I had purchased a Martin Backpacker Steelstring guitar and an Apogee One recording interface so I would be able to record songs and ideas during my trip. One week before boarding the plane to Iran I visited my Grandpa in his hobby shop to build a fixture for attaching the recording device to the guitar.
After a long journey of finding the right travel guitar and the proper recording equipment (read about it here and here) I had decided to purchase a Martin Backpacker travel guitar and an Apogee One mobile recording interface. The Apogee One came with a mount that could be attached to any regular microphone stand. Under normal circumstances, setting up the recording device in front of a guitar would be a piece of cake. In my case, however, I knew that carrying a microphone stand would not be an option due its size and weight. Thus I had to find another solution for properly setting up the Apogee One with my travel guitar.
So I met with my grandpa in his hobby shop, a room in the basement of his house with every tool imaginable stuffed into it. Here we built a wooden fixture to attach the Apogee One to the travel guitar.
The Martin Backpacker is a strongly build instrument with a chunck of solid wood at the point where the neck is attached to the body. Here we drilled two wholes into the guitar's body. Then we screwed a piece of wood with two metal guide rails onto that part of the guitar. Next, we sawed a piece of leftover wood to build the arm. This would later hold the recording device in an optimal distance to the strings.
One side of this arm was more narrow so that it would slide right into the guide rails. Now it could be attached and removed within seconds. Finally we drilled and sawed a cavity into the arm that would hold the recording device. Our producer Toby had advised for a distance of about 20 mm with the device being set up right above the twelwth fret, slightly turned towards the sound hole. Due to the shape of the guitar's body we had to move the arm closer to the sound hole and reduce the arm's lengths to keep it stable. In the end the Apogee One is set up above the (non existing) 17th fret at a distance of about 12 mm at an angle of 30°.
Et voilà, a custom-made appliance to quickly set up the Apogee One mobile recording interface with the Martin Backpacker travel guitar.
