To create “Orchestral Illusions” on two guitars causes extraordinary demands on the instrument itself. One needs a guitar that has a lot of different colors to imitate different instruments. A guitar that has as fast an attack as a Flamenco Guitar for the very rapid scale parts as well as a long sustained sound for the slow movements that in an orchestra often are played by bowed instruments. A guitar that separate each voice very clearly in a contrapuntal work. A guitar that needs to be extremely loud at the same time as it should supply the finest pianissimo in order to create a very wide dynamic range. And a guitar that projects it all in large halls while performing live as well as doing the same very close to the microphone in a studio environment... In short, a guitar so full of contradictions that it can't exist!
    Or at least so we thought—until we in late 1997 ran into a guitar by the extraordinary talented Australian Luthier Jeff Kemp. Usually, two guitarists with as different style of playing as we would choose entirely different instruments, but Jeff’s guitar just fulfilled our needs so completely that we both ordered one at once! Just how much this has improved our sound will be possible to hear in our second album “Baroque Illusions”, which was released in 1999.
    We don't know how Jeff does it, but you can find much more information about this at the Jeff Kemp Site. If you are looking for The Complete Guitar—go visit it!

The guitar on the picture belongs to Max Gossell. He has put some plastic protection close to the sound hole in order to protect it from beating when doing the rasguado. (You might recognize if from our main page—were we used a detail from it, changed the color and applied the Photoshop effect “Plastic Wrapping”).