Welcome !

For more than 45 years, my creative power concentrated on playing guitar and inventing sound and composition tools:
1975 I built my first guitar amplifier, totaly different, no tubes, but built-in effects
1985 I abandoned rock and started to build relaxing music on delay units.
1992 I built the Paradis LOOP delay which turned into the Gibson Echoplex, the first Livelooping tool with all basic funcions.
1993 I moved to Salvador Brasil and learned to collaborate over internet and implement my ideas in software.
2014 my partner Rolf Spuler died and I took over his workshop and continue the Paradis mission.
2019 was a fascinating experience in the ECC Berlin and mid 2020 we met BlaueBlume and moved with 15 love- and nature-driven creative free spirits into a magic hotel in a region full of lakes and forests...
2023 I moved back to Brasil to be with my son Icauê which is 14. so far in my flat in Salvador but we hope to find a more secure and open space for him to beath and meet his gang...   

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!
2003-2008, I formed improvisation circles with amateurs and people who never played music before. The only rules were: "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...
2004-2010 I played once a month at a contact dance jam in Salvador. Its marvelous to see he effect of music and feel the spirit of improvisation flow naturally between several forms of art!
since 2014 I play weekly in free harmonic bands and finally start to understand how my improvisation works!

Paradis Guitars

April 2014 Rolf Spuler died of pleura cancer and I spent more time in Switzerland, first to help Rolf, then to care for his workshop and clients, then to finish all the instruments he started and finally, after all this learning, developing a new version of Rolf's main design, the Avalon. I call it Devalon now and it will contain a totally new version of our electronics which is also offered to other Luthiers!

and yet another new site !

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 multi-platform C++, being that the VST plug-in Echoloop has been the most efficient platform for development.

LiveLooping

The community 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 wrote 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 Plug-ins

At Mathons, Andy Butler and me develop audio plug-ins 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 plug-in 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 plug-ins are planned.

Polyphonic Guitar Effects

Immediately after I received my masters in electrical engineering, Rolf Spuler and I started Paradis Guitarworks, developing piezo pickups and analog polyphonic effects - pioneering work in 1984! After 2003 the new Paradis guitars had the PolyBass effect built in. 2008 it was a big success at NAMM.

The guitars as Rolf built them will not be available any more, but we want to offer the ideas and parts so the inventions can live on and develop in other guitars!

The big work for the series of Mathons Polyphonic Plug-ins did not have any response yet. But recently, the new Boss pedals bring individual strings per USB to the computer. so we make an effort to upgrade the plugins to 64bit with JUCE.

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 electronic workshop, changed my accountant, 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 developed 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

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 Brazilian 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...