Touch Guitar benefits/functions:

Bunker prodly announces the all new TG-2009 Touch Guitar Touch Guitar features in detail: Hand crafted from the finest woods, then integrated with patented electronic innovations, this instrument has a broad range of sound from the brightest country to the mellowest standards. The Back Side of the TG2001 is all wood with snap out ebony or rosewood covers for easy 9-Volt battery access.  The Touch Guitar runs for 20 hours on just one battery. There is even an a/c adapter which provides phantom power. Bunker's amazing individual Hexophonic Pickups combined with the Electronic Mute ™ are absolutely the finest combination of sounds you can attain for Touch style and Hammer-on style playing. The Hexophonic Pickups are employed on all of our Touch Guitars™ and Electro-Mute™ Guitars and Basses (see below) are the heart of our product line. Our great sounds give you the best of all music worlds and our pickups are available separately for those who wish to modify their current instrument. We have pickup models for all standard -size guitar and bass applications. The Electro-Mute™ (shown above) is at the center of our dynamic Muting System. This patented technology keeps each string fully muted until you touch or pick it, thereby eliminating all unwanted noise. This creates dynamic new sounds never before possible. What is an Electro-Mute™? The Electro-Mute™ is our patented device which enables the strings to be off at all times. This eliminates all hum, hiss and other extraneous noise.You'll hear no unwanted sound when you remove your fingers from the strings, especially moving from note to note. This also negates any pick noise or finger noise when touching a live string. String electronics is activated only after it touches the fret, then it stays off when your finger leaves the fret. This is as pure and clean a guitar sound as you will ever hear. The system also adds over forty percent more high and low frequencies. These and other innovations are why Bunker instruments are  supremely valued among guitar artisans Want to play your bass neck in the normal pick method? The Touch Guitar™ has a defeat switch which lets you turn off the Electro-Mute™ on either the Bass or the Guitar. Dynamic 6-Sense! Another feature which allows you to play open notes and fret touched notes is the 6-Sense effect. The 6-Sense has two trim pots which allow you to manually set how hard the string must be picked before sound will be heard and how long the string vibrates until it turns itself off again. This effect works on both the Bass and Guitar necks of the Touch Guitar. The Dave Bunker Method Book© "Play a full Bass and a Guitar at the same time!" This is the first ever double neck Touch Guitar Method book. This book will help you learn to play music on the Touch guitar with ease.  So  take your skills and talents to new heights. Call and order your book today. Dave Bunker The Birth of a new musical instrument No one could have predicted the influence that a black Devon Guitar was going to make on a young boy over the next half century. This new musical instrument wasn’t something that a father and mother of five young children could really afford to purchase. But his parents sensed that son David had a destiny in music. It was May of 1949. David was fourteen years old. During the family’s long trip home from a Chehalis, Washington music store to the family farm in Garden Grove, David's hands never once left the fingerboard of his new guitar. Joe and Ella Bunker soon found a teacher in Olympia, Washington about one hour’s drive from their small pig farm in Garden City. His name was Clyde Landsaw. To this day Dave Bunker credits everything he plays to the expertise of his most influential mentor. Clyde Landsaw was also teaching young Donny Rich, who would become a close friend of Dave’s and still later become lead guitarist for the legendary Buck Owens band. In 1950 the Joe Bunker family, with young Dave and his revered black Devon guitar in hand, moved farther west to the rain soaked Olympic Peninsula. They rented a house in Forks, Washington which was just big enough to enclose the growing family. It wasn’t long before young Dave, with brother in law Joe McReynolds and Dave Beales, a close family friend, were having fun jamming on their guitars.The rest of the family took in the free entertainment as they played cards. Typically these sessions would extend late into the night. It was viciously cold during the winter of 1950-51, with deep snow and biting winds. On one of these nights, January 13, 1951, Mother Ella was startled awake by daughter Joanne’s cat making a noisy commotion running back and forth in the living room. She immediately smelled smoke and to her shock saw that the ceiling above the living room was on fire. Ella screamed, waking all who could hear. She ran through the smoke-filled house to alert the rest. Thirteen extended family members were at the Bunker home that night and all were able to escape into the deep snow before the roof of the house collapsed behind them. It was a miracle that no one was killed or injured. But Dave’s black Devon guitar did not survive the fire. He found what was left of it in the frigid rubble a few days later… just a few burned out strings and metal shards.For the rest of that lonely winter the Bunker family lived in a neighbor’s small one room house and an adjoining tent, surrounded by two to three feet of snow. But a lack of music had put a damper on the family’s evenings. A neighbor had an old “beater” guitar that he graciously gave to Dave so the family could continue to enjoy his growing music talent. Soon the frosty little shack came alive with music again as a growing circle of friends and extended family musicians joined in to sing and enjoy the gatherings. In 1950, the major industry in Forks, Washington was logging and most all the young males would labor in the woods when not in school. When summer time arrived, it was an established  tradition for the young men to grab their boots, khaki shirts and chain saws, then flag down a crew bus to a job in the deep woods, somewhere up a wet and rough logging road. It was at one of these logging sites, where Dave Bunker first found the real meaning of God and destiny in his own life. It was damp and dreary that morning on Bear Creek Mountain as David Bunker climbed over a log pile, then down the steep cliff to a place where his crew had stopped yarding logs the day before. As David started for the choker cables used to wrap and drag logs, Jack, the rigging slinger, told him to be cautious of large rocks on the ledge about a hundred feet above him. A large two inch woven steel cable called the mainline would be slapping against those rocks as David was setting his chokers in the steep gully below. As he moved over the first timber to choke it, he found it difficult to position the cable under a log. David climbed over the log to the uphill side, his back now turned to the rock wall. He was about to find the real meaning of the word miracle. Jack had found a safe spot up on the side of the gully and had told David that if he saw anything fall from the cliff, he would yell “rock” and David was to dive under the log for protection. Only a few seconds later Dave heard it. “Rock!!” was the head turning scream. He whipped around to see a four foot boulder angling down at him not 20 feet from his certain death. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, the dead man whistle was blowing, over and over. One thousand feet away below in the canyon, Dave's co-choker setter Stanley Meyers and the job hook tender Red Hammond were re-setting the haul-back block for the next change. When they heard the dead man whistle they snapped toward the sound and immediately began lurching up the steep canyon through boulders and branches as fast as they could move, aiming for the log where Dave had disappeared from sight. As the crew scrambled and crashed upward through a maze of obstacles, someone shrieked from below: “Who is it! Who is it?!”  As he staggered toward the horror he did not want to view, Jack pointed down in the direction of Dave Bunker’s last standing position. Dave’s head slowly lifted from behind the rubble of boulders and logs.  He must be alive because he was moving. A stunned yell broke from his own mouth as he struggled to rise. Dave didn’t know...He didn’t know the dead man whistle had been blown for him. The crew’s early morning terror slowly turned to a disbelieving shock as they saw Dave rise from the near dead.  His legs were numb but he seemed to be… OK. And in fact he was. Dazed. But OK. No broken bones. No lacerations. Still the implausible event traumatized his incredulous crew. Jack had watched this with his own eyes, yet he would never accept it. Jack was so stunned by the vision that he walked off the job that day and never returned. He later told Dave’s father, “Your son was smashed by that rock on the mountain. That’s the way it is. That’s what happened.”  For many years when he saw Dave walking up the street in Forks, he would tell anyone who would listen that Dave shouldn’t be here because he was dead. And he meant it. In his stubbornness and desire to be with his family, Dave resisted feelings that seemed to be pushing him away from this beautiful spot on the Olympic Peninsula. He continued to work as a logger in all his off time from school. For many years Dave had no explanation for that day on Bear Mountain. Only as the years slipped by did he come to realize the miracle that had befallen him. Sometimes it takes a second coming to get our attention. There was bright sunshine on that morning in July when, with Dave’s older brother Allen, they jumped on the crew bus and headed south along highway 101 towards a new logging job. This location would overlook the beautiful Pacific Ocean on the Hoh Indian Reservation of the Washington coastline. If Dave's first brush with death would not alert him to his need to move on, a second would. One thing he was happy for on this job was the flat terrain. At least there were no boulders hanging over his head. Around mid morning the yarder engineer tight-lined the rigging to start yarding the timber he had just chokered. Suddenly a sharp thwack broke the routine, as all on the crew turned to see the log bundle dropping 20 feet to the ground in a crushing cacophony of wood against wood. The event was as welcome as a computer crash today.The next string of words Dave heard from his brother's mouth couldn’t be repeated in Sunday school. Allen was frustrated because they were already behind on this job. Jack James, the hook, was pushing everyone to hurry and get the job done. Allen started to “long splice” the haul back cable, which required at least an hour of down time. Jack angrily demanded that he stop and insert a “short splice” instead. This could be done in far less time and would get the rigging moving again but at considerable risk of a another bundle dropping event.  Allen, knowing that this was a very dangerous shortcut, argued… to no avail. After his "very dangerous" short splice was finished, logs once again began flying out of the woods, with the engineer being careful not to tight line the haul-back.  He knew that it could break, and bring everything crashing back to the ground once again. Dave was told by his big brother Allen to “get his rear end up on the landing” and “chase” for the rest of the day as he did not trust the short splice he had been forced to put in the haul-back cable. As a chaser your job in those days was to "unhook turns”, i.e. to chainsaw any unwanted limbs from the logs. Finally this long day was over and everyone was eager to head home. As the engineer tightened the haul-back cable in order to pull the mainline and the chokers up in the air so no one could steal them, another “thwack” brought the crew to instant attention. Dave also came to quick alert on the landing as he stood under a 120 foot spar tree. By his own words, he will as long as he lives never forget the next sound he heard…..swoosh, swoosh, swoosh…. it seemed like a thousand times as the haul-back cable came out of the pulley block 120 feet above his head and made a perfect four foot circle around his body where he was standing. One eighth-inch strand of that three quarter inch cable would have eviscerated him from top to bottom, and there he stood, once again at the mercy of a power far greater than anyone could dare to imagine, just a hair's breath away from certain death. Yet the circling cable completely missed him. It was in that moment that Dave made the next big decision in his life. He had risked that life two too many times in Forks, Washington. This time, he would heed the warnings and leave logging.

• Older  brother Allen finished his not too reserved tirade to Jack James. It was harsh and Allen was furious. You wouldn’t have wanted children around that day. As the crew started to board the bus heading back north to Forks, Jack and Whitehead the engineer chose to stay and re-thread the haul-back cable.****  which now had After retracting to some sixty feet above the ground, Using a small quarter inch cable hanging from a pulley at the top of the 120 foot high spar tree, jack attached a ring cable apparatus called the ____ where he would be elevated, in his uncomfortable seat, to the top of the tree where he would thread the haywire cable which would then be used to pull the haulback cable back through the large pulley block at the top of the spar where it had fallen through earlier. Whitehead lowered a large hook from the yarder Jack attached a  loop that that would serve as his uncomfortable seat. Whitehead began to hoist Jack up so he could "re-thread the haul back cable through the pulley block at the top of the 120 foot high spar tree when to everyones surprise they heard the yarder motor stop and saw engineer Whitehead and big Al heading for the crew bus.  After retracting to some sixty feet above the ground retrieve the frayed end of the haul-back cable.

****Young Dave remembered Allen saying to the crew bus driver, “Just wait a minute, I have something I want to do”. As big Al jumped off the crew bus and headed for the yarder, none of them had any idea what was to happen next. (working on the above 10/20/08 DDB) The entire crew watched from the bus as the cable lift abruptly stopped and left Jack dangling at about 60 feet up the spar tree. A tentative silence fell over the scene as Jack's predicament became clear to everyone. Allen had told Whitehead to shut off his yarder. They were going home. Whitehead, recognizing Allen's resolve, did as Allen instructed. Then they boarded the crew bus for the return home. Jack remained... twisting gently in the wind Stifled sniggers soon turned to unabated laughter as the bus careened down the logging road(not on mountain, flat country) mountain. As the crew bus came to the end of the logging road, where they would start their one hour trip north on highway 101 to Forks, Dave asked the driver to stop and let him off. (WHY?) Of course, big brother put up a fuss asking him where he was going and said that he'd better not go back and let Jack down out of the spar tree, or he’d do the same to him. Dave assured Allen that he had no intention of letting Jack down, but pressed big Al that he should not leave Jack up the tree. He refused, and the crazy bunch of loggers drove off north with young Dave standing in the middle of highway 101, fifty miles from anywhere and wondering what he would do next. Many hours later, when Jack's wife became concerned, she phoned Jack's favorite tavern. Someone confessed to the poor man's lofty elevation and the deed was exposed. Young Dave still remained standing at the logging crossroads. He decided that when the next vehicle came along he'd stick out his thumb and see where it would take him, whether north or south. It was an old pickup truck heading south to Aberdeen, so that’s where he went. The driver of the old pickup was a crude old dude who had been out collecting night crawler worms and was taking them to Aberdeen to sell as fishing bait. Half way to Aberdeen still in his logging clothes, Dave decided he would continue on to Sumner and stay with his wonderful Aunt Grace and Uncle Harold. This was Dave's last day in Forks, and he never returned to the woods as a logger. (Dave wanted to be closer to music as a future for him....) With permission from his parents, he decided to remain at his Aunt and Uncle's house and continue school in Puyallup, Washington. When Dave received his last check from Forks he bought himself new clothes, a new guitar, and started a new direction in his young life. Music school and Joe Farmer In the fall Dave started back for his last two years of high school in Puyallup, Washington and enrolled for lessons in guitar theory at Joe Farmer music in south Seattle. Joe Farmer had classes for advanced guitar students and part of his wonderful teaching was to take students who had done their homework to see special groups like Andrés Segovia and other great artists when they performed at places like Meany Hall on the University of Washington campus. Dave was excited when Mr. Farmer asked him and several others to go see a guitarist named Jimmy Webster, from England. Webster was doing a tour of the United States demonstrating a new method for playing guitar music. It was called the Touch System. At the concert, Dave watched transfixed as this man played by tapping with two hands on one neck, much like great guitarist Eddy Van Halen does today, making music and sounds he had never before imagined. It was utterly intriguing, and shortly after that concert Dave found himself trying to emulate Webster's technique. He worked week after week on this new style of playing. But as he became more proficient, he also became aware of how limiting it was, playing on a single neck guitar with two hands tapping. The strings were too close together, he couldn’t move one finger past the other on the finger board, and one hand continually wanted to be on the same string as the other. Dave felt that this technique was too restricting for a traditional guitar. Dave wanted more strings, and possibly two necks, where one hand that could be independent of the other. One day, in his frustration, Dave asked his father Joe Bunker, a fine craftsman, if he thought that they could build a double neck guitar. "We can build anything", said Joe. "Just draw it up". Several long months later there it was, a gangly looking apparatus with two necks at odd angles to each other on one body, Yet it was quite an accomplishment for their first attempt as novice guitar builders. Although Dave didn’t know it at that time, this instrument was the first chapter in his continuing lifetime quest for the perfect stringed musical instrument. Dave Bunker called it his Duo-lectar, for “dual electric guitar”.  Later, in his first patent, he changed the name to Touch Guitar. The first ever double neck Touch Guitar patent was filed in 1957 in Seattle and was issued a full US patent in 1961. Dave Bunker's Touch Guitar was the second patented new stringed instrument in the US. Many double neck guitars had been built, and still are, but only one neck at a time can be played. The claim that made the first Touch Guitar possible was a manual muting of the strings to eliminate unwanted noise. No one had previously been able to suppress this noise, as two hands were playing on two necks, leaving no hand to mute the unwanted tones. Three new claims or improvements were granted to this patent, #2,989,884: a muting apparatus, wide string spacing, and a body design which would easily allow the artist to simultaneously play two necks with two hands. Although this instrument was a clumsy first attempt toward an ultimate goal, it was a great milestone in the quest for the perfect stringed musical instrument. The Touch Guitar evolution years, and the Dave Bunker Show Like most everything dreamed, time seems irrelevant when only perfection will do. Version after version, one little improvement after the other... as friends and family kept urging Dave to go get a real job! Because he needed income to support his engineering ideas, Dave decided to do exactly that. As a teacher of guitar which he'd become, Dave was also meeting many talented, young artists. In the late 1960’s a father and mother brought two girls to Dave Bunker for guitar lessons. It didn’t take long to realize that they were exceptionally gifted. The two older girls, Vicki and Patti, quickly became proficient on two, three-quarter size Martin guitars and soon were singing beautiful songs accompanied by their instruments. The mother Jodi and younger daughter Dixie then learned other percussion instruments, and both became good singers and drummers. Dave identified a real working collection of talents with which to build a group. With his Touch Guitar filling out the mix, as bass and lead guitar all in one, this gifted set became the Dave Bunker Show featuring the Wilkinson Family. And their star was quick to rise. For more than a decade their show played throughout the western United States and Alaska, along such early greats as Jimmy Hendricks, Jimmy Dean and others. In 1963 Dave's older brother Allen (big Al) again came back into play. Allen was now a grizzly tough logger who spent five to six days a week in southeast Alaska being dropped out of a helicopter into the wilds of Alaska. He was cutting many of the power line right-of-ways that today bring electricity to the cities. The Red dog saloon,a dirt floored and very wild night spot in Ketchikan Alaska, would seem like the most unlikely place in the world where anyone would find an opening to one of the finest night spots in Nevada. In 1964 it almost took an act of Congress to get a booking in Las Vegas where some of the top entertainers in America were performing, but it happened to Dave and his band. The last thing in the world you would expect to see in the Red Dog was a man dressed to the hilt in a one thousand dollar black suit and two beautiful blondes, one on each arm, to a grizzly old logger like big Al, this was just over the top. Eight of the dirtiest, loud mouthed, bad mouthed Timber cutters were sitting at a round table, all getting blasted, when (this stranger and his two beautiful lady's walked in) walked a man in a black, thousand dollar suit with two beautiful blondes, one on each arm. His name was Bill Green and relates the story as he remembered: "When I walked into the Red Dog saloon that evening with my two lady friends, I couldn’t help but notice a table of wild loggers. They were a noisy bunch and I knew noise from my days around the Las Vegas bars. I really just tried to ignore them, but all of a sudden here was this big burly guy with pants shredded halfway to his knees. He smeled Bill said, "Well this is my wife and this is her sister. We're from Las Vegas and we're up here on business". Of course Allen couldn’t let it stop there. He had to know what business. Bill answered that he was making a deal to buy one of the southeast Alaska airlines and then asked Allen if he wanted to sit down. Lucky for Dave and his band he did. After the crew got a round of booze from Bill, Allen and Bill became talking buddies, and their party-friendship even extended into the next several days. It was on one of those days that Bill asked Allen if he had a brother named Dave Bunker, who had a young musical group in the Washington State area which he had been told about. Allen, quite surprised that he would know of his brother, owned up to the sibling relationship.. Bill Green was the one-half owner of the famous Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas and eventually purchased Wein Air of Alaska. Bill told Allen to tell his brother that, when he felt ready, to contact his entertainment director Carolyn in Las Vegas, which a year later he did. Shortly thereafter, the Dave Bunker Show was booked into the Golden Nugget, six months a year for the next ten years. Bill Green would laugh so hard he’d cry when he would tell Dave about that strange and scary day when he had met his brother, big Al. Over the next ten years, Dave says that Bill was a great man, and so was the other gentleman and his wife, Buck Blain, who owned the other half of the Golden Nugget. The Nugget was sold in 1974 for a hefty sum, which also ended the many years of country music which had been such a tradition. Those years featured some of the finest country, cross over stars and stage groups to appear anywhere. It was during these ten years that many changes and innovations were made to the Touch Guitar. Some worked and others didn’t, but a great understanding of the instrument which Dave Bunker had dreamed had now moved a bit closer to completion. like a chain saw burning sawdust and he slapped me on the back. He loudly asked what the hell I was doing in his town with two beautiful women, when all he had was seven ugly b------s.. Shortly after The Dave Bunker Show closed at the Golden Nugget, Dave took more time to work on improving his Touch Guitar. He had realized in his many performances that his manual muting design was never going to properly work for the Touch Guitar. So he decided to call on an engineering friend, George Blatt, who had just moved from Argentina to (Bothell)Burien, Washington, to work for Red Carlson. Carlson (who) owned the Artisan Organ Company. Dave had a business association with Red and asked George if it was possible to build an electronic type muting device. George assured Dave that they could. Several weeks later they had their first “always off” instead of “always on” guitar which solved a passel of previous problems associated with noise, attack of a note, threshold of a note and a group of other issues. At this point Dave thought he had the bull by the horns, but soon found that he only had it by the tail. He now discovered he had deeper problems. One of the problems that plagued him most was the electronic switching required when you touch a string to the fret. This action turns on a electronic (FET type) switch and allows the signal of the notes to be played through the amplifier. Many things worked... but not well enough.  Early electronic switches were just too noisy, mostly caused by AC and DC voltage differences and voltage offsets. In the 1990 GT-2000 series, using RC circuits, Dave was able to silence most noise. But he found he was losing some of the audio range because of the RC (resistor/capacitor) application. It wasn’t until the development of new technology audio switchers in the mid 90’s and early 2000’s that a perfect audio switch combination was found. Today there is absolutely no noise of any kind when touching the string to or releasing it from the fret and the speed of each note (repeat) is much faster than any artist can play. This advancement made MIDI an easy and enjoyable addition to the Touch Guitar as it eliminated virtually all unwanted sounds. It seemed like time had consumed its capsule and that the Black Devon guitar had served its purpose well. It had  launched this twisted path of time. It had burned but not disappeared. Yet it fostered the interest in Dave Bunker that ultimately would give birth to new sounds in music that would create songs and music never before imagined. The end of T G Evolution--DDB 10/14/08