Schneller began making string instruments like guitars, ukuleles, mandolins, and even the occasional violin. Schneller rose to the challenge by securing 600 pairs of iridescent beetle wings from Bangkok that will be incorporated into this guitar. Take, for instance, a guitar he’s working on for Alex Kapranos of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand, who asked him to make a guitar that would reflect his love of entomology. Because each piece is one of a kind, Schneller not only does a custom design, but often is called upon to find creative sourcing to get the piece exactly right. “They’re my stab at immortality.”Īlthough completion time varies, a typical project from start to finish absorbs the better part of eight months. They are a part of me no matter where in the world they have gone,” he said. “This sounds corny, but I really see them as my children. In the past 30 years, he estimates he has created 600 pieces. Specimen Products employs six artisans along with 24 apprentices and interns, but Schneller’s hands are on every product. It was almost inevitable that Ian Schneller, a musician who trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, would wind up creating Specimen Products, a Chicago studio that creates handmade instruments, amplifiers, and horn speakers noted for their beauty and functionality. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart-and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where-For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.A handcrafted piece awakens something in human beings. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes-And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness. There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting-I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with porpoises … before land was … before the water went down … before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun-I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and loop and double-cross. There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood-I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
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