DON HENLEY | SHAWN COLVIN | PIERRE BENSUSAN | LOS LOBOS
DECEMBER 2015 | ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM
ART OF THE AXE
9 INLAY ARTISTS STEP INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
3 DADGAD MASTERS SHARE THEIR WISDOM HOW MELODIC SOLOING CAN ADD DEPTH TO YOUR PLAYING NEW GEAR LICHTY SMALL JUMBO TAKAMINE EF360S-TT MACKIE FREEPLAY PA
3 SONGS
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GEORGE HARRISON Hear Me Lord THE LEFT BANKE Walk Away Renée CHARLEY JORDAN Keep it Clean
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CONTENTS
‘A lot of traditional country music is about heartache and regret, looking back, which is what a man tends to do when he reaches my time in life.’
Features
DON HENLEY, P. 30
Special Focus It’s a DADGAD World!
December 2015
56 Pierre Bensusan Making DADGAD his own
McPherson Guitars
By Karen Peterson
Artist: Eric Pelton
26 Welcome to the Machine Inside the David Rawlings Machine’s new Southern-Gothic album Nashville Obsolete
58 Sarah McQuaid DADGAD in the UK— a comfort zone
The custom-built Manhattan Skyline
By Kenny Berkowitz
By Karen Peterson
a curly Brazilian Rosewood back
30 Homeward Bound Don Henley returns to his country roots on Cass County
60 Daithi Sproule Magically Irish
adorns the deco-style back art with
By Karen Peterson
the Manhattan waterfront in the late-
22 Stuff Like This Yo La Tengo is back with a successor to Fakebook By Pat Moran
Volume 26, No. 6, Issue 276 On the Cover Manhattan Skyline
is a full-size McPherson featuring an Adirondack Red Spruce top fit into and sides. Master luthier Eric Pelton
1920s era. The intricate inlay consists
By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
38 The Art of the Axe Sometimes an acoustic guitar is a canvas of wood and steel By Greg Cahill
hand-cut and inlaid pieces depicting
Miscellany
of koa skyscrapers, Myrtle, maple, and
10 From the Home Office 96 Marketplace 97 Ad Index
waterfront, cocobolo and Brazilian
Brazilian rosewood buildings on the rosewood sky, and ziricote water. See more on pg. 38
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NEWS 15 The Beat David Hidalgo on Los Lobos’ city of gold; Int’l Bluegrass Museum breaks ground; Inside the Americana Awards 20 News Spotlight Five minutes with Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers PLAY 63 Here’s How Tap your inner guitar teacher 64 Weekly Workout Developing melodic solos Songs to Play 68 Hear Me Lord From George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass 70 Walk Away Renee The Left Banke’s 1966 smash 74 Keep It Clean A classic ’30 blues AG TRADE 79 Shoptalk Ovation reopens USA plant
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80 Movers & Shakers Collings GM Steve McCreary
82 Guitar Guru Putting pickups on high-end guitars 84 Review: Lichty Small Jumbo This might be your dream steel-string 86 Review: Takamine EF360S-TT Bold, balanced tones— plugged or unplugged 88 Review: Mackie Freeplay A feature-rich personal PA 98 Great Acoustics A classic ’60s Fender flattop MIXED MEDIA 91 Playlist Shawn Colvin delivers Uncovered; also Tom Russell’s The Rose of Roscrae: A Ballad of the West, Joan Shelley’s Over and Even, Beppe Gambetta and Tony McManus’ Round Trip, and Hot Wax: Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding on audiophile vinyl 95 Books Boutique Acoustics: 180 Years of Handbuilt American Guitars
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CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Tracy Cox drew the design for “Wolf Guard.” The pickguard graces one of two Dreamcatcher custom Martins that were ordered by Willcutt Guitars in Lexington, Kentucky. p.38
Editorial Director & Editor Greg Cahill Editor at Large Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Managing Editor Blair Jackson Associate Editor Whitney Phaneuf Copy Editor Anna Pulley Production Manager Hugh O’Connor Contributing Editors Kenny Berkowitz, David Hamburger, Steve James, Orville Johnson, Richard Johnston, Sean McGowan, Jane Miller, Greg Olwell, Adam Perlmutter, Rick Turner, Doug Young
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Stringletter.com
here’s something about the acoustic guitar that lends itself to quiet reflection—maybe it’s those moody chords and wistful ballads, or perhaps it’s a DADGAD tune that lets those open strings ring. And there’s something about these winter issues (published in the dog days of summer) that also lends themselves to reflection. This is the December 2015 issue, with nary a Yule log in sight, but I’m in a decidedly reflective mood nonetheless. In that spirit, this issue offers profiles of three DADGAD players of various persuasions, with a player tip from each. You’ll also find the haunting Baroque folk-pop song “Walk Away Renée,” one the best break-up songs of the 1960s, arranged by contributing editor Adam Perlmutter for DADGAD tuning. In addition, there’s a lengthy pictorial spotlighting the intricate works of nine talented inlay artists, including William “Grit” Laskin, a master of the craft who has a forthcoming book on the subject, and Pete Davies Jr., the gifted
T
young artist whose work before his untimely death last year graced some of Taylor Guitar’s most-coveted limited editions. You’ll also find editor-at-large Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers’ insightful interview with Don Henley, whose country-inflected album Cass County is packed with reflective songs that mark something of a homecoming for the former occupant of Hotel California. Longtime contributor Kenny Berkowitz catches up with guitarist Dave Rawlings to discuss the David Rawlings Machine’s latest album project, steeped in Southern Gothic imagery (and it doesn’t get much moodier than that). And I contribute a short review of the new audiophile reissue of Bob Dylan’s 1967 acoustic masterpiece John Wesley Harding, which the All Music Guide has hailed as “quiet, country-tinged . . . [and] reflective.” That works for me. Play on. —Greg Cahill
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16
The Beat Bluegrass museum breaks ground
19
20
The Beat Inside the 2015 Americana Awards
NEWS
5 Minutes with . . . The Wood Bros. in ‘Paradise’ David Hidalgo of Los Lobos
4 ESSENTIAL LOS LOBOS ACOUSTIC SONGS
EL CANELO from Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles 1978
SCOTT SHEFF
LA PISTOLA Y EL CORAZON from La Pistola y El Corazon 1988
THE BEAT
Golden Sounds Los Lobos return with a new album full of acoustic textures
SAINT BEHIND THE GLASS from Acoustic en Vivo 2005
BY BLAIR JACKSON
os Lobos albums are always eclectic affairs, blending rock, blues, soul, and Mexican folk influences into a roots fusion that sounds unlike any other band. Their latest, Gates of Gold (429 Records), is no exception. It artfully weaves songs that were clearly influenced by such ’60s predecessors as Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Buffalo Springfield with plaintive ballads and mid-tempo numbers from the resident writing team of guitarists David Hidalgo and Louie Perez (the band’s original drummer), and gritty boogie-blues and Latin flavors from guitarist Cesar Rosas.
L
Not surprisingly, there are acoustic textures in many of the new songs, a Los Lobos tradition dating back more than 40 years. “A good portion of the ideas that became songs and ended up on this album started out acoustic,” Hidalgo says, by phone from his LA home. “The basic chords and riffs came out of playing the guitar in a hotel somewhere. I might come up with 30 seconds or so of something that I liked and I’d record that on my phone, so I wouldn’t forget it. “Then, after a couple of years, when it came time to make this album, I went back to those CONT. ON PG. 16
TIN CAN TRUST from Disconnected in New York City 2013 AcousticGuitar.com 15
THE BEAT
Jim & Jesse with Lester Flatt
Los Lobos Gates of Gold 429
and found some other ideas that we’d work on from an acoustic-guitar start. Sometimes, as songs developed, we’d keep the acoustic guitar as part of it, and sometimes we didn’t. ‘Made to Break Your Heart’ [which opens the album] is an example. That was a hotel idea and we kept the acoustic guitar prominent.” Hidalgo says his primary acoustic guitar for that period of songwriting in hotels was Perez’s Gibson Keb’ Mo’ L-00 Bluesmaster. “I also found an old Harmony OO-18 concert size with a mahogany top—a really nice guitar. Those are the ones I used the most.” When it came to recording, he chose a 1959 Guild flattop. “I don’t know the model number, but it’s close to their version of a J-200, with a big, focused sound. I got it a year before we did the recording and it was the best-sounding acoustic I had.” The acoustic ornamentation doesn’t stop with guitars. “Made to Break Your Heart” also features what sounds like it could be a 12-string, but is actually a new creation: “That’s an instrument I came up with,” Hidalgo says. “Phil Alvin, from the Blasters, called it a ‘Hidalguero.’ It’s a double tenor—eight strings. The Gs are in octaves and the Bs are high-strung, almost like a Nashville tuning. It’s a four-course instrument [made by] Candelas Guitars [in LA]. I told [owner] Tomas Delgado I wanted something like a double-requinto. It has a nice, bright, transparent sound.” Other songs on Gates of Gold include Perez playing a jarana (a smaller, eight-stringed instrument) and Rosas plucking a 12-string bajo sexto; both are widely used in Mexican and Tex-Mex music. Hidalgo also contributes mandolin on the title track. “Those instruments are all fun to play,” Hidalgo offers. “We plan to do more folkloric stuff, maybe do another album of that, and take it on tour.” 16 December 2015
BIG CHANGES AT INTERNATIONAL BLUEGRASS MUSIC MUSEUM The International Bluegrass Music Museum has a new executive director and will soon break ground on a new location, three blocks west of its current space in downtown Owensboro, Kentucky. Executive director Chris Joslin—a guitarist and banjo player who was a founding member of the bluegrass group Crucial Smith— assumed his new role September 1, telling the local newspaper, the Messenger-Inquirer, that he plans to make Owensboro the bluegrass music capital of world. Joslin’s goal will no doubt be aided by the museum’s move to a 48,000 square foot building, which is set to break ground before the end of 2015. According to promotions director Chris Langdon, the new location will double the museum’s current exhibit and archive space, include an outdoor stage and indoor, 500-seat
auditorium that will become the official home of the Bluegrass Opry, and have classroom space for music education and lessons. The building is estimated to cost $15.3 million, according to the Owensboro Insider; that money was jointly raised through grassroots fundraising in the bluegrass community, the city of Owensboro, and the state of Kentucky. Langdon says construction is set to take 16 months, and the new location will be open by 2017—in time for Owensboro’s bicentennial. The Bluegrass Music Museum was established in Owensboro in 1991. The museum’s current exhibit, Bluegrass Music: A History with Many Sources, traces bluegrass from the early 1900s to the late 1950s; it will remain open through 2016. Upcoming exhibits include a celebration of women in bluegrass. For details, visit bluegrassmuseum.org. —Whitney Phaneuf
Select winners of the 26th annual International Bluegrass Music Awards, announced on Oct. 1. Entertainer of the Year The Earls of Leicester Instrumental Group of the Year The Earls of Leicester Song of the Year “Moon Over Memphis,” Balsam Range Album of the Year The Earls of Leicester, The Earls of Leicester, Jerry Douglas, producer
Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year “The Three Bells,” Jerry Douglas, Mike Auldridge, Rob Ickes Emerging Artist of the Year Becky Buller Recorded Event of the Year “Southern Flavor,” Becky Buller, with Peter Rowan, Michael Feagan, Buddy Spicher, Ernie Sykes, Roland White, and Blake Williams
Dobro Player of the Year Jerry Douglas Guitar Player of the Year Bryan Sutton Inductees into the Bluegrass HOF Bill Keith and Larry Sparks
The complete list can be found at ibma.org.
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THE BEAT
Marc Ribot and Buddy Miller
Guitar Foundation of America
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Metropolitan State University Local Host, Alex Komodore
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JUNE 20-25, 2016
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The cream of the crop gathered September 23 at the fabled Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for the 14th annual Americana Honors and Awards Show to honor their peers. Limos delivered stars dressed in rustic chic and fans filled the balconies and downstairs lobby to rub elbows with industry bigwigs and media folks. The winners this year were: Album of the Year: Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone by Lucinda Williams Artist of the Year: Sturgill Simpson Duo/Group of the Year: The Mavericks Song of the Year: “Turtles All the Way Down,” by Sturgill Simpson Emerging Artist of the Year: Shakey Graves Instrumentalist of the Year: John Leventhal Free Speech Award: Buffy Sainte-Marie Lifetime Achievement Award: Don Henley Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist: Ricky Skaggs Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance: Los Lobos Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriter: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
ERIKA GOLDRING
THE 2015 AMERICANA MUSIC AWARDS
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AcousticGuitar.com 19
5 MINUTES WITH OLIVER WOOD
Left to Right Chris Wood, Oliver Wood, Jano Rix Below ‘Paradise’
‘Paradise’ Found A sense of desire and longing informs Wood Brothers latest CD BY KENNY BERKOWITZ
After playing together as teenagers, Chris and Oliver Wood spent the next 15 years finding their voices. Oliver cut his teeth on guitar with bluesman Tinsley Ellis and Southern rockers King Johnson; Chris made his name on upright bass with Medeski Martin & Wood. In 2004, they formed the Wood Brothers, whose new album is Paradise (Thirty Tigers)—an acoustic, jaminflected mix of the blues, rock, soul, and gospel. AG recently chatted with Oliver Wood about the new album. 20 December 2015
What did you two play as kids? I was really into my dad’s record collection, like Jimmy Reed, which was simple enough, formwise, and technique-wise, to do together. When I was 16, I got an electric bass, but I switched to guitar after a few months and gave the bass to Chris. He just disappeared into his room, quit having a social life, and got really good really fast, even before I left home. But we drifted apart, and until the last couple of years, it was hard to stay connected. So you started a band . . . The Wood Brothers really brought us together. We have our music and our brotherhood in common, and that’s been a real bonding for us. For the first time in our adult lives, we’re living in the same city, so instead of trying to schedule time together, we can just drive down the street, hook up, and work on a new song. He’s a world-class bass player, and I feel superblessed just trying to keep up with him. Is that why the album is called Paradise? It started as a pun. There’s a song called “Snake
Eyes,” and the chorus is, “I’m looking for my paradise.” You know, “snake eyes”—pair of dice,” that kind of thing. But, in retrospect, we realized this album really has a strong theme— not just of paradise, but of longing and desire, of wanting things you don’t have. That keeps creeping up, and it may be that you want some sort of spiritual redemption or it may be you just want an iPad. It runs the gamut of all different types of desire: sexual or spiritual or material. On the cover of the record, there’s a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of it on a stick. When we saw that image, we were like, “Man, that’s exactly what this album is about.” It’s like you’re already in paradise, and this may be as close as you’re going to get. What do you long for? There’s a song called “Two Places,” about this double life we lead as touring musicians. We love being with our families, and we love our work, which requires us to be gone a lot of the time. So when I’m on the road, I long to be with my family, and when I’m at home, I long to be playing music. AG
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FAKING IT B
efore Yo La Tengo covered the Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” on their new album, Ira Kaplan says the band “may have only played the song twice before.” Yet that tune’s live debut could be Yo La Tengo’s strangest gig, because it was the night the band got killed onstage. Kaplan, the guitarist and co-founder of the long-running indie-rock band, convinced his band mates, drummer/vocalist (and wife) Georgia Hubley and bassist James McNew, that the Cure’s jaunty, bipolar hit would be ideal for a Christmas party thrown by the irreverent fake news site The Onion. The satirical website had lampooned the hipster adulation of Kaplan’s band with its story “37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster,” and the band agreed to the show on the condition that they could reenact the article. The twist was that Yo La Tengo got killed instead of the audience. Fake speakers fell from the rafters and landed on Kaplan, Hubley, and McNew, crushing them, and they were carried offstage on stretchers. For an encore the band reappeared, resurrected in angel’s wings. “Friday I’m in Love” is one of several songs relaunched on Stuff Like That There (Matador), 22 December 2015
With their new album, Yo La Tengo returns to the eclectic, covers-heavy, acoustic template of their 1990 alt-rock classic Fakebook By Pat Moran
Yo La Tengo’s 14th album. It’s an acoustic-based mix, including a handful of shimmery originals, reinterpreted gems culled from Yo La Tengo’s back catalog, and an eclectic batch of covers ranging from sunny folk-rockers the Lovin’ Spoonful to avant-garde jazzman Sun Ra. “Our enthusiasm for playing cover songs [remains] unabated,” says Kaplan, who also calls the new album a sequel to the band’s folkinflected 1990 recording Fakebook. As well as replicating Fakebook’s acousticsand-covers template, Stuff Like That There harkens back to the earlier release in other ways. Dave Schramm, Yo La Tengo’s original electric guitarist who returned to the fold for Fakebook, contributes mostly electrics to the new collection. “On one song I played an acoustic,” Schramm says. “It was my 1991 Taylor Grand Concert on ‘Friday I’m in Love.’” Kaplan plays all other acoustics on the set. Also on board is Fakebook producer Gene Holder, who mixed and recorded the current album. For Kaplan, the new project feels like he’s revisiting old roles. “It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I can still fit into my old army uniform,’ but it also works as a marker of how everybody’s changed. That’s
lucky, because if [the recording process] hadn’t been surprising, we’d have been disappointed.” One welcome surprise was bassist McNew’s decision to learn upright bass for the new recordings. “Al Greller’s upright bass is one of the touchstones from Fakebook,” Kaplan says. “Once we decided to revisit [that record], and James expressed his desire to learn upright bass, we thought, ‘Why not?’” Acceptance of—and willingness to work with—whatever comes their way has characterized Yo La Tengo’s approach to music making, ever since Kaplan and Hubley composed the core of the trio in 1984. “We were (recently) doing a session, and some . . . people there were trying to obtain a specific sound,” Kaplan says, “and I thought how alien that was to me. I’m rarely looking for a sound. It’s more a matter of working with the one I’ve got.” Since the addition of full-time bassist McNew in 1992—“He filled in for our [rotating bass chair] for a tour, and it just worked out,” says Kaplan—that sound centers on the dusky warmth of Hubley’s vocals, Kaplan’s swarming harmonies, and the tactile strumming and picking of his Gibson B-25.
GEAR LIKE THIS HERE
Left to right Dave Schramm, James McNew, Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan
“It’s the same Gibson I used on Fakebook. For years it was the only acoustic guitar I owned, and it’s still the one I play live,” Kaplan says, adding that his guitar’s tone is simply “what we sound like.”
I
t wasn’t always like that. Throughout the late 1980s, and well into the 2000s, Kaplan alternated honeyed acoustics with coruscating electric runs on his Stratocaster, routed through an array of pedals, including a pair of Pro-Co Rats, a Vox Wah Wah, and a Mutron II, with a switcher running to two Fender amps. In contrast, on the new album, his Gibson—and on a few songs, his Guild F-30—are played dry, without the aid of pedals or amps. Though acoustics have always been on Yo La Tengo’s palette, emphasis switched to them during the band’s “Freewheeling Yo La Tengo” tours between 2007 and 2009. “We were doing two sets,” Kaplan says. “The first set was quiet and the second set was louder, [and] a lot of the songs in the loud set would make an appearance in the quiet set.” With Kaplan on his Gibson and McNew on electric bass, “we referred to those [quiet] sets
as stripped-down rather than acoustic,” Kaplan says. A similar gig, for the band’s former European label City Slang, planted the seed for Yo La Tengo’s return to Fakebook’s spare, eclectic approach. Kaplan and crew recruited Schramm for the gig, and they “played a show Fakebookstyle, drawing from our entire career with City Slang.” The show’s concept appealed to the band, Kaplan says, “because it was out of character (for us) to go back to something we’d done before.” The career-retrospective quality of Stuff Like That There is reflected in its choice of covers, many of which come from Yo La Tengo’s stage repertoire: A dry-eyed, two-step rendition of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” dates from a 1994 tour when the trio opened for Johnny Cash. “That song started with us just liking the way Georgia sings it,” Kaplan says. In fact, the sound of Hubley’s voice is often the deciding factor in which songs to cover. On the new album, Hubley’s deadpan lead cuts through the jaunty instrumentation of songs like the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Butchie’s Theme,” which dates from “the quiet set when we were on tour for [the 2013 album] Fade,” Kaplan says.
“I don’t approach acoustics differently than electrics,” Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan says. “When appropriate, I’ll use an acoustic to make a racket, and I’m not more likely to use my fingers instead of a pick than I am with an electric.” Kaplan’s primary guitar on the new album, Stuff Like That There is his vintage Gibson B-25, which he has owned for several decades. More recently, he acquired a Guild F30, “which I played on a couple of songs on the album to get a different color,” he says. Kaplan uses D’Addario or DR 12s strings. Stuff Like That There was recorded at three studios, one in New York and two in New Jersey: Brooklyn Recording in Brooklyn, Water Music across the Hudson River in Hoboken, and Kaleidoscope Sound in Union City. At Kaleidoscope, a Gibson J-45 and a Kalamazoo KG11 were available, and Kaplan played those guitars on retakes. Kaplan used no pedals or amps in recording the album. Onstage, he runs his acoustics through “the pedal setup that I have at my disposal for my electric guitar, but I use the pedals more sparingly,” Kaplan says. Yo La Tengo uses multiple tunings on acoustic guitar for several songs, so live they “switch between the Gibson and the Guild,” Kaplan says. “Not so much because of the sound of the guitar, but to keep the set moving.” He uses a Boss EQ pedal to match the sound between the two guitars.
AcousticGuitar.com 23
YO LA TENGO
As with “Friday I’m in Love,” Kaplan remembers the exact night a cover of avant-jazz great Sun Ra’s “Somebody’s in Love” made its stage debut. “I was driving to a show in DC by myself,” he says. “For some reason, Georgia and James took a separate car. I was listening to [the Sun Ra singles collection] and it occurred to me that it would be fun to hear what the three of us singing together sounded like. So we did the song that night, and we’ve done it ever since. “It’s frequently our last encore,” Kaplan adds. “Georgia is upfront and everyone is singing. Of all the songs on the record, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the one that we’ve played the most.” In addition to two new, suitably strippeddown compositions penned specifically for Stuff Like That There, the album also boasts a trio of Yo La Tengo tunes drawn from the band’s past. “We like the balance of these three songs together,” Kaplan says of “Deeper into Movies,” first recorded for 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One; “The Ballad of Red Buckets,”
24 December 2015
originally on 1995’s Electr-O-Pura; and “All Your Secrets,” from 2009’s Popular Songs. Yet, he feels each song works well individually, and that recasting the tunes in an acoustic setting yielded some surprises. “When we did ‘Deeper into Movies,’ we were finding new sides of that song the whole time we tracked it,” he says. “We recorded it with drums, and then we [accidentally] found out what it sounded like without them. We put up faders without labeling them, and at some point we were listening—just monitoring our recording—and there were no drums. We all looked at each other and said, ‘That sounds interesting. Let’s pursue that.’” Pursuit of the accidental has been a factor of Yo La Tengo’s development since day one, Kaplan says. “It’s funny to talk about James [McNew] becoming a full-time member of the band almost by accident, because that’s how I came to lead guitar.” Schramm, who had played lead, decamped after Yo La Tengo’s 1986 debut album Ride the
Tiger. “After that, Georgia and I played shows with various people on lead guitar.” With no permanent replacement for Schramm, “we would practice as a trio,” Kaplan says. “I was playing lead guitar [during practice], because I was the only guitarist. “We accepted a show in Albany, and then found out that nobody could make it. We had the choice of canceling or playing as a trio, so we thought, ‘Well, we practice that way a lot. Why don’t we see what it’s like?’ I just kind of fell into the lead guitar role.” Thirty-one years on, the initially accidental guitarist and his band mates have become that rarest of rock institutions—one that continues to evolve and astonish. And with Stuff Like That There, Yo La Tengo may have made their most surprising move. “A lot of times [making music] is just a matter of listening and being open to things rather than having a concept to follow,” Kaplan says. “That’s what’s so unusual about doing this sequel, because this time, we did have a concept.” AG
HENRY DILTZ
WELCOME TO THE
MACHINE
The David Rawlings Machine returns with the Southern-Gothicinfluenced album Nashville Obsolete By Kenny Berkowitz
26 December 2015
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hirteen years after their breakthrough as a duo, David Rawlings and Gillian Welch decided to switch places. On Friend of a Friend (2009), credited to Dave Rawlings Machine, he became the frontman and she became the backup, and they’ve been alternating roles ever since. They write slowly, so following Welch’s The Harrow & the Harvest (2011)—which took eight years to record, with her next album still nowhere in sight—they’ve returned to the Machine, performing pop-up gigs around the country and, in July, anchoring the 50th anniversary Bob Dylan tribute at the 2015 Newport Folk Festival. On Nashville Obsolete (Acony), the latest offering from the Dave Rawlings Machine, Rawling has taken another leap, building a set of new songs around his strengths as a singing, songwriting, guitar-slinging folkie. He’s found his voice as a lead singer with a rich, lonesome twang that’s halfway between Dylan and Neil Young. Rawlings has grown into a relaxed, rambling confidence as a storyteller, with songs that lean toward Southern Gothic, like the ten-minute-long sojourn “The Trip,” which opens with a handkerchief, a hatchet, and a warning that “whistles blow and people get on trains without knowing where they’re going.” Best of all, backed by Brittany Haas (fiddle), Paul Kowert (bass), Jordan Tice (mandolin), Willie Watson (guitar), and Welch (guitar), Rawlings is exploring new ways to accompany himself on guitar, in a perfect balance of rhythm and lead that emphasizes quiet, unanswerable mysteries. How do the seven songs on this record feel different from Friend of a Friend? That first Machine record was constructed horridly. We’d been a long time between records, and I felt there was just too much pressure. We tried to record, but things were breaking under that weight. So I realized there were songs I’d written, like “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)” [with Ryan Adams] or “I Hear Them All” [with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor], songs that I’d sung, that I’d liked, and some cover songs that we’d been doing, and I thought we could make an album out of them. The turning point was when we started to write “Ruby,” which we thought was a strong song, and it felt like the wise thing to do was to make a record. There was no thought that this was something we were going to keep doing, but it reflected the shows we were playing, and I thought it would pay off when we made the next Gillian Welch record.
And then you recorded another Machine album. Are you more satisfied with this one? With Nashville Obsolete, we had material and songs, artistic things we wanted to explore, but they felt strange to me. I didn’t know how accessible they were, and I still don’t. But it was art, and we liked it, and when we started working on it in earnest, some of the stuff didn’t end up quite as strange as it seemed like it was going to be. We road-tested these songs on a little pop-up tour, and the audience responded really well. It didn’t feel like the songs were obtuse—it felt like we’d focused them in a way people could understand. Does that mean your writing process has changed? It’s developed. Like “To Be Young,” we wrote that very quickly, at a party when we weren’t exactly in our right minds. Ryan forgot we’d even been working on it, and a couple of days later, when I said, “We should finish that song,” he was like, “What song?” So I played it for him, as well as I could remember it, and he remembered parts that I’d forgotten, and we cobbled together what we could, and then he put it on Heartbreaker (2000). That’s a different process, for sure. Even a song like “Ruby,” which was closest in process to these new songs, was a change for us at the time, the way we kept pushing it forward, kept working on it. When you and Gillian write together, how do you divide the work? It’s different for virtually every song. Both of us start songs, and on this record, it’s pretty well split. We tend to be working on a lot of material at most times. Songs can be around for a period of years, and often they get retooled and refocused, and then there’s an intense period of finishing. There are songwriters I know that if they don’t get something they like in that first initial burst of inspiration, they move on to other things and never come back. We’re in the other camp. How do you start writing a ten-minute song like “The Trip”? It started with the feeling; the emotion of the groove. It was a long, long piece of work initially, and we looked for a way to focus it into what felt like a single thought, a single line, a single emotional landscape. When you’re dealing with something that’s going to be as big as that, it’s not useful to do any editing while you’re writing it, or to judge it too much. It’s funny, because you might think that if you’re writing a really long song, the hard thing is to make it long. But it’s very easy to make it long. The hard thing is to give it emotional focus. AcousticGuitar.com 27
DAVE RAWLINGS MACHINE
Trim 8.25” x 10.875”
How do you know whether you’re writing a song for Gillian or a song for the Machine? We both sing the songs as we’re writing them, but I think we’ve gotten a little more adept over time. I’ve come around to being a little more familiar with my own voice and the kind of song that we enjoy playing when I’m singing. In general, they’re in the minority, because Gill is a much better singer, and I would rather listen to her than listen to myself. But one of the fun things we’ve learned over the last few years is there are kinds of songs we can do when I’m singing, and we both enjoy that. When we start a song that we feel is in that camp now, we’re usually pretty aware of it. What goes into a good solo? When I’m playing a solo that I find satisfying, I tend to get tugged along. I play something, and then I play something else, and then something starts to pull me. I know what I want to hear next, and I just try to find it. I go along until I can see the end coming, and I know what it is, and I try to do something to close it down. But you know, if my eyes are closed and I’m in the middle of some of this stuff, I have no idea where I am on the neck or what I’m really doing. I lose the thread, and it isn’t until later, when I listen back, that I know what’s happening. Did you know you could write string arrangements? I’d never done an arrangement in my life. The two that I did here are my first and second. It took five days, where I slept maybe two or three hours a night, and the last night I didn’t sleep at all. We scheduled the session for Monday in Memphis, and I started the string 28 December 2015
RICK DIAMOND
Rawlings and Welch performing at the 2015 Americana Honors & Awards Show, where they were honored for their songwriting.
‘THERE’S DEFINITELY AN ORGANIC MUSICALITY, THE FEELING THAT WE’RE ONE WHEN WE PLAY.’
arrangements on Wednesday night, wrote the worst stuff you’ve ever heard in your entire life. It was just awful. And I finally came upon one little thing for “The Weekend” that I thought was good, so I chased it down and I wrote this part that I thought sounded pretty good. Then I had to do it all again on “Short Haired Women,” which was even more complicated, and I just wrote garbage. Finally on the last day, we had to go in at 10am, and I was still working, still sitting in the same chair. I’d kind of overwritten it, but it was time to go into the studio, so there it is. I told the string players, “This is my first chart,” and they seemed to like it. What do you love about playing with Gillian? The way our timing works together. We have a way of settling back into the vocals and letting the time relax there, and we have a way of driving into lead parts and picking up the time we’ve lost. There’s definitely an organic musicality, the feeling that we’re one when we play. That’s why we played as a duo for so long, and that’s part of what makes the Machine different. We’re adding other people who have that kind of feel, expanding a bit tonally, bringing different personalities. That brings a different emotion to the music, and exploring that stuff is one of the great things about playing music. And life in general. AG
WHAT DAVID RAWLINGS PLAYS The first time David Rawlings played his 1935 Epiphone Olympic, he fell in love. “I was 24,” he says. “I wanted an instrument that would do the tonal work of a mandolin or a Dobro, so Gillian Welch and I could create a twoperson sound where there would be bass and rhythm coming out of Gill’s guitar, while I’d be playing an instrument that sat in the middle. I came upon this archtop, but it didn’t have a bridge, so I asked a luthier friend to make me one. “And when we went to make the first [Gillian Welch] record, I had just gotten the guitar back, but had never played it. So I did, and as soon as I heard it on tape, I was like, ‘This does exactly what I want.’ It has a voice. It has personality. It’s a long-scale instrument with a tiny body, which no other manufacturer ever made, and it gives the guitar this sort of pianistic, straight harmonic sound. I can play it more aggressively than I’d be able to play on many other of the small archtops from that era, because they’d all be shorter scale and the strings would be less tense. “And gradually, as I learned to play it better, I found it was a pretty useful tool, even in a little string band like the Machine.”
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THE AG INTERVIEW
HOMEWARD BOUND Don Henley returns to his country roots on ‘Cass County’
By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
C
ass County, the long-awaited new album by Don Henley, is a kind of homecoming—a return to Henley’s rural roots in northeast Texas, and to the country music that filled the radio waves of his childhood. Some of the songs he covers on the album date from his formative years in the ’50s and ’60s, like Ira and Charlie Louvin’s “When I Stop Dreaming” (performed as a heart-rending duet with Dolly Parton), but most tracks are new originals. At 68, Henley is stepping into the spotlight as an old-school country singer and songwriter in the tradition of George Jones or Merle Haggard. 30 December 2015
The direction of the album, Henley’s first solo release in 15 years, does not come out of the blue. With the Eagles, Henley was the songwriter (with Glenn Frey) behind such countryfolk strummers as “Tequila Sunrise” and “Lyin’ Eyes.” Henley checked out of the Hotel California in the ’90s and has been living with his family in Dallas ever since. But stylistically, Cass County is a thousand miles from the synth-heavy sounds of Henley’s last solo album, Inside Job, and his pop hits like “Dirty Laundry” and “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.” Cass County does not attempt to fit in with the pop-, rock-, and
rap-influenced productions coming out of mainstream Nashville today, either. With songs like “Waiting Tables,” a portrait of a struggling single mother, and “The Cost of Living,” an older and wiser reminiscence sung as a duet with Haggard, Henley focuses on storytelling, simple melodies, and accompaniment you can strum along with on first listen. Henley’s fellow architect for Cass County is his longtime friend and collaborator Stan Lynch, former drummer with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who served as Henley’s cowriter and co-producer. Though Henley wrote
DANNY CLINCH
these songs on acoustic guitar and is playing rhythm guitar on tour, he relegated all the sixstring parts on the album to others—especially to latter-day Eagles guitarist Steuart Smith (see “The Guitars of ‘Cass County’,” page 34). Smith also helped write several of Henley’s new songs and even pays tribute on piano to Floyd Cramer, whose tinkling lines made an indelible mark on hits by Patsy Cline. In late summer, as Henley was going into rehearsals for an Austin City Limits performance and subsequent tour, he spoke at length about making the new album. Thoughtful and down
to earth, he came across as quite content in this phase of his songwriting and life, and unconcerned that Cass County hardly fits into current commercial trends—in Nashville or anywhere else. “Father Time is a friend,” he sings in “Where I Am Now,” the closing track. “I feel at home in my own skin.” In keeping with the album title, do the lyrics of these songs have a lot of direct references to your childhood? Some of them do. The most autobiographical song on the album is “Train in the Distance.”
That’s about my boyhood in northeast Texas and my grandmother’s house that I went to, which was in a town 21 miles west of my hometown, where my dad’s auto parts shop was. In the summers when I wasn’t in school, he would drive every day to work and I would go with him and hang out at my grandmother’s house. The people next door had a grandson who was my playmate, and we used to go put nickels and pennies on the railroad tracks and watch the train run over them. That was a big deal. The only other song that’s a glancing nod or reference to my hometown is “Waiting Tables.” AcousticGuitar.com 31
DON HENLEY
The first verse references a timber town, and the timber industry is just about the only industry left in and around my home county—except the chicken business. A lot of people have chicken farms now. Stylistically, how do these songs connect to the music you heard as a kid? I’m sure you’ve read the story that I tell about listening to a radio program called The Louisiana Hayride, which was like The Grand Ole Opry but a little more oriented toward musical rebels—like Elvis and Johnny Cash and Hank and George Jones. It was broadcast on a radio station called KWKH out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and my dad and I would listen to that in the car driving to his shop. So that had some influence, especially in the cover tunes that I did, like [the Louvin Brothers’] “When I Stop Dreaming.” That song was published in 1955, so I’m sure I heard it. Dolly Parton knew that song well. When she came to the studio, she said, “Me and Porter [Wagoner] used to do this song,” and she just killed it. I think she did it in about three takes. She’s a force of nature. Her voice contains within it the history of a people, and it contains suffering and joy and love and compassion. There’s nobody quite like her. Is your cover of “She Sang Hymns Out of Tune” a tip of the hat to the Dillards? Yes, it is. The Dillards put out a brilliant album in 1968 that was a real pioneering effort. It was called Wheatstraw Suite, and it changed my life. Elton John has said in the past that’s his favorite album of all time. On that album was “She Sang Hymns Out of Tune,” arranged by Herb Pederson, who was the banjo player at the time. Back in, I think, ’69, the Dillards played some small joint in Fort Worth, and I drove through a snowstorm from Dallas to see them. Herb Pederson was very congenial and talked with me for a while. I was just thrilled and never forgot that. Our version of that song is so faithful to the Dillards’ version that I actually gave Herb an arrangement credit on my album, even though he wasn’t there. Turning to your new original songs, the melody of “That Old Flame” reminds me of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Did you think of that similarity as you wrote? No. I’m glad you mentioned that, because I’ve been trying for months, since we wrote that song, to think of what it sounds like. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” also sounds like a lot of Protestant hymns that we used to sing in church, and there are some rockabilly songs 32 December 2015
that are similar. So I think that melody and that chord progression go way back to some foggy time in history. All this stuff goes back to Scotland and Ireland and England. That’s where most of my ancestors came from, so I think some of it is just genetic. I think we’re all programmed in some ways with music in us that dates back for centuries.
‘A LOT OF WHAT THEY CALL COUNTRY MUSIC NOW IS UNRECOGNIZABLE TO ME. MAYBE WE WERE RESPONSIBLE IN PART FOR SOME OF THAT.’ Stan Lynch plays a big part in the songs and sound of this album. How would you describe your roles in co-writing these songs? We don’t have specific roles. I really enjoy writing with him because I enjoy hanging out with him. You can’t write with just anybody. I have to be comfortable with the person, and I have to know them really well and vice versa. Songwriting is a very personal process. You philosophize, and you talk about your inner hopes and fears and your ideas about life in general. Stan and I have been able to do that. His dad was a psychology professor down in Gainesville, so Stan’s a smart guy, and he’s a funny guy—he brings a lot of humor to the process. And he’s a damn good musician. We just get in a room and pick up acoustic guitars, and we strum those and talk and laugh, and we pace around sometimes. We usually start with a title. Who would come up with the titles? I usually come up with the titles. I would say that I have a larger role in the lyric writing department than Stan does, although Stan does contribute gems—sometimes he’ll just spit something out, off the cuff, and it’ll be the thing that’s needed to fill a certain space. And we both do the music. He’s a little better at constructions. He helps me with the form. He’s a little more capable on the guitar than I am, even though he’s a drummer, too. That’s another thing: We’re both drummers who can play a little guitar, just enough to write songs. You don’t want to know too much. It gets
in the way. I know a lot of extraordinary musicians who have trouble with songwriting because they know too much. So we’re a good team, Stan and I, and Steuart Smith is part of that team. He’s a hundred times the musician that either of us is when it comes to stringed instruments or even the piano. So Steuart is the secret weapon. Between the three of us, it’s a good process. You opted not to play guitar on the album, though you’ll be playing on the upcoming tour. Why? I didn’t play drums either, because if someone’s better than me, I’ve got no ego problem stepping back and letting them do what they do best. I’m content to write songs and sing them. Do you think of guitar primarily as a songwriting instrument? Yeah. I’m not a whiz kid on the guitar. I’m proficient. I know more than three chords, and what I don’t know somebody can show me and then I can play it. I’ve developed pretty good finger flexibility over the years. Capos help, of course. The songs on Cass County are filled with breakups, heartache, regret, looking back. Do you think of the album as having an overall theme? Well, I’m a big fan of traditional country music. George Jones and Merle Haggard are my heroes, so their music had a lot of influence on these songs. A lot of traditional country music is about heartache and regret, looking back, which is what a man tends to do when he reaches my time in life. But the album ends with a song called “Where I Am Now,” which, after all those heartache and regret songs, kind of comes full circle and says I actually like where I am now. It’s a song about perspective, which I think next to health is probably the most important thing a person can have. The interesting irony with Cass County is that the Eagles helped establish a pop/ rock/country blend that a lot of country artists ultimately adopted. And now you’re putting out an album that’s way more traditional than what typically comes out of Nashville these days. I know what you mean, and I don’t want to comment. As the old saying goes, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. But yeah, a lot of what they call country music now is unrecognizable to me. Maybe we were responsible in part for some of that, but I don’t know. I think there are a lot of other influences now, including metal. I hear metal music coming out of Nashville now.
Pete Huttlinger and Collings Guitars.
Pete Huttlinger and his 1997 Collings OM1C
Serious Guitars | www.CollingsGuitars.com | (1) -777
DANNY CLINCH
DON HENLEY
‘I’M NOT A WHIZ KID ON THE GUITAR. I’M PROFICIENT. I KNOW MORE THAN THREE CHORDS, AND WHAT I DON’T KNOW SOMEBODY CAN SHOW ME AND THEN I CAN PLAY IT.’
34 December 2015
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DANNY CLINCH
DON HENLEY
At your album sessions, was there a sense among the Nashville studio players that this project was in a style they don’t get asked to play much anymore? Yeah, we got comments to that effect, which of course made me feel really good about what we were doing. Several of the players said, “Man, this is such welcome stuff to hear.” Working with the guys in Nashville was a real pleasure for us. Being in Nashville is very much like being in my native east Texas—it’s the same culture, really, the same vibe and the same accents and the same food. It’s just very comfortable working there. And all these musicians have wicked senses of humor. I mean we worked hard and took our work seriously, but there was always a lot of laughter involved in these sessions, which makes the work more pleasant when it can sometimes be grueling. In the past you’ve been fairly critical of your songwriting abilities, sometimes saying you don’t consider yourself a real songwriter. Do you still feel that way? I think I’ve changed my mind a little bit. I’ve learned you can be too self-critical. I know people who are so critical of what they do that they get writer’s block. So I realized that once I lightened up on myself a little bit, I actually wrote better. There’s a delicate balance between being too critical and not being critical enough, and you have to find that middle ground and then work from there. With the completion of this album, I think I’m a songwriter, although I do best when I collaborate with other people. I still hope that my best work is ahead of me. I’d like to evolve. I aspire to be like Randy Newman or Paul Simon or Leonard Cohen, within that league. I’m not there yet. AG 36 December 2015
THE GUITARS OF ‘CASS COUNTY’
Onstage, Don Henley plays a Takamine TF77-PT, amplified with the CTP-2 Cool Tube Preamp through a Genz Benz Shenandoah Acoustic 100 amp. The guitar is set up with Ernie Ball Regular Slinky acoustic strings, .012–.054 gauge. In the studio, a prime selection of flattop guitars was used in the making of Cass County. Here’s a complete rundown, by player:
STEUART SMITH 1934 Martin 00-17 (owned by Rodney Crowell) “Bramble Rose” “No, Thank You” “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” “Too Much Pride” “She Sang Hymns Out of Tune” 1939 Gibson J-35 (owned by Rodney Crowell) “The Cost of Living” 1957 Martin 00-18 “Waiting Tables” “Words Can Break Your Heart” Collings C-10 (owned by Henley) “Too Far Gone” “When I Stop Dreaming” “Praying for Rain” “A Younger Man” (strumming part) “Where I Am Now” 1960s Martin 00-17 (owned by Henley) “A Younger Man” (fingerpicking part)
STAN LYNCH 1970s Martin 00-18 Nashville high-strung tuning 1960s Gibson B-25 1960s Gibson J-200 “Take a Picture of This” BRYAN SUTTON 1948 Martin D-28 “That Old Flame,” “Train in the Distance” J.T. CORENFLOS Larrivée 09 Series “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” VINCE GILL 1928 Martin 000-45 “Praying for Rain” PAT BUCHANAN Vintage Martin “Too Much Pride.”
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Because sometimes an acoustic guitar is a canvas of wood & steel By Greg Cahill
38 December 2015
AcousticGuitar.com 39
ART OF THE AXE
heir palette can include mother of pearl and ancient ivory, shells and gems, exotic woods and precious metals. While the guitar is a tool for players, for inlay artists it is a canvas upon which to create personalized images that can help to fire the imagination, serve as status symbols, or celebrate a milestone. Few guitarists can afford to commission custom inlay, but most can appreciate its beauty. With the one-year anniversary of the passing of one of the industry’s most talented young inlay artists—Pete Davis Jr. of Taylor Guitars—and on the eve of a new book by one of the art’s true visionaries, Grit Laskin, AG is spotlighting the stunning work of nine inlay artists.
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GRIT LASKIN IMAGINE ARTIST: GRIT LASKIN How much direction does an inlay artist get from a client? Well, that depends, but the artist usually has a free rein, as on the “Imagine” guitar (the headstock is seen on pg. 39) that took builder and inlay artist Grit Laskin 125 hours to complete. Laskin relates his conversation with the client: “‘As we discussed, the theme is John Lennon. He likes John, especially from toward the end of the Beatles (Let It Be, Abbey Road, etc.) to the beginning of his solo period (Imagine). He wants, not only the music, but also John’s lifestyle, conviction, ideas (love and
peace, etc.) from this period. He also wants to picture the influence of other Beatles to John.’ “My client was the ‘he’ in that quote, not the speaker,” Laskin continues. “His wishes were conveyed through a translator because his English wasn’t up to the task. That was the sum total of my instructions. Because of the language barrier there wouldn’t be the opportunity for further clarification, not to mention my chance to hear tone of voice and emphasis during a phone discussion. Despite these limitations, I wasn’t concerned. I, too, was a fan of John Lennon, and admired Lennon for many of the same reasons my client expressed. My very first reaction was that this was going to be a pleasurable design challenge. Still, there is an oft-times incremental process I take to crawl my way to a design. I do get there, but the road is sometimes rocky. This inlay, happily, was an exception. One of my all time favorite songs happened to be Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ The fact that my foreign client cited that song title specifically, coupled with his request for me to represent Lennon’s ‘conviction, love and peace. . .’ made it obvious that the now-iconic song title itself could be my overarching theme—it met so many of my client’s criteria.” Excerpted from Grit Laskin’s upcoming book Grand Complications.
40 December 2015
MCPHERSON GUITARS PICASSO ARTIST: ERIC PELTON “The Picasso was the first major inlay project of my career,” master luthier Eric Pelton says. “The main inlay on the back is an actual Picasso painting titled ‘Guitar,’ painted during the winter of 1912–13. The inlay was a huge undertaking, all done by hand and taking 70-plus hours to complete. The guitar itself has Brazilian rosewood back and sides, an Adirondack spruce top, and a Spanish cedar neck (a nod to Picasso’s heritage). The woods used for the inlay include: maple, koa, ziricote, bubinga, pau rosa, ebony, redwood, walnut, sassafras, and myrtle.”
AcousticGuitar.com 41
ART OF THE AXE
MCPHERSON GUITARS 1776 ARTIST: BOB HERGERT This detailed headstock depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence (scrimshaw on woolly mammoth ivory).
42 December 2015
PRS Acoustics A Culture of Quality
© 2014 PRS Guitars / Photos by Marc Quigley
Born in our Maryland shop, PRS acoustics are heirloom instruments with remarkable tone and exquisite playability. A small team of experienced luthiers handcraft all of our Maryland-made acoustic instruments with passion and attention to detail.
The PRS Guitars’ Acoustic Team.
ART OF THE AXE
C.F. MARTIN & CO. THE MILLIONTH MARTIN ARTIST: LARRY ROBINSON Martin Guitar & Co. historian and archivist Dick Boak writes: “Work on the millionth Martin began in early 2002, when master inlay artist Larry Robinson submitted drawings for the various inlay elements. After selection and parts preparation in Nazareth, the various pieces were shipped to Robinson’s shop in Sonoma County, California. Nearly two years of cutting the inlay pieces (by hand, with a jeweler’s saw), fabricating the designs, gluing them into carefully incised wood and flat-sanding followed. Robinson was assisted by world-class engraver Dave Guilietti, who engraved all the gold elements as well as the angels, cherubs and portrait of C. F. Martin Sr. on the back. The jewels were tube set by Jeweler’s Warehouse. The various elements were returned to Martin in late 2003. The jewels were placed in their settings and the final assembly and finishing was completed in midDecember 2003 in anticipation of the guitar’s unveiling on January 15, 2004, at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. “Crafted from C.I.T.E.S. certified Brazilian rosewood, Adirondack red spruce, black African ebony, and genuine mahogany, Serial No. 1,000,000—fittingly, a dreadnought, one of the Martin’s most influential designs—is the most elaborate instrument in the company’s history, surpassing even the D -45 China Dragon (#700,000) and the D-45 Peacock (#750,000). Intricate inlays of abalone, mother of pearl, sea snail, 18-karat gold, white gold, and precious gems, including diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and aquamarines, cover the back, fingerboard, headstock, rosette, pickguard, and inset soundhole “rose.” Similar inlays accent the sides and neck.
44 December 2015
“The inlays feature Victorian and Baroque imagery as well as some uniquely Martin elements. Tendrils of vines and leaves frame the top, back, sides, and neck, and more elaborate inlays in the same style are set into the back of the neck and the sides. A grand trellis rises from an urn at the base of the fingerboard. A golden eagle peers from a flourish of leaves on the headstock. The pickguard features a guitar top with Martin’s innovative X-bracing as well as tools of the luthier’s trade. “Most spectacular of all is the guitar’s back. An urn near the center supports an arbor of vines and leaves on which four angels play guitars, a mandolin and a ukulele, while near the top, two more angels place a wreath on the neck of an early Martin of the sort the founder C. F. Martin Sr. made in his early years in the United States. Framed by cascading tendrils, ‘#1,000,000’ is followed by the familiar ‘C.F. Martin & Co., Est. 1883’ logo in abalone. Near the bottom, an engraved portrait of C.F. Martin himself completes the inlay.”
C.F. Martin
AcousticGuitar.com 45
ART OF THE AXE
LARRIVÉE GUITARS ACOUSTIC GUITAR 10TH ANNIVERSARY ARTIST: WENDY LARRIVÉE The AG 10th anniversary Larrivée guitar, one of two created by Wendy Larrivée (one was given to a reader, the other resides in our office), has a rich origin. It began with a live model, thenLarrivée employee Hollie Mackie, captured in a series of sketches and later immortalized in abalone and wood.
46 December 2015
MCCONNELL GUITARS TOMAHAWK ARTIST: JORDAN MCCONNELL “The tomahawk inlay was commissioned by a client in New York state,” McConnell says. “We were throwing around ideas for the guitar and he had seen the Avett Brothers guitars so asked if I could do something similar with a tomahawk as the central theme. ‘Nothing too big,’ I believe he said. The design kept getting bigger and bigger and the outcome is what you see. It was a fun challenge trying to lay things out so I could capture as much motion as possible in the visual field available. The inlay is composed of spalted maple for the blade of the axe, quilted walnut for the handle, and satinwood, spalted maple, ebony, abalone, and mother of pearl for the details on the feathers.” KATHY WINGERT ANGEL ARTIST: JIMMI WINGERT (KATHY’S DAUGHTER)
KATHY WINGERT STEAMPUNK ARTIST: KATHY WINGERT “I’ve always loved classic lit, and grew up with Jules Verne,” says Wingert. “The biggest design problem was how to do something that was unmistakably steampunk, which usually has a nice patina and rough look, with something that wouldn’t be out of place on my guitars. The biggest challenge was in having the design run all the way through the headstock. I had a lot of fun using metal and jewelers’ tools, and assembling parts out of whatever I could find.” AcousticGuitar.com 47
ART OF THE AXE
JOHN KINNAIRD SITTING BULL (BANJO) ARTIST: CRAIG LAVIN Materials: Black pearl, fossil mammoth, ebony, white river pearl. “Being asked to create one-ofa-kind inlays on a full-time basis means constantly growing and pushing my limits and abilities,” says Lavin. “Each new work is a new story, relationship, idea, and challenge. While the techniques are repetitive, the outcome is always unique, and that constant creative process, as I inlay dreams into reality, is why I love my profession.” TAYLOR GUITARS LIBERTY TREE ARTIST: PETE DAVIES JR. (1977–2014) Taylor Guitars crafted 400 limited-edition instruments with Sitka top and tulip-poplar back and sides. The poplar, which since Colonial times had grown in Annapolis, Maryland, was the nation’s last Liberty Tree, a symbol of the new nation.
TAYLOR GUITARS LIVING JEWELS (RIGHT) ARTIST: PETE DAVIES JR. Bob Taylor remembers: “Inlay art is akin to tattoo art. Pete Davies Jr. had a flair for it and filled our manila folder with pages of options to inlay on guitars. Koi fish, sea turtles, hot-rod art, and so on. Liberty Tree art. Wow! That one. His designs were impactful, yet each detail within them purposeful. He treated each guitar as a canvas of limitless possibilities in design and materials.”
48 December 2015
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䌀爀愀昀琀攀搀 椀渀 匀漀甀琀栀攀爀渀 䌀愀氀椀昀漀爀渀椀愀
攀爀渀椀攀戀愀氀氀⸀挀漀洀
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
T H E
2 0 15
Not sure what to get the guitar players on your shopping list? These guitars and accessories are sure to keep them playing all year long.
HOLIDAY
GIFT
GUIDE
Acoustic Remedy Cases
Beautiful Humidity Controlled Display Cabinets
The Pinnacle of Protection and Display Handcrafted in the USA by Amish craftsmen, each case is constructed from your choice of domestic/exotic hardwoods and is designed to keep guitars properly humidified and exquisitely displayed. Our cases are the perfect addition to your home, office, or studio. Available in floor standing, wall mounted, and fully customizable models.
American Music Furniture offers solid hardwood humidity controlled display cabinets for guitars, mandolins, ukulele’s, fiddles and other stringed instruments. Artisan crafted to your specifications in our Pennsylvania workshop with the latest active humidity control technology. Features include LED lighting, locking doors, and tempered glass.
(651) 341-9955
[email protected] | acousticremedycases.com
(267) 272-2460 | americanmusicfurniture.com
The Christmas Songbook
Cole Clark Australian Eco Series
This beautiful keepsake book contains over 100 holiday classics, a color insert, histories of select tunes, and 12 solo guitar arrangements. The CD contains performances of the guitar solos and printable lyrics for every song! The Christmas Family Songbook features piano/vocal/guitar arrangements and a CD with MP3s, lyrics, and software.
Cole Clark’s Australian Eco Series guitars are built from 100% sustainable or non-endangered timbers including Bunya, Californian Redwood, and Blackwood, all grown in Australia and responsibly harvested from private land. They feature Black Bean fretboards, Blackwood bridges, the company’s trademark integral neck design, and its patented 3-way pickup system - the most natural sounding pickup in the world.
alfred.com/christmas
50 December 2015
[email protected] coleclarkguitars.com | musiquip.com
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SpiderCapo: The Everything Capo.
D’Addario’s EXP with NY Steel
SpiderCapo makes possible hundreds of open string tunings without retuning your guitar. Enjoy the inspiration of open tunings, while still playing your hardlearned licks, chords, etc. As a full capo you can fine tune each string to get the guitar exactly in tune. It fits all standard 6 string guitars, Leather pads protect the neck. NAMM Winner, “Best in Show”. Street: $29.95. Creative Tunings Inc.
D’Addario’s proprietary EXP coated strings now feature plain strings and hexagonal cores made of our revolutionary NY Steel. Meticulously engineered to be more consistent than any other standard musical wire, the strings’ superior strength and pitch stability can play anything from Jingle Bells to Hells Bells.
(845) 679-3391 |
[email protected] | spidercapo.com
D’Addario & Co., Inc. 1 (800) DADARIO | daddario.com
D’Addario Clip-On Headstock Tuner
New Deering Goodtime Banjo Ukulele
Before playing those holiday songs, tune up your guitar with the D’Addario Clip-On Headstock Tuner. Featuring a large display and sleek, discrete design, it automatically turns on when opened and off when closed. Put one on and spend less time tuning and more time playing.
After years of customer requests, Deering Banjo Company is proud to offer the new Goodtime banjo ukulele! Whether you are a seasoned ukulele or banjo player or simply looking for something new and exciting to learn, the Goodtime banjo ukulele is a stunning instrument that everyone will love. Made in U.S.A.
D’Addario & Co., Inc.| 1 (800) DADARIO | planetwaves.com
Deering Banjo Company (800) 845 7791 |
[email protected] deeringbanjos.com/ukulele
DIY Solderless Pedalboard Cable Kit
DIY Stocking Stuffer: Zero Glide
When you’re done building a snowman, build your own custom pedalboard kit. D’Addario’s DIY Solderless Pedalboard Cable Kit is the ultimate solution for custom wiring your pedalboard. Simply cut the provided cable to length, place it into the plug end, and secure the set screw for a flawless, performance-ready sound.
The Zero Glide® Replacement Nut System borrows the “zero fret” concept to reduce string friction; increasing tuning stability, playability, and open string tone. With a simple DIY installation and no permanent changes to the instrument, Zero Glide is the perfect $30 upgrade to gift your musician with this holiday.
D’Addario & Co., Inc. 1 (800) DADARIO | planetwaves.com
Zero Glide by Gold Tone (800) 826-5482 |
[email protected] zeroglide.com
D’Addario NYXL 3-Packs
Faith Guitars Now In the US!
Now available in 3-Packs, D’Addario NYXL guitar strings are the gift that keeps on giving. Envisioned, perfected, and manufactured by D’Addario in New York, these newly engineered strings will bend further, sing louder, and stay in tune better than any string you’ve ever played before.
Voted the UK’s Best Acoustic Guitar for the past 3 years, Faith guitars are now available in the states. This acclaimed UK based line of acoustic and acoustic/electric guitars, guided by famed luthier Patrick James Eggle, are all completely made of solid woods and handcrafted using traditional methods.
D’Addario & Co., Inc. 1 (800) DADARIO | nyxlstory.com
Distributed by Connolly Music (800) 644-5268
[email protected] faithguitarusa.com
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AcousticGuitar.com 51
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
Fur Peace Ranch Musical Oasis
Reimagine Your Acoustic Guitar with the ToneWoodAmp
Rest your soul and feel the Peace at Fur Peace Ranch. Take Guitar, Bass, Vocal, Mandolin or Songwriting classes in Ohio or California. Gift certificates make a great gift. Shop our Company Store or visit the Psylodelic Gallery. We’re waiting to rock your world.
The ToneWoodAmp is a revolutionary new product that attaches to virtually any acoustic guitar and allows guitarists to add effects without any external amp or stomps. Hear for yourself why professional and amateur musicians alike are raving about the ToneWoodAmp—visit our website to see it an action.
(740) 992-2575 |
[email protected] | furpeaceranch.com
tonewoodamp.com/agm | facebook.com/tonewoodamp
FELiX 2 Channel Instrument Preamplifier
Indian Hill Guitars
For acoustic musicians plugging in, FELiX is a game changer. Studio quality audio performance, powerful EQ and unmatched reliability combine to make the finest instrument Preamplifier/ DI available. MSRP $1,095
Visually stunning, superb craftsmanship, and a powerful and nuanced tone are just a few of the comments about Indian Hill Guitars. Multiple sizes from OO to Grand Concert plus optional features available. Let luthier Michael Kennedy work with you to create the guitar of your dreams!
(303) 823-8100 |
[email protected]| gracedesign.com
Mike Kennedy, Luthier (514) 942-4902
[email protected]
Guitar Humidor
JamPlay.com Live and On-Demand Lessons
Handcrafted, beautifully finished in walnut, maple or cherry; fully lined, lighted, and humidified. Wonderfully displays your instrument while protecting your guitar from damaging dry air. Hygrometer visible from outside lets you know your humidity at a glance. Keep your guitar within reach, protected, and visible. Floor standing or wall mounted.
JamPlay features the largest library of HD video guitar lessons on the internet, with daily, live workshops with awesome acoustic instructors. Great for any skill, age, or playing style. Get discounts off any membership during the holiday season, with our massive Christmas Sale starting in late December.
(847) 382-8656 | guitarhumidor.com
1-877-999-4JAM |
[email protected] | jamplay.com
The T-Shirt Club for Guitarists!
Carbon, Collapsible, Carry-onable, Colorful, & Cool!
Wear your passion for all things guitar with a subscription to Guitar Shop Tees. Each month subscribers receive a limited edition T-shirt from one of the world’s very best guitar shops along with special offers and amazing extras! Perfect for every guitar player, collector and fan! guitarshoptees.com
52 December 2015
The OVERHEAD™ OF660 is the friggin’ awesomest travel guitar on the planet! The patented OF660 collapses into a custom travel case at overhead dimensions of 22*14*9”! Carbon construction, wedged, beveled & scooped, full 24.5” scale, truss rod, pickup, and killer tone make this guitar the ultimate for your musical journey! Journey Instruments | (512) 689-9007
[email protected]| journeyinstruments.com
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Session DI: Studio Tools for the Stage
Private Stock Angelus Cutaway
Inspired by the LR Baggs Handcrafted Video Sessions and our experience in some of Nashville’s great studios, the Session Acoustic DI brings our signature studio sound to your live rig. The Session DI enhances your acoustic pickup and imparts the rich sonic character that you’d expect from an experienced audio engineer using some of the world’s finest studio gear. MSRP: $359.00
Handcrafted by PRS Private Stock luthiers, the PRS Angelus Cutaway boasts a remarkable voice and lasting sustain. Each Angelus instrument is built with unparalleled care and attention, and with numerous Private Stock options available, including woods and inlays, you can design the Private Stock Angelus of your dreams with PRS.
(805) 929-3545 |
[email protected] | lrbaggs.com
Guitar Appointments from Purflex® Engraved truss rod covers, tuner buttons, Purflex® purflings, backstrips, bridge pins and more! After market and new. Petros Guitar Shop petrosguitarshop.com
PRS Guitars (410) 643-9970
[email protected] prsguitars.com
PRS Acoustic Strings PRS Acoustic string gauges were carefully chosen by Paul Reed Smith to achieve the desired feel and sound for PRS acoustic instruments. The plain strings are drawn through the highest quality dies. The wound strings are computer wrapped on hex core. Gauges are .012, .0116, .025, .035, .045, .056. PRS Guitars | (410) 643-9970
[email protected] | prsguitars.com
SE A10E
Santa Cruz Parabolic Tension Strings
The SE A10E is an all-mahogany acoustic with direct response and woody tone. Its controlled punch and focused midrange make it capable of handling aggressive attack and laid back rhythm playing. Quality specifications include a solid mahogany top, PRS X/Classical hybrid bracing, bone nut and saddle, and undersaddle electronics.
When it comes to strings, it’s all about tension. Santa Cruz Guitar Company’s new Parabolic Tension Strings are engineered to do what others cannot, to put the exact tension on each individual string to create the appropriate download pressure. Hear and feel the difference that will bring out the best in your guitar. Available in low and mid tension.
PRS Guitars (410) 643-9970
[email protected] prsguitars.com
(831) 425-0999 |
[email protected] | santacruzguitar.com
SE Alex Lifeson Thinline
Steve Kaufman’s Acoustic Kamps
The SE Alex Lifeson is a road-worthy guitar for players in need of a stage and studio-ready instrument. The thinline body provides musicians with a comfortable playing experience and the PRS bracing pattern gives the guitar a resonance and warmth that will catch every ear in the room.
Voted gold and number one for over a decade. Held at Maryville College just 17 miles south of Knoxville, Tennessee.
PRS Guitars (410) 643-9970
[email protected] prsguitars.com
Old Time and Traditional Week: June 12-18, 2016 Bluegrass Week: June 19-25, 2016 (865) 982-3808 |
[email protected] | flatpik.com
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
AcousticGuitar.com 53
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Timber Tones Luxury Guitar Picks
Mérida Guitars Receive Rave Reviews
Timber Tones offers the world’s largest collection of natural material picks, using carefully selected materials to help musicians fine-tune the tone of their instrument. Proud to be an eco-friendly brand, our components are sustainably sourced, often off-cuts and bi-products of other industries. A Timber Tones mixed tin is a unique gift idea for the guitarist on your list!
Mérida guitars are built with extreme care. Our Norwalk, Connecticut facility takes incredible pride to expertly setup each and every guitar. Put one in your hands and you’ll instantly feel and hear why so many of the world’s top professional players have begun to play and endorse our brand.
[email protected] | timber-tones.com | musiquip.com
Dreadnought Cutaway with Fishman Electronics The Heritage WD20SCE is a high quality dreadnought cutaway acoustic/electric guitar featuring a solid Alaskan Sitka Spruce top with quarter sawn scalloped bracing, gorgeous rosewood back and sides, chrome die-cast tuners and Fishman Isys+ electronics with a built in tuner. It’s perfectly suited to live performance or studio work. Washburn Guitars (800) 877-6863 |
[email protected] washburn.com
Mérida Guitars, USA c/o Vision Musical Instruments (203) 295-3606 | meridaguitars.com
Greg Brandt Guitars Building fine classical guitars in the Los Angeles area for over 35 years. Using only the finest, aged tone woods from around the world. Custom design work and repairs accepted. (818) 980-9348
[email protected] gregbrandtguitars.com
Are You Doing Your Weekly Workouts?
The Book that Should Have Come With Your Guitar
Weekly Workout will get your fretting- and picking-hand fingers working in different ways, and offer musical studies that will help you visualize and explore the fingerboard. This series, from Acoustic Guitar Guides, is available for download and features video instruction. Visit us online to explore the Weekly Workout catalogue.
You’ve made a big investment in your guitar. You deserve to know how it works, how to maintain its value, and how to keep it sounding great. With this definitive and indispensable guide, you’ll become a more savvy acoustic guitar owner and repair-shop customer. store.acousticguitar.com
store.acousticguitar.com
Guitar Inspiration in Your E-Mail Inbox
Acoustic Guitar T Shirt
Sign up for Acoustic Guitar Notes and we’ll e-mail you articles and videos that will help you improve your playing and stay connected to the acoustic guitar world. Sign up for free today.
An instant classic. Look great and let the world know you love the guitar, even when you’re not playing one. This shirt is pre-shunk and 100% cotton jersey knit with a comfortable, modern fit. Get your Acoustic Guitar tee today - it’s sure to look great on you!
acousticguitar.com/acoustic-guitar-notes
store.AcousticGuitar.com
54 December 2015
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
BRIAN SHUEL
SPECIAL FOCUS IT’S A DADGAD WORLD!
Davey Graham
THE DADGAD WAY Three masters of the Celtic tuning demonstrate its versatility while personalizing its sound By Karen Peterson
few years before George Harrison put world music on the pop charts with his 1967, Indian-inspired “Within You Without You,” from the Beatles’ landmark Sgt. Peppers album, another Brit, the late folk musician Davey Graham, had already invigorated Western acoustic guitar music with his brilliant cross-cultural contribution, DADGAD tuning. Inspired by Graham’s travels in India and Morocco, and his subsequent introduction to the region’s lute-like oud, DADGAD revolutionized the folk genre by allowing the guitar to mimic the piping, or “droning,” sound that defines authentic Celtic music. The D-based, open-string DADGAD effectively transforms the guitar into a modal—rather than chord-driven—instrument, thus allowing for easier shifts between minor and major keys, with the open strings on either side of the treble and bass strings serving as the drone generator. Embraced by such British folk greats as John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, and Martin Carthy,
A
the genius behind DADGAD tuning is that Graham had offered up something akin to a tonal Rosetta stone: It was now possible to do justice to traditional Irish music on the guitar, particularly the outpouring of works by blind, 18th-century harper and composer Turlough O’Carolan. It wasn’t just Celtic music acolytes from the British Isles who appreciated the versatility and range that this alternative tuning provided. Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Paul Simon, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Wings’ lead guitarist Laurence Juber, Jimmy Page, among many others, gave DADGAD a chance. (Page termed it his “CIA tuning,” for Celtic/Indian/Arabian.) DADGAD has found its way into genres including classical, blues, gospel, and jazz, and into the hands of acoustic guitarists everywhere. As one of DADGAD’s most notable practitioners, French-Algerian-born Pierre Bensusan, advises “DADGAD is not a genre—it’s a tuning.” Play a DADGAD version of ther Baroque-pop song “Walk Away Renee,” on page 70. AcousticGuitar.com 55
SPECIAL FOCUS IT’S A DADGAD WORLD!
PIERRE BENSUSAN MAKING DADGAD HIS OWN Multi-award-winning guitarist, singer, and composer Pierre Bensusan, lauded by the LA Times as “one of the most unique and brilliant acoustic guitar veterans in the world music scene today,” is regarded as one of music’s greatest exponents of DADGAD. Almost every performance and recording of Bensusan’s is a celebration of DADGAD tuning. Currently on a world tour to mark his 40-year career, Bensusan’s style includes Celtic, folk, world, new age, and chamber music. CONT. ON PG.58
56 December 2015
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SPECIAL FOCUS IT’S A DADGAD WORLD!
HIS TAKE ON DADGAD Bensusan has described DADGAD as a tool that “helped me to be identified, and to identify myself. It gives me confidence.” Introduced to DADGAD by a friend who had learned it from Graham, Bensusan was experimenting with different tunings at the time, anxious to settle on one that he could make his own. DADGAD won out. Bensusan realized that embracing DADGAD meant he would have to relearn the guitar if he wanted to translate the new tuning style for an across-the-board repertoire of music normally played in standard tuning. It was a guitar lesson to-do list that included taking a second look at the neck, the chord shapes and positions, the sounds, and the intervals. He mastered the task and highlighted the journey in Pierre Bensusan Presents DADGAD Guitar. Published in 2000, it is primarily a songbook featuring comments and DADGAD selections from James Earp, Laurence Juber, Doug Smith, Bill Mize, David Surette, Eileen Niehouse, and Peppino D’Agostino, among others. The pitfalls in the beginning, he notes, included fighting against “a ready disposition to fall into all the predictable trappings of such a modal tuning as DADGAD”—notably by doing the obvious, such as playing almost exclusively in the key of D. “If I wanted a key change, I’d simply use a capo,” he writes. But as Bensusan discovered, relying on capos limited the possibilities for chord voicings, which he recalled, “got me right back to the point of really learning the fretboard. There is certainly nothing wrong with using a capo— sometimes you have to. Still, though, with a limited understanding of the fingerboard, it was very easy to get stuck in the ruts of stand positions and chords.” Another challenge: the disposition of the open strings. While DADGAD tuning is famous for its open, ringing strings, that’s not always a plus: It can get in the way of the music, Bensusan advises. “You want to be able to control the sustain and the length of the sound,” he says. Bensusan’s goal was to make DADGAD “completely disappear. I don’t want there to be any active consciousness of the particular tuning I happen to be using. And I certainly don’t want my audiences to be distracted by it. You have to play the instrument—the music— not the tuning.” PLAYER TIP “Virtuosity is not showing off what you can do on the guitar,” Bensusan told Acoustic Guitar 58 December 2015
last year. “Virtuosity is making the guitar and the musician completely transparent, and having the music just speak out. This is a high, high standard of virtuosity for me. The music is using you as a channel. So you have to be ready for it. Technically, you have to be ready. You work your ability, your tone. But when you play, all of this has to be forgotten.” Visit pierrebensusan.com for more information on his work, concerts, numerous songbooks, and more.
SARAH MCQUAID SHE WROTE THE BOOK ON DADGAD, LITERALLY Born in Spain, raised in Chicago, and now living in rural England, Sarah McQuaid’s music is an eclectic mix that, as noted on her website, segues from original compositions “to a 1930s Cuban jazz number, a 16th-century lute piece, or an unexpected contemporary cover.” Regardless of the genre, the tuning is always in DADGAD. McQuaid is the author of The Irish DADGAD Guitar Book, described by the Irish Times as “a godsend to aspiring traditional guitarists.” She has developed two workshops: “An
Introduction to DADGAD,” for players with little or no experience, and “DADGAD Song Accompaniment,” for experienced DADGAD guitarists. Her workshops have been held at music schools, festivals, arts centers, private homes, and other venues in the UK, Ireland, the United States, Holland, and Germany. HER TAKE ON DADGAD “In my teens, I was a big fan of Windham Hill Records artists like Michael Hedges and Will Ackerman, and also of Joni Mitchell,” McQuaid says, “so I was tinkering around with different tunings all the time. Then, when I was 18, I went to study in France for a year, and quite by accident wound up singing and playing guitar with a traditional Irish band. At a festival gig somewhere in France, I got to chatting with a French guitarist, who said to me, ‘You know, most of the Irish guitar players these days are using DADGAD—you should try it.’” She did, and never looked back. “I tuned my guitar to DADGAD straightaway, started experimenting with chord shapes, and it was a real eureka moment—suddenly I could make all the sounds I’d been trying to make for years,” McQuaid says. “I loved the fact that it freed me up from the limitations of major and minor [and that] I could play in all these weird modal scales.” McQuaid has been playing in nothing but DADGAD for more than 20 years. “I write all my own songs in DADGAD, and I play everything from Elizabethan ballads to blues in DADGAD,” she says. “It’s a wonderfully versatile tuning, especially when you get out of the mentality that you have to play in D all the time: E minor, G, G minor, A, A minor, and B minor also work beautifully, to name a few. “I love the way it encourages you to focus on notes rather than chords,” she adds, and “to work with the song, interweaving the guitar melody with the vocal melody so that it’s a case of the guitar [in duet] with the voice, rather than merely accompanying it. I don’t think there are any two songs that I play the same way in DADGAD.” PLAYER TIP “Don’t forget that lots of other keys besides D work beautifully in DADGAD! E, G, A and B, to name just a few—all work really nicely and offer great scope for expanding your repertoire of chord shapes and picking patterns,” McQuaid says. “Also, remember that sometimes it’s nice to just suggest a chord by playing a note or two, rather than filling out the full shape.” For more about Sarah McQuaid’s work and workshops, visit sarahmcquaid.com.
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SPECIAL FOCUS IT’S A DADGAD WORLD!
DÁITHI SPROULE MAGICALLY IRISH A guitarist, singer, and composer of traditional Irish music, crowned “a seminal figure in Irish music” by the Rough Guide to Irish Music, Dáithí Sproule began using DADGAD tuning not long after Graham introduced it to the folk music world in the 1960s. A native of Derry, in Northern Ireland, who now calls Minnesota home, Sproule began his career with the traditional Irish music group Skara Brae, collaborating with fellow DADGAD pioneer Michael O’Domhnaill of the Bothy Band. Later he became a founding member of the internationally known Irish band Altan, considered one of the best in the world. He continues to perform with Irish music greats, including box player Billy McComiskey, fiddler and composer Liz Carroll, and flute and fiddle duo Dermy and Tara Diamond. He continues to influence a new generation: Sproule’s “The Death of Queen Jane” was featured in the 2013 Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis. Sproule has taught at the University College Dublin and the University of Minnesota, and is a DADGAD guitar instructor at the Center for Irish Music in St. Paul, Minnesota. HIS TAKE ON DADGAD “I first heard of DADGAD in the late ’60s on the sleeve notes of a Bert Jansch solo album. His playing, in whatever tuning, was of course inspiring,” Sproule recalls. “I used it then occasionally to accompany songs. Around 1973 or so I accidentally discovered it worked well for me in accompanying Irish dance music—reels, jigs, and so on—and I began to use it a lot for everything. . . . [And] it works well for instrumentals I compose myself.” 60 December 2015
Among the benefits of using DADGAD, Sproule notes, is the “very versatile tuning enables us to get an immense amount of variety in voicing. I generally don’t use full chords in DADGAD and I think this suits Irish music, which is really a genre that has developed as a purely unilinear, non-chordal music. It complements the melody and doesn’t trap it—at least the way I try to play. It truly has a literal quality of openness. “Since the tuning comes down to D and A with built-in droning, it magically reproduces the situation of the Irish uilleann pipes, on which so much of our music was formed—and those pipes have D and A drones.” PLAYER TIP “Standard tuning—which I also love—as most people play it, boxes a melody in, traps it,” Sproule says. “DADGAD is quite literally an open tuning—it harmonizes, resonates, but doesn’t tie things down. “Resonance is one of the beauties of the tuning—it makes us aware of the sound of the strings we are not actually playing.” In 1996, he told Acoustic Guitar: “The way I put chords to songs is totally intuitive. I can’t really describe how I do it. Most of the time, I’m not playing full chords at all. I’m playing basses and bits of chords and there are always droning strings in the background. You could break it down into chords, but it’s not a matter of chords. It’s a matter of varying the bass lines and the harmonies.” Visit daithisproule.com for more information about his work and upcoming performances.
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64 Weekly Workout
‘Hear Me Lord’— a Harrison hymn
70 Acoustic Classic
‘Walk Away Renée,’ a ’60s Baroque-pop classic JACK BERNHARDT
Melodic soloing adds depth
68 Acoustic Classic
PLAY Private lessons are best for more focused study. Know your strengths and preferences as a player, and be honest when talking to potential private students. Are you a folk traditionalist? Are you a classical player? Can you play a variety of styles? Do you plan to teach using tablature? Sight-reading? Song books? What is the desired goal or desired outcome for the student? Can you help the student achieve it? Will it be a deal breaker if a student is more of a casual learner (someone for whom practice is elusive at best)? Don’t be afraid to refer someone to another teacher if you don’t have the expertise requested.
HERE’S HOW
Teach Them Well A few pointers on guitar instruction BY OCTOBER CRIFASI
eaching guitar can be a rewarding way to share your love of the instrument as well as to provide a supplemental income or new career. One of the best ways to get started is to teach a few friends so you can get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t in terms of your instruction. For ideas and inspiration, read up on the topic and see what folks are already doing online. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet, ask yourself the following questions to help find what suits you best”
T
WHO SHOULD I TEACH? What sort of student are you comfortable working with? Do you prefer teaching friends and family or do you want to work with the
Happy Traum teaches a Steady Thumb Fingerpicking class at the Ashokan Guitar Camp in Olivebridge, New York.
public? Do you have the calling and empathy to work with beginners or would you rather help fine-tune and share chops with more advanced players? What age range are you more comfortable working with? If the idea of working one-on-one with seven-year-olds prompts an anxiety attack, probably best to stick with adults and vice versa. HOW SHOULD I TEACH? There are numerous ways to go about teaching the instrument; the key is to find what comes most natural to you. Song-based learning is excellent for group instruction and can provide students with the listening and timing skills not necessarily gleaned in a private or semi-private situation. Map out a course of six- or eightweek chunks with a series or chords or a technique for each class (usually one technique, or two to three new chords a class is plenty) and then pick a few songs to use in class as examples. Be prepared to modify this lesson plan as necessary, as group classes will move at the learning pace of the collective. Your goal is to inspire and challenge the students, not overwhelm them.
WHERE SHOULD I TEACH? There are four standard locations for guitar instruction: in your own home, private rented studio space, local music store, or music school. If teaching a class in-house sounds appealing consider what that entails. If at all possible, set up in a room with a separate entrance or a comfortable garage so students don’t have to walk through the kitchen or other more private areas of your living space. And get additional insurance to cover yourself and your property. Teaching through a music store or community school or college usually means the organization sets the rate of the lesson and then pays you a flat fee or percentage of tuition. They also usually do a bit of promotion or marketing that can be a nice perk. Do your research and check out the vibe of the program or store to decide if the location and terms are agreeable. Sometimes renting a private office space or sharing a space with another instructor can end up being a more cost-effective and flexible option, depending on your area. Be sure to include marketing funds and insurance into your monthly budget should you go this route. THE FINE PRINT It’s always a good idea to have a few things in writing so both student and instructor are clear about the expectations. If you are charging for a class or lesson, include your cancellation and payment policy. Standard cancellation policy is 24 hours. Some teachers and programs charge a pre-paid tuition on a session or monthly basis; other folks are fine charging lesson by lesson. It comes down to whatever you are comfortable with, but remember that your time and expertise are valuable. AG AcousticGuitar.com 63
WEEKLY WORKOUT
Make It Sing!
BY JEFFREY PEPPER RODGERS
Melodic soloing can add depth to your playing
reat guitar solos start with the song’s melody—that’s what makes it sound like you’re playing a song rather than a bunch of riffs and scales. But as a soloing instrument, the acoustic guitar lacks the natural melodic power of, say, a violin or saxophone or electric guitar with amped-up sustain. Playing a truly melodic solo on acoustic guitar requires careful attention to articulation and phrasing, with touches of harmony and other embellishments.
I’ve arranged the song in the key of A, and laid out the melody entirely in second position (that is, with your index finger staying on the second fret and the second, third, and fourth fingers covering frets 3, 4, and 5, respectively). The basic chords are shown above the notation. If you want to have a friend accompany you while you play the melody, great (in the video for this lesson, at acousticguitar.com, I’ve also provided an accompaniment part you can play over). But the melody of “Amazing Grace”
Here are some techniques for melodic soloing, working from one of the most enduring melodies, “Amazing Grace,” which in its familiar form actually takes its tune from the hymn “New Britain.” The goal is to make the acoustic guitar really sing and take advantage of its special qualities.
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WEEK ONE First on the agenda is playing the melody of “Amazing Grace” in a simple, unadorned form.
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stands on its own beautifully—that’s one reason why people love to sing it a cappella. Take the song slowly, and focus on playing legato—letting the notes ring as long as possible so that they connect with each other. Add vibrato to the longer notes, to make the guitar sound more like a vocalist. Once you’re solid with the melody in this position, try playing it elsewhere on the neck: in seventh position (the first note on the fifth string, seventh fret) or an octave up in ninth position (first note on the third string, ninth fret). You can even play it in a lower octave, starting on the open sixth string. It’s great practice to learn melodies in as many locations and registers as you can.
from below. These articulations can make a big difference in highlighting key notes in the melody and achieving more of a vocal quality. WEEK THREE So far you’ve stuck with single notes, but one advantage the guitar has over an instrument like the saxophone or the flute is that you can play more than one note at a time. This week, exploit this by adding harmony notes, often as double stops (two notes at a time), and some chordal riffs. The example starts off like Week Two but then, in measures 2 and 3, goes into a pedal steel-type riff with a hammer-on on the third string. This riff recurs in measures 5 and 6. In
measures 7 and 8, highlight the chord change from E to E7 with a sweet series of double stops. After that, the melody jumps up an octave. Play double stops with grace-note slides of two frets (measure 8) and one fret (measure 10). In measures 12 through 16, harmonize the melody (on the first string) with notes on the third string. In measure 15, delay the resolution to A by hanging for a moment on a D chord, as a church organist might do. All these additions aim to support the melody by creating a thicker sound that in many situations holds its own over other instruments better than single notes could do. To locate these supporting notes, simply look at the underlying chords. Knowing your chord
BEGINNERS’
TIP 1
For this entire example, keep your first finger in a barre position at the second fret, as if you were playing an open A chord.
artistry
BEGINNERS’
TIP 2
For the eighth-note triplets in the melody, play three notes evenly in the space of one beat. Try counting them as “one trip-let.”
WEEK TWO Although playing within the same position, as you did in Week One, is efficient for your fretting hand, it’s not necessarily the way to get the most singing sound in a guitar solo. One of the best techniques is using slurs—hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides—to connect notes without picking every one individually. This week, revisit the “Amazing Grace” melody and check out what happens when you slur these notes. The first thing to notice is that there’s now a lot more shifting around the neck. Instead of moving from string to string, you’re going up and down the strings—particularly the fourth and third. In measures 6 to 10, stay up around ninth position, and then in measure 11, fall back to second position with a slide down the fourth string. To help smooth out these position changes, see the fretting-hand fingering suggestions throughout. The example is full of slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs, with lots of grace notes where you quickly slide into or hammer onto a note
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Escape the expected. Experience graphite. AcousticGuitar.com 65
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WEEKLY WORKOUT
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66 December 2015
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5 WEEK FOUR 2 46 4 The one strength 2 of4the acoustic 4 7 guitar that I 7 haven’t taken advantage of yet in this workout is open strings—every note so far E has been 6 fretted. So to wrap up, take one more pass at4 j and use open strings to add “Amazing Grace” œ 3 some richness and ring, chord-melody style. 3 The open strings enter right after the pickup measure, with an open fifth string bass note and then a touch of Aadd9 harmony courtesy of 5 5 5 9 the open first4and on beat 2. 6 second 4 strings 6 6 In9 measure 2, play a piece of an A7 chord—this is the first of several spots where the solo colors the underlying A chords. In measure 6 and again j in12measure 13, play an F m in place of the A for œ a little variety (a good, smooth substitution œ since F m is the relative minor of A).
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melody notes on top. In measure 10, let the open third and second strings ring while you navigate back 5 the neck for 3 the closing 3 down phrases. Tag the 46 24 2 2 2 melody in measure 15 with a short line 2 4 leading 2 2 from D to A. AsEyou Grace” solo 7 can hear, this “Amazing A j j 1since Week nœ has come a long œway One. The sound œ nœ 2 is more complex, but the melody still shines 2 through. 3 Pick another melody you love and go through these same steps for developing a solo: 7 in 9 its most 12 9 in mul8 9 learn the melody basic form, 9 9 8 10 10 10 12 10 9 10 tiple positions/registers on the neck; experiment 8 7 with articulations (hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, and bends too); harmonize parts of the melody; and try adding open strings and pieces D of the j E7 j underlying chords. . œ œ œ and. attention to detail, you’ll With practice find that your guitar has a great voice. AG
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AcousticGuitar.com 67
George Harrison All Things Must Pass Apple
ACOUSTIC CLASSIC
Harrison’s Hymn
A yearning gospel song that marks the 45th anniversary of ‘All Things Must Pass’ BY ADAM PERLMUTTER
68 December 2015
hen George Harrison presented “Hear Me Lord” to his fellow Beatles during their Get Back sessions, in 1969, they weren’t keen on recording it. In fact, Harrision presented the song on the same day that a film crew captured Paul McCartney chastising Harrison about his guitar work, leading the guitarist to responded sheepishly, “I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to.” So Harrison reserved this gospel-rock song, his most explicitly religious, for a big statement on his 1970 three-LP solo album All Things Must Pass. Harrison played electric guitar on the original recording and so did his friend Eric Clapton. There might not be any steel-strings in the mix, but “Hear Me Lord” works well when strummed on an acoustic guitar. The song is built from
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just three chords—F#m, E, and C#7—making it easy for a guitarist at any level to learn. The bulk of the tune—everything save for the chorus—is built from a repeating four-bar chord progression in which each chord is played for one measure. Try the strumming pattern suggested here in notation: Keep your strumming hand moving in a continuous 16thnote down-up pattern, but only sound the strings where indicated. Feel free to add whatever rhythmic variations come naturally to you. You can use the basic strumming pattern for the chorus, which has the same harmonic rhythm but is built from a reordering of the three chords. When you see the N.C. (no chord symbol), simply stop strumming (for beats 2–4 on the F#m chord). This will give both your pick hand and your audience’s ears a quick respite. AG
HEAR ME LORD
WORDS AND MUSIC BY GEORGE HARRISON
Main Chord Progression
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©1970 HARRISONGS LTD. COPYRIGHT RENEWED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HAL LEONARD CORPORATION
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The Left Banke Walk Away Renée / Pretty Ballerina Smash
ACOUSTIC CLASSIC
Let Your Fingers Do the Walking Don’t walk away from this fingerstyle arrangement of a Baroque-pop classic BY ADAM PERLMUTTER
ichael Brown, the classically trained keyboardist and songwriter who died last March at 65, was 16 when he developed a crush on the girlfriend of one of his band mates. This inconvenient infatuation inspired Brown (with his cohorts Tony Sansone and Bob Calilli) to write what would become one of the great songs in the pop canon: “Walk Away Renée,” a hit for the Left Banke in 1966. “Walk Away Renée,” which incorporates harpsichord and flute in an electric ensemble, is prototypical Baroque pop, but the song lends itself nicely to solo fingerstyle guitar. I’ve arranged it in DADGAD, fingered in the key of G major, with a second-fret capo putting the music in the original key of A. (In the notation, everything sounds a whole step higher than written.) The arrangement adapts the electric bass part, with its insistent dotted-quarter-eighthnote rhythm (shown as down-stemmed notes),
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SHUBB The best performers will settle for no less.
M
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vocal melody, and chords. It includes an approximation of the harpsichord’s arpeggios in the intro, and a different spin on the harmonized vocals in the chorus, with some cluster (closely voiced) chords for color. The interlude captures the flute solo heard on the original recording, transposed down an octave so that it sits in the same quarters on the fretboard as the bass line. Key to playing the arrangement will be using efficient fingerings. During the chorus, in bar 12, for example, on beat 3 go ahead and start moving fingers 2, 3, and 4, to grab the chord that appears on the “and” of beat 4. In that same section, note that the melody falls in the highest voice of each (up-stemmed) threenote voicing until the arrival of the Csus2 chord, where it’s reassigned to the lowest notes. So, be sure to play the bottom note of each chord with more emphasis than the higher two. AG
U
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ON TOUR NOW! TICKETS & INFO AT TOMMYEMMANUEL.COM DEC:
Burnsville, MN • Des Moines, IA • Madison, WI • Kansas City, MO • Columbus, OH Cincinnati, OH • Chiacgo, IL • St. Louis, MO • Phoenix, AZ JAN: Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA • Campbell, CA • San Diego, CA • Malibu, CA • San Luis Obispo, CA Santa Barbara, CA • Merced, CA • Sacramento, CA FEB: Boston, MA • State College, PA • New York, NY • Alexandria, VA • Bethlehem, PA Glenside, PA • Cleveland, OH
Quality is laced throughout IT’S NEVER TOO LATE, the first studio album featuring Emmanuel completely solo since 2000. He frequently threads three different parts simultaneously into his material, operating as a one-man band who handles the melody, the supporting chords, and the bass all at once.
[email protected] • www.shubb.com 707-843-4068
70 December 2015
ALBUM INFO AT CGPSOUNDS.COM
A friend and follower of the late Chet Atkins – who christened Emmanuel a Certified Guitar Player - Emmanuel easily skates Pl between musical styles, playing with blues, jazz, country, and folk on this album.
WALK AWAY RENÉE
WORDS AND MUSIC BY MIKE BROWN, TONY SANSONE, AND BOB CALILLI
Tuning: D A D G A D, capo II
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©1966 BY ALLEY MUSIC CORP. AND TRIO MUSIC COMPANY. COPYRIGHT RENEWED ALL RIGHTS FOR TRIO MUSIC COMPANY CONTROLLED AND ADMINISTERED BY BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (US) LLC INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT SECURED ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION
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WALK AWAY RENÉE
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2. From deep inside the tears that I’m forced to cry From deep inside the pain that I chose to hide Just walk away Renee You won’t see me follow you back home Now as the rain beats down upon my weary eyes For me it cries 3. Your name and mine inside a heart upon a wall Still finds a way to haunt me though they’re so small
AcousticGuitar.com 73
ACOUSTIC CLASSIC
Dissin’ Dat
This old blues song inspired Waylon Jennings’ ‘Waymore’s Blues’
Charley Jordan Vol. 1 Document
BY ADAM PERLMUTTER
ong before insults became common in hip-hop, they featured prominently in the blues. Case in point: “Keep It Clean,” a 1930 song by the St. Louis singer, songwriter and guitarist Charley Jordan (1890–1954). In the lyrics the narrator disses not just an opponent’s mother, but his father and sister as well. The song, one of Jordan’s signature numbers, is better known to some listeners through Dave Van Ronk’s version; younger audiences might be more familiar with the interpretation by the Raconteurs. Country outlaw Waylon Jennings lifted several lines for his hit “Waymore’s Blues.”
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But the original version offers some classic guitar work. Shown here in notation is the instrumental intro, based on the 12-bar blues, which also forms the basis of the verses. Note that while the music is fingered in the key of E major, a fifth-fret capo causes everything to sound a perfect fourth higher, in the key of A. To play “Keep It Clean,” as transcribed here, pick the notes on the bottom three strings with your thumb (or thumb pick) and those on the upper strings with your index and middle fingers. You can approach the part in other ways without changing the music’s essential character. For instance, pick the lowest notes
with a thumb pick and the highest notes with your index finger, omitting the middle voice on three-note chords. On the I chord (E; sounds as A), you could also play an alternating bass line with your thumb: the open sixth string on beats 1 and 3 and the second-fret E (seventh-fret A) on beats 2 and 4. However you play it, the most important thing is that the song should swing—the eighth notes should be played not straight as written, but long-short. And once you’ve mastered the song, try improvising your own slight variations for each repeat of the 12-bar form, as Jordan did on the original recording. AG
Grace Harbor Guitars New and very nice! Quality Craftmanship Great Tone Hard Case Included
Tools and parts for working on your guitar Shipped fast Rock-solid guarantee
Strum one today! Where the pros shop, since 1969 Grace is playing a GHP-200 Parlor 74 December 2015
www.GraceHarborGuitars.com
stewmac.com
Capo V Swing
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(q q = q e) E WORDS AND MUSIC BY WAYLON JENNINGS
#### 4 œ œ & 4œ œ
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©1930 UNIVERSAL MUSIC CORP. COPYRIGHT RENEWED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HAL LEONARD CORPORATION
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2. Up she jumped down she fell Her mouth flew open like a mussel shell now 3. Your sister was a teddy your daddy was a bear Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Put the muzzle on your mama 'cause she had bad hair now Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Take soap and water for to keep it clean Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean 4. If you want to hear that elephant laugh Take him down to the river and wash his yes yes yes then Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean 5. If you want to go to heaven when you d-i-e You got to put on your collar and your t-i-e now Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean LISTEN
TO THIS Waylon Jennings Dreaming My Dreams RCA Victor
Take him down to the river and wash his yes yes yes then Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean 5. If you want to go to heaven when you d-i-e You got to put on your collar and your t-i-e now Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean 6. Instrumental 7. If you want to get the rabbit out the l-o-g You’ve got to put on the stump like a d-o-g now Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean 8. Run here doctor run here fast See what’s the matter with his yes yes yes now Ride him over give him a Coca-Cola Lemon soda saucer of ice cream Take soap and water for to keep it clean
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Standing Ovation!
Iconic guitar brand reopens historic Connecticut plant BY GREG CAHILL
sk Elizabeth Lang, of Drum Workshop Inc., the new owners of Ovation Guitars, about the brand’s strength as a performance guitar and she doesn’t miss a beat. “We recently had a well-known guitar player who was trying one of the newer models and who sort of balked at it say, ‘I don’t like to play acoustic guitars because they take away my super powers,” she recounts. “He played the new Ovation and said, ‘Wow! I can do a lot of what I can do on an electric guitar on an Ovation.’ And it’s true, you really need to get your hands on one and experience it.” With the October reopening of the Ovation factory in Hartford, Connecticut, where the company’s high-end models will be manufactured (lower-priced guitars still will be manufactured overseas), and the forthcoming relaunch of Ovation to mark its 50th anniversary, players everywhere soon will have the opportunity to become reacquainted with one of the industry’s most iconic brands. In early 2016, select US retailers and online outlets will carry three models built at the
A
Hartford plant, including a 50th anniversary model. “The Hartford plant is such an integral part of the brand.” Lang says. “It’s the original factory and between the four key luthiers that are still there, there’s over 120 years of experience designing and building Ovation guitars.” Those guitar makers include master luthier and brand manager Darren Wallace, appointed last fall to oversee all Ovation brand activity, including manufacturing, new product development, and strategic marketing. According to a recent report in Rolling Stone, Wallace rebuilt the plant, closed last June, and helped persuade Drum Workshop not to move Ovation manufacturing to California. In January, DW—a major manufacturer of percussion instruments and accessories—raised a few eyebrows across the industry when it announced it had purchased the Ovation guitar brand from KMC Music, a subsidiary of Fender Musical Instruments Corp. What should guitarists expect from DW? “We’re not trying to reinvent what we think is an amazing wheel,” Lang says. “There will be
new looks, new designs, new colors, but at the heart of the matter these are Ovation guitars.” Still, she notes that some in the guitar world may be suspicious of a drum company manufacturing an iconic guitar brand. “We’re a family-owned company,” Lang says. “The ethos at DW is that we solve musicians’ problems. If we introduce a new product or redesign a product, it’s always a solution to a problem.” Expect some of the same rare and exotic woods used in DW’s drums to work their way into the design accents on Ovation guitars. “These are things that a guitar company alone could never afford to do and could never realistically make available to the consumer at the prices that we can. It opens up a lot of possibilities,” she adds. “This is a great American brand. . . . We want to give Ovation the same love and attention we give to all of our brands. We’re looking forward to reinvigorating a lot of aspects of the brand including some of our core artists. So we’ll have new signature models coming out and we’ll be announcing some new endorsements for the brand.” AG AcousticGuitar.com 79
MAKERS & SHAKERS
Steve McCreary
Balancing Act Collings’ GM Steve McCreary keeps the business humming BY ADAM PERLMUTTER n the early 1990s, Steve McCreary, an operations manager with a large cellular phone company and enthusiast of all things musical, often could be found in Austin’s downtown entertainment district. That’s where, through mutual friends, he met the guitar maker Bill Collings. Not long after, Collings casually offered McCreary the job that would make him one of the industry’s top players. “Bill and I and some friends were hanging out one night,” McCreary recalls, “and he told me he’d been building a proper shop, but didn’t want to deal with the business aspects. He asked if I wanted to come help run the thing, and I said, ‘Why not? I’ve always been comfortable dealing with people.’” As the general manager of Collings Guitars since 1992, McCreary has helped Collings expand from a small shop with a half-dozen craftsmen producing a guitar a day to an 85-employee company with an annual output of about 3,000 fretted instruments. “The shop was really just starting to get into a rhythm when I started,” McCreary says. “Our growth has always been pretty organic. We’ve built to our capacity and then added dealers as we needed. All of our instruments have been made to order, and it’s cool that quality has always been the main goal. It isn’t easy to build such high-end instruments in a production style, which is why no one else does it.” In the process of overseeing the operations at Collings, McCreary has become a fixture among his cohorts in the industry—and among players as well. The jazz phenomenon Julian Lage, whom McCreary recently invited to the shop to give feedback regarding the company’s Waterloo brand, Collings’ new line of 1930sstyle flattops, is one of the many guitarists who’ve enjoyed working relationships with McCreary. “Steve is one of the most kind, creative, forward-thinking, and hard-working 80 December 2015
DENNIS BURNETT
I
Limited Edition cowboy model
people I know,” Lage says. “And to have his energy in the guitar community, constantly uniting musicians and instruments into a cohesive narrative, is one of the greatest gifts.” KEEPING THINGS MOVING At 61, McCreary is an affable and modest man—so modest that he expressed incredulity when approached to be interviewed. He grew up in the small city of Tyler, Texas, in a musical household. His mother was a vocal major in college and a professional jingle singer and lifelong church choir member, so at home he was subjected to the classical and vocal literature, as well as pop fare. “Andy Williams, Perry Como, and the Lettermen were big in our house,” he says. At the same time, McCreary was inspired by rock, especially a local group that would make a big name for itself. “I’ve been a fan of ZZ Top since it recorded its first album in my hometown in 1970. My friends and I sat outside the studio and listened to the recording sessions,” he says. “And I probably saw ZZ Top a dozen times at funky local places, like the National Guard Armory and a junior-college gymnasium, where you could stand right next to them while they were playing. That charted my course as a lifelong music lover, and moving to Austin in the early ’70s only furthered things. It was, and still is, a very creative place for making music.” McCreary has made his own music since he took up the guitar in his childhood, though he tends to downplay his ability on the instrument. “I played in little bluegrass bands doing local benefits in the ’70s and ’80s, but I’m hardly much of a player,” he says, adding that the Beatles are at the cornerstone of his repertoire. Before signing on at Collings, McCreary held a series of jobs unrelated to music. In the ’80s, he worked as a project manager for both a law firm and a cellular-phone company, and he also ran the first standalone Whole Foods restaurant—the supermarket chain was founded in Austin. When McCreary joined the Collings team, he wore many hats out of necessity, filling the traditional role of an office manager while still having his hands on the guitars. “Bill was constantly working on designing and building tools and fixtures, and I was handling all the administration, while also getting to polish the guitars and install the pickguards. For years, I got to inspect and play every guitar that left the shop,” he says. During the first several years with McCreary as general manager, Collings’ sales doubled
each year, and the company later expanded its product line to include mandolins, electric guitars, and ukuleles. With McCreary’s oversight, the company evolved from a laidback shop to a formal business. “I had a lot of work to do to make it a ‘real’ place to work,” he says, laughing. “As the company grew, I had to figure out how to get good health insurance and 401(k)s set up, how to draft an employee manual—all the typical stuff on the business end of things—while keeping dealers and customers happy, as well as the people in the shop, who really deserve all the credit for what we’ve accomplished. “It’s easy in manufacturing to go into the ditch,” he continues. “So I had to help figure out how to stay on the road and keep things moving forward. Luckily, it’s Bill’s engineering prowess—it’s in his genes; his grandfather and his grandfather’s uncles had these amazing engineering pedigrees [as automotive and manufacturing pioneers]—that’s helped us grow and build more and better stuff.” McCreary became the face of Collings while running the office on his own for many years. His presence at trade shows, concerts, and festivals freed up Bill Collings to design and realize instruments and solve engineering challenges. Due to his standing in the industry, McCreary testified at a 2013 Congressional Natural Resources Subcommittee hearing on the Lacey Act Amendment, centered, in part, on the importation of wood. “The intimidation factor was offset somewhat by the fact that the majority of the members seemed to be receptive to our concerns,” McCreary says. SUPPORT SYSTEM It might be assumed that McCreary, working as the general manager of a boutique guitar company, is a luthier himself. But while he’s a stonemason and woodworker, and in his spare time enjoys such large projects as constructing cabins and arbors, he’s never built a musical instrument. “I’ve always thought about making a guitar, but seeing all the fine handwork that goes into each instrument here at Collings—how many layers there are to the onion—I know how deep and daunting that is,” he says. McCreary feels the same way about instrument design, having witnessed Collings, with his uncanny combination of technical knowhow and sharp aesthetic sensibilities, up close at work. “Bill’s so good at not only the engineering and the geometry of the guitar, but he also has an amazing design sense, which is unusual,” McCreary says. “So I don’t tend to
have any input in our designs. I leave that to him; I don’t create, I support.” Still, McCreary did help conceive of the limited-edition Cowboy model in the early 2000s, with its stenciled top, a nod to the cheap, small-bodied guitars of the 1930s and ’40s. He had collected a few ukuleles with custom paint jobs by the visual artist and guitarist Robert Armstrong, who had played with R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders, the string band fronted by the underground cartoonist. These instruments served as an inspiration for the project. “I wanted to make something that wasn’t an inexpensive instrument like the old stenciled guitars, but one on Collings’ quality level. So I turned our C10 body shape into a cool little guitar with a stencil of the cowboy singing at the moon and howling with the coyotes,” says McCreary, who keeps one of the Western-themed guitars in a case under his desk, along with a 1983 mahogany-bodied roundhole archtop, which he rescued from a local guitar store. “We had some visitors at our shop years ago, and one of them mentioned that he had just seen a used Collings archtop in a shop downtown. I ran down and bought it on the spot.” These days, McCreary’s job at Collings might look a little more conventional than it did two decades ago. But one thing hasn’t changed—the high level of artistry with which the company builds guitars on a large scale. “At the moment, I’m working on a contract with a very interesting retail project, a television commercial,” he says, “I’m working with international lawyers regarding foreign trademarks, and dealing with insurance people—the sorts of things required of any business, though we get to make cooler stuff than other businesses in what is a constant balance of art and commerce.” AG AcousticGuitar.com 81
Left Dean Markley Artist Transducer Acoustic Pickup has a 1/4-inch jack that would require an endpin modification.
GUITAR GURU
Proceed with Caution Should I put a pickup on my high-end instrument? BY DANA BOURGEOIS
Q
Onstage, miking an acoustic guitar can be problematic. Today, we have a wide variety of pickup options, and in the right hands, guitars with pickups can sound wonderful. However, they can sometimes have an unpleasant twang, something like rubber bands on a cigar box. What are your thoughts about installing pickups on a fine guitar? Sandra Rizzo Peoria, Illinois
GOT A QUESTION? Uncertain about guitar care and maintenance? The ins-and-outs of guitar building? Or a topic related to your gear?
82 December 2015
A
Years ago, I owned a ’39 D-28, which sported prominent screw holes through the rosette for surfacemounting a magnetic pickup, as well as a plugged hole below the bridge where a volume pot once lived. I don’t know how long a pickup was used on that guitar, but it couldn’t have been for more than a fraction of its life. The disfiguration of a vintage classic, however, is permanent. The first question to ask when contemplating pickup installation is, “What alterations am I willing to live with after discarding an obsolete pickup?” Mounting a magnetic pickup on a prewar D-28 seems like an obvious no-no, now that the pickup is long gone, and prewar D-28s cost more than my first house. But what about installing a modern pickup on a Brazilian Santa Cruz? These days, pickup installation typically requires enlarging the endpin hole to accept a ¼-inch jack, securing wires and/or batteries to the interior of a guitar, drilling a hole through
Ask Acoustic Guitar’s resident Guitar Guru. Send an email titled “Guitar Guru” to editor Blair Jackson at
[email protected], and he’ll forward it to the expert luthier.
the saddle slot, and so on. Some alterations are irreversible. Anyone who’s tried removing the formerly gummy, later petrified adhesives used to mount interior components, however, can attest to the lasting quality of even the least obtrusive aspects of pickup installation. A fine acoustic guitar can last several lifetimes. But will today’s acoustic pickups someday be prized by future collectors in the same way that, say, antique carbon ribbon microphones are now coveted? I’m betting that some modern-day Nikola Tesla invents a highfidelity, wireless, miniature, low-impact, acoustic sensing element in your lifetime, if not mine, rendering contemporary pickups obsolete. I understand why players need pickups. Whether you’re a pro who can afford a salaried sound man, or you gig for fun just a couple times a year, you still want good sound. The guy who installed the pickup on my D-28 was also after the best sound available at the time. My advice to clients who request pickups is to think globally about how they intend to use their guitars, and to alter with caution. An amplified acoustic guitar sounds as good as the entire signal chain, which for the pros includes guitar, pickup, cables, preamp, signal processing equipment, and sound system— not to mention judicious and experienced mixing. The Brazilian Santa Cruz with a pickup and an “acoustic” amp probably beats “rubber bands on a cigar box,” but don’t expect it to match the concert fidelity of Sean Watkins from last year’s Nickel Creek tour. Many guitars produced today by independent luthiers, boutique shops, and the custom facilities of large production shops are destined to become tomorrow’s vintage classics. If you can afford the Santa Cruz, you can probably also afford a designated gigging guitar. Quality new and used high-volume production guitars are available literally by the millions. Plugged in and with minimal sound support, many, if not most, sound about the same as the guitars you’re saving for the grandchildren. If you’re less committed to collecting sound reinforcement than to collecting guitars, think about keeping the Santa Cruz in the music room—and wait patiently for the second coming of Nikola Tesla. AG
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
Beveled armrest
Solid bear-claw Sitka spruce top with X bracing
Solid Madagascar rosewood back and sides
Carolina Craftsmanship The Lichty Small Jumbo just might be your dream steel-string BY ADAM PERLMUTTER
he foothills and mountains of North Carolina hold an important place in the acousticguitar world. This westernmost region of the Tar Heel State is where Doc Watson, among other wizardly bluegrass and country pickers, was born and where he lived until his death in 2012. For the past decade, it’s where the boutique shop Dream Guitars has offered the finest luthier-built and vintage acoustics. And it’s where the instrument maker Jay Lichty builds world-class guitars in his workshop in Tryon. Lichty started his professional life as a homebuilder. After the housing bubble burst a few years ago, he got deep into guitar making by studying with Wayne Henderson, the Virginia craftsman and instrumentalist who’s made guitars for Watson and Eric Clapton. A full-time luthier since 2009, Lichty has built about 200 ukuleles and guitars, no two alike,
T
84 December 2015
including the stunning Small Jumbo, made of Sitka spruce and Madagascar rosewood. FEEL & SOUND The Lichty Small Jumbo is a fairly large guitar, with a 15.5-inch lower bout and a body depth of 4.25 inches, but at 4 pounds, 5 ounces, it’s a long way from massive. While some guitars take a while to reveal their charms, the Small Jumbo is immediately likeable. Its C-shaped neck is of medium girth and super comfortable in all regions of its 22-fret fingerboard—it’s got a perfect low action that makes it easy to play barre chords and speedy single-note lines alike for hours. The Small Jumbo is deeply resonant and has a warm, commanding voice. Its projection and sustain are impressive, as is the balance between the registers. The bass is firm and present, but doesn’t overwhelm, as can often be the case on
an instrument of this size; the treble is clear and robust; the mids, with a satisfying bark, stand up well to their neighboring frequencies. Jumbo guitars are typically associated with strumming approaches, and the Lichty fares well in this context. Whether played in standard or open tuning, the guitar sounds clear and expansive. It’s easy to hear the individual notes of chords of any quality. Thanks to its generous headroom, the guitar sounds just as good strummed gently or forcefully. With a 1.75-inch nut and 2.25-inch string spacing at the saddle, fingerpicking feels comfortable on the Small Jumbo, and it sounds terrific, too, for playing everything from country blues to Celtic music. What’s more, the guitar’s excellent tone holds up admirably when using slackened alternate tunings, and its Gotoh 510 tuners, with their smooth action, make it easy to access them.
VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR
Honduran mahogany neck with ebony fretboard
16:1 gold Gotoh 510 tuners
AT A GLANCE
LICHTY SMALL JUMBO BODY Small jumbo size with Venetian cutaway and Manzer wedge
NECK 25.5-inch scale length
EXTRAS D’Addario EXP16 strings (.012–.053)
PRICE $7,300 as reviewed (base price: $4,200)
Ameritage hard-shell case
Made in the USA lichtyguitars.com
1.75-inch camel bone nut Ebony bridge with camel bone saddle (2.25-inch string spacing)
Gloss finish (water-based acrylic lacquer)
Humidifiers and polishing cloth
Side soundport Certificate of authenticity Gloss finish (water-based acrylic lacquer)
DESIGN & EXECUTION The Small Jumbo is thoughtfully designed in all aspects. The neck is bolted to the body, for a solid connection and ease of maintenance and repairs. The neck block is C-shaped for extra strength in both the neck joint and fretboard extension. A Manzer-style wedge—a tapering of the guitar’s body, pioneered by the luthier Linda Manzer—and an armrest bevel add comfort, and a side soundport allows the player to more easily hear the guitar’s output. The bridge pins are custom-fit for each string and marked with grooves, to help keep them in order. The care that Lichty took in designing the guitar extends to how he presented it. In a deluxe Ameritage hard-shell case, the instrument comes complete with soundhole and headstock humidifiers, a custom polish cloth, a
Lifetime warranty
series of letterpress cards confirming the instrument’s authenticity, and instructions for its care, and details of the luthier’s work. Lichty, like many of his contemporaries, has chosen not to use a lot of ornamentation on this model and instead lets the wood speak for itself. To that end, he assembled a gorgeous complement of tonewoods for this particular instrument. The finely grained Sitka spruce has ample bear-claw figuring, and the Madagascar rosewood used for the back, sides, and headplate has a lovely deep-brown coloration and striking figuring. Cocobolo binding and rosette complete the package. Overall the craftsmanship on the Small Jumbo is just a hair shy of unimpeachable. The fretwork and setup are perfect. The waterbased lacquer finish is thinly and evenly applied and rubbed to a faultlessly even gloss. But a
peek inside the guitar reveals the subtlest traces of excess glue, and when the guitar is shaken, a small amount of debris from the building process can be heard rattling around—admittedly, picky stuff. SKILL & ARTISTRY With more guitar makers making fine instruments than ever before, it can be a daunting task to select a handmade instrument or to choose a luthier to build one. But if the Small Jumbo is any indication, Jay Lichty—with the skill and artistry he devotes to guitar making, and the consideration he puts into the details— is a worthy contender for building your dream steel-string. Adam Perlmutter transcribes, arranges, and engraves music for numerous publications. See his website at adamperlmutter.com AcousticGuitar.com 85
NEW GEAR
AT A GLANCE
TAKAMINE EF360-TT BODY 14-fret dreadnought Torrefied solid Sitka spruce top Solid Indian rosewood back and sides with ivoroid binding Rosewood bridge with ebony pins and bone saddle Natural gloss finish NECK Mahogany with satin finish Ebony fretboard with mother-of-pearl dots 644 mm (about 25.35 inches) scale length Bone nut with 45 mm (about 1.77 inches) width Open-gear nickel-finished 15:1 Gotoh tuners ELECTRONICS Takamine Palathetic under-saddle pickup and TLD-2 preamp system EXTRAS D’Addario EXP16 coated phosphor-bronze strings (.012–.053) Hard-shell case Limited lifetime warranty PRICE $2,399.99 list; $1,549.99 street Made in Japan takamine.com
86 December 2015
BRAD AMOROSINO
Defying Expectations
Plugged or unplugged, Takamine’s ‘thermal top’ EF360S-TT offers bold, balanced tones BY ADAM LEVY
any players prefer older guitars because aged instruments tend to be more dynamic and sound more balanced harmonically. These benefits owe much to the fact that wood dries out over time and its mass decreases. Such changes at the cellular level allow the top of a vintage acoustic guitar to vibrate more freely—particularly if the instrument has been played regularly over the years. Anyone who has owned a guitar for more than a decade or so has likely experienced this phenomenon first hand. Instrument builders are, of course, aware of the benefits of age-worn wood as well. Perhaps that’s why some of them—including Martin and
M
Bourgeois—have recently been offering models with torrefied tops. (Torrefaction is a process that dries the wood in a controlled high-heat, low-oxygen environment.) The best of these instruments defy expectations of how new guitars are supposed to sound and feel. Japanese guitar manufacturer Takamine recently threw its hat into the ring with two “thermal top” models: the EF340S-TT (with mahogany back and sides) and the EF360S-TT (our review model, with rosewood back and sides). Both feature solid Sitka spruce tops, ebony fingerboards, and the TLD-2 onboard preamp system, and are assembled using protein glue for increased resonance.
VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR
BIGGER SOMETIMES IS BETTER By design, dreadnought-size guitars are meant to produce big, bold-toned sounds, and that’s just what the EF360S-TT delivers. Its tones are especially rich in the lower and middle registers. Bass runs and open-position chords feel like the natural place to go. If you’re a songwriter or composer, you may find yourself writing pieces that exploit this bigger bottom. Notes in the uppermost octave (above the ninth fret, on the first, second, and third strings) are less punchy but no less charming. Another notable sonic feature of this Takamine is the way chords and single notes sustain— and keep on sustaining—in all registers. This, too, could influence the way you write and perform. The EF360S-TT’s mahogany neck is a little chunkier than guitarists have come to expect on modern-day steel-strings, but not unwieldy. Barre chords are easy enough to grab (inasmuch as barre chords are ever “easy”), and melodic lines lay comfortably along the unbound fingerboard. The string spacing is wide enough to accommodate fingerpicking techniques, yet narrow enough to work well for most flatpicking or hybrid-picking styles. Intonation is good up and down the fretboard, thanks to the compensated two-piece bone saddle. The third-string slot on the test model’s nut was a little too snug, which made it hard to tune the string. A bit of soft pencil lead improved the situation, but a pro slot reshaping would be ideal. STEALTHY TONE TOOLS At first glance, the EF360S-TT seems to be strictly plug-and-play, with no onboard controls. There are, however, three tone-shaping controls hidden stealthily inside the guitar. To access them, you need to remove the three small screws that hold the endpin jack in place, pull the jack all the way out of the guitar, and slide off the protective sheath that covers the three DIP switches—for bass, mid, and treble. Each switch can be set to boost (+3 dB), cut (-3 dB), or flat. This is not a quick fix that you’d want to attempt onstage between songs. The idea is to experiment at home, dial in the tone that works best for you, then set it and forget it. If you’re not a tinkerer, worry not. The factory preset (bass and mid boosted, treble flat) is suitable for just about any musical situation. It’s worth noting that while acoustic-guitarpickup technology advances every few years or so, the Palathetic pickup on the EF360S-TT is essentially the same undersaddle unit that Takamine has been using since the late ’70s. If it ain’t broke, as they say . . . .
TOAST OF THE TOWN I didn’t have the benefit of a before/after test, so it’s impossible to say just how much of the Takamine EF360S-TT’s tonal character is driven by its torrefied top. Still, the guitar sounds more light and lively than most brandnew (non-torrefied) models I’ve tested. Its winsome tones would be suitable in a wide variety of stage or studio settings—really, anyplace you’d reach for your favorite dreadnought. With its tasteful blend of old and new
aesthetics, and streamlined electronics, the EF360S-TT could, in fact, become your favorite dreadnought. 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. His guitar work has appeared on recordings by Norah Jones, Tracy Chapman, Amos Lee, and Ani DiFranco, among others. Read more of Levy’s writing and hear his music at adamlevy.com.
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AcousticGuitar.com 87
NEW GEAR
AT A GLANCE
MACKIE FREEPLAY FEATURES Bluetooth audio streaming input and remote control Two ¼ TS, ¼ TRS, or XLR inputs, plus aux input Eight-inch woofer, dual one-inch tweeters Bi-amped power section with 75 watts RMS for woofer, 37 watts RMS per tweeter 65 Hz-20 kHz frequency response ¼-inch TRS monitor output Four EQ presets and three-band EQ Four effects presets (plus 12 available via Bluetooth) Automatic feedback destroyer AC powered, 120-240 volts, 50-60 Hz, or eight D-size batteries Optional rechargeable battery pack DIMENSIONS 11 lbs.; 9.5 x 17.8 x 9.1 inches PRICE $499 list; $399 street Made in China mackie.com 88 December 2015
Well Worth the Weight
Portability is paramount with Mackie’s feature-rich FreePlay personal PA BY DOUG YOUNG
hen you think of PA systems, you probably envision big, heavy speaker cabinets along with a mixer and lots of wires. Even a small system, for a solo act, may involve multiple trips to the car. Fortunately, the trend has been toward more compact sound systems, with a number of companies promoting personal amplification packages that allow you to show up for the gig with a guitar in one hand and your PA in the other. Mackie’s FreePlay is a PA that ups the ante on size, weight, and portability. Mackie has been producing products for musicians for a long time— well known for its complete line of mixers and speakers that can handle anything from clubs to concert stages. With FreePlay, the company offers a high-tech solution for lower-volume gigs, a complete battery-powered stereo sound system in a package the size of a boom box.
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LIGHTER THAN YOUR GUITAR First impressions of the FreePlay are that it’s amazingly lightweight, even for its size, which is also astonishingly small. At just 11 pounds, it probably weighs less than your guitar in a case. Mackie packs a lot of features into FreePlay’s small size. The basics include two input channels, for guitar or dynamic microphones, along with an auxiliary input for a CD player or other sound source. FreePlay is meant to sit on a table or the floor, but there is an optional accessory available that allows FreePlay to be mounted to a pole. Controls are tucked away on the back of the device, with a single knob to control volume off the different inputs, and pushbuttons to switch between effects and EQ presets. The controls can be awkward to access, and the black-onblack color scheme could be challenging in
VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR
performance situations. But the built-in controls are best seen as a backup—the real power comes from using the FreePlay Connect app (available for iOS and Android) to control all functions, including many features not available via the physical controls. From your phone, using a free app, you can access additional effects, per-channel three-band EQ, effect sends, individual channel and master volume— and also stream music from your phone at the same time. An especially attractive feature of FreePlay is its portability—not only the small size and weight, but also the option to run off batteries. You can use your own D-size batteries—eight of them—but Mackie also supplies an optional rechargeable lithium-ion pack. When using the rechargeable pack, FreePlay can display the remaining battery life.
commonly provided for acoustic instruments, even for active pickups.) FreePlay’s volume is adequate for a small coffeehouse or playing at home, but don’t expect to fill a large hall or compete with a drummer. FreePlay includes an automatic feedback destroyer; however, I was unable to exercise it, even sitting facing the amp from a few feet away with the amp all the way up. But I was able to drive the amp considerably harder and gain more output volume by adding a preamp. And, of course, for louder gigs, you could feed the monitor output to a house PA system,
while still using FreePlay as a mixer and stage monitor. NOVEL SOLUTION FreePlay is a novel solution for guitarists who need an extremely portable amplification system with modest volume requirements. The battery options are sure to be a hit with street performers or anyone who needs to play off the beaten path. A solo singer and guitarist could easily walk into a venue—or the beach!—with guitar, mic, guitar cord, iPhone, and FreePlay, and be set up to play with backing tracks in minutes. AG
FreePlay is a novel solution for guitarists who need an extremely portable amplification system SOUND THAT BELIES ITS SIZE Given its small size, FreePlay’s sound quality is surprisingly good. I tried the amp with several pickups—a D-Tar Wave-Length undersaddle pickup, a Trance Amulet M, and a passive K&K soundboard pickup—and streamed music from my iPhone. Playing the streamed music, FreePlay sounded like a quality boom box. Although the device is described as stereo, a single mono woofer handles everything below 3 kHz, and only the tweeters are truly stereo. In spite of this, recorded stereo tracks sounded quite good, although with only about a foot between tweeters, the stereo effect was not very evident. The guitar sound with the two active pickup systems was pleasant, warm, and full. I was happy with the flat EQ preset as well as the “solo” EQ mode, but the three-band EQ on the iPhone app allowed me to further tweak the tone, from a bigger bass to shimmering highs. The effects, which range from simple reverb to delays, slap echoes, and doublers, worked well and sounded useful, in spite of having no finegrained controls. For acoustic guitar, I preferred the sound of the “warm theater” preset, a default reverb available without using the iPhone.The sound with the passive K&K pickup was adequate, but less pleasing, because FreePlay’s input impedance is only 400 kHz, substantially lower than most passive piezo pickups require. (Input impedances of 1M to as much as 10M are more AcousticGuitar.com 89
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Rock Out. Ten Great Rock Strumming Patterns
ACOUSTIC ROCK ESSENTIALS
Add ten popular rock rhythms (and their variations) to your strumming vocabulary. n
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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
90 December 2015
Acoustic Rock Essentials ALL THE TIPS AND TECHNIQUES TO UNPLUG YOUR ROCK AND ROLL store.AcousticGuitar.com.
93
Playlist Gambetta and McManus—flash and substance
95
Books ‘Boutique Acoustics’ explored and explained
PLAYLIST
MIXED MEDIA
ALEXANDRA VALENTI
Playlist Joan Shelley’s commanding indie folk
94
Shawn Colvin
Common Thread
For the first time in 20 years, Shawn Colvin returns to the all-covers format BY PAT MORAN
hawn Colvin’s Uncovered is her second album of reverent, yet surprising, renditions of other writers’ material. What distinguishes this collection from 1994’s Cover Girl is Colvin’s stripped-down, acoustic-centered approach to these diverse tunes. As well as being a tribute to a number of fine songsmiths, Uncovered serves as a reminder that Colvin started out as an acoustic guitarist. Most of the cuts build on the solid backbone of Colvin’s strummed, plucked, and percussive Martins—a D-18 and her signature M3SC. Even the most artfully arranged productions boast the unvarnished vitality of first takes and tossed-off demos. On Tom Waits’ “Hold On,” Colvin’s
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percolating acoustic urges the melody along while her amber-hued alto caresses colorful heirloom phrases like, “I miss your little brokenchina voice.” The galloping “Private Universe,” originally recorded by Crowded House, spirals off Colvin’s insistent taps on her guitar top, which suggest the metronome of the human heart. The ragged-but-right clutter of the Band’s “Acadian Driftwood” is traded for minimal snare and winding mandola, turning an ambling narrative into a folkloric quest. Similarly, the bombast of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” is tempered by Colvin’s hymnal harmonies with David Crosby. Wisely, the original’s over-driven saxophone is traded for the far-off locomotive
wail of pedal-steel, lending Rafferty’s hard-luck fantasy unexpected grit and gravitas. With massed strummed acoustics, Colvin’s lush, propulsive take on Graham Nash’s “I Used to Be a King” runs counter to the pared-back approach on the rest of the album, recalling the layered production of 1970s Laurel Canyon pop. Prized for her distinctive, confessional songwriting as well as her dusky, soaring vocals, Colvin has never been shy to honor her influences. On Uncovered, her folk-tinged grab bag of favorites crosses genres but shares a common thread. It’s a pop collection that balances accessibility with integrity, tunefulness with emotional ballast. AcousticGuitar.com 91
PLAYLIST
1967. Eighteen months after being sidelined by a life-changing motorcycle accident on a winding country road in upstate New York, and right around the time of the marathon sessions that would come to be known as The Basement Tapes, Bob Dylan spurned the “thin, wild mercury sound” of Blonde on Blonde to record a landmark album that would serve as the calling card of the Acoustic Nation. John Wesley Harding—its title drawn from the notorious Old West outlaw—found Dylan tapping his folkie roots and embracing his growing interest in fundamentalist Christianity as he shed his rock-star past. The album includes the romantic “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” But, for the most part, such songs as “All Along the Watchtower” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” (a nod to Joan Baez’s cover of Alfred Hayes’ labor anthem “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”) are rife with religious symbolism and a compassionate, often fiery, worldview. MFSL has given the classic album the full audiophile treatment: two remastered 180-gram vinyl discs pressed at 45RPM for detailed sound. —Greg Cahill
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
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SONGWRITING BASICS FOR GUITARISTS • 21 Songwriting Tips from the Masters
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Songwriting Basics for Guitarists.
store.AcousticGuitar.com
92 December 2015
Bob Dylan John Wesley Harding (Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab)
Tom Russell The Rose of Roscrae: A Ballad of the West Frontera Epic outlaw tales take the listener on an expansive journey Talk about ambitious: Twenty years in the making, The Rose of Roscrae stretches across 52 songs and two CDs, telling the story of outlaw Johnny Behind-the-Deuce, his one-and-only Irish love, Rose, and a thousand things in between, rambling from the Old Sod to the Wild West and back again. It’s a sprawling epic Russell describes as “Les Miserables with cowboy hats.” Somehow, there’s room along the way for cameos by Johnny Cash, Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Ana Gabriel, Eliza Gilkyson, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Jimmy LaFave, Lead Belly, Augie Meyers, Maura O’Connell, David Olney, Dan Penn, Gretchen Peters, Moses Platt, Tex Ritter, John Trudell, Ian Tyson, and Walt Whitman. Standing front and center, Russell manages to hold it together as Johnny, waxing poetic as he stands on the gallows with a noose around his neck. (He begins his tale with, “I’m about to die, why in hell would I lie?”) Russell has been telling cowboy stories for years, but never better than he does here, combining folk songs with his own compositions, and approaching all with a keen sense of drama. Is it a folk opera? A ballad opera? A Broadway musical? Whatever you call it, there’s a hell of a lot to listen to, from rock to blues, corridas, chorales, fiddle tunes, gospel chestnuts, music hall, and sagebrush favorites like “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Ultimately, each part is less important than the swirling whole. The Rose of Roscrae is a certifiable masterpiece with Technicolor scope, the power of music, both old and new, and the richness of Russell’s vision. —Kenny Berkowitz
CHECK OUT JOAN SHELLEY’S AG SESSION AT ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/SESSIONS
Joan Shelley Over and Even No Quarter
Indie-folk starlet offers collection of timeless, gently moving tunes In recent years, Joan Shelley has emerged as a quietly commanding voice in indie folk, performing her own songs, revisiting traditional Appalachian tunes with the trio Maiden Radio, and collaborating with Daniel Martin Moore, Joe Manning, and other kindred spirits around her home base of Louisville, Kentucky. Over and Even is billed as a solo album (Shelley’s third since 2012), but instrumentally it is very much a duo project with Nathan Salsburg, a gifted fingerstyle guitarist who is also curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. Shelley and Salsburg recorded the dozen original songs on Over and Even during one winter weekend, playing a variety of guitars—Bourgeois and Collings OMs, a Harmony nylon-string, and a Gibson ES-335, all tuned down a half step—and had friends overdub keyboards, percussion, and vocals. Guests include legendary Louisville songwriter Will Oldham, who harmonizes beautifully with Shelley on “Stay on My Shore” and two other songs. Shelley’s music has a distinct British Isles flavor. The opening track, “Brighter Than the Blues,” with her and Salsburg picking entwined guitar melodies between verses, brings to mind the folkier side of Pentangle. Shelley’s serene voice, too, recalls English singers like Vashti Bunyan and Sandy Denny. As a songwriter, Shelley taps into folk’s timeless language—lyrically and melodically— without ever sounding archaic. “We sight the mornings softly,” she sings in the title track. “Take to them easy, the scent of the wood and coffee, our cup is filling.” In its gentle way, Over and Even leaves me feeling full, but wanting more. —Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers AcousticGuitar.com 93
PLAYLIST
䜀甀椀琀愀爀 匀琀爀椀渀最猀 眀椀琀栀 一礀氀漀渀 漀爀 匀甀瀀攀爀 䌀愀爀戀漀渀 吀爀攀戀氀攀猀 ᰠ䘀椀渀愀氀氀礀Ⰰ 愀 猀琀爀椀渀最 琀栀愀琀 栀愀猀 椀琀 愀氀氀Ⰰ 漀甀琀猀琀愀渀搀椀渀最 琀漀渀攀Ⰰ 匀甀瀀攀爀戀 愀挀琀椀漀渀 愀渀搀 氀漀渀最 氀椀昀攀ᴠ
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伀甀琀猀琀愀渀搀椀渀最 刀椀挀栀 吀漀渀攀 倀爀攀挀椀猀椀漀渀 吀甀渀椀渀最 䰀漀渀最 䰀椀昀攀 倀攀爀昀攀挀琀 䈀愀氀愀渀挀攀
ᰠ吀栀攀 䰀甀琀栀椀攀爀 匀琀爀椀渀最猀 栀愀瘀攀 洀愀搀攀 瀀漀猀猀椀戀氀攀 琀栀愀琀 洀礀 䘀氀愀洀攀渀挀漀 攀砀瀀爀攀猀猀椀漀渀 戀攀 戀愀氀愀渀挀攀搀 愀渀搀 昀甀氀氀 漀昀 洀甀猀椀挀愀氀椀琀礀⸀ᴠ
䰀甀琀栀椀攀爀 䴀甀猀椀挀 䌀漀爀瀀⸀ 䴀愀渀甀昀愀挀琀甀爀攀爀 漀昀 䰀甀琀栀椀攀爀 栀椀最栀 焀甀愀氀椀琀礀 猀琀爀椀渀最猀 㐀㤀 圀攀猀琀 㐀㐀琀栀 猀琀⸀ 㐀琀栀 䘀氀漀漀爀 一攀眀 夀漀爀欀Ⰰ 一夀 ∠ 吀㨀 ㈀㈀ⴀ㌀㤀㜀ⴀ㘀 ㌀㠀 ∠ꀀ最甀椀琀愀爀䀀氀甀琀栀椀攀爀洀甀猀椀挀⸀挀漀洀 ∠ 眀眀眀⸀氀甀琀栀椀攀爀洀甀猀椀挀⸀挀漀洀
Beppe Gambetta and Tony McManus
LEARN TO PLAY
WHISKEY IN THE JAR AND 14 OTHER IRISH FAVORITES!
Round Trip Borealis
IRISH SONGS FOR GUITAR COMPLETE EDITION n
Learn to play 15 traditional Irish classics
n
Includes tab, standard notation, chord diagrams, and complete lyrics
Includes 85 minutes of video
store.AcousticGuitar.com
Guitars in the Classroom trains, inspires, and equips classroom teachers to make and lead music that transforms learning into a creative, effective, and joyful experience for k-12 students from coast to coast and beyond.
HAVING ACOUSTIC ISSUES? DON’T FRET. There’s a capo for that. The Kyser® Quick-Change®.
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MADE IN USA
94 December 2015
Thanks to Martin Guitars and the C.F. Martin Foundation, Oriolo Guitars, the Bill Graham Foundation, and D'Addario & Co. for helping us launch the latest round of GITC programs!
Please visit
to learn more and check out GITC's first publication: The Green Songbook Available now from Alfred Music Publishing at www.GreenSongBook.com.
Guitar virtuosos take a deep musical excursion together Beppe Gambetta and Tony McManus cover a lot of territory, both musically and geographically. Gambetta, who hails from Genoa, Italy, has a style that encompasses his native country’s traditions, plus other influences from American roots to Eastern European melodies. McManus, a Scot living in Canada, uses Celtic music as the foundation of his approach. The masterly guitarists join forces on Round Trip, which showcases their globetrotting tendencies and virtuosic technique, not to mention their ability to synthesize the music of different traditions and eras into new sounds. The guitarists push each other outside of their comfort zones—McManus tackling the Mediterranean repertoire and Gambetta the Celtic—to excellent effect. It’s breathtaking to witness Gambetta and McMacnus trade wits on the traditional “Doherty/Return to Milltown/ Tommy Peoples” and converge on striking harmonies in “Moustambeiko,” the duo’s arrangement of a Greek number, with McManus playing the bouzouki. Round Trip is full of delightful textural surprises. On “Ligurian Bells Melody: Motivo Improvvisato,” McManus plays a Manzer 36-string Pikasso, its harp strings and fretless neck lending uncanny timbral effects. On the duo’s interpretation of “Slightly Go Blind,” by John Herald, McManus plays an electric solo with fiddle-like articulations courtesy of an EBOW, juxtaposed nicely with Gambetta’s ringing harmonics on the steel-string. This exhilarating trip is highly recommended to acoustic-guitar fans of all stripes. —Adam Perlmutter
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BY GREG OLWELL he history of guitars has been told many times before, but a new book takes a fresh approach. In Boutique Acoustics, writer Michael John Simmons chronicles the story of the American steel-string guitar and how today’s premier crafters of acoustics are producing some of the best guitars since the “golden age” of Gibson, the Larson Brothers, and Martin. Simmons traces the American guitar’s evolution, from the pre-steel-string Viennese-style instruments made by C.F. Martin in the 1830s through later waves of influence from Spanish builders and Hawaiian guitarists, as players worked with luthiers to create louder guitars and the instrument moved out of the parlor to larger concert stages. Later, of course, as the quality of guitars coming from large manufacturers dropped in the late-’60s through the ’70s, small custom shops blossomed all over the country, building guitars that were, in many cases, superior to anything else on the market. This new generation of makers was working at both refining classic models, almost exclusively from Martin’s hallowed designs, and creating new models that blended the best of the past with modern characteristics. The names of some of these crafters are familiar. They include Michael Gurian, Santa Cruz Guitars, Jeff Traugott, and Kathy Wingert. As a writer, Simmons has his bona fides— he’s the co-founder of the Fretboard Journal and a Grade-A guitar nut. Reading this book, you get the sense that Simmons knows this
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material so deeply that if he talks in his sleep, 865-982-3808 it’s probably about the benefits of X-bracing vs. ladder bracing. Today’s boutique guitars are for players wanting a personalized instrument, one that is A unique to them. Boutique Acoustics is geared G G j . j j j j j j œ #4 toward that guitarist. More than just recapping Ó ‰ œ œ & 4 œ œ œ . œ œ ˙ œ ‰ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ history, the book also includes a reference œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ p i p section, detailing some of the options available 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 to players, with guides to body shape, tone2 0 0 0 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 woods, and construction, and a selected list of B 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 contemporary boutique-guitar makers. 7/F#cover, as G You shouldn’t judge a book by Dits j j # j œj j œœ œ . be Œ œ œ . œj œ œ j j œ œj œ the old saying goes, yet buyers & could œ easily . œ ˙ œ œ œ œNEARER, œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ on œ the œ œMY GOD, faulted for expecting this book to focus TO THEE p i p traditions and innovations of the contemporary i p i p i p 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 boutique guitar-building scene. In focusing on 2 2 2 0 2 0 0 2 2 0 2 0 0 0 0 4 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 the development of steel-stringBflattops, Bou2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 tique Acoustics spends too much time with the D 7/F# G D 7/F# G A m7 B bdim7 G /B back story of Martin—which has been covered # ‰ œ j œ . j œj j j œ j jœ . œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ many times before, including the&recent œ œInventœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ b˙ n˙ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ œ ˙ œ ˙ ing the American Guitar (Hal Leonard)—and other early makers. 1 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 Overall, Simmons missed a chance 0 0 to tell 2 2 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 chapter 0 2 2 0 in 0 Each 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 B more stories about the small-scale builders of 3 2 2Gospel 3 3 3 3 3 2 Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar contains the last few decades who have been crafting B C Ga PDF with instruction D 7/F# G D 9/F# j j some of the finest guitars ever made. Many of j j j j j œœœ ˙ # œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ j œ .and jœ. j and œœ notation an b œ œ n œ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ . œœ œœ ˙ œ these important makers are still&alive, œ œ œ œ œvideo. œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œpushing œ œ œ œ œ œ œaccompanying œ œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ ˙ new boundaries and reviving guitars pushed
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GREAT ACOUSTICS
hough Roger Rossmeisl is not a name many guitar aficionados recognize, the Germanborn luthier, who died in 1979, was responsible for several iconic American guitar designs. His masterpiece may be the electric Rickenbacker 330, but Rossmeisl was an accomplished builder of acoustic archtops before arriving in the United States in 1953. Working with Leo Fender, he was responsible for Fender’s underappreciated 1960s acoustic flattops, such as the Concert model pictured here. Fender believed he could use bolt-on necks to make acoustic guitars easier to build and maintain, just as he had on his solid-body electrics. He was convinced that a reinforcing rod running from the neckblock to the end pin (similar to a feature he may have seen on certain Larson Brothers guitars) would make the body stronger and enable use of lighter, more resonant tops. He also believed that acoustic players craved the advantages of adjustable bridges. Rossmeisl, who Fender hired away from Rickenbacker in 1962, was charged with styling the Fender acoustic line. He gave the instruments a Fender family identity through the use of Stratocaster-styled headstocks and also borrowed a few design motifs he’d developed at Rickenbacker, including gold-backed Lucite pickguards and checkerboard binding. Though they were distinctive and more contemporary looking, the guitars, which debuted in 1963, didn’t sound appreciably better than the competition. And though Fender acoustics showed up in the hands of country stars like Johnny Cash and Buck Owens as well as rockers like the Kinks’ Ray Davies, demand did not blossom as Fender had hoped. By 1971, Fender, then in the hands of CBS, discontinued the acoustic line. The 20-fret Fender Concert pictured here was second only to the King (later Kingman) model on the Fender acoustic price list. It was built with a spruce top and could be ordered with rosewood (Brazilian or Indian, as shown) or mahogany backs and sides. It also featured an effective six-saddle adjustable bridge. Though Fender’s ’60s acoustics were not a commercial success in their time, they are well made and are often exceptionally playable guitars when cared for. And though the larger collector community tends to ignore them, they have a devoted cult following.
T
An underappreciated cult classic BY CHALRES SAUFLEY
O
R
FR
A
C
M E
IV
TH
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PAUL KELLY. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF CASSELL ILLUSTRATED, AN IMPRINT OF OCTOPUS BOOKS USA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
A ’60s Fender Flattop
This article was first published in the October 2010 issue.
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