio
machine. since he completely depended on it, this
might even have contributed to the end
of his career around 1990.
For 10 years he was happy to sells dried spiced
fish (he was a brilliant cook, too!).
around 2005 someone created a special MAX software
on a WinXP Laptop and he tried a comback with the
last recording Guiteros.
then he lost his workshop and living place and had
to sell his instruments and lost the reason to
live and died in 2013 rather miserable.
