Acoustic Guitar 273.pdf

OTIS TAYLOR | INDIGO GIRLS | JASON ISBELL | KAREN DALTON

SEPTEMBER 2015 | ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM

WARREN HAYNES UNPLUGGED SOUTHERN ROCKER TEAMS UP WITH RAILROAD EARTH

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SPIRIT FAMILY REUNION Wake Up, Rounder FAIRPORT CONVENTION Matty Groves JOHN McCUTCHEON Joe Hill’s Last Will

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CONTENTS

Strummin’ & Learnin’ The New York City Guitar School offers classes from ‘Blues Guitar Basics’ and ‘Play the Beatles’ to ‘Ear Training for Guitarists’ and ‘Songwriters’ Circle.’ COMMUNITY LEARNING, P. 34

Features 18 Deep Blues Otis Taylor explores the rock classic “Hey Joe” and the dark side of his songs By Kenny Berkowitz

Special Focus Acoustic Guitars in the Classroom 30 Bluegrass U Young pickers head to college to hone down-home chops

Miscellany 10 From the Home Office 12 Opening Act 80 Marketplace 81 Ad Index 82 Final Note

By Pat Moran

22 Into the Mystic Warren Haynes and Railroad Earth unite on Ashes & Dust By Pat Moran

34 Community Learning Community music schools offer an affordable way to study guitar By Louise Lee

38 Guitars for Good Needy schools benefit from nonprofits bringing guitars By Blair Jackson

September 2015 Volume 26, No. 3, Issue 273 On the Cover Warren Haynes Photographer Danny Clinch

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CONTENTS

Michaud Guitars were on exhibit at the Memphis Guitar Fest p. 57

NEWS 15 The Beat Remembering folksinger Karen Dalton; rediscovering guitarist Peter Walker; Leon Redbone retires; Iris DeMent returns 17 News Spotlight A chat with Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls PLAY 42 Take It Easy How your guitar can provide music therapy 44 The Basics What mode is that? 46 Weekly Workout Using the CAGED chord system to open up the fretboard Songs to Play 50 Joe Hill’s Last Will John McCutcheon pays tribute to the labor legend 52 Wake Up, Rounder! Sunny vibes from Spirit Family Reunion 54 Matty Groves A classic English murder ballad AG TRADE 57 Shoptalk Boutique builders turn out at Memphis guitar fest; Yamaha revamps Silent Guitar; a wireless MIDI controller for acoustics; plus, Fab Four guitar mystery solved

62 Makers & Shakers The saga of Virginia-based luthiers Huss & Dalton 64 Guitar Guru Why 12-fret guitars sound so good 66 Review: Martin GPCRSGT A no-frills workhorse electro-acoustic 68 Review: Guild Westerly F-1512 Jumbo-size jangle from a 12-string 70 Review: Epiphone Masterbilt AJ-45ME Modern “vintage” guitar pays tribute to J-45 72 Pickin’ Ibanez AVT2E-NT tenor guitar 74 Great Acoustics 1976 Gurian S3R MIXED MEDIA 76 Playlist Jason Isbell’s roots-rock gem, Something More Than Free; also, Dar Williams’ Emerald, Little Wings’ Explains, and Helen Avakian’s Notes from Helen

AcousticGuitar.com 7

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8 September 2015

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Gone noodling

’m looking for inspiration in the sweet sound of a Santa Cruz PJ parlor guitar, the AG 10th anniversary custom model that hangs from the wall outside of my office. (It’s so easy to play a rag on this short-scale neck.) The door is closed, but passersby can see through the vertical window on the side of the doorway. It probably looks like I’m hard at work, though I’m really just noodling, shaking off a bad head cold and playing little blues runs, while trying to fill this page with thoughtful prose before slipping out to a baseball game. Well, at least the noodling’s going well. It’s the end of June and one of the first heat waves of the summer is battling the cool marine layer on San Pablo Bay. This time next week, I’ll be standing in front of a Fourth of July BBQ, and I’ll be perched on the patio with one of my own guitars. Noodling, most likely. I do a lot of noodling, so much so, in fact, that AG is publishing a special section next month on the art of noodling as well as backyard jam etiquette, a primer for couch potatoes (Are you sensing a lazy-hazy summer theme here?), and other tips for those who play around the house.

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This month, you’ll find a special section on guitars in the classroom that includes an article on guitarists who are enrolled in, or who have graduated from, degree-granting roots-music programs. There also are features on the benefits of studying at a community music school (you had me at sliding scale) and the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society’s program in Ferguson, Missouri. Elsewhere, you’ll find a cover story on S o u t h e r n r o c k e r Wa r r e n H a y n e s ’ n e w unplugged collaboration with Railroad Earth; a report on John Lennon’s lost Gibson J-160E, one of the most iconic guitars in acoustic rock history; an interview with bluesman Otis Taylor, discussing his new album based on the rock classic “Hey Joe”; a review of the Epiphone AJ-45ME, a real workhorse and a real bargain for budget-conscious guitarists; a dispatch from the inaugural Memphis Acoustic Guitar Festival; a transcript of a rare Earl Bell blues song, as well as two other songs to play; a Weekly Workout on mastering the CAGED chord system (no pain, no gain); and much, much more. Me? I’m going back to my noodling. Play on! —Greg Cahill

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10 September 2015

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OPENING ACT

The Doobie Brothers STERN GROVE FESTIVAL SAN FRANCISCO, CA JUNE 14, 2015

JAY BLAKESBERG

Pat Simmons, left, and John McFee

12 September 2015

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The Beat Leon Redbone retires

16

The Beat Iris DeMent’s new muse

17

NEWS

News Spotlight Indigo Girls return

REDISCOVERING PETER WALKER

THE BEAT

Karen Dalton

Remembering Karen Dalton

A new album brings the late folksinger’s unfinished songs to life BY WHITNEY PHANEUF

olk artist Karen Dalton only recorded a handful of covers before her tragic death in 1993, but thanks to guitarist Peter Walker and the roots imprint Tompkins Square, the world is hearing her original songs for the first time. The woman Bob Dylan described in his autobiography Chronicles as having “a voice like Billie Holiday” and playing guitar “like Jimmy Reed” recorded a mix of traditional and new music by such folk contemporaries as Tim Hardin on her two studio albums, 1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best and 1971’s In My Own Time, earning a cult following for her jazz-inflected interpretations. Her own lyrics and poetry didn’t see the light of day until 2012, when Walker—who cared for the troubled folksinger before her death from AIDS and currently manages Dalton’s estate—compiled and self-published them as Karen Dalton: Songs, Poems, and Writings. The book inspired Tompkins Square label owner Josh Rosenthal, who had helped resurrect Walker’s career (see sidebar, “Rediscovering

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Peter Walker”), to ask his favorite female musicians to put music to Dalton’s lost lyrics. “I decided that the material should be covered by female artists, as the feelings and expressions in the lyrics seem to come from a decidedly feminine perspective,” Rosenthal writes in a statement. The new 11-song collection Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton features Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, Sharon Van Etten, and more. It captures Dalton’s bluesy spirit and bittersweet sentiment, similar to how Wilco and Billy Bragg, and more recently Del McCoury, brought Woody Guthrie’s unfinished songs to life. “Some of the lyrics were probably intended as poems, not as lyrics to be set to music. Some of the songs, like ‘Remembering Mountains,’ for instance, actually have chords assigned to them,” Rosenthal notes. “Whatever her intent, we find a gifted lyricist whose talents as a songwriter and poet have never been known to the public . . . until now.” AG

In the late ’60s, Peter Walker was considered one of the most talented guitarists of his generation, alongside John Fahey, Sandy Bull, and Robbie Basho. An innovator of the American folk-raga, which combined American Primitive guitar with Indian raga traditions, Walker released two acclaimed albums on Vanguard Records— Rainy Day Raga and Second Poem—before heading to Spain to master flamenco and, soon after, retreating into family life. Decades later, Tompkins Square label owner Josh Rosenthal came knocking. “In the pre-social-media environment of 2005, when I started Tompkins Square, finding someone named ‘Peter Walker’ was challenging. After many dead ends, I contacted a publisher who gave me Peter’s Woodstock, New York, address in ‘I’m-really-not-supposed-to-dothis’ fashion,” Rosenthal recalls. His persistence paid off. By 2008, Walker was back in the spotlight and releasing new music—his first recordings in nearly 40 years. A Raga for Peter Walker paired four new Walker cuts in his signature folk-raga style with musical tributes from younger admirers, including Jack Rose, Thurston Moore, James Blackshaw, and Steffen BashoJunghans. That same year, Walker also released Echo of My Soul, an album of entirely new material devoted to Spanish guitar styles. In 2009, Tompkins Square released Long Lost Tapes 1970, sessions recorded in Levon Helm’s living room that Rosenthal discovered in an old box at Walker’s home. —W.P. AcousticGuitar.com 15

THE BEAT

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Leon Redbone

LEON REDBONE RETIRES

IRIS DEMENT RETURNS WITH ‘TRACKLESS WOODS’

The enigmatic roots artist Leon Redbone (real name alleged to be Dickran Gobalian), who gained a following in the mid-’70s from appearances on Saturday Night Live and such famous fans as Bob Dylan, has announced his retirement from both stage and studio. In a statement, Redbone’s management writes that “his health has been a matter of concern for some time” and “it has become too challenging for him to continue the full range of professional activities.” The 65-year-old retro singer-songwriter— characterized by his gravelly baritone, nimble guitar work, old-time shtick, fedora, and sunglasses—specialized in early 20th-century music, including jazz and blues standards and Tin Pan Alley classics. To commemorate Redbone’s retirement, Jack White’s Third Man Records will press a vinyl reissue of his 1975 debut album, On the Track, and issue a doublealbum collection of never-before-released live and studio recordings from 1972, titled Long Way Home. Check thirdmanrecords.com for official release dates. —W.P.

From her current home in rural Iowa, Iris DeMent found an unlikely muse in a 20th-century Russian poet. The singersongwriter’s new Iris DeMent album, The Trackless Woods, is a collaboration of sorts with the Russian writer and activist Anna Akhmatova. DeMent started reading Akhmatova’s work and quickly began penning melodies around her words. “My experience with and connection to poetry has primarily been through songs, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising to me that most, if not all, of these poems weren’t fully known to me, or understood on that deeper emotional level, until the melodies arrived,” DeMent told NPR. DeMent says the album was also inspired by her daughter, whom she and her husband, singersongwriter Greg Brown, adopted from Siberia in 2005. DeMent is currently on tour; check irisdement.com for dates. —W.P.

7/2/15 9:50 AM

NEWS SPOTLIGHT

Amy Ray and Emily Saliers

Tried & True

Indigo Girls One Lost Day Vanguard

Emily Saliers—one half of the Indigo Girls— always returns to the guitar for songwriting BY WHITNEY PHANEUF

mily Saliers and Amy Ray met in elementary school, started playing together in high school, and, 30 years later, are still making music as the Grammy-winning Indigo Girls. When the duo recently stopped by the AG office to record an Acoustic Guitar Session, they shared that the chemistry they felt when they began harmonizing and playing guitar together as teens has never waned. The Indigo Girls’ new album, One Lost Day (Vanguard), finds the women writing songs from very different lives than when they last recorded four years ago: Both Saliers and Ray became mothers, Ray’s father died, and Saliers went into rehab. Those themes imbue the 13-track album, which ranges in style from new-wave guitar rock, on “Happy in the Sorrow Key,” to their classic folk sound, on “Spread the Pain Around,” which recalls their 1989 breakthrough hit “Closer to Fine.” The one constant, Saliers says, is her lifelong passion for guitar.

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How did you start playing guitar so young? Music saturated my family experience. My sisters and I were all encouraged to learn and play any instrument or instruments of our choice.

I started to play guitar when I was in third grade. I saw a flyer posted in the schoolroom about lessons at the YMCA. I just remember thinking I would like to try guitar. As soon as I held one in my hands, I became completely obsessed with it. I played it incessantly and began to write songs with it. My first guitar was a ¾-size nylon-string that my parents bought me for $24. I still have it. Who were your favorite acoustic guitarists? What did you learn from them? Early on, I loved John Denver—his songs were so acoustic-guitar-focused and they inspired me to write my own songs. In high school, I loved Ann Wilson [of Heart] because she taught me that women could play guitar well and that acoustic guitar could rock. When I studied classical guitar at age 11, I listened to Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening. Later on, some of my very favorite acoustic guitarists played with artists I knew and loved, like John Jennings with Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Val McCallum with Vonda Shepard. I love the way my friends Adam Hoffman and Scott Schwartz from the Shadowboxers play acoustic guitar—they never resort

to the easiest chord. Sometimes the easiest chord is absolutely perfect, sometimes it’s not. How does guitar play into your songwriting process? Walk us through one of the songs on One Lost Day. The guitar has been the vehicle that has driven my songs from the very beginning of my songwriting. While I have stretched a bit with writing songs on banjo, uke, and even piano, guitar is my tried and true. I love all guitars: acoustic, electric, high-strung, 12-string, nylon-string. I wrote a song called “Findlay, Ohio, 1968” for our new record, One Lost Day. I was just messing around in an open-D tuning and landed upon this chord progression that I had never used before, even though I write a lot in open-D tuning. So, this chord progression immediately felt spooky to me, and spooky made me think of childhood memories, some that actually happened to me and some that were a dreamy imagining of mysterious things that kids try to interpret. Suddenly, all of these images poured out, and only because I happened to land on that particular chord progression in that tuning on my acoustic guitar. The song belonged to that chord pattern. It wouldn’t have materialized without it. AG AcousticGuitar.com 17

DEEP BLUES Otis Taylor on ‘Hey Joe’ and exploring the dark side of songs

EVAN SIMONE

BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

18 September 2015

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very time he records an album, Otis Taylor endeavors to do something different. On Hey Joe Opus/Red Meat (Trance Blues Records), he’s created a ten-part suite around the ’60s chestnut “Hey Joe,” about a man who’s on the run after shooting his lover. It’s a song he’s been performing for close to 20 years, and has recorded twice before, but unlike Jimi Hendrix—or the hundreds of others who’ve covered the song, including the Byrds, the Leaves, and Love—Taylor is less interested in Joe himself than he is in Joe’s questionable decision to kill the woman he loves. Taylor uses “Hey Joe”—penned in 1962 by South Carolinian Billy Roberts Jr., a member of the San Francisco-based folk trio the Driftwood Singers—as the moral foundation of an album that explores “the decisions that we make and how they affect us.” Taylor focuses on the tragic consequences—the two lives ruined by jealousy. In the sadness of Taylor’s voice, you can hear the regret underlying Anne Harris’ violin, the portentous echo of Ron Miles’ cornet. You also hear that wistfulness in the writing of three new songs, including “Peggy Lee,” about a decision to change genders, and “Red Meat,” about falling in love, for better or worse. It’s in the guitar-playing, which is for the most part electric, as Taylor weaves his “trance blues” with help from Warren Haynes, Bill Nershi of the String Cheese Incident, and Taylor Scott, repeating the same riffs over and over for maximum effect. And it’s in the four instrumentals that tie these stories together into 48 continuous minutes of music, arguably the most powerful he’s ever recorded. Do you remember the first time you heard ‘Hey Joe’? It was Love [who covered the song on their 1966 debut album]. I was a kid living in Denver, with no hip people around, and I thought Love was just too cool. Two black guys in a band had a little process, long hair like the Beatles’ style. I wanted to be like Love, have all the mod clothes. So when I heard Hendrix do it [on the 1967 US single], I didn’t like it as much, because I liked the fast version. Then, becoming a Hendrix fan and trying to deal with the Hendrix thing, it just sort of morphed. We did “Hey Joe” on my first album, BlueEyed Monster, just bass and electric guitar, no drums. I didn’t even play guitar, just sang. So when I wanted to start playing it on guitar, I went to the [Denver] Folklore Center and said, “Teach me the chords of ‘Hey Joe.’” But I forgot to go to the A, so I’ve been doing “Hey Joe” without the A forever.

Why has it stayed with you for so long? When I do a concert, I play all my songs, which a lot of people don’t know, and as soon as I start “Hey Joe,” everybody starts clapping. Because they know it, like, “OK, here’s something I can relate to.” And it helps suck in the crowd. We usually do it for about 15, 20 minutes. In Europe, we do it for about half an hour. Now, on the album, I have eight of my other songs on there, but you can’t really tell, because it feels like you’re in “Hey Joe” the whole time. When did you know the music on this album would be continuous? When I first thought about it. See, this is my 14th album, and every time I do one, it gets harder, not easier. It’s like a riddle: How can you be different, but yet the same? Because if I do something the way I always do it, people will say, “He’s already done that. Why bother?” If I do something too different, they’ll go, “Well, that’s not very Otis.” So as a singer-songwriter, I thought if I created the illusion I was making a cover song the title of my album, it would be different. I decided to make the album a journey, where you start listening to “Hey Joe,” but end up listening to Otis.

When Negroes Walked the Earth 1997

Truth Is Not Fiction 2003

CONT. ON PG. 21

5 ESSENTIAL OTIS TAYLOR ALBUMS “Otis Taylor is among the most mercurial of bluesmen,” Thom Jurek wrote in the AllMusic Guide. “While his signature vocal phrasing and playing—whether it be on guitar, mandolin, or banjo—is rooted in several blues traditions—his music almost never strictly conforms.” Since emerging from retirement in 1995, after careers as a musician, professional bicycling coach, and an antique dealer, the Chicago-born Taylor has recorded 14 albums, steeped in blues, often dealing with social injustice, and incorporating a mix of acoustic and electric guitars, resonators, banjos, trumpets, drums, and other instruments. Here are five essential Otis Taylor albums:

Recapturing the Banjo 2008

Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs 2009

My World Is Gone 2013

AcousticGuitar.com 19

EVAN SIMONE

OTIS TAYLOR

Son House is one of Taylor’s favorite artists

THE MINIMALIST Ask Otis Taylor to name his Top 5 acoustic blues albums, and the question falls flat. “I don’t listen to albums like some people do,” says Taylor, whose 14-fret H model signature Santa Cruz guitar is a mainstay of that company’s product line. “I just hear songs.” 20 September 2015

So I ask: How about five songs? “I don’t even know songs,” says Taylor, who then names “Death Letter Blues” by Son House, who he’d seen perform in 1966. Instead, Taylor paraphrases his favorite blues line, taken from “Hellhound on My Trail” by Robert Johnson. “‘If

today was Christmas Eve, if today was Christmas Eve, then tomorrow would be Christmas Day,’” he says. “That blows me away. I don’t know why.” He’s stopped before the second half of the couplet—“All I would need is my little sweet rider just to pass the time away,

to pass the time away”—which resolves the first, so I ask if there’s more. “No, just that line,” he says. “It’s so profound. If you’re still alive, it’ll be Christmas Day.” —K.B.

What made it so hard? Usually, when you do an album, you record all the songs, right? Then you pick out the sequence. Well, I couldn’t do it that way. I had to have “Hey Joe” at the beginning, “Hey Joe” at the end, and bring everything into the middle. So I changed the lyrics to a song I’d written a long time ago, “Cold at Midnight,” and wrote some new songs: “The Heart Is a Muscle,” “Peggy Lee,” “Red Meat.” What’s behind the song ‘Red Meat’? Sometimes you eat the meat and sometimes the meat eats you. Sometimes you fall in love and it’s good. Sometimes you fall in love and it’s bad. That’s “Red Meat.” It’s about how decisions make us. Every decision affects the world, affects us, affects our family. You get married, you get divorced: “I loved you, but now I don’t love you.” Every second, we make a decision that changes our life, or somebody else makes a decision that changes our life. Is that too profound?

What do you teach people on guitar? How to play one note. How to feel one note. And how to get into the groove. That’s all I teach them. I’m a minimalist musician. It isn’t how many notes you play, it’s how you play that one note. Are you thinking about that when you write? I just play. I just write the songs, and they’re gone. Songs for me are like dreams—I do it,

and then it’s out of my head, I don’t think about it anymore. I’m not that deep. See, I don’t really feel like I’m a dark person. Sometimes I have to talk about my songs, and I say, “I’m just dark. If I had to sing ‘Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-EI-O,’ I’d add ‘and the cow died.’” I can see the dark side of a song in a millionth of a second. And go there. Intensely. It’s nothing I consciously do, it’s just in my instincts. Michael Jordan can fly. I can get dark. AG

Smokey darkness

‘I’M A MINIMALIST MUSICIAN. IT ISN’T HOW MANY NOTES YOU PLAY, IT’S HOW YOU PLAY THAT ONE NOTE.’ OTIS TAYLOR

What’s the most important decision you made in designing a signature guitar with Santa Cruz? I only wanted 14 frets. No frets over the body. Because I’m not a very technical player, I can’t even barre, so I’m not going to go way up the neck. I thought that made it way prettier. I have a theory that the smaller the guitar, the better the sound. Like a violin is very small, but the sound is so intense. And they made it deeper, so I could get more bass, because I need to have the balance of sounds. What does trance blues mean to you? Trance blues is trance music, but it’s blues. Like voodoo music is trance music. Mississippi Hill Country music, Malian music, Ravi Shankar is trance. Anything that’s repetitive, with no chord changes. When we first started the band, we’d play a song and people would go, “Oh, that’s a nice hook.” Five minutes later, they’d get bored, wonder where the chord changes are. But by ten minutes, they’ve forgotten completely, they’re just lost in it. You have to bore people with trance before you can suck them in.

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AcousticGuitar.com 21

BRIAN GLASS

22 September 2015

INTO THE MYSTIC Southern-rock iconoclast Warren Haynes hitches a ride with Railroad Earth on his new acoustic-driven solo album By Pat Moran

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arren Haynes says the first take of a brand-new song is like a first date. “You’re hyper-aware. You’re on your best behavior. But when the song is fresh, your ideas are also fresh. You’re rolling with the flow and whatever happens at the moment—if it’s good—is carved in time.” In casual T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, the guitar adept, Gov’t Mule founder, and Allman Brothers alumnus seems down to earth and comfortable anywhere—even in the elegant upper sitting room of Charleston’s Francis Marion Hotel, an ornate 90-year-old establishment around the corner from the music hall where Gov’t Mule will play later this evening. He leans forward as he describes the recording process and genesis of Ashes & Dust (Provogue), his new acoustic-accented solo album. Throughout his career Haynes has compiled dozens of songs he composed on acoustic guitar. A few are current, but some go back 30 years. “They all fit together,” Haynes says. “They didn’t belong on a Gov’t Mule project, an Allman Brothers project, or even my last solo record [2011’s Man in Motion]. They come from an Appalachian and Celtic folk direction— singer/songwriter-type songs.” One of those songs, the country- and Latintinged “Spots of Time,” was bookmarked for an Allman Brothers project. “It would have been on the final Allman Brothers record, had we made that record,” he explains. “One of the reasons I wanted to record ‘Spots of Time’ for [Ashes & Dust] was to take advantage of the arrangement we’d worked up onstage.”

Many of the titles on the new album’s tracklist are of similar vintage, dating back to 2010. “Before I recorded Man in Motion, I was going to cut a record with Levon Helm, Leon Russell, and [Hall and Oates and session bassist] T-Bone Wolk.” Though written on acoustic guitar, the songs “would have been a little more electric, more soul and R&B influenced,” Haynes says. However, when Wolk, and then Helm, passed away, “the project just disintegrated.” Yet the songs remained. Haynes started playing those soulful numbers in a different manner—dusky acoustic arrangements that harked back to the roots and mountain music he heard growing up in Asheville, North Carolina. It took the involvement of Railroad Earth to give Haynes’ orphaned tunes a new life. The newgrass-influenced Americana sextet first caught Haynes’ ear in 2009 when they opened for the Allman Brothers at Red Rocks. “I’m not sure what I expected,” Haynes says, but Railroad Earth defied his preconceptions, and he became a fan of the Stillwater, New Jersey, band. When Haynes and the combo found themselves sharing a bill at DelFest in 2011, Haynes invited the band onstage to flesh out his acoustic set. “The gig was really cool, very loose, but it had a vibe,” he says. In 2012, the vibe intensified at two solo shows at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, where Railroad Earth joined Haynes onstage again. “We were better prepared, but it was still spontaneous. The chemistry was there, and I started thinking, ‘Maybe this is the way I should do the next record.’”

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ast December, at Barber Shop Studios in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, Haynes and Railroad Earth started recording songs with an acoustic/Americana approach. Lashings of soaring fiddle, shimmering mandolin, and percolating banjo gave old songs, like “Is It Me or You,” a fresh lease on life. Haynes, who originally composed the tune on acoustic guitar, felt that “playing [the song] that way made sense.” It also made sense to apply the recording method used on “Is It Me or You” to the rest of the sessions. “It’s all live. [Railroad Earth] and I set up in the big room—myself, Andy Goessling [acoustic guitar] and John Skehan [mandolin]. Tim Carbone played fiddle and Carey Harmon played drums in isolated rooms that we could see. Andrew Altman, on upright bass, was the farthest away,” but still in view of his fellow players. That way, Haynes and Railroad Earth captured the energy of everyone playing together in the same space. It had a practical application, too. Since Haynes likes to switch up arrangements and chords on the fly, band members needed to see him when he cued or called out changes. “We got a chemistry working and went with it,” Haynes says. “That’s my favorite way to record.” That chemistry gelled three days into the recording process with “Hallelujah Boulevard,” an epic reverie that wraps echoing guitar and silvery mandolin in a violin sirocco. “It’s a narrative, so there’s not a lot of room for soloing. AcousticGuitar.com 23

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It’s more of a conversational piece,” Haynes says. “I thought it would benefit from recording around midnight. I said to the guys, ‘Let’s wait until the end of the night and capture whatever happens.’ They all agreed not to listen to the playback until the next morning.” Haynes played the song solo for Railroad Earth, and then gave the group three words of instruction: “Think Astral Weeks,” Haynes said, referring to Van Morrison’s magisterial, mystic 1968 masterpiece, “and everybody knew what I was talking about.” Haynes feels “Hallelujah Boulevard,” like most of the other cuts recorded, benefited from his “three take” rule. “I like to do things in threes. Once you get past that third take you’re trying to re-create something you’ve already done, usually to no avail. The early takes are better because you’re not thinking, you’re responding.” That intuitive approach informed much of the material on Ashes & Dust. “Blue Maiden’s Tale,” a gossamer Celtic ballad, “has this surreal dreamlike interlude. It’s psychedelic with acoustic instrumentation—‘Psyche-Celtic,’” Haynes says, laughing. “That was impromptu. Every take was different and we really liked the one with the interlude.” The album’s title also came unbidden in a late-night epiphany—“I was listening to one of the playbacks of ‘Spots of Time’ and the line, ‘Memories that to me are everything, but to someone else might be only ashes and dust,’ jumped out. I realized there were all these references to ashes and dust throughout the record.” Noting that the album title “conjures up a folksy image,” Haynes says the songs “are very personal. They represent important memories in my life.” To capture those memories, Haynes and Railroad Earth relied on a delicate acoustic weave of fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar. “I played three different [custom] Rockbridge acoustic guitars on the record [including a dreadnought] and I played my Washburn signature model acoustic.” Haynes also played a 1964 Epiphone acoustic, and he used his 1974 Guild acoustic to provide the ghostly slide guitar on “Glory Road,” the album’s eerie highdesert lament. “I played a lot of Martins on that record,” Railroad Earth guitarist Andy Goessling adds by phone a week later at Brothers Music Shop in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania. The shop is restoring a few of Andy’s guitars, including the 1980 Martin M-38 he played on Ashes & Dust. “I was playing the M-38 and putting it on the seventhfret capo. I wanted the Martin’s tone, but I didn’t want to take over the track. So I had [the M-38] in open D. That way I could play in a

tuning that was a little lighter, a little airier, than what Warren was doing with full-on rhythm.” “There were tunes where Warren played the whole track on electric. When he wasn’t on acoustic, I played rhythm with a ’42 Gibson Southern Jumbo.” Goessling also laid down rhythm tracks with his 1968 Guild D-44. “I don’t use it a lot live, but in the studio it has great separation between the strings,” he says. “It’s a pearwood model, and something about the wood gives it this transparent sound.” The Guild lays down a solid rhythm, “but still leaves plenty of room for all the other instruments, like the mandolin and bass,” he says.

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hile Haynes played and was surrounded by acoustics on the album, he just as often played electrics. “Much of the time I tracked with an electric, [while] Andy tracked with an acoustic,” he says. The exceptions are the all-acoustic “Glory Road,” “Blue Maiden’s Tale,” and Haynes’ contemporary Woody Guthrie tribute, “Beat Down the Dust.” For the hardscrabble Appalachian ballad “Company Man,” he tracked with an acoustic, then overdubbed slide. Haynes feels that, despite the use of electrics, an acoustic vibe remains ingrained in the album, in part because of the electric guitar he played throughout the project. His D’Angelico hollow-body “is more like an acoustic instrument,” he says, “because it has a wooden bridge like an acoustic. You can’t play the blues on it. It’s not designed for bending strings and vibrato. “I keep flatwound strings on that guitar, so it has an old-school sort of sound.” The guitar is also versatile: “I can set it where it’s on the verge of being dirty and you can’t tell that it’s a D’Angelico. But if I turn it down, it cleans up nicely and has this fat, warm sound that I love.” Calling the D’Angelico “a kind of jazz guitar,” Haynes says it changed the way he played. “Stranded in Self-Pity,” which couples a jaunty Django Reinhardt shuffle with New Orleans swing, reflects the D’Angelico’s acoustic-jazz influence. AcousticGuitar.com 25

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More often, however, the sound of each song “was chosen to fit the mood, and then the mood would turn around and influence the sound. It was a snowball effect,” says Haynes. For instance, the sentimental and heartbreaking “New Year’s Eve” benefits from a country-folk approach, and the defiant workingman’s anthem “Coal Tattoo” employs rattling mandolin and bluegrass banjo in a high-country tale of a union vs. mining-company clash. The latter is one of the album’s political songs, Haynes says, along with “Company Man” and “Beat Down the Dust,” in which he adopts the persona of a heartless oligarch. “I think 99 percent of the people who hear the song are going to realize that’s a character and not a very savory one,” Haynes says, adding that the album started out being much more political. “We recorded more than 30 songs. I picked the 13 that worked together to make the most cohesive statement, while also having a rhythmic and melodic arc,” he says. Whether stating a message or spinning a tale, Haynes often started with an arrangement based on his standpoint as a solo performer, but of course he accepted new ideas from his collaborators. It was inspiring, he says, “because each new song was getting this fresh treatment of having just been learned, arranged, and performed for the first few times.” At the same time, inspiration and improvisation had to be balanced with structure, and the stories Haynes wanted to tell with his songs. “With the story-songs I usually write the lyrics first because I can figure out what mood the words project and write music accordingly. I find it easier to pair the two that way,” he says. “There have been times when I wrote music that I really liked and then I wrote lyrics to it, but the two didn’t work together. They didn’t sell each other. The beautiful thing about music is that the right music will make the lyric heavier than it already is. If you can capture a lyric and the music that best sells it together, it’s like another dimension. It’s beyond music. It’s beyond poetry.” With an eclectic solo album that combines folk, acoustic jazz, and traditional story-songs into a cohesive whole, as well as a sympathetic set of collaborators in Railroad Earth, Haynes sees Ashes & Dust as a signpost to his next solo project. “We recorded a lot of material and I think we’re going to go back in and record even more,” he says. “There’s more of this to come.” Despite his satisfaction and success with acoustic material, Haynes feels a folk approach is not the path Gov’t Mule will take, at least not in the near future. “I think the next Gov’t Mule

record will be like our first two records,” he says, “but with more emphasis on instrumental passages.” That said, it’s possible that some of the new acoustic-derived material may still show up in a Mule set. “There are a couple of songs that we recorded that aren’t on Ashes & Dust that could become Gov’t Mule songs as well,” Haynes says. One song that did make the album, “Hallelujah Boulevard,” “could be a good Gov’t Mule song because of its psychedelic nature,” he adds. “There are times [onstage] when we go into a trancelike vibe as a release from harder rocking material we did earlier,” he says. In many ways, a Mule set is as much a balancing act as his current solo album, Haynes says. It’s all about “striking the midpoint between hitting people over the head and massaging them with music, between songs that are stretched to improvisational spaces and songs that tell a story. “I wouldn’t want to be in a band that just did improv, and I wouldn’t be in a band that only played short songs all night. But it sure is fun to experiment with a balance between the two.”

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ater that evening at the Charleston Music Hall, Haynes and Gov’t Mule walk that tightrope with apparent ease. Haynes’ ricocheting bent-note electric blues on “Larger Than Life” flow deftly into Mule keyboardist Danny Louis’ rolling Booker T-style fills on “Flip Wilson.” Loping reggae meets hard-rock crunch on the Bob Marley and the Wailers cover “Lively Up Yourself,” while Haynes snaps up a megaphone to lead the crowd in a call-and-response chant. Over the course of two energetic sets, Haynes’ and Gov’t Mule’s experiment proves to be a success, balancing angular psychedelic rock with liquid B.B. King guitar fills, free-form percussion-driven freak-out with ominous darkmatter trance. As the band displays mastery of technique, a telepathic feel for improvisation, and an impressive knowledge of music styles, I recall Haynes telling me the one quality he rates above all: “When you hear music we deem timeless, it’s the honesty that prevails. New technology can make a poor singer sound pretty good, but you’re never going to be able to push a button and make somebody sound like Ray Charles or Otis Redding. “So I’ve got to aim high and be ready to be compared to the greatest music of all time. But the only way that I can do that is if I’m inspired for the right reason. I can’t dilute my inspiration with ambition.” AG

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STRUMMIN’ & LEARNIN’ Looking for guitar lessons? Here’s a guide to everything from community music schools to degree-granting colleges

A member of NYC Guitar School’s Mass Appeal jam

AcousticGuitar.com 29

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BLUEGRASS U A new generation of young pickers is heading to college to hone those down-home chops By Pat Moran

30 September 2015

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nce looked upon as country music’s poorer, Appalachian kin, bluegrass has, of late, found an unlikely home in the ivory tower. In fact, 17 US colleges and universities now offer roots-music programs for flatpickers, fiddlers, banjo, and mandolin players, and the like. The burgeoning movement has not only given credence to the notion of bluegrass as an art form, it has also helped redefine how music is taught. “More and more schools are incorporating bluegrass into their music programs,” says Andy Carlson, director of the bluegrass program at Denison University, a bucolic liberal arts college in Granville, Ohio. “The attitude is changing nationally, and bluegrass is no longer looked down upon.” While the rise in the number of college-level bluegrass offerings over the past four decades doesn’t exactly constitute a flood, it does represent a sea change in music education: A traditionally down-home, do-it-yourself genre now

Left ETSU’s Bluegrass Pride Band, one of 40 in their program

Below Guitarist Courtney Hartman of Della Mae is a Berklee grad.

Given that Cook had never earned a music degree, his addition to the school’s faculty was somewhat controversial, but Carlson argued that Cook’s background as a working musician would bolster the program. “It’s something the music education world is going to have to wrap themselves around,” Carlson says. “While an instructor might not have a music degree, that’s not the important component here with this music.” In the classroom, both men rarely use sheet music. “Ninety-five percent of what we do here is learned by ear,” Cook says. “Occasionally, students are given a piece of music or a tab, but only to get them comfortable. We teach them to read chord charts to get them used to the Nashville numbering system, but almost everything is done by live recordings.”

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‘AT NO POINT WILL THEY COME TO A BAND CLASS AND PLAY BY SHEET MUSIC. IT’S NOT WHAT WE DO. IT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS.’ ETSU’S DANIEL BONER

finds itself being embraced by the formal, often exclusionary world of academia. Traditionally passed down from generation to generation, from ear to ear, bluegrass has endured, not in the form of sheet music, but via memory, where it continues to evolve. In contrast, university music programs have typically relied on fixed classical notation and tablature, presenting a challenge to educators looking to incorporate bluegrass into the curriculum. For Carlson, the question of how to teach bluegrass is personal. At age five, he was introduced to music by his grandfather, Georgia fiddler Earl Murphy. This organic approach— learning by listening—dovetailed with Carlson’s post-graduate work at the University of Georgia. “I trained in the Suzuki program. It’s a method of learning classical music much like learning a language,” Carlson says. “Music, like speech, is sound, and the Suzuki method relied on listening instead of reading. It’s teaching music the same way my grandpa taught me.”

After starting as a six-student performance group in the year 2000, Denison’s bluegrass major was formalized a decade later, requiring students to take coursework in music theory and the history of bluegrass, folk, and country music, in addition to mandatory participation in the bluegrass ensemble. Carlson’s modest performance group’s numbers quickly swelled, and the ensemble, which performs regularly, has since become a regional draw. “We had to move from our 300-seat recital hall because the fire marshal shut us down and the university president couldn’t find a seat,” Carlson says. “Now we play in Swasey Chapel, which seats 900.” As word spread about the new program, the number of students applying for the major shot up, too. “It got to the point where I couldn’t teach everybody, and the school allowed me to bring in a co-director, Casey Cook, a wonderful flatpicker who has played with the Dappled Grays,” Carlson says.

ast Tennessee State University (ETSU) pushes the division between academic and intuitive learning a step further. The school’s Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program—which instructed close to 200 students out of a total population of 15,000 last year—is not even part of the school’s music department. Instead, it falls under the Appalachian studies umbrella. “The music department wanted us to teach Western classical music,” program director Daniel Boner says. “They said students should learn about tonal counterpoints. Now you can do very well by learning those things and applying it to your music, but that’s not what our students need. We attract fiddlers and banjo players. If the first thing we put in front of them is a Bach choral, they’re not going to be interested in that.” Founded in 1982, the program has produced such notable graduates as Blue Highway guitarist Tim Stafford, Alison Krauss and Union Station bassist Barry Bales, and country-music star Kenny Chesney, perhaps because it helps prepare students for life on the road. When he was a student at the university, Boner himself toured Japan, England, Scotland, and Belgium with the college’s bluegrass band. “I was just a kid who grew up in rural southern New Jersey in farmland country and never really thought I would get to do things like that,” Boner says. Still, even though he first learned to play fiddle and guitar as a child by ear, Boner acknowledges that book learning can be a useful part of a bluegrass education. “There might be supplemental material like tablature [in the program],” Boner says. “We might use a Nashville-style chart. Students can take theory classes. We want them to understand standard musical notation, to understand chords, but at no point will they come to a band AcousticGuitar.com 31

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class and play by sheet music. It’s not what we do. It’s not how it works.” Similar to Denison’s curriculum, ETSU places students in bands, and performance is required for matriculation. In that way, the university stresses a cooperative, rather than conservatory approach. “It’s more important that students be able to play by ear, improvise, write their own material, and create their own sound. That’s the way this music has always been,” Boner says. “Everybody comes with their own little touch on their instrument. It’s important to help them expand on that, rather than making everyone sound . . . the same.”

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ack in 1975, South Plains College, a two-year school in the tiny west Texas town of Levelland, became the first institution to award diplomas in roots music when it offered a bluegrass minor. The reason it did was simple, students demanded it. “Initially John Hartin was the guy they hired to run our program,” says Joe Carr, associate professor of commercial music and director of the Bluegrass and Country Music Program at South Hayes Griffin, left, of the April Verch Trio, is an alum of Denison.

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Plains. “He started teaching country music. But in between classes, students would start playing bluegrass for fun.” A program that literally got its start in a converted broom closet now serves 250 country and bluegrass students. Yet there have been growing pains along the way. “The difficulty with this type of program is there’s no established protocol or curriculum that you could plug into,” says Carr. Carr stresses that the school’s mission evolved “to prepare our majors for a career in the music industry,” and integrates a trade school approach to teaching. “Even if you come in as a guitar player, you’ll get a basic mastery of recording techniques,” Carr says. “You get to be in the studio and understand how it works.” Carr, a professional musician who played guitar and mandolin with influential bluegrass combo Country Gazette, joined the faculty in 1984. He advocates an organic approach to teaching that utilizes memory and aural tradition, but only up to a point. Students also learn tablature, standard notation, and theory before settling on a

primary instrument and being placed into performance ensembles. Private lessons are required, and students are expected to hit performance benchmarks set each year by the department. “It’s probably the most professional setting these students have been in,” says Carr. “The groups work all semester to develop a 30minute set to play in our performance hall before a live audience.” If South Plains’ impressive alumni is any indication, their approach seems to be working. Lee Ann Womack, mandolin and banjo prodigy Ron Block (Alison Krauss), and bassist Mike Bub (Del McCoury) have all graduated from the college. “Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks was here as well,” says Carr, adding that Maines went on to study at the institution that most in the field consider the gold standard of roots-music education, Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Matt Glaser, artistic director of Berklee’s American Roots Music Program, characterizes the school in less rarified terms, however. “Berklee has a long tradition as a blue collar, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of school,” says

Glaser, who is also the fiddle player for the Wayfaring Strangers. After 28 years chairing Berklee’s String Department (he has since been replaced), Glaser felt constricted by administrative duties. In 2009, he went to the college president with a proposition. “I said, ‘Why don’t we create a program that is based on the educational needs of these folk-based musicians.’ So we created the American Roots Program.” Berklee strings instructor Joe Walsh, who has played and recorded with Darol Anger, the Gibson Brothers, and Joy Kills Sorrow, signed on as managing director of the program and helped create the roots-music minor. “Roots minors, like all Berklee students, are expected to read music,” Walsh says. “In addition to a core curriculum including harmony, ear training, arranging, and private lessons, there is a menu of roots-related classes and ensembles that students can choose from.” “We bring in visiting professors like Tim O’Brien, Bruce Molsky, and Paul Rishell,” Glaser says. “Students get to study with these people for no credit, for free, and for no grade.” In that sense, the Roots Music Program teaches bluegrass in the traditional folk manner. “The whole rural idea of master players and teachers just spending time with people is a great model for learning,” Glaser says. “We’re using the physical structure of an academic institution to make that happen.” To be sure, one unique challenge for these programs is accommodating the full-time students who are also busy launching their own music careers. “We work with students, so they can be available when opportunity knocks,” says Carr. “Part of our business is training students to be professional players.” Guitarist and Berklee alumna Courtney Hartman found juggling work and school tricky at times, particularly after she joined contemporary Americana quintet Della Mae. “My last year at school, I was touring about seven weeks out of each semester,” Hartman says. “Matt Glaser, in particular, helped me with advice and direction during that time.”

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uitarist Hayes Griffin, who currently tours with fiddler and Berklee alumna April Verch, found Denison to be equally accommodating when, during his junior year, he began playing in a bluegrass band with former Denison professor Richard Hood. “At that point in my career as a student, gigging out was actually beneficial to my studies,” Griffin says. “It allowed me to put what I had learned into practice. Touring with

April is a fast-paced, on-the-go job.” He credits his college training for making him “musically quick on my feet.” Fiddler Kenzie Maynard, a recent Denison grad, agrees. “Getting experience playing in front of people is a really important aspect of my performance major,” Maynard says. “In the end, that’s what it all comes down to.” Maynard believes that Denison’s program has brought her up to speed in four years, allowing her to contend with musicians who have been playing bluegrass all their lives.

Though each school may successfully blend down-home training with book learning in its own way, academic institutions are ultimately way stations for some musicians, rather than a final destination. “We’re trying to create a model for our students to spend their entire lives mastering music,” Glaser says, adding that the learning process applies to everyone. “I’ve been into this stuff for 44 years, and I feel that I know nothing. After all this time, I’m just getting started.” AG

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COMMUNITY LEARNING Community music schools offer an affordable way to study guitar By Louise Lee

34 September 2015

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sk Lindsay Rinaldi, executive director of the Nashua Community Music School in Nashua, New Hampshire, what advantage a community music school has over private lessons, and she doesn’t hesitate: “Music is about interaction and exchange.” Community music schools are exactly what they sound like: Nonprofit organizations or small family-run businesses that teach music at all levels to anyone who’s interested. Most schools schedule the bulk of their activities in the late afternoons, evenings, and weekends, when the grownups are off work and the kids are out of school. Many offer a sliding scale rate. People choose community music schools for a range of reasons. The atmosphere is designed to be laid-back; people who attend tend to be pursuing music as a fun extracurricular activity. Auditions aren’t necessary, so you can just register, find a time slot, and start learning. The quality of teaching can be high: The guitar instructors, like the teachers of other instruments, often hold multiple degrees in music or pedagogy and have extensive teaching and performing experience. Guitar teachers tend to be versatile and able to teach blues, classical, jazz, and other styles.

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Opposite Bill Hinkle, right, gives guitar instruction at Nashua Community Music School. Left NYC Guitar School’s Mass Appeal jam

Schools also offer a sense of community. Because they can serve hundreds if not thousands of individuals in a range of instruments, you’re likely to meet plenty of like-minded fellow students before and after lessons for spontaneous conversation and musical interaction. “That kind of energy is infectious,” says Rinaldi. While studying in a teacher’s private home studio certainly can be effective, a school allows extra opportunities for collaboration. And some schools offer other music-related classes, so you might be able to sign up for a theory or history class, too. Some schools occasionally invite a prominent local teacher to give a master class or workshop to a group of students. Most schools also organize informal student recitals a couple of times a year, held either at the school or at a local library or community center. Participation is voluntary; recitals are meant only to provide performance experience and are attended generally by just friends and family. You can sign up for private lessons or group lessons with four or five other students. For a sense of some specific programs and their fees, consider the following:

FINDING THE RIGHT COMMUNITY MUSIC SCHOOL Some community music schools target parents seeking lessons for their kids. Those schools tend to have an especially kidfriendly atmosphere. (Look for toys scattered in the waiting area.) Half-hour lessons are the norm, and instructors generally have extensive experience teaching children as young as three. Some schools also offer group lessons with up to six other kids. Schools that are specifically Suzuki guitar schools teach classical style by following the

Suzuki methodology and repertoire, from Twinkle in Book 1 through Leyenda in Book 9. They offer a full schedule of private lessons, group classes, and Suzuki-style group recitals. In the summertime, parents can sign up for some form of a “guitar camp,” comprised of five morning or afternoon sessions that combine group playing, singing, theory lessons, musicrelated games, and snacks. The website of the National Guild for Community Arts Education is a good place to start your search. Visit nationalguild.org.

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Community Music School at the University of Memphis. This nonprofit school, serving both adults and kids, offers both Suzuki and nonSuzuki private guitar lessons. Students pay by a six-week session; six hour-long lessons are $324, or $57 each. The school offers a limited number of financial-aid packages; people over the age of 60 receive a 10-percent discount. New York City Guitar School. This school offers many guitar classes with titles including “Blues Guitar Basics,” “Play the Beatles,” “Ear Training for Guitarists,” and “Songwriters’

Circle.” Most classes are limited to six students and meet for an hour a week for ten weeks. Cost: $319. If you miss a class, you can attend another section of the same class. Private lessons are charged in sets of five sessions and cost $50 to $80 a lesson, depending on length. Unlike most other schools, missed lessons are refundable. Nashua Community Music School in New Hampshire offers both private lessons and semiprivate lessons, which are taken with one other student. A term of ten 45-minute private

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36 September 2015

lessons is $660; ten semi-private lessons costs $300. The school also holds a “Folk Lunch” at noon on Wednesdays, when students can drop in for a 45-minute group class in folk guitar. Portland Conservatory of Music in Portland, Maine, teaches private lessons in jazz, blues, rock, and classical guitar, using both the Suzuki and non-Suzuki methods. Tuition is charged by semester: 16 half-hour lessons cost $528, or $33 a lesson; hour-long lessons are $1,056, or $66 each. Students aged 55 and older receive a 5-percent discount. Students can also sign up for classes in jazz history (an hour a week for ten weeks for $150) and jazz ensemble (two hours a week for eight weeks is $240). Phoenix Conservatory of Music in Arizona offers group classes for adult beginners, covering posture, note-reading, fingerpicking, and basic chords. A six-week session of six 45-minute group classes is $60. Private lessons cost $85 a month for 30-minute lessons and $170 a month for hour-long sessions. Enrolling in a community music school can carry some drawbacks. Because the tuition covers the teacher’s time plus the overhead of the school itself, your fees could end up costing what you’d pay for lessons outside a school. Schools structure their fees assuming students will take one lesson a week, so if your schedule allows only a couple of lessons a month, you’re better off finding an independent teacher. Scheduling can be more bureaucratic, too. If you go to a teacher’s house, arranging lesson times is between you and the instructor. At a music school, the office staff acts as an intermediary. Schools with lots of students tend to balk at requests to change the schedule; that’s why most places stipulate that if you can’t make it to a lesson, it’s simply a missed and non-refundable lesson. At schools that do allow make-ups, you might have your make-up lesson with a teacher other than your own, depending on instructor schedules and availability of studio space. Studio space might be in a room where a trumpeter is blasting away next door while you’re learning a quiet guitar passage. (Bad soundproofing in community music schools is common.) Overall, though, plenty of students find the experience rewarding. Jonathon Triplett, a college student studying music production, started taking lessons at Nashua Community Music School in January and is learning blues and rock. “I was an extreme beginner,” says Triplett, 25, who adds he’s pleased with the quality of the instruction he’s receiving and is already planning on participating in an upcoming school recital. “It’s been going great.” AG

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GUITARS FOR GOOD Needy schools benefit from nonprofits bringing guitars into the classroom By Blair Jackson

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n August 2014, the city of Ferguson, Missouri—just outside St. Louis— exploded in violence in the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown by a white policeman. Then, when a local grand jury declined to indict the policeman, Ferguson erupted again, as did many other US cities, with protesters of every race loudly condemning what they saw as targeted police violence against African Americans, and rallying around the cry that appeared on hundreds of signs: “Black lives matter!” The St. Louis Classical Guitar Society (SLCGS) didn’t get involved in the Ferguson protests, but took the message of those signs to heart nonetheless: In January, the nonprofit organization, under the leadership of president William Ash, instituted the Ferguson Guitar Initiative in some of the troubled, largely black and poor municipality’s schools. Thanks to a generous grant from the Augustine Foundation (the philanthropic arm of the noted string manufacturer), the SLCGS was able to donate classical guitars to two of Ferguson’s schools, train teachers in how to use Austin Classical Guitar’s 38 September 2015

acclaimed online guitar course (guitarcurriculum.com), and even supply expert SLCGS guitarists as occasional teachers’ helpers. The cost to the impoverished school district: zero. Ash has no illusions about the guitars and lessons the SLCGS has brought to Ferguson— and to 16 other financially disadvantaged schools in the area, which have received close to 300 guitars since 2010—providing some sort of panacea to deeply rooted racial and economic problems. But at the very least they offer fulfilling growth opportunities for scores of students to be involved in structured music programs that can have far-reaching effects. As Ash put it in a recent grant proposal, “We look to see the benefits of school-music ensemble participation—cognitive and emotional development; hand-eye coordination; enhanced self-esteem; problem-solving, critical-thinking skills, and risk-taking; self-discipline, work ethic, pride in accomplishment; and enhanced accountability and empathy and camaraderie with peers.” By phone, Ash adds, “This is really the first time [the Austin curriculum] has been

Students at Johnson Wabash Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, pose with artists-in-residence Thomas Flippin, (kneeling middle left) and Chris Mallett of Duo Noire

promoted in the African-American community, which I think is really important. I think the whole field [of classical guitar] has neglected the diversity aspect—we’ve never really addressed it and I think it’s time we do. If we can make it work here in St. Louis, in the North County areas that have had all this unrest, then we can prove it can work anywhere. “So far it’s been very well-received by the community, not just in Ferguson, but in the adjoining one—Normandy—which is even more desperate in terms of education, even more needy,” Ash adds. “The fine-arts directors in both of those districts are very much in favor of what we’re doing; they’ve bought into it completely. We’re going to be in all of the Normandy schools and eight or nine in Ferguson. Then, of course, we need to keep the program moving as they graduate from elementary to middle school. In Normandy we’re already in the middle schools and in high schools. But it’s all about finding the funding and the partners to make it succeed, and that means we need local involvement, too, which is why I’m sitting here writing grants.”

‘AS A GUITAR COMMUNITY NATIONWIDE, WE NEED TO PULL TOGETHER MORE AND SHARE IDEAS AND SHARE OPPORTUNITIES, AND MODEL ON EACH OTHER WHATEVER IS WORKING WELL.’ WILLIAM ASH

he SLCGS is not alone in promoting guitars in schools as a means to expose children to music and provide them with a skill that could last them a lifetime. All over the country (and around the world), numerous foundations, arts societies, and independent nonprofits have stepped up to fill in funding gaps in financially challenged schools where music programs have been dramatically cut or eliminated altogether. And it’s not just in the schools—the Les Paul Foundation, for instance, sponsors Guitars for Vets and Spring Break Workshops in Memphis, among its many good works. In 2014, the NAMM Foundation allocated half a million dollars in grants to more than a dozen community, national, and music-industry-based groups, including the Australian Music Association, the Manhattan School of Music, and Guitars in the Classroom (which focuses on educating guitar teachers). The Guitar Center Foundation’s grants have aided rehabilitation centers that use music therapeutically, as well as the nonprofit Hijos de la Musica Latina, and the Salvation Army’s New Jersey Music & Arts Program. Other groups putting guitars in the hands of eager young learners, or offering scholarships to needy students who show promise, include the always-generous and far-reaching D’Addario Foundation, the Fender Music Foundation, the Traveling Guitar Foundation, VH1’s Save the Music Foundation, and many others. “As a guitar community nationwide,” William Ash says, “we need to pull together more and share ideas and share opportunities, and model on each other whatever is working well. Because it’s all one big pie and everybody’s success supports everyone else’s. It’s a lot of work raising money and coordinating everything, but obviously the results are worth it.” AG

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Using the CAGED chord system

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42 September 2015

s an acoustic guitarist, you’re equipped to brighten someone’s day. You can bring your guitar along to family gatherings and parks, or volunteer at a local organization’s event. If you’re a beginner enjoying practicing songs with two or three chords to change, find some kids who will help you through “Wheels on the Bus,” “Skip to My Lou,” or “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Baby Boomers will respond to ’50s rock ’n’ roll music with two or three chords and some fun, steady shuffle strumming, like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” The music of the Beatles or such singer-songwriters as Crosby, Stills, and Nash will give you a workout practicing some picking-hand fingerstyle patterns and some more active chord progressions. In the process, you could bring a live music experience to someone from the generation for whom the acoustic guitar became emblematic of an era. Ever think about using your guitar-playing skills to help trigger the memory of an aging or infirm person? Music therapy has become a valuable component of care in many different settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities, libraries, and schools. Music therapists work with children, adults, and elderly clients with various physical and psychological disabilities. Colleges throughout the United States offer music therapy as a major for undergraduates, with graduate programs being offered in some. Berklee College of Music in Boston, for example, offers a music therapy major for undergrads, as well as a master’s degree. Acoustic guitar, with all of its portability and versatility, is a requirement for the program, regardless of the student’s principal instrument. Music therapists work with their elderly clients to trigger memories through the music of their younger days. If you are practicing music from the American Songbook, such as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and George and Ira Gershwin songs, then you will find a

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connection with someone born in the 1920s and ’30s. As you make your way through standards and show tunes, such as “I Got Rhythm,” “All of Me,” “Shine on Harvest Moon,” and “Ain’t She Sweet,” you could be capturing the attention of someone for whom these songs hold the stories of a lifetime. Patriotic songs can get people moving, and they can offer some harmonic challenges, as well, such as “America the Beautiful.”

As you make your way through standards and show tunes, you could be capturing the attention of someone for whom these songs hold the stories of a lifetime. Playing with a pick for projection is great practice and fun to try out on any audience. As you put your attention on bass-note accuracy, see if you can maintain eye contact with your listeners. Strumming a G or E chord (all six strings) without looking down will feel natural, but switching to a D chord and strumming just four strings takes more finesse. Since a large part of music therapy work is staying engaged with the client, your practice of making guitarplaying second nature will be put to the test as you sing along and share some smiles. Practicing guitar on your own is an essential part of your musical progress, but at some point, you’ll find that playing for even just one other person in the room will make a difference in your performance. And improving someone’s life while you gain performing experience is a win all around. AG

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hen you’re jamming with other guitarists in the key of G and it’s time for your solo, you can rely on G major scale positions as your reference for creating improvised melodies. Suppose you’re playing on a typical progression like G-Am-C-D7. All of those chords are in the key of G naturally, so there’s no need to change keys. But should you change modes? Modes are derived from scales by starting on any note of the given scale and playing through the notes in order, say, from re to re instead of do to do. No notes are altered from the original scale. The most common example of this is the natural minor scale, which is called the Aeolian mode, built on the sixth degree of the major scale. In our example of the key of G, the natural minor is E minor, or E Aeolian. The notes in G major are: G A B C D E F G. The notes in E Aeolian are: E F G A B C D E.

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Big-picture thinking is important when determining what scale or mode to use while improvising. If you play the G major scale against our progression G-Am-C-D7, it will sound like G major, not E Aeolian. Now switch the chords to Em-Am. Play that same G major scale. It sounds minor! The context changed, making the scale sound different, even if you played the exact same notes in the same order.

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Here are the mode names in order, as derived from a major scale: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. Each mode has its own characteristic sound, as demonstrated by the relative minor example. Big-picture thinking is important when determining what scale or mode to use while improvising. Our progression is still in the key of G, even if you decide it would be a good idea to use A Dorian over the Am chord, C Lydian over the C chord, and D Mixolydian over the D7. Oh, and of course, G Ionian over the G chord! All of that simply means key of G. It gets better. Suppose you play a G major scale starting on the note B, which is its third degree. That’s B Phrygian. But play it against our G-Am-C-D7 progression and it’s still a G major scale. There isn’t even a Bm chord in our progression, but that scale will sure enough sound like a good match. The fact is, it will sound like a good match from any starting note. It is not necessary to think of your scale positions as modes. Here’s a quick example of a Dorian-sounding progression: Am-Bm-Am-Bm. Now you can think of your scale positions as A Dorian, because the chords give it that context, that characteristic sound. One more big picture to consider: You can improvise in A Dorian starting on any note in the mode (or any note in the parent scale G major). Go ahead and use that position that starts on the note B, which we called Phrygian a moment ago. Now it’s A Dorian. The characteristic sound will be Dorian no matter what note you choose as a starting point in your hand position. AG

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WEEKLY WORKOUT

CAGED (and Loving It!)

BY PETE MADSEN

Use this chord system to open up the fretboard

he CAGED chord system—a mnemonic aid based on the open-chord shapes C, A, G, E, and D—can be a terrific ally for navigating the guitar fretboard. If you’ve done any work with the major-triad version of this system, you know what I mean. And as you might imagine, dominantseventh CAGED chords—remember, major triads with flatted sevenths added—can be equally useful. You might already know many if

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not all of the chord grips, but in this lesson you’ll move them up and down the neck of the guitar and find new ways of connecting the shapes in some common chord progressions. WEEK ONE Ex. 1 depicts the open C7, A7, G7, E7, and D7 chords. If these aren’t already familiar, learn the shapes and get comfortable switching from chord to chord before moving on to the next examples.

In Ex. 2, use the five CAGED shapes to produce five different C7 voicings. As you move the shapes up the neck, notice that a first-finger barre often replaces the previously played open strings. This can make for some difficult fingerings, such as the C7 with the G shape. But don’t worry; I’ll show you how to reduce these finger-busters into more manageable chords. For now, go with the full-blown versions, so you can best see how

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46 September 2015

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the CAGED system works. The same idea is transferred to a series of A7 chords in Ex. 3. In Ex. 4a and b, I’ve shown how to transform the G and E shapes into some more manageable grips. The G-shape A7 in Ex. 4a can be fingered as a simple barre over the 0 top four strings 0 1 with 1 2 0 first either the second or third finger fretting the 3 0 0 2 string. In Ex.24b, the full six-string barre0 chord 3 0 2 can be simplified to a partial first-finger3 barre, with the second finger on string 3, fret 6.

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WEEK TWO Now that youAhave 7 the basic shapes A 7 down, try x0 2 0 3 0applications.431112 some real-world In Ex. 5, play a two-measure strum using E7 and A7 chords. In the first two bars you’ll find common chord voicings; in the second two bars, you’ll switch to a D-shaped E7 chord and then to the slimmed-down G-shape A7 chord. Ex. 6 starts with a C-shaped E7 chord. To get to the next E7 chord, the fourth finger is

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removed from string 3 and placed on string 1, fret 7, while the third finger is relocated from string 5 to string 3, fret 7. This can still be considered a C shape, even though it doesn’t look C shape A shape very similar to the original. You can extend the two-bar E7–A7 strum from Ex.05 to create the 0 2 3 3 1 in Ex. 7. 1 5 strumming pattern 1 2 3 3 0In Ex. 7, each0 two-bar section 2 represents5a 2 3 3 shift 0 up the neck. You’ve already played the first

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E shape G shape D shape When learning a new chord 6 fingering,8 try forming 12 the 5 8 11 chord and before 5 9 strumming12 5 8 your fingers10 removing and 7 10 gripping8again. Repeat this 8 process, increasing the distance from the fretboard Ex. will 4b help Ex. 4a each time. This with muscle memory—the A7 A 7 is to be Aable 7 A7 to place x0goal xx 1 2 11 431112 1112 1 3 1 2 11 5 fr. all your fingers down simul-5 fr. taneously, rather than one at a time.

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Û Û Û Û Û AcousticGuitar.com 47

WEEKLY WORKOUT

four bars. In measures 5–6, you’ll use the modified version of the C-shape E7 chord, combined with the shortened E-shape A7 chord. In bars 7–8, use a slightly shortened version of an A-shape E7, combined with a D-shape A7. And, finally, in bars 9–10 you’ll use a shortened G-shape E7, combined with an altered C-shape A7. Notice that each pair of chords plays within the same fret range: Bars 2–4 are between frets 2–4; bars 5–6, between frets 5–7; bars 7–8, frets 7–9; and bars 9–10, frets 9–12.

BEGINNERS’

TIP 2

When finding CAGED chord voicings for a group of chord changes, restrict yourself to a certain fret range; for example, frets 2 through 5.

BEGINNERS’

WEEK THREE So far you’ve only worked with seventh chords. Ex. 8, based on a I–V–IV–V in G major (G–D7– C7–D7) adds a major triad into the mix. The first two measures contain open chords. In the second two bars, switch to a shortened E-shape G chord, then use the modified C shape for the D7; move up to a modified G shape for the C7, and then a return to the D7 with the same

TIP 3

For a verse or chorus, start with CAGED chords voiced in a lower register, gradually working your way up the neck to create highersounding chords. This can add a level of excitement or drama to the arrangement.

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G shape. Notice in the third bar that the move from G to D7 allows you to keep your first finger in the same place (string 2, fret 3), which should make that change easier. Also, moving from the G-shape C7 to the G-shape D7 sets you up to play higher-voiced chords, as in the last two bars of this example. The last two bars start with a D-shape G, then move up to the G-shape D7. Slide the latter up to fret 8, move your second finger to string 3, and you’ll have an E-shape C7. Then, move everything up two frets to easily access the D7 chord.

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WEEK FOUR Ex. 9’s progression uses the I, IV, and V chords (A7, D7, and E7) in the key of A major. Each grouping of chords stays in a relatively tight fret space. Start out with a G-shape A7, then move to a D-shape D7, back to the A7, and then to a D-shape E7. In the second group

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AcousticGuitar.com 49

SONGBOOK

Ode to a Troubled Troubadour ‘Joe Hill’s Last Will’ is a tribute to a martyred union organizer and proud rabble-rouser BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

ive years before the state of Utah put Joe Hill in front of a firing squad, the labor troubadour worked on the docks in California, where he became a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka the Wobblys. His songs, sympathetic tales of downtrodden workers and their families, were sung at labor protests. In 1915, he was accused of murdering three men in Salt Lake City. On the

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50 September 2015

night of his execution, leaving a populist legacy that continues to inspire unionists, Hill wrote his last will. Earlier this year, singer, songwriter, and guitarist John McCutcheon put Hill’s last words to music as part of an album marking the 100th anniversary of the Swedish immigrant’s birth. “Joe Hill is the most famous labor songwriter and labor martyr in US history and most people know precious little about him . . . other than Joan Baez sang about him at Woodstock,” McCutcheon wrote on the Kickstarter campaign that raised $35,000 for the recording project. “He wrote about labor, immigration, workers’ rights, love, and war using the melodies of the popular songs of the day, creating a template used subsequently by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and others. . . . I aim to introduce people to the music that helped fuel the American Labor Movement. It’s been decades since a recording of any of Hill’s music has been released.” Here’s the title song from that album. “Joe Hill’s Last Will” is played with a capo at

the second fret, which causes everything to sound a major second higher than written—in the key of B minor instead of A minor. The music shown in notation and tab contains all you need to play the entire song: the intro, the three verses, and the outro. This figure is based on the classic Travis pattern, in which the thumb picks a steady driving quarter-note figure on the lower strings while the other fingers add melodic work, often syncopated, on the upper strings. To play this part, assign your thumb to pick the notes on strings 6–4, while your index and middle fingers articulate the notes on strings 3–1. If you have trouble with the pattern, focus on the thumb before adding the higher notes. Break down the music into digestible slices, noting what the thumb is doing in relation to the other fingers at any given point, and you should be able to put it all together without too much difficulty. Alternatively, you could just use the five chord grips shown to the left of the notation and turn the song into an easy strummer. AG

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SONGBOOK

A Summer Classic

‘Wake Up, Rounder!’ is a paean to the sun, a celebration to life

Spirit Family Reunion Hands Together

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

he Spirit Family Reunion might be based in Brooklyn, but this Americana group has little in common with its art-rock counterparts in the Williamsburg and Bushwick neighborhoods of that New York City borough. The ensemble’s old-timey music, which it calls “open-door gospel,” has the string-band instrumentation of guitar, banjo, fiddle, upright bass, and washboard, supporting a wall of harmonized vocals, as is heard on the excellent new song “Wake Up, Rounder!,” from the recent album Hands Together.

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52 September 2015

The song kicks off with a riff played on the five-string banjo by Maggie Carson. It works just as well on the guitar and is shown here in notation and tab. Situated neatly in the open position, it shouldn’t be too difficult to play—if the E minor chord in the fourth bar feels awkward, you can play just the highest note, the open first string. To cop guitarist Nick Panken’s part, use the strumming pattern shown here—or any basic eighth-note-based strum—throughout the song. In the chorus, while Panken sits on a C chord, bassist Ken Woodward plays an ascending

sequence of notes that adds excitement to the proceedings. This line is incorporated in the lowest notes of the chords: C/D, C/E, C/F, and C/A (which some readers will recognize as another name for Am7). Feel free to omit these chords and instead play a C chord for the duration of this passage. A couple other things to note: The interlude that precedes the second chorus is based on a static G chord, as is the third verse, providing a nice contrast to the more harmonically active sections. AG

WORDS AND MUSIC BY KEN WOODWARD, MAGDALENE CARSON, MATTHEW DAVIDSON, NICHOLAS PANKEN, PETER PEZZIMENTI AND STEPHEN WEINHEIMER

WAKE UP, ROUNDER!

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AcousticGuitar.com 53

Fairport Convention Liege & Lief Island

SONGBOOK

A Child Ballad with Bite

‘Matty Groves’ is one of the most famous murder ballads in the English folk tradition BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

Dead, bassist Phil Lesh taped this English ballad with guitarist Jerry Garcia on a home recorder.) But the song is perhaps most closely associated with Fairport Convention, who recorded it on 1969’s Liege & Lief—an album considered by some to have marked the beginning of the English folk-rock movement. The song—one of the so-called Child Ballads included in Francis James Child’s 19th-century compilation of English, Scottish, and American folk ballads—is known to have as many as 30 verses, but this arrangement, which is inspired by the Fairport Convention version (before it

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goes into an instrumental jam), includes a mere 19. Harmonically speaking, it’s very simple, having just two chords, the i and the VII (Dm and C, respectively) in the key of D minor. A strum pattern that will service each verse is shown here in notation and tab. The best way to play this part is to strum the beats and the “ands” with downstrokes and all the others with upstrokes. If needed, use a metronome and practice the pattern slowly at first, gradually increasing the tempo until it feels natural. Then, be sure to add your own rhythmic variations to the basic strumming pattern. AG

Benjamin Verdery

atty Groves,” also known as “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard,” is one of the most enduring English folk ballads, dating back to the 17th century. As with many folk songs, the details vary from version to version, but the basic narrative remains the same: a lord’s wife takes advantage of her husband’s absence to have a tryst with a plebian, only to be ratted out by a servant before a violent end ensues. “Matty Groves” has been widely recorded, by everyone from Joan Baez to Doc Watson to Tom Waits. (Long before they were the Grateful

“M

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54 September 2015

Strum Pattern

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5. But if I a Lord Dar She 2. cast herwhen eyesthe about And meeting it was done He is out 3. there Come home with meMatty littleGroves Matty Groves And little He bent his inbreast and to rancarry the news Sheshe castsaw her eyes about 7. And his hurry And the first one of the year And8. when DCome mAnd 5. stream But if I am Bringing Lord Dar home withsaw me tonight Walking in the crowd Little Groves heand lay ran down he came to the broad mill there she little Matty Groves He Matty bent his breast homein with me little Matty Groves And took little sleep off hisashoes and swam Walking crowd And when he came to the broadLord mill stream C He took 1. AC Come holiday atheDholiday Darnell’s not a m C Dm sleep with tillMatty light Groves 3. ComeAnd home with meme little When he awoke Darnell He took off hisLord shoes and swam wife church œœ Come œœ œœ3. home œœ meœœDarnell’s œœ œœcame œœ œœ into8.the He is out6.inAnd theafarse œœComeœœ with œœ me œœLord œœ Matty œœ œœ œœœGroves tonight LittleWas Mattystanding Groves at hehis layfeet down home with little œœ Come œœ 4.œœ Ohhome œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ with œœcome œœ with œœ Groves œœcome I can’t home Im won’t me little œone œMatty œ home œ Dœm œ œ And 8. took a little sleep home me tonight Little Matty Groves he lay down œ œœCome D Cœœ year hear And the first of the Bringing theAnd yearlin And sleep withtill you tonight And sleep withhome me light 9. Saying how Lord you like my feather bed When he awoke Darnell Come with me little Matty Groves And took adolittle sleep ≥ ≤ ≥ ByAnd ≥the≥sleep ≥ on ≤The ≥megospel ≥till light ≥ I ≥canfor ≤ tell ≥ C ≥ ≥ ≤ to≥ hear He swore rings your fingers howhe do youfeet like myDarnell sheets Was And standing at awoke his with When Lord And inLord his Darnell hurrywhat tohe carry the news He7.swore would know And hearing was said HeHe bent breastDarnell Before the sunhiswould setand ran swore Lord he would know And whenthe he sun came to the Before would setbroad mill stream He took off his shoes and swam 7. And in his hurry to carry the news

1 1 0 You 0 are 0 Lord 0 0Darnell’s 1 1 wife 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 4. How dostanding you like at myhis lady Was feet 3 Oh 3 1I can’t 1 come 1 1 home 1 3I won’t 3 1come 1 1home 3 3 3 3 3 Before Lord Darnell’s wife 6.bedAnd a servant whoth 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 came 0 0 2 into 2 2 the 2 2church And sleep with you tonight Who lies in your arms asleep 9. Saying how do you like my feather 4. Oh I can’t come home I won’t come home 0 0 2 2 2 2 2 0 0 2 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 3 3And when 3 3 the By 3the 3And rings on2. your ID can And 9. how do you likedomy sleep with you tonight Saying how yousheets like my feather D3m Cfingers mtell3 meeting it was done Andbedhearing what w You areByLord How do you like my lady theDarnell’s rings on wife your fingers I can tell youfeather like mybed sheets 10. OhAnd wellhow I likedoyour

She cast her eyes about And Darn in h TheYou gospel for to hear He swore7.Lord WhoAnd lies in your arms are Lord Darnell’s wife How doI like you likeasleep my lady well your sheets And there she saw little Matty Groves liesI in ButWho better likeyour yourarms ladyasleep gay Before the He sunbent wou 5. But if I am Lord Darnell’s wife Who lies in my arms asleep Walking in the crowd And whe 2. AndLordwhen the it was done Darnell’s notmeeting at home

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is out in the far cornfields 11. Well get up get up Lord Darnell He took SheHecast her eyes about 7.cried And in his hurry to c Bringing the yearlings home Get up as quick as you can 3. she Come meGroves little Matty Groves And there sawhome littlewith Matty It’ll never be said in fair England He bent his breast a 6. And a servant who washome standingwith by me tonight I slew a naked man 8. he Little Ma Walking in Come the crowd And when came And hearing what was said Come Groves And took He swore Lord Darnellhome he wouldwith know me little Matty 12. Oh I can’t get up I won’t get up He took off his shoe Before the sun would set I can’t get up for my life AcousticGuitar.com When 55 And sleep with me till Groves light he 3. Come home with me little Matty For you have two long beaten swords

And well I like sheets Getyour up as quick as you can But better IIt’ll likenever your be ladysaid gayin fair England Who lies in Imy arms asleep slew a naked man

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16. And then took his wife 17.Lord AndDarnell then uphespoke own dear wife And he sat Never her onheard his knee to speak so free Saying whoI’d dorather like the bestfrom of usdead Matty’s lips a kiss Matty Groves or me Than you and your finery

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17. And then spoke his own dear wife 18.upLord Darnell he jumped up Never heardAnd to speak loudly so he free did bawl I’d rather a He kissstuck fromhis dead lips the heart wifeMatty’s right through Than you and fineryher against the wall Andyour pinned

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18. Lord Darnell jumped up Lord Darnell cried 19. A he grave a grave And loudly To he put did these bawl lovers in He stuck hisBut wife right bury mythrough lady at the the heart top And pinnedFor hershe against the wall was of noble kin

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19. A grave a grave Lord Darnell cried To put these lovers in But bury my lady at the top For she was of noble kin

16. And then Lord Darnell he took his wife And he sat her on his knee Saying who do like the best of us Matty Groves or me 17. And then up spoke his own dear wife Never heard to speak so free I’d rather a kiss from dead Matty’s lips Than you and your finery

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18. Lord Darnell he jumped up And loudly he did bawl He stuck his wife right through the heart And pinned her against the wall 19. A grave a grave Lord Darnell cried To put these lovers in But bury my lady at the top For she was of noble kin

56 September 2015

60

Shoptalk Long-lost Lennon Gibson J-160E goes to auction

62

Makers & Shakers The saga of guitar builders Huss & Dalton

66

New Gear Martin issues a no-frills electroacoustic workhorse

72

Pickin’ Ibanez tenor guitar blends the old & the new

AG TRADE The SLG200

YAMAHA REVAMPS THE SILENT GUITAR Bruce Sexauer with his all-walnut guitar

SHOPTALK

Bounty of Beauties The first Memphis Acoustic Guitar Festival showcased the world’s top boutique builders BY MARC GREILSAMER

hose fortunate enough to have attended the inaugural Memphis Acoustic Guitar Festival, held June 5-7 in Memphis, Tennessee, were treated to a cornucopia of world-class instruments, players, and instructors. Festival director Bob Singer personally selected and invited the roughly 80 builders, so it’s no surprise that the show featured the crème de la crème of modern lutherie—some building in a traditional style, others pushing the envelope. Add in an assortment of performances, demo concerts, and instructional workshops, and the result was an entertaining and informative event for a serious and knowledgeable audience. In terms of the guitar construction, a continuation of the trends from the last few years was evident: lots of armrest bevels, scoop-style and flush-to-the heel cutaways, “Manzer” body wedges, and, of course, experimentation with exotic tonewoods. And with a number of

T

first-rate players and teachers making the rounds—people like Paul Asbell, Tim Sparks, and Al Petteway—these guitars were shown in all their glory. Here are a few highlights. Joel Michaud of Calgary’s Michaud Made perhaps turned the most heads with his surprisingly lightweight, supremely elegant designs and stunning guitar tones. Of particular note was his 00-R, with Swiss moon spruce top and “Tree” mahogany body, along with ebony binding and scoop cutaway, and his German spruce/Madagascar rosewood OM-R with intricate metalwork (designed by friend Frances Strathern of Franny E) incorporated into the rosette, headstock, and backstrip. George Leach of the Phoenix Guitar Company impressed with his nylon-string “crossover” OM, featuring Engelmann spruce top and Amazon rosewood back and sides, 17/8-inch nut, 14 frets to the body, elevated fingerboard, and Macassar ebony bevel and binding—perfect for

At this year’s Summer NAMM in Nashville, Yamaha introduced its refurbished Silent Guitar to the US market. The new SLG200 series, available in both steel-string and nylonstring models, utilizes Yamaha’s unique SRT (Studio Response Technology) preamp and pickups, giving the instrument a sound-modeling system intended to emulate a true, full-bodied acoustic instrument. The company has also overhauled the control panel, which features a three-position effects knob (with room reverb, hall reverb, and chorus), built-in tuner, auxiliary input (to play along with an iPod or CD player), and a headphone jack. There’s also a ¼-inch jack that allows you to connect with an amplifier, PA system, or mixing board. The SLG200 features an all-wood upper bout that can be removed for travel purposes, and a streamlined, satin mahogany neck. Also of note is the six-crystal piezo pickup located under the saddle, which can either be blended with the SRT system or used independently. Yamaha will list the new models for around $1,000 and expects them to be available to US buyers in September. AcousticGuitar.com 57

SHOPTALK

steel-string players looking to make the switch. Brent McElroy’s Generation 2.1 Standard Model, the first creation to come out of his new La Conner, Washington, shop, boasted a gorgeous combination of bearclaw Sitka spruce and Indonesian rosewood, sounding as magical as it looked. Rick Micheletti is working wonders with his patented Rigid Rim technology, which boosts

volume, presence, and articulation. It was showcased marvelously on his red cedar/walnut Osprey model, with cherry rims, five-piece neck, and paua abalone appointments. Indian Hill’s Mike Kennedy brought along No. 22, his first attempt at fan frets: red cedar top, claro walnut back and sides, flush-to-heel cutaway, inlaid end graft, elevated fingerboard, and Macassar ebony bevel and bridge.

ANNO U N CI NG TAKE COMMAND OF YOUR FRETBOARD! A Practical Approach to Understanding Chords and Melody Through Blues, Gospel and Fingerstyle Originals TAUGHT BY

Woody Mann

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This extraordinary 2-DVD set teaches exciting new pieces, invaluable musical concepts, and an understanding of the fretboard to help you build your guitar playing to new levels. Tunes: Hudson River Boogie • Sunset Lake Rag • It Is No Secret • There’s Destruction in This Land • Lonnie’s Guitar • And Three Not Four • Death Don’t Have No Mercy • Mean Old World • A Little Love and Kiss • We’ll Be Alright. Download Set now $34.95

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Acoustic Guitar Lessons at All Levels! WOODSTOCK, NY

58 September 2015

Bevan Frost of Colorado’s Big Hollow Guitars specializes in building vintage-style small-bodied guitars using hide glue, oil varnish, and advanced scalloped X-bracing. His 00-sized model with Adirondack spruce top and mahogany body delivered an incredibly rich and full sound. Julius Borges had a terrific, classic-style Adi/Brazilian OM-45 that elicited much praise from the patrons. Hailing from Yamanashi, Japan, Ryohei Echizen, a Sergei de Jonge disciple, displayed a couple of the finest-sounding instruments I played, including his 00-size R2 (with European spruce top and Madagascar rosewood body) and jumbo R3 (with ziricote back and sides, Manzer wedge, and flush cutaway). Among the other noteworthy builders on hand were Jay Lichty, Gordy Bischoff, Bill Tippin, Kathy Wingert (whose Steampunk Inspired collection featured inlays by daughter Jimmi), Bruce Sexauer (who brought along an all-walnut guitar, built pretty much on a dare), Tim Reede (who brought a sinker redwood OM with myrtle back and sides), and Matt Petros. As for archtops, two builders to take note of are New York’s Cristian Mirabella, who has long specialized in repairing vintage D’Angelico and D’Aquisto models and has developed his own unique designs (interchangeable pickguards, anyone?) largely based on the work of those two builders, and New Hampshire’s Erich Solomon, who boasts a rather distinctive, understated build style. In truth, these highlights are merely the tip of the iceberg, as Memphis offered a veritable treasure trove for aficionados of high-end, hand-built instruments.

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It may look like the world’s strangest pickguard, but the new ACPAD is so much more than that. Billed as the first-ever wireless MIDI controller for acoustic guitar, ACPAD puts an “electronic orchestra in your hands.” Clearly, the new product has captured imaginations: The demo video launched in early June garnered nearly 700,000 views on YouTube within the first two weeks. The brainchild of Berlin musician Robin Sukroso, ACPAD is a mere two millimeters thick and sticks directly onto your guitar’s top— no screws or wires to be found. It includes a wide range of loopers and effects, plus an internal rechargeable battery. “The perfect bridge between electronic and acoustic music,” claims Sukroso.

SHUBB CAPOS

After

40

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still the best! [email protected] • www.shubb.com 707-843-4068

Rock Out. Ten Great Rock Strumming Patterns

ACOUSTIC ROCK ESSENTIALS

Add ten popular rock rhythms (and their variations) to your strumming vocabulary. n

n

Strumming patterns based on music by the Beatles, Coldplay, the Strokes, Buddy Holly, and more Tips for finding the right rhythm patterns for your own songs

By Andrew DuBrock Includes 16 minutes of video

Acoustic Rock Essentials ALL THE TIPS AND TECHNIQUES TO UNPLUG YOUR ROCK AND ROLL store.AcousticGuitar.com.

AcousticGuitar.com 59

SHOPTALK

A Fab Four Mystery Solved John Lennon’s long-lost legendary Gibson J-160E finally turns up BY MARC GREILSAMER

ate this spring, the big buzz in the acousticguitar world was the discovery of John Lennon’s fabled 1962 Gibson J-160E, which was missing for more than 50 years and is being auctioned by Julien’s Auctions in November. The guitar, used on several of the Beatles’ earliest hits, is expected to fetch between $600,000 and $800,000. The man who authenticated the find was Andy Babiuk, co-author of the outstanding book Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four’s Instruments from Stage to Studio and the world’s foremost authority on the band’s guitars. AG caught up with Babiuk to get the full lowdown. “A lot of guys who bought the Beatles book, they call all the time or send emails, and it’s fine—I embrace it, it’s cool,” Babiuk explains over the phone. “I get a lot of emails and phone calls, tons of it—‘I’ve got John Lennon’s this’— and 99 percent of the time, it’s ‘I’m sorry, you don’t.’ You want to be polite, because you never know. I always look at everything, because there are still a handful of pieces [of Beatles gear] that are out there.” One of the people who contacted Babiuk recently was John McCaw, a Vietnam vet and the guitar’s current owner who paid a couple of

L

60 September 2015

hundred dollars for it. Last year, McCaw was jamming with some of his friends, one of whom had a magazine with all of George Harrison’s guitars pictured. “He says, ‘Wow, that looks a lot like my guitar,’ never thinking anything of it,” Babiuk states. “Then they found a copy of my book, and in the book, it tells the story of how John’s guitar went missing.” After receiving some new photos of the instrument, Babiuk was more than a little intrigued. “You look at wood grain—no two are the same, it’s like a fingerprint,” he says. Turns out that McCaw had bought it unsuspectingly in 1969 when he got home from the Vietnam War, secondhand, off a guy in San Diego who worked in a music store. He’s had it ever since. “Now this is the weird thing: George Harrison’s guitar had the serial number for the receipt I have for John Lennon’s J-160E,” Babiuk continues. “Last August, I was working on an update to the book when this guy calls me. I was like, ‘This is far out—this is the guitar.’ I match up the wood grain, the pickguard with the tortoiseshell, the scratches—I matched it all. “As far as the serial number, the story is this: John and George ordered two guitars, and

Beatles manager Brian Epstein was going to pay for the stuff on purchase hire, like a layaway, but they got to take the guitars with them. They hired a photographer, took pictures at Rushworth’s Music House, and did a whole press thing on it—they got these two guitars flown in from America.” Apparently, in the ensuing chaos, John and George had inadvertently swapped instruments. “When we photographed George Harrison’s guitar for my book, I had this document that showed the serial number being listed as John Lennon’s guitar, but Harrison had it his whole life until he passed away, and it’s still part of his estate. Somehow, the two guys switched their guitars. We showed the Gibson shipping record that shows that serial number for the guitar George Harrison kept [the one originally assigned to Lennon]. A couple of digits away is the serial number for this [newly discovered] guitar. They were identical guitars shipped on the same day. “You got two young guys in the store, and no one knows if the Beatles are going to take off—they haven’t even recorded ‘Love Me Do’ yet. They’re just happy they got these two guitars. They put the things back in their cases, two identical brown Gibson cases. Time to

Grace Harbor Guitars New and very nice! leave. Do you think they stopped and looked at the serial numbers? John Lennon wouldn’t give a flying f---; they were matching guitars! ‘Gimme a guitar, and let’s get out of here before they change their minds!’ Soon after, there are pictures of Lennon playing [Harrison’s] guitar on the Helen Shapiro tour with that same wood grain, so the switch must have happened immediately.” Despite the serial-number confusion, Babiuk was convinced he had a match. “You have all the wear marks,” he explains. “These were done ages ago. Without a doubt, the wood grain is where I’d hang my hat; I’d bet my whole reputation on just the wood grain alone. The serial number being a couple away is just icing on the cake. You could forge a serial number—guys do that all the time. Wood grain is something you can’t mess with; you can’t mimic it. Same with the tortoiseshell pickguard.” Lennon surely loved this guitar, and started using it immediately. “He got it on September 10, 1962,” Babiuk notes, “and on September 11, he’s in the studio with it recording ‘Love Me Do.’ Subsequently, he used it on a ton of live shows. There are also pictures of him and Paul McCartney, which Paul’s brother Mike took, of them writing songs together. This is the guitar he used to write ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘She Loves You,’ ‘All My Loving,’ all the songs we know and love.” In December of 1963, the Beatles played a show at London’s Finsbury Park. It was there that the guitar was lost, and everybody assumed it had been stolen. Many years later, Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager, indicated that he might have “misplaced” it. “Chances are,” Babiuk says, “he left it behind.” The speculation is that another British Invasion band stumbled upon it in England and brought it with them to the States. “I got to play the guitar—it was bone-chilling,” Babiuk says. “I played the beginning of ‘This Boy’—it’s that tone, it’s the guitar. I’ve played a lot of famous guitars in my day, but this blew all those away. . . . It’s just a really cool historical find. Kind of a crazy story.” Babiuk can now turn his attention to a few other outstanding pieces of gear. “The real trilogy is: Paul’s first Hofner, George’s second Rickenbacker 12-string, with the rounded top, and George’s Gretsch Tennessean, which were all stolen at the exact same time. The other one would be Lennon’s Hofner Club 40, which he bought at Hessy’s Music Store in Liverpool, and sold in Germany when he got his little Rickenbacker. I got great pictures of wood grain and everything. “You never know—send me a picture.” AG

Quality Craftmanship Great Tone Hard Case Included

Strum one today! Grace is playing a GHP-200 Parlor

www.GraceHarborGuitars.com

AcousticGuitar.com 61

MAKERS & SHAKERS

Virginia Is for Luthiers

Huss & Dalton celebrate two decades making fine guitars and banjos BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

emperamentally speaking, Jeff Huss and Mark Dalton, the owners of Huss & Dalton Guitar Co., are not much alike. “Jeff is from the Midwest,” says Dalton, with a twangy chuckle. “And Midwesterners are super even-keeled, emotionally speaking. On the other hand, I’m a Southern country boy, and we’re known to run a little hot from time to time.” But as guitar makers, Huss and Dalton work together beautifully, sharing a common aesthetic and production values in the small-batch instruments they make in their Staunton, Virginia, workshop. “Luckily, it’s very rare that we have an issue that we disagree on. We certainly have complementary personality types,” says Huss, with a hint of the Midwest in his voice.

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62 September 2015

For 20 years, Huss and Dalton have been building flattop steel-string guitars—from parlors to jumbos—and banjos whose designs are inspired by prewar classics but have their own distinctive identities. “We’ve never really copied any vintage guitars, chapter and verse. We never wanted to do a real slavish imitation, and even though one of our guitars might be in the shape of, say, a J-45, it’s all Huss & Dalton, tone-wise,” Dalton says. “We do go for our own sound,” Huss adds. “People sometimes tell us it’s between a Martin and a Collings, whatever that means. But it could be just that we have a clear midrange that cuts right through a jam.”

BLUEGRASS BEGINNINGS At 56, Huss is the older of the pair. He grew up in North Dakota and went to college there, on a pre-med track that abruptly ended when he scored 12 out of 125 possible points on the first test of an organic chemistry class. “At that moment, I knew my career as a doctor was over,” he says. “I borrowed $200 from my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, and bought a banjo and an Earl Scruggs method book.” While delving into bluegrass in his free time, Huss switched the focus of his studies to law, only to realize that other vaunted profession was not for him. But he went through the motions and studied for his bar exam. Then came a fortuitous announcement. “I heard that

‘We do go for our own sound. People sometimes tell us it’s between a Martin and a Collings, whatever that means.’ JEFF HUSS

Mark Dalton, left, and Jeff Huss

Dalton at work

the Stelling Banjo Co. was moving from San Diego to Virginia, which was a hotbed of bluegrass. Later, on the same day I passed the bar, Stelling called to offer me a job,” he says. Huss began building banjos at Stelling in 1985. Half a decade into the gig, he built a home garage workshop and started crafting guitars, both for himself and for the company. He transferred his banjo-making skills while picking up constructional insights from various books and from attending ASIA (Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans) conventions. “It was nice to experiment with guitar-making under Stelling’s name; I was getting paid to learn,” says Huss. Dalton, 52, was reared in the Piedmont region of Virginia, in a house filled with music. He learned bluegrass guitar and banjo as a kid, and, naturally, was particularly affected by the music of Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs. “I grew up in a real rural area, and we didn’t have a lot of money,” says Dalton. “So our family—and a lot of other kids my age—played music to entertain ourselves, to do something creative or positive rather than get in trouble out of boredom.” Dalton’s father, a part-time farmer, owned an auto body shop. When the elder Dalton retired to devote himself entirely to farming, in 1987, Mark took over the shop. The self-professed country boy learned a lot about being a businessman in the process—ideas that he would take with him to his guitar company. “I learned how to treat customers, especially when it came to warranty work. If we ever did anything that people found unsatisfactory, we’d have them bring it back in to make it right. The way that you handle these things helps build your reputation,” he says, adding that some of the finishing techniques he learned also transferred to making guitars. PERFECT TIMING Huss and Dalton met at a bluegrass jam in 1994, when Dalton had just started working at Stelling. They bonded over a shared affinity for bluegrass and the following year found themselves in Huss’s garage, working to get a new line of guitars off the ground. “The first couple of months were pretty challenging, having to build all the jigs and molds, not to mention needing to create design methods for building efficiently,” Huss says. After they made a few guitars to their satisfaction, the partners began peddling their wares to the owners of local music shops, the Stelling connection a selling point. Within a year of working in the garage, Huss and Dalton outgrew their space, set up an outside shop, and began hiring employees. “Mark had that body shop right next to his house and said that it was hard to leave when work was always right there,” Huss says. “I found that to be true, and we also needed a larger space with a more

professional look than my garage, which was full of rakes and four-wheelers.” The company soon developed a buzz after its NAMM debut, in 1997, when its offerings caught the attention of retailers such as Elderly Instruments, Mandolin Brothers, and Gruhn Guitars. The timing—which coincided with the dot-com boom—was fortunate. “The economy was so hot that stores everywhere expanded. They were open to selling a brand even if nobody had heard of them. New guitar discussion boards on the Internet also helped spread the word,” Dalton says. AUSTERITY MEASURES Huss and Dalton enjoyed a period of rapid expansion in the early 2000s and by the middle of the decade had a staff of a dozen, making 400 guitars per year in a three-building facility. But with the Great Recession, around 2008, the company was forced into a much leaner period. “We struggled just like everybody else,” Huss says. “We came up with a line called the Road Edition, stripped-down guitars selling for under $2,000 street [compared to more than $4,000 for the other guitars]. They weren’t profitable, but they kept everybody working and we didn’t have to lay anyone off.” “Oddly enough, the recession brought us a little confidence,” Dalton says. “Everyone worked 40-hour weeks and we sold everything we made. It felt better going out than coming in.” Today, the company is in much better shape, though not up to its prerecession levels of production. A staff of eight full-time and two parttime employees makes about 20 to 22 guitars a month, in batches of five per week; both Huss and Dalton still have their hands on each instrument the company produces. “We’re in production 98 percent of the time,” Huss says. “I shape necks and fit them to the bodies, do the sanding work and prep them for the finish room; Mark does the CNC programming [for the necks] and setup work, and we do repairs in between.” To commemorate its 20th anniversary, Huss & Dalton has put together a package that it will use on any model, including a torrefied red spruce soundboard, sinker mahogany back and sides, mountain-scene and script fretboard inlays, and cocobolo embellishments throughout. The package made its debut at the 2015 Winter NAMM show—an event that left Huss in an optimistic mood. “It felt like a real turning point for us,” he says. “I’m feeling a lot better about business than I have for six or seven years.” For his part, Dalton, once more anxious than his Midwestern colleague, feels he can finally relax a little. “For so many years, I felt like anything we didn’t do perfectly would make the whole thing blow up,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe the trivial things that used to keep me up at night, worrying. But now that we have a solid reputation, I’m no longer waiting for the whole thing to come apart.” AG AcousticGuitar.com 63

GUITAR GURU

make many of these, perhaps because players are by now relatively unfamiliar with the virtues of 12-fret steel-string guitars, and because some have access requirements similar to yours. A long-scale, 12-fret 000 is essentially a 12-fret OM. The OM outline was created by shortening the upper bout of a 12-fret 000 to about the location of the 13th fret. Additional fret access was created by shifting the location of the fretboard—and with it, the bridge—to join the end of the shortened body at the 14th fret. An extra fret was added to the end of the OM fretboard, effectively preventing the soundhole from crowding the neck block.

Martin 12-fret 000-28

The Sweet Spot

What gives 12-fret guitars such a sumptuous sound? BY DANA BOURGEOIS

Q

To my ears, guitars with 12 frets clear of the body sound fuller and richer than 14-fret models, but maybe that’s because I play mostly with fingers instead of a pick. For performing, however, I need access to the upper register and therefore use 14-fret guitars. What structural characteristics account for the tonal differences between the two styles, and is there any way to get 12-fret sound in a 14-fret guitar? Lucille Livingston Bartlett, Tennessee

GOT A QUESTION? Uncertain about guitar care and maintenance? The ins-and-outs of guitar building? Or a topic related to your gear?

64 September 2015

A

In the early decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of radio, popular music of mostly European origin gave way to indigenous American musical forms such as Appalachian, country, blues, and jazz. Following the music’s path, guitars ventured out of parlors and polite concert chambers and found their way into dancehalls and roadhouses. Demand for increased volume stimulated growth in body size and scale length, and spurred the adoption of steel strings. In addition, changes in playing technique necessitated access to more frets. Within a period of little more than a decade, the petite, gut-strung, 12-fret parlor guitar was effectively replaced by fully modern 14-fret steel-string flattops (and archtops), whose popularity and dominance continue to this day. To my ears, too, 12-fret guitars sound gloriously rich and full. In my four decades of stringing up brand-new guitars, the model that most consistently puts a smile on my face is the long-scale 12-fret 000. Unfortunately, I don’t

Ask Acoustic Guitar’s resident Guitar Guru. Send an email titled “Guitar Guru” to editor Marc Greilsamer at [email protected], and he’ll forward it to the expert luthier.

If the 14-fret mechanical model could somehow be made to produce 12-fret sound, I’d have done it by now. By comparison, the 12-fret 000 features a longer outline, larger vibrating top surface, and larger air cavity than its direct 14-fret counterpart. Equally significant, its bridge is located at the widest part of the lower bout, while the OM bridge is located forward of the lower bout, at a narrower area of the top and closer to its soundhole. Mechanically speaking, the rich, full sound of the 12-fret 000, and by extension all 12-fret guitars, is attributable to its bigger column of air, driven by a larger soundboard and an efficiently located bridge. Believe me, if the 14-fret mechanical model could somehow be made to produce 12-fret sound, I’d have done it by now. Someday, maybe someone will. In the meanwhile, several contemporary builders offer a variety of 12-fret guitars with cutaways, featuring even greater upper-fret access than non-cutaway 14-fret models. The ones I’ve tried sound like true 12-fret guitars, are fun to play, and are worthy of a test drive. AG Dana Bourgeois is a master luthier and the founder of Bourgeois Guitars in Lewiston, Maine.

If AG selects your question for publication, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of AG’s The Acoustic Guitar Owner’s Manual. Dana Bourgeois

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NEW GEAR

Polished gloss finish on solid Sitka spruce top

Grand Performance for Under a Grand Martin’s GPCRSGT is a no-frills workhorse electro-acoustic guitar BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

ight out of the box, Martin’s new Road Series GPCRSGT is an agreeable companion. Its modified-V neck and low action make it effortless to play, and its voice, while a tad polite, is clear and balanced, adaptable to all styles and approaches. No t y our grandfath e r’s M art in, t h e GPCRSGT is outfitted with Fishman Sonitone electronics, with USB connectivity, making it easy to interface with a Mac or a PC.

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66 September 2015

But what’s especially nice about the GPCRSGT is its price, around a grand with a TKL hard-shell case. The guitar is made at Martin’s Navojoa, Sonora, Mexico, factory and is much more affordable than similar models originating at the company’s domestic home base, in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. If the test model is any indication, though, the Mexican factory is producing instruments that are just as well-built as the venerated American-made Martins.

Grand Performance body size

CLASSIC MARTIN STYLING The GP in the name stands for grand performance—a relatively new body style for Martin, sort of a 14-fret mini jumbo, slightly wider and deeper than an OM (15.75 inches wide compared to 15 and 4.5 inches deep compared to 4 1/8). Our GPCRSGT boasts all-solid-wood construction. It’s got a Sitka spruce top; the back and sides are sapele—a sit-in for mahogany. The neck is made from sipo, another mahogany substitute. Meanwhile, instead of precious ebony, the fretboard and bridge are Richlite, a composite material made primarily from recycled paper. The GPCRSGT is a modest-looking instrument, the most alluring visual aspect being the spruce soundboard with its lovely reddish tint and polished-gloss finish. Embellishments on the instrument are tastefully spare and inconspicuous—black binding, only around the top, a black end strip, and tiny dot markers on the fretboard.

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Far Left Sipo, a mahogany alternative, is used for the neck. Left The solid Sitkaspruce top is finished with polished gloss.

Black Richlite fretboard

1.75-inch nut

Chrome enclosed tuners with small buttons

EXTRAS Martin SP Lifespan phosphor bronze light strings (.012–.054)

BODY Grand performance size

NECK Select hardwood neck (sipo as reviewed)

Solid Sitka spruce top

Black Richlite fretboard

Solid sapele back and sides

25.4-inch scale length

Black Richlite bridge

1.75-inch nut

PRICE $1,299 list/$999 street

Polished gloss finish on top and satin on back and sides

Chrome enclosed tuners with small buttons

Made in Mexico martinguitar.com

Fishman Sonitone USB electronics TKL hard-shell case

AT A GLANCE

MARTIN GPCRSGT

On the headstock is a cap of East Indian rosewood, bearing Martin’s traditional script logo. Craftsmanship on the review model is tiptop, no big surprise for a modern Martin. The guitar’s 20 frets are smoothly crowned and polished, the Corian nut and Tusq saddle cleanly notched. No imperfections can be found on the soundboard’s gloss finish, rubbed to a perfect shine, and everything is also super clean on the guitar’s interior surfaces. WELL-BALANCED Weighing four pounds and 11 ounces, the GPCRSGT is lightweight overall, but slightly neck-heavy. The grand performance body sits nicely on the lap. The neck shape, the performing artist profile, is best described as splitting the difference between a traditional ample V profile and a modern slender C. It has a little meat to it, and, coupled with perfect low

action, feels fast and comfortable, from the nut to the cutaway. The 1.75-inch nut keeps the fretting fingers from feeling cramped, too. Unplugged, the GPCRSGT doesn’t necessarily have the deep resonance and lush natural reverb of a high-end Martin, but it does sound very good. Its overall voice is warm, with good clarity and balance between the registers. It’s a little reserved, though, in the areas of projection and volume. Nonetheless, the guitar works quite well for strumming approaches from boom-chuck to modern rock, and for fingerpicking, in standard and alternate tunings. Single-note lines from bluegrass to swing also sound hearty and focused on the guitar. Given that the GPCRSGT is equipped with Fishman Sonitone USB electronics, the guitar’s unplugged sound might not be quite as relevant for some players. When played through a Fender Acoustasonic amplifier, the guitar has a

natural sound that requires little in the way of tweaking, a sound that pairs well with outboard reverbs, choruses, and delays. The USB connection makes it possible to plug directly into a MacBook Pro and record a quick sketch on Apple’s built-in software, GarageBand. For some applications, this direct sound would even be sufficiently good to sit in a mix. With the GPCRSGT, Martin offers a no-frills workhorse of a guitar—an all-solid electroacoustic thoughtfully designed with the gigging performer of average means in mind. While it doesn’t have the most dazzling unplugged tone, it does sound better than most in its price range, and, thanks to the Sitka spruce top, it will likely sound even better with age. AG Contributing editor Adam Perlmutter transcribes, arranges, and engraves music for numerous publications. adamperlmutter.com. AcousticGuitar.com 67

NEW GEAR

AT A GLANCE

GUILD WESTERLY F-1512 BODY Jumbo-size 12-string Solid Sitka spruce top Solid Indian rosewood back and sides Natural gloss polyurethane finish NECK Mahogany neck Indian rosewood fretboard 25.5-inch scale length 17/8-inch nut width Guild die-cast closed-gear tuners EXTRAS D’Addario EXP38 coated phosphor-bronze 12-string light (.010-.047) Guild jumbo polyfoam case Limited lifetime warranty PRICE $1,265 list/$999 street Made in China guildguitars.com 68 September 2015

Big Box of Glimmer

Guild’s Westerly F-1512 12-string proffers jumbo-size jangle BY ADAM LEVY

uild offers two jumbo 12-string models with the F-1512 designation. One is part of its mid-priced Guild Acoustic Design series (with a list price of $1,530); the other is part of Guild’s budget-conscious Westerly Collection ($1,265 list). Our review model is a Westerly F-1512. This isn’t a shootout—I won’t be comparing the two—but do keep this in mind if you go shopping for an F-1512: The models’ specs are slightly different, as their pricing suggests. That said, there’s nothing about the Westerly F-1512 that looks, sounds, or feels inexpensive. It’s built in China, using solid tonewoods, and the craftsmanship is excellent. The thing that makes any good 12-string sound nearly magical is the tuning scheme. (It’s essentially the same as found on six-string guitars, plus unison doubles of the first and second strings, and octave-up doubles of the other strings.) When not made well or set up properly, 12-string guitars can be discordant nightmares. When such instruments intonate evenly all along the fretboard, even fundamental chords and simple melodic runs seem to shimmer. Our F-1512 review model chimes and jangles with no tuning issues whatsoever.

G

A WIDE RIDE By necessity, virtually all 12-strings sport beefier necks and wider fretboards than their six-string counterparts—for high-tension stability and adequate string spacing. This can be challenging for players with small hands. That said, the Westerly F-1512 is comfortably proportioned, with a 17/8-inch nut width, 23/8inch string spacing at the bridge, and relatively slender C-shaped neck. The scale length is 25.5-inches long and the radius is a flattish 16 inches. A standard Shubb capo can be effectively used as high as the third fret. For higher capoing, you’d probably need one designed specifically for 12-string usage. (Many manufacturers offer this option.) BROAD-SPECTRUM TONES The Westerly F-1512 has a remarkably wellbalanced sound for an instrument at this price point. The low frequencies are full-bodied, the punchy mids give the guitar an up-front presence, and high end is almost lacy. Such depth of character is due in no small part to the pairing of venerable tonewoods (solid Sitka spruce top; solid Indian Rosewood back and sides) as well as the scalloped Sitka spruce

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X-pattern bracing. Size does matter, so it’s worth noting that the upper bout is 12 inches wide (with a body depth of 4 inches) and the lower bout is 165/8 inches wide (with a depth of 4.5 inches). The overall length of the body is 21 inches. With its full-spectrum voice, the F-1512 mics up nicely for studio recording or live performance. It has no onboard electronics, though Guild offers an F-1512E model at, surprisingly, the exact same price—with a Fishman Sonitone pickup system included. MODEST CHARM As you might expect for an under-$1,000 guitar, the Westerly F-1512 is not big on bling. The Guild closed-gear tuners are nickel-plated (not gold, as found on the GAD edition). The mother-of-pearl dot inlays are small and unremarkable. The black/ivory/black/ivory top purfling is handsome enough and the same can be said of the rosette—which features motherof-pearl highlights. As such, the F-1512 is not a guitar that you’re likely to fall in love with from across the room. But once you get close enough to strum a few chords or play a favorite melody, you’ll have a hard time putting it down. AG Adam Levy is an itinerant guitarist based in Los Angeles, where he is the chair of the guitar department at Los Angeles College of Music. Read more of Levy’s writing and hear his music at adamlevy.com.

CarbonFiberCases.com

AcousticGuitar.com 69

NEW GEAR

Solid mahogany back and sides

AT A GLANCE

EPIPHONE MASTERBILT AJ-45ME BODY Advanced jumbo shape Solid Sitka spruce top with hand-scalloped bracing Solid mahogany back and sides Rosewood bridge Satin vintage sunburst finish NECK Mahogany neck Rosewood fretboard 24.75-inch scale length 1.69-inch nut Grover Sta-Tite tuners (18:1 ratio) Satin finish EXTRAS D’Addario EJ16 phosphor bronze light strings (.012–.053) Shadow NanoFlex undersaddle pickup and Shadow Sonic preamp Hard-shell case Limited lifetime warranty PRICE $999 list/$599 street Made in Indonesia epiphone.com 70 September 2015

Modern Vintage Epiphone’s Masterbilt AJ-45ME strives to be this era’s J-45 BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

ith its satin finish and slender neck, Epiphone’s Masterbilt AJ-45ME has a decidedly modern feel. But the slope-shouldered guitar has the sort of warm, honeyed sound characteristic of the classic 1940s flattop to which it pays tribute—namely, Gibson’s J-45. What’s more, the AJ-45ME is cheaper than the original article, adjusted for inflation. When Gibson introduced the J-45 in 1942, it sold for $45 (about $645 in today’s money); it became known as the “Workhorse,” on account of its affordability to working musicians and its durability. While a brand-new Gibson J-45 will set you back more than $2,000, the Epiphone AJ-45ME has a street price of a cool $599—a modern-day workhorse, for sure.

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ALL-SOLID CONSTRUCTION The AJ-45ME is built from an excellent complement of tonewoods: a Sitka spruce top, with hand-scalloped Sitka bracing, and mahogany back and sides—all solid, a definite bonus for a

guitar in this price range. The guitar’s mahogany neck is capped with a rosewood fretboard, the same species used for the bridge. Cosmetically speaking, the J-45 is recalled in some of the AJ-45ME’s details, like the unbound fretboard with simple dot markers, the upside-down bridge, and the deep sunburst finish, ranging from a toasted brown at the soundboard’s outer edges to a sunset amber in the center. The distinctive headstock, with its asymmetric crown and old-fashioned script logo, bears the influence of Epiphone’s 1930s Masterbilt archtops. All in all, it’s a handsome guitar, though the satin finish does detract from its vintage vibe and won’t develop the patina that occurs with age on the traditional gloss nitrocellulose lacquer finish. And not only does the pickguard feel flimsy, it has an unfortunate wacky shape that completely obscures the rosette on the treble side. True to its name, this Masterbilt is well built. Its genuine bone nut and saddle are

VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR

cleanly notched, and its 20 medium frets are smoothly crowned and polished. There are no obvious defects in the satin finish, and the guitar’s innards are smoothly sanded and free from the typical traces of excess glue. This level of craftsmanship would be befitting of a much more expensive guitar. SMOOTH PLAYER Out of the box, the AJ-45ME has a perfect setup with a comfortable action in all regions of its relatively short-scale neck, 24.75 inches. While some players might find the neck to be thin, others will find its comfortable C profile to be an improvement over the vintage style. Electric guitarists in particular will appreciate how smoothly the neck plays and how discouraging of fret-hand fatigue it seems to be. It’s even possible to bend the strings without too much effort. Overall, the guitar has a warm and handsome voice. But it doesn’t have the richness, the deep resonance, and responsiveness typical of the best vintage or modern examples. To get the best sound from the instrument, I really had

to dig in, and because of this, the guitar performed slightly better for flatpicked approaches than fingerpicked. It sounds especially nice for traditional accompaniment styles like boom-chuck and Carter strumming, in standard and alternate tunings. Thanks to the Grover Sta-Tite tuners— pairing a vintage look with modern performance—it’s easy to quickly switch tunings. With an onboard Shadow undersaddle pickup and preamp system, it’s also easy to plug in and play. These electronics do a good job of delivering the guitar’s natural acoustic sound with a minimum of extraneous noise. GREAT BANG FOR THE BUCK Epiphone’s AJ-45ME is a smart contemporary interpretation of one of the great historic flattops. Updates like a streamlined neck and builtin electronics make it a good choice for modern players, while traditional features like all-solidwood construction and a dovetail neck joint lend an old-school sound. The AJ-45ME might not ever have the vibe of a golden-era acoustic, but neither does it have its price tag. AG

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PICKIN’

AT A GLANCE

IBANEZ AVT2E-NT TENOR GUITAR BODY Mini dreadnought size Solid Sitka spruce top Mahogany back and sides Rosewood bridge with compensated bone saddle Natural gloss finish NECK Mahogany neck Rosewood fretboard 580mm (22.84-inch) scale length 30mm (1.18-inch) nut width Chrome open-gear tuners with ivory knobs

The Tenor of the Times

The Ibanez AVT2E-NT tenor guitar blends modern playability with an old-fashioned sound BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

Satin finish ELECTRONICS Fishman Sonicore pickup Ibanez AEQ-SP2 preamp with onboard tuner EXTRAS D’Addario J66 strings (.010–.032) Optional gigbag PRICE $599.99 list; $399.99 street Made in China ibanez.com 72 September 2015

t first glance, Ibanez’s Artwood Vintage AVT2E-NT looks like a tiny dreadnought. In fact, it’s a tenor guitar—the type of fourstring instrument (not to be confused with a tenor ukulele) that has gone in and out of style several times since it was first offered by makers like Gibson and Martin in the 1920s. The AVT2E-NT, with its sweet, lively sound, might conjure up the music of the swing era and the folk boom, but it boasts smooth modern playability in an affordable package. With a body length of 16.25 inches and a scale length of 580mm (about 22.8 inches), the AVT2E-NT initially feels a bit dinky, but it balances comfortably in both seated and standing positions and requires little time to get accustomed. And, with perfect low action right out of

A

the box, it feels effortless to zip around the 20-fret, gently-V-shaped neck, in both singlenote and barre-chord formations. All of the notes sound clear and faithful, without any buzzing or intonation issues. Like a violin- or mandolin-family instrument, the tenor guitar is customarily tuned in perfect fifths—C–G–D–A, lowest note to highest—and so none of the standard chord grips apply when playing the instrument. Ibanez’s website offers a handy, downloadable chord chart of major and minor triads and dominant seventh chords, but it’s very satisfying to experiment on the instrument and happen upon less idiomatic harmonies. Whether played with a more traditional approach or an idiosyncratic one, the

VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR

AVT2E-NT has a warm and lovely sound, with a respectable bass response (perhaps owing to its miniaturized dreadnought body) and a nice balance between the different registers. While it’s got a decent amount of projection and headroom when strummed with a plectrum, it also responds well to delicate fingerpicking.

What it lacks in sheer wattage, it makes up for in portability and features. CLASSIC TONEWOOD COMBO The AVT2E-NT is built from a classic tonewood combination: The soundboard is solid Sitka spruce, while the back, sides, and neck are mahogany; rosewood is used for the fretboard and the bridge. The instrument has a tasteful, vintage-inspired look, too, with its herringbone purfling, wooden mosaic backstrip, white body

binding, and open-gear tuners with ivory buttons. The test model is soundly constructed, with frets that are cleanly seated and polished, without any jagged edges, and precisely notched bone nut and compensated saddle. The body’s natural gloss finish is free from imperfections, and everything looks clean inside the box as well, although there is a hint of excess glue under the fretboard extension. The instrument comes complete with an onboard electronics system—a Fishman Sonicore pickup paired with Ibanez’s AEQ-SP2 preamp, powered by a nine-volt battery. Played through a Fender Acoustasonic amplifier, the guitar has a convincingly natural sound, and as a bonus, the preamp incorporates an easy-to-use electronic tuner (a green light illuminates when a string is at pitch). Any guitarist looking to explore the tenor should check out the Artwood Vintage AVT2ENT, a well-built, solid-topped guitar with a winning sound and feel, not to mention very good electronics, for well under $500. AG

The AVT2E comes eqipped with a Fishman Sonicore pickup.

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AcousticGuitar.com 73

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GREAT ACOUSTICS

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Forerunner Michael Gurian heralded the age of boutique guitars BY RICHARD JOHNSTON

lthough Gurian guitars don’t look exceptional today, when they first appeared in the late 1960s, nobody else was building smallbodied steel-string guitars with wood binding, herringbone purfling, and a blank fretboard. The company made three different body shapes, with or without a cutaway, in either mahogany or rosewood. Size 2 was similar to a classical guitar, while Size 3, shown here, was over 15 inches wide, making it sort of a deep-bodied OM but with more rounded bouts. This S3R has Indian rosewood sides and back, a Sitka spruce top, and a slim, asymmetrical neck designed to fit the hand. Gurian made one larger model, a jumbo with sides five inches deep. Despite the classical influence in its design, its highly decorated label inside the soundhole is pure ’60s, with “third planet from the sun” as the instrument’s origin. Michael Gurian, a New York art student and classical guitarist, built his first guitar in the early 1960s. In 1965 he moved to a three-room shop in Greenwich Village, where he built classical guitars and lutes using traditional Spanish methods. Over the next few years, Gurian expanded his business, adding steel-string guitars to his line, and when the company moved to Hinsdale, New Hampshire, in 1971, the Gurian workforce numbered 15. As one of the few small guitar companies at the time with national distribution and with stars such as Paul Simon and Jackson Browne playing its guitars, Gurian seemed poised to challenge the established American guitar factories. But a fire wiped out the Hinsdale factory in 1979, destroying over half a million dollars worth of guitars, wood, and machinery. The company moved to West Swanzey, New Hampshire, but the acoustic guitar market entered a deep slump just as production got rolling again. And with few buyers to notice the company’s miraculous rise from the ashes, bankruptcy soon followed. Michael Gurian now produces lutherie supplies such as wood purfling and ebony bridge pins, and his guitar-making legacy lives on in the work of builders like Michael Millard, founder of Froggy Bottom Guitars, and William Cumpiano, both of whom got their start at Gurian. AG

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This article was first published in the September 2004 issue. 74 September 2015

76

COURTESY OF RIOT ACT MEDIA

Playlist Jason Isbell finds peace of mind

77

Playlist Little Wings fires up its weird folk

78

Playlist Helen Avakian— fingerstyle champ

PLAYLIST

MIXED MEDIA

Little Wings, p. 77

AcousticGuitar.com 75

DAVID MCCLISTER

PLAYLIST

Jason Isbell

The Heart of Dixie Jason Isbell continues his ascent toward the pantheon of roots-rock songwriters BY MARC GREILSAMER

rom the time he joined the Drive-By Truckers in 2001, Alabama-born Jason Isbell has shown more than a few flashes of brilliance, thanks to his razor-sharp songwriting and aching, lived-in tenor voice. With 2013’s Southeastern, it all came together in impressive fashion: well-crafted, convincingly delivered songs full of fine detail and emotional resonance. Something More Than Free, the follow-up, is just as compelling. With Dave Cobb once again at the production helm, the new album is in a similar vein, though not entirely so. For one thing, the instrumentation here is more fleshedout (though far from heavy-handed), judiciously utilizing the talents of Isbell’s 400 Unit band and putting these new songs on a bit of a grander scale. For another, there appears to be a tad more sunlight peeking through the shades this time around. A classic ’70s-style country-gospel progression propels the sanguine opener, “If It Takes a Lifetime,” though harsh reality never falls too

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76 September 2015

far behind. “You thought God was an architect, now you know, he’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow,” Isbell sings on “24 Frames,” which calls to mind the spirit of Bruce Springsteen. “Flagship,” a haunting, low-key slice-oflife tale set in a deteriorating old hotel, serves as a cautionary tale for potentially jaded lovers: “Baby, let’s not live to see it fade.” Elsewhere, Isbell lights out for fresh sonic territories. The brooding “Children of Children,” with its distinct CSNY vibe, swirling string arrangement, and penetrating slide guitar, builds to a powerful crescendo. On “The Life You Chose” (“Are you living the life you chose? Are you living the life that chose you?”), Isbell rides a soaring pop melody that belies the song’s sobering intent. “Speed Trap Town,” reminiscent of Steve Earle, speaks of cheap roses, high-school football, and pickup trucks—more a dismissal than celebration of life in the sticks. While the reflective “Hudson Commodore” hews closely to the

Jason Isbell Something More Than Free Southeastern Records

acoustic-folk template, “Palmetto Rose” is gritty, electric swamp blues. Closing track “To a Band That I Loved,” what Isbell has called a “eulogy” for fabled Texas band Centro-matic, is as warm and genuine a moment as you’ll find here. While these songs are perhaps more ambitious and farther-ranging than Isbell’s past work, they maintain a rock-solid foundation built on unpretentious lyrical themes and straightforward acoustic guitar. These are songs for working folks—heartfelt, direct, hopeful, and plainspoken. Yet, there’s an undeniable dramatic sweep at work here, giving his vivid imagery and insightful reflections more weight. Isbell is an artist who seems to have found peace, uneasy as it may be, by letting go of life’s tougher questions and just living day to day, finding a way to move forward no matter the obstacles. The yearning title track best exemplifies Isbell’s newfound brand of optimistic fatalism: “I don’t think on why I’m here or where it hurts; I’m just lucky to have the work.” AG

Dar Williams

Little Wings

Emerald Self-released

Explains Woodsist

Folk-pop veteran goes deep, with help from her famous friends The latest from folk-pop luminary Dar Williams, her first DIY release after a long run on the Razor & Tie label, is an album in motion—recorded around the country with an array of friends. On the title track, Richard Thompson entwines his fingerpicking with Williams’ acoustic guitar as she sings about traveling through the Northwest and pondering her life path. Mother and daughter Suzzy and Lucy Wainwright Roche harmonize on the soothing “Weight of the World,” as do the Milk Carton Kids on the more rocking “Mad River.” Two standout tracks are co-writes. “FM Radio,” written and performed with Jill Sobule, is a perfect snapshot of a teenage girl in the ’70s, flirting with the public-pool lifeguard and singing into her hairbrush. In a better world, this exuberant, hooky pop rocker—and sly feminist anthem—would, in fact, be all over FM radio. By contrast, “Slippery Slope,” with Jim Lauderdale, is a poignantly grown-up duet, in which a long-married couple wonders, “Are we doing it wrong?/Are we dancing along/Down the slippery slope that they told us about?”— and choose to stand their ground and stick together. The track that especially lingers in my memory is the gorgeous “Empty Plane,” which narrates an increasingly surreal airport departure, and is finally revealed to be a dream preceding an actual trip. This song, like many others on Emerald, displays the kind of nuanced writing that Williams has delivered for more than 20 years, pulling us in with vivid day-inthe-life details and then going much deeper than we expect. —Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Cryptic collection of weird folk is as impenetrable as it is satisfying Kyle Field doesn’t do much explaining on Explains, which is one of the best things about it. The lyrics spill out of him in a slow, logorrheic ramble, and even if they don’t make sense, they keep flowing as if they do. Some are absurdly tragicomic, like “I would hitchhike far away/but they cut off my thumbs” (from “Old Apocalypse Style”). Some are pop culture stream-of-consciousness, with long strings of words that sound like “Wolverine/Maybelline/ Dry those tears/Mr. Clean” or “360 full spin/ garbage can climb in/green grouch morning/ red alert warning/bloodshot blazing/freak flag waving” (from “Fat Chance”). But whatever these lyrics do or don’t mean, Field sings them like they matter, freely associating in a quavering, confessional mumble, as if merely saying the words could somehow unlock the clouds around him, so he could finally “write a rainbow with no hands.” It’s crazy, it’s impenetrable, and it’s incredibly satisfying. Without the pressure of logic, he’s free to simply let these melodies wander wherever they go—to think like a visual artist, which is what he is. Even if he’s never had a real band, this latest group of friends comes awfully close. There’s Lee Baggett and Paul Dutton (guitars), Tommy McDonald (bass, keyboards), Fletcher Tucker (dulcimer, banjo), and Zeb Zaitz (drums, piano), all taking care not to overwhelm the languid, low-affect deadpan of Field’s voice and strummed acoustic guitar. Best of all, there’s Joel Tolbert (lap steel), who matches Field breath for breath, providing the twang that underpins these songs and a thin, wan melancholy that can’t be put into words. —Kenny Berkowitz

Download 21 Songwriting Tips from the Masters and you’ll learn to write better songs with advice from from Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Jakob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and more! SONGWRITING BASICS FOR GUITARISTS

21 SONGWRITING TIPS FROM THE MASTERS Ex. 1a

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Helen Avakian Notes from Helen Self-released

Fingerstyle champion offers wideranging collection of instrumentals Helen Avakian’s first all-instrumental CD is an impressive introduction to the winner of the 2014 International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship, held annually at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. The 12 songs on this album could serve as a “recital” of sorts, as she deftly serves up a wonderfully eclectic program that showcases the breadth of her talent as a solo guitarist working in a wide variety of styles. On paper, it seems like this shouldn’t work. Two songs by ECM guitar pioneer Ralph Towner sandwich a splendid arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue” and are followed by a surprising version of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours).” A rumbling take on the traditional Irish “Monaghan Jig”—a duet with Pete Huttlinger—recalls the Grateful Dead’s “The Other One” in parts. The oft-played Arab-tinged flamenco number “Zambra” sits side by side with a lovely arrangement of Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell.” The Beatles’ lilting “In My Life” is joined by four evocative and diverse originals that have some of the early Windham Hill vibe, calling to mind guitarist-composers such as Will Ackerman, Alex de Grassi, and Michael Hedges. Somehow, Avakian confidently brings these disparate sources together and molds them into a cohesive whole—no easy feat. Guitarists will find much to marvel at: The arrangements are consistently imaginative, and Avakian’s precise finger work and rhythmic assurance are on display throughout, always serving the tunes; she never resorts to look-atme pyrotechnics. Some credit must also go to engineer/mixer Mike Zirkel, who captured Avakian’s guitar—from bright harmonics to throbbing bass tones—so beautifully. The recording is full of life and energy, just like Avakian’s playing. —Blair Jackson

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ADVERTISER INDEX Acoustic Guitar Guides, store.acousticguitar.com . . . 59, 77, 78

Guitars in the Classroom, guitarsintheclassroom.org . . . . . . 42

Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp, rockcamp.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Acoustic Guitar Notes, acousticguitar.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Hill Guitar Company, hillguitar.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Saga Musical Instruments, sagamusic.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Acoustic Guitar Subscribe, acousticguitar.com/subscribe . . 79

Hoffee Cases, carbonfibercases.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Acoustic Guitar Sessions, acousticguitar.com/sessions . . . . 83

Homespun, homespun.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Alvarez, alvarezguitars.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Huss & Dalton Guitar Company, hussanddalton.com . . . . . . 50

American Music Furniture, americanmusicfurniture.com . . . . 56

Janet Davis Music, jdmc.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Bourgeois Guitars, pantheonguitars.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Kyser Musical Products, kysermusical.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Bread & Roses, breadandroses.org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Levy’s Leathers, levysleathers.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Stewart-MacDonald’s Guitar Supply, stewmac.com . . . . . . 44

D’Addario & Company, daddario.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26, 27, 43

Luthier Music Corp., luthiermusic.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Sweetwater Sound, sweetwater.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Dana B. Goods, danabgoods.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Mackie, mackie.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Taylor, taylorguitars.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Eastman Strings, Inc., eastmanstrings.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

C.F. Martin & Co., Inc., martinguitar.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

Elixir Strings, elixirstrings.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4, 24

The Music Emporium, themusicemporium.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Elliott Capos, elliottcapos.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Original Guitar Chair, originalguitarchair.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Ernie Ball Music Man, ernieball.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Paul Reed Smith Guitars, prsguitars.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

G7th, Ltd., g7th.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Peterman Acoustic Guitar Pickups and Stomp Boxes

Sam Ash Direct, samash.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Shubb Capos, shubb.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Soloette, soloette.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Steven Kaufman Enterprises, Inc., flatpik.com . . . . . . . . . . . 42

TC Electronic A/S, tcgroup.tc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Acoustic Music Company Ltd theacousticmusicco.co.uk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Walnut Valley Association, wvfest.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Graph Tech Guitar Labs, graphtech.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

peterman.com.au . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Woodstock Invitiational, woodstockinvitational.com . . . . . . . 39

Guitar Foundation Of America, guitarfoundation.org . . . . . . 54

RainSong Graphite Guitars, rainsong.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Yamaha Corporation of America, yamaha.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

AcousticGuitar.com 81

FINAL NOTE

“I COPPED ALL KINDS OF STUFF FROM BRUCE COCKBURN! I JUST LOVE BRUCE COCKBURN AND JOHN MARTYN. I BORROWED ALL KINDS OF STUFF FROM HIM IN THE BEGINNING AS WELL. I WILL CLAIM TO BE MY OWN PERSON NOW, BUT

WHO DOESN’T LISTEN TO OTHER PEOPLE AND TRY TO EMULATE THEM?” MICHAEL HEDGES AG, MARCH 1997

Acoustic Guitar (ISSN 1049-9261) is published monthly by String Letter Publishing, Inc., 501 Canal Blvd, Suite J, Richmond, CA 94840. Periodical postage paid at Richmond, CA 94804 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send changes of address to Acoustic Guitar, String Letter Publishing, Inc., PO Box 3500, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Changes of address may also be made on line at AcousticGuitar.com. Printed in the USA. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608. Canada Returns to be sent to Imex Global Solutions, PO Box 32229, Hartford, CT 06150-2229.

82 September 2015

Intimate Peformances and Insightful Conversations with Today’s Top Guitarists

BRUCE COCKBURN

SETH AVETT

PIETA BROWN

DELLA MAE

MURIEL ANDERSON

PETER ROWAN

LAURIE LEWIS

JOSE JAMES

JORMA KAUKONEN

VALERIE JUNE

ANI DIFRANCO

BUZZ OSBOURNE

RICHARD THOMPSON

DAWN LANDES

Binge-watch them all, totally free.

SESSIONS New Sessions Added Every Week. AcousticGuitar.com/Sessions

JOHN DOE

JULIAN LAGE

ERIC BIBB

DOUG PAISLEY

ED SHEERAN

PETER CASE

SARAH JAROSZ

THE BARR BROTHERS

BADI ASSAD

PARKER MILLSAP

SHOOK TWINS

THE T SISTERS

MEKLIT

CHRIS SMITHER

TRIGGER HIPPY

GRACE ASKEW

FIRST AID KIT

THE WOOD BROTHERS

SCOTT LAW

PAUL MEHLING

meet the family

New Look. Six Envelopes. Long-lasting Tone. The same Martin Strings you fell in love with in the first place.

Learn more about the family of Martin strings at martinstrings.com.