Test

while most instruments are made to sound similar to other older famous instruments,
we allways searched for the new improved, the most expressive, least noisy, most flexible…
for example our guitars can take the function of

– a deep full bass, with the Polybass –

– a singing tone like a celo or woodwind with Polydistortion –

– a clean broad tone similar to an acoustic guitar, but “better” –

– an agressive rock sound with a distortion, even with nylon strings –

and you can play it very softly, because it has no noise and no feedback
and we think Bach would have loved this sound, please listen to this on real monitor speakers:

Inventions

the Paradis team can list more creative innovation than most big companies!

Rolf met Matthias because they both wanted a polyhonic (hexaphonic, separate string) pickup and since piezo had some obvious advantages, they learned from how to build them and soon they sounded more like the string than any other… up to date!

1985 Polysubbass: the first effect that uses inter string inteligence: it detects the lowest played string

Polybass can be built into any guitar with a polyhonic (hexaphonic, separate string) pickup
Out of the box, plug and play, it only works in guitars with RMC Polydrive system, mainly the Godin Multiac’s that provide a 13pin Roland compatible output: SA/ACS/Spectrum/Jazz (not Duo, not Encore).

1986 the first low D fret board extention (with one click thumb operation)

This helps a lot for those who sometimes tune down the lowest string. our version is much easier because the other notes on the neck stay the same!

Its much harder to create a headless nylon than steel string. the screw system as Ned Steinberg spread it in the 80ies does not work because the nylon string extends about 5 times more. so Rolf found a way to include standard tuners into the body

1991 mono rail: the first bridge for bass for individual strings, since common on Ibanez and other instruments

We wanted to optimize the separation between strings on the piezo pickup, so Rolf built a bridge where each string sits directly on the body. when he designed the Ibanez AFR bass, he also used this system and Ibanez patented it together with him and called it MonoRail. now they use it even without piezo pickups!

1992 LOOP delay: the frist livelooping tool with a Record and all those other functions that so many looping tools use now

Its hard to imagine now that until 1992 there was no tool on the marked which could do the most common Livelooping command: Tap-Play-Tap-Repeat – usually called Record. but the LOOP delay was not only the first tool with this function but it had most functions that later were offered (except multi track, because we did not have the processor power) and many functions that never became copied because all later loopers had a different memory configuration (read more here)

2005 Spuler-Paradis: the first hollow solid body nylon guitar

After Rolf worked as a machine designer for 10 years, he had all the skills to design the entire guitar in 3D (I doubt that anyone else did that in 2005) and this gave him the prcision to route precisely enough from the back to make the top suficiently thin to react similar to a glued together acoustic guitar

2007 Diguit: the only FireWire guitar with built in 12ch audio interface and András Szalay MIDI conversion

This project failed because it aparently was too complex for the users and really, few years later FireWire was completely abolished, so we learned to not build short life electronics into long life instruments. nevertheless the instruments possibilities were amazing:

2016 Polybass as a upgrade for Godin Guitars

our clean and deep sound of the Polybass was 30 years old by then, but new was that someone create a board that can be placed into someone elses guitar, without soldering! It was Tom Maiers idea. he wanted to improve the noise of the guitar and found that instead of only improving the preamp, we could also add our favorite effect. and Philipp Scheidegger created the discrete noise free preamp and we redesigned the suboctave effect completely to make a single 9V battery last nearly as long as the preamp did!