Going down, down, down to floppy "A" town.

Listening today to Roger Miller's "I'm A Nut," I noticed that the guitarist's low E string was tuned down to A for a floppy "baritone" effect. 



I remember this effect being used on Dwight Yoakam's "Little Ways" (which is itself a Buck Owens throwback) in the late eighties:



So I set to work getting my sixth string down to a floppy A.  A nice thing about this extreme downtuned effect is that barre chords are still very easy to grab if the rest of the guitar is in standard tuning - just play "A form" chords, extending the barre finger down to the sixth string, and everything is just all right.  Like so:

oo|||o
||||||
||ooo|
||||||


And then the fun begins.  For consistency of effect in single-note runs, you have to play everything up and down the one string - jumping to one of the other strings is too jarring a timbral difference.  The downtuned string has a deep, slowed-down tone and a slight pitch wobble, especially if picked hard.  This is what distinguishes the "A" downtune from a baritone guitar, which is at at the same lower range, but sounds "tighter." I wonder if this tuning is in Mark Hanson's alternate tunings book? Martin Simpson's DVD?

It's my sense that this trick is not widely used these days. The alternate tunings wiki lists several tunings that go down that low, but what makes this tuning more interesting is the disparity in pitch between the rest of the strings that are tuned in standard and the one floppy low string.  Am I incorrect about this? A Google search yielded nothing about this specific trick, but I'm not sure which keywords would do the job.

The flanger, forgotten pedal.

I stopped by this morning at Capsule Music, my local higher-end used guitar store.  In the 'bargain bin' I found a battered pink 80s iteration of the flanger, the forgotten pedal.

The flanger is by no means the only also-ran of the 1970s-80s effects pedal renaissance.  Anyone plugged into an Aural Exciter lately? Even the once-mighty chorus pedal has largely fallen from grace, though I'm told that it is on the comeback trail, sales-wise.

Part of the problem for the flanger has been its similarity to both the chorus and phaser in its operation and sound.  I've never owned a stand-alone flanger pedal myself.  In fact, my only 'modulation' effects are an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Nano phaser and the dubious chorusing abilities of the EHX Memory Man Deluxe (one of the older models). 

The exception to the flanger's general decline is the strong cachet of the A/DA flanger, which sells for at least $500 on the rare occasions that it shows up at a store like Capsule.  As often as not, these esoteric pedals are snapped up by the roadies for mega rock stars like Neil Young and the Edge and stockpiled in case of failure.

The origin of flanging, first as a recording studio effect and later as a stand-alone effects pedal, is tied up with the recording history of the Beatles.  It is popularly acknowledged (with some compelling alternative histories) that Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend was responsible for first harnessing the effects of pressing on the flanges of moving tape reels on multiple machines.  As the story goes,

it was Lennon who actually gave the process the name "flanging." Lennon asked Beatles producer George Martin to explain how ADT worked, and Martin answered with the nonsense explanation, "Now listen, it's very simple. We take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange with double negative feedback."  From that point on, whenever Lennon wanted a Beatles song double-tracked, he would ask for "Ken's flanger". According to Lewisohn, "The Beatles' influence was so vast that the term "flanging" is still in use today, more than 20 years on." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanger

Once used to help realize the groundbreaking production of "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1966, flanging (along with the Leslie rotating cabinet) was used almost obsessively by the Beatles to render wobbly, psychedelic guitars (or voices, or pianos). 

One of the more interesting, and dated, uses of the flanger would have to be its employment with full band mixes, such as at :51 in the Small Faces' 1967 single, "Itchycoo Park":




Or after 2:48 for the coda of "Bold As Love" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience:



Or at 2:17 in the Doobie Brothers' 1972 "Listen To The Music":



Remember when ugly bands could still make it?

One of the last examples of non-ironic full-band flanging must be the bridge of the Eagles' "Life In The Fast Lane" (sorry, no YouTube video of the litigious Eagles' 1976 studio recording of this song).

I would theorize that full-band flanging was more popular when flanging was a studio-only effect. It was quite easy to flange an entire section of a mixdown - vocals, instruments, and reverb (flanged reverb is prominent in the Hendrix example). When improvements in integrated circuits allowed the flanging effect to be implemented in a small, battery-operated effects pedal, flanging shifted towards being a guitar-only effect.

The A/DA was the first commercial flanger pedal, introduced in June 1977. Eddie Van Halen was an early adopter of one of the first to follow, the MXR:



The Ibanez Jetlyzer was another popular flanger of the seventies.  In the late 70s and early 80s, the flanger pedal was fairly ubiquitous on guitar tracks, especially clean chord strums and arpeggios.  But the pedal slowly declined in popularity along with chorus.  It might be argued that flanging was the innocent victim of the overexposure of chorused guitar in 1980s pop music.

Lenny Kravitz's 1993 "Are You Gonna Go My Way" is a prime example of ironic flanging - the entire mix is heavily flanged at one point, exaggerating the most subtle full-band flanging of the Small Faces and Beatles.  The full-band flange section begins at 2:10 for the climactic instrumental section:






I think that the flanger did not survive its initial novelty appeal because it imposed too coherent a sonic text on the music that it was used for.  Once you knew the sound of the flanger, it was easy to identify - it was an exposed and ubiquitous code that tended, over time, to overtake the songs.  The prominent (and recognizable) flanging effect helped to turn "Itchycoo Park" into a relic.  It subsequently became a go-to pedal for overtly nostalgic sixties effects, as in Lenny Kravitz' sonic museum.  But it became a rarity on the pedalboards of the musical rank and file.

There may be a cult of the flanger still out there, but I'm not aware of it.  Musicians and music store staff that I have asked about the flanger seem ambivalent - they're aware of it, it may even be in a multi-effect unit that they have, but it's not seen as a staple effect.  The only way to have any certainly about these things is to get facts and figures, which as far as I know are not published.  I'd like to know, for example, how many flangers did Boss sell last year compared to Metal Zone pedals?

Baritone guitars, liminal zones and the economy of pub gigs.

I had a Danelectro baritone guitar, a reissue of a fifties model, for a few years in the late nineties.  It was pretty cheap - around $400 - so I impulse-bought it at Lakeshore Music in Burlington.  I used it for a guitar solo on my album Been Here And Gone in 2000 and not long after traded it for a used Camry, a trade that I actually regret.  In between I found a use for it that was, as I thought at the time, undiscussed.  Actually, I can't remember knowing very much at all about the uses of baritone guitars.  I knew that they had been on spaghetti Western soundtracks and Nashville studios in the sixties, often doubling string bass (leading to the studio term "tic-tac bass").  The closest thing that I saw or played prior to the mid-nineties was the Fender Bass VI, which was originally produced from 1961 to 1975.  But the Bass VI is really a six-string bass, a guitar an octave down.  The Wikipedia article on baritone guitars does not make a distinction between the Fender Bass VI and baritone guitars, and seems to suggest that baritone guitars were used on Pet Sounds and "Hey Jude," which I think is misleading. 

The baritone guitar is six stringed, tuned halfway between a guitar and a bass, B E A D F# B (low to high).  That's a scary looking tuning (especially the F#!) but it's just standard guitar tuning down a perfect fourth.  But it's the tuning, in a kind of liminal space between guitar and bass ranges, that defines the baritone.  It's really the only way, short of adding two strings, to be able to passably represent guitar and bass at the same time on the fly.  The "on the fly" part is important, because retaining the six-string design keeps things simple and keeps neck widths down.  If I was on a pickup acoustic gig, I wanted to be able to move around the neck easily, since I was probably transposing the chords of the song in my head at the same time.

At the time, I was playing with the Kevin MacLean Band around Hamilton.  Kevin was just starting to expand beyond performing as a single and booking small band dates.  For cramped pubs we could play as a trio, with the drummer on stand-up cocktail kit and myself on baritone guitar.  With Kevin's acoustic guitar filling in the harmony, I covered bass lines and could throw in credible sounding solos.  It was a easy, low-tech way for a three-piece to sound like a four-piece.  

I can see this idea working for acoustic pub bands, though I haven't seen, through the recent boomlet of baritone guitar interest, anyone playing one live. Maybe that's because I've ignored recent metal, where the "nu metal" downtuning of Korn and Deftones has led to a resurgence of black, pointy baritone guitars.  It stands to reason that nothing assaults the colon like subsonic power chords.  Another contemporary take on the baritone idea is the acoustic baritone guitar.  Vicki Genfan and Al Petteway sound wonderful on it, which suggests to me that the acoustic baritone has all kinds of possibilities as a solo fingerstyle instrument.

All of the above was inspired by a post over at Guitarz on baritone Telecasters, an idea whose time has come.  Now I see from my reading that Duane Eddy used a baritone guitar.  When I was a really small child I loved my mother's record of Twangy Guitar and Silky Strings.  Perhaps my baritone desires are deep-seated.  Maybe it's time for a conversion.

Sol Ho'opi'i and my year of Hawai'ian steel guitar.

About ten years ago, I traded in an old Boss Chorus Ensemble pedal for a National lap steel guitar at the Guitar Clinic in Hamilton.  Resplendent in a mother-of-toilet-seat pearloid finish, this sturdy plank was to capture my imagination for the next year or so.  Guitar Clinic staffer and mandolin god Randy Hill gave me a lead-filled Bakelite slide bar to get me started, and I was off.  At the time, I was doing a lot of private guitar teaching at a music store in Burlington, doing long shifts with student no-shows or cancellations happening often.  I started to bring my steel to work and practice on breaks.

I had fooled around with slide guitar since soon after I started playing, but I never really got the hang of it and feared open tunings.  The lap steel, though it resembles a guitar in many ways, is a very different instrument.  Here's Wikipedia's fine description:

The lap steel guitar is typically placed on the player's lap, or on a stool in front of the seated player.
Unlike a conventional guitar, the strings are not pressed to a fret when sounding a note; rather, the player holds a metal slide called steel (or tone bar) in the left hand, which is moved along the strings to change the instrument's pitch while the right hand plucks or picks the strings. This method of playing greatly restricts the number of chords available, so lap steel music often features melodies, a restricted set of harmonies (such as in blues), or another single part.

The steel guitar, when played in Hawaiian, Country, Bluegrass, or Western Swing styles, is almost always plucked using a plastic thumbpick affixed to the right hand's thumb, and metal or plastic "fingerpicks" fitted to the first 2, 3, or even all 4 fingers of the right hand. This allows the player greater control when picking sets of notes on non-adjacent strings. Some Blues players, especially those who use a round-neck resonator guitar played upright, conventional-guitar-style, with a bottleneck or hollow metal slide on one left-hand finger, forgo the fingerpicks and thumbpicks, and use their bare fingers and thumb instead.

I got started, as I have with many aspects of the guitar, with a book.  This was Stacy Phillips' The Art of Hawai'ian Steel Guitar book.  This book got me playing little Hawai'ian melodies like "Sweet Lei Lehua" and "Na Moku Eha".  Through playing the examples in that book, I came to appreciate the simple beauty of Hawai'ian music and the hellish difficulty of playing the lap steel well.  Stacy's book also acquainted me with the possibility of bar slants, which are tricky to execute (they involve a kind of one-handed juggle of the tone bar in the left hand) but are essential for getting around harmonic changes.  This allows the possibility of doing harmonized fills, and by straightening a slanted bar mid-note, pedal-steel like oblique "bends".  I found out years later that the tuning Stacy writes all of the book examples in, "high G open", is not a standard Hawai'ian tuning but IS a standard Dobro tuning.  This made it easier for me to make the transition to playing in the country style later on.

The Hawai'ian lap steel legend Sol Ho'opi'i (pronounced Ho-Oh-Pe-Ee with glottal stops between the first and second halves of the "oh" and "ee" vowel sounds, not like "hoopie") was my favourite Hawai'ian player at the time.   Born in 1902 in Honolulu, Sol came with his brothers to the mainland in 1924 to make his fortune.  And in Los Angeles, he did.  The U.S. was in the midst of a Hawai'ian fad, and his virtuosic steel playing was in demand.

Sol Ho'opi'i's was a cosmopolitan art.  His authentic Hawai'ian style also incorporated jazz and blues ideas, which give his recordings a certain hipness and swing where other old Hawai'ian records sound, well, old.



Sol eventually gave up pop music to follow the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a fascinating figure herself who came into scandal.  He retired to Seattle and died of pneumonia there in 1953.
Here's a rare film of Sol after his religious conversion, playing hymns on the steel. "Bringing In The Sheaves" is my fave.



At one point in my year at Steel U., I got a lesson and further tips from Kim Deschamps, a Hamilton resident at that time who is now tearing up the Austin roots music scene.  Kim, who played for many years in Blue Rodeo and the Cowboy Junkies, and whom Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy dubbed "the Duke Ellington of the pedal steel" played, like me, without plastic or metal fingerpicks.  In our lesson I remember that he advocated a relentless right-hand damping scheme involving four fingers.  Each finger would damp (or deaden) one string and remain in place unless the string was sounding a note at that moment.  I've never mastered this technique - it requires right-hand finger independence that I'm not close to having at this point.  But it's a big reason behind Kim's warm and organic yet clean and accurate sound on the steel guitar, be it lap or pedal.

The tuning issue is what eventually slowed my progress on the Hawai'ian style. I went to Mississauga for a lesson with a real old-time Hawai'ian steel player.  I can't recall his name now.  But we quickly learned that I was playing in a non-standard tuning, G B D G B D low to high.  I like this tuning because three of the strings are the same as standard tuning, and because the same three note group is duplicated over two octaves, many shapes and licks can be adapted.  But the standard Hawai'ian tuning, the tuning of record, was C6 tuning, which is also a standard pedal steel tuning (though with a lot more strings).  This tuning, C E G A C E low to high, requires restringing of the instrument with the equivalent of a fifth string, fourth string, third string, another third string, a second and a first string.  There's also very little visual commonality between C6 and standard tuning (which I guess I should start referring to as "Spanish tuning").  And let's not forget about the big ol' major second between two adjacent strings (G and A).  I got a Mel Bay C6 steel guitar book but the thrill was gone.

Luckily I had a lot of nifty slanted bar licks that adapted well to country steel.  Not long after I moved to Toronto in 2003 I got a call from Justin Rutledge, who was putting together a band for a Monday night residency at the Cameron House on Queen Street West in Toronto.  I joined that band and we did a year of Mondays in the front room.  Though I later played more electric guitar with the group, I was hired as a steel player.  I continued to use the "high G open" tuning and began to incorporate echo and reverb into my nascent steel style.  I didn't play steel for a few years after that gig ended, but have returned to it more and more lately.  A recent highlight for me was playing the lap steel parts in "A Pillow Of Winds" and "One Of These Days" in a performance of Pink Floyd's album "Meddle" at the Phoenix in Toronto.

Who's got time to practice?

Christine Bougie, one of my favourite Toronto musicians, wrote a blog entry last fall about practicing.  Her insightful comments came to mind yesterday when I was emailing with an old friend and one-time guitar student about the difficulty sometimes of finding time and motivation to practice the guitar.  My friend has a day job, a side job, and a wife and two young children.  His guitar is, in his words, "gathering dust."  I really felt for him because I've been in his situation, and have sometimes gone weeks without picking up a guitar.  It's still hard sometime for me to find time, and I'm a professional musician.  What Christine outlines is a plan for being intentional about what and how you practice.

I often tell people who say that they have no time to practice that 15 minutes a day makes a difference.  If you don't have 15 minutes in a day to yourself, you're too busy.  It helps a lot to try to practice at the same time, or at least at the same point in the day, every day.  I suggested 'after breakfast' to my friend.

At first it's like daily exercise.  Every excuse to avoid practicing will spring to mind in the first few days.  But as you get in the groove, practicing gets more fun as your hands and fingers get more limber.  Ms. Bougie suggests using a countdown timer when practicing.  This can regulate the entire session or specific sections within it.  Even using a metronome can help to structure time during the practice session.  But it's equally important to know what you're practicing, and why.

Christine emphasizes the importance of having goals.  I also sometimes use a practice notebook.  I use it to keep track of what exercises I'm doing, metronome settings (for tempo), new practice ideas and so on.  I often find little repeating patterns when I'm practicing that I will immediately forget if they're not written down.  But a practice notebook also shows you your progress, your past goals and your successes or failures.  This self-awareness is a big part of developing as a musician.

It's really important, I think, to be brutally honest with yourself about your trouble areas, and work on these more, and first, in the practice routine.  We tend to want to practice the things that we do well.  I'm currently targeting my left-hand pinky, which has had an easy ride for far too long.  But I think there should be some time in every practice session for running well-worn routines one more time.  Everyone needs an A-game toolkit in reserve, and that's what the things you do well are.

Big Bill dreams of an electric guitar.

I did some recording today with my musical partner Alec Fraser - the video above is a montage of some of our blues and spiritual material.  Today, we tracked an original tune of mine called "Blues All Around Me" and for the guitar breaks Alec suggested that I do something in the vein of Big Bill Broonzy's "How You Want It Done," a saucy 1932 blues.

Notice Bill's tone - he's picking very close to the bridge, giving his licks a nasal, cutting tone.  The licks themselves are prototypical guitar boogie, of the sort that would later be promulgated by Arthur Smith and others:


And lest we forget the Virtues:



I could go on and on.  The bass-string boogie figure is by now a venerable guitar riff.  On electric guitars, it is usually played through the bridge pickup to bring out the snap and percussion of the low strings.  On acoustic, the tendency is to move the pick close to the bridge.  When I was first starting on guitar, I noticed the 'tinnier' sound I got by picking close to the bridge, and for a while I played there all the time.  I was yearning for the electric guitar sound.  Was Big Bill yearning too, for a sound that had not yet been invented?

In a thought-provoking letter to Guitar Player magazine a few years ago, Ry Cooder argued that Robert Johnson recorded facing the corner of the room to take advantage of an acoustical principle called 'corner-loading,' whereby the guitar sound reverberates against itself and accentuates midrange and increases sustain.  The reason? Johnson wanted the sustain and whine of an electric guitar, something that was only beginning to see the light of day at the time of his death in 1938.   Looking at Big Bill retrospectively, it's plausible that he was searching for an uncommon sound, one that would cut through a noisy club.

The technique is certainly not easy if you're unaccustomed to it.  I opted for one of Alec's more stout picks, a Fender heavy, and it was well shredded after just a couple of takes.  There was also the tendency for the pick to get hung up on the strings while playing rapid boogie-woogie lines - the strings have much less 'give' close to the bridge.  I was forced to play both hard and accurately - two attributes that are usually mutually exclusive.

Most guitarists that I hear tend to use the pickup switch to get different tones.  Acoustic guitarists in my experience find an optimal place to pick and stay there.  I'm just as guilty of both of these approaches.  But there are ways to get more tones out of our guitars - we just need to delve into the past for ideas sometimes.

Beatles guitar tones: the abyss.

I played a show/church service last night at Church of the Redeemer that consisted of nothing but Beatles songs. For the occasion I put together a band with some of my favourite musicians including Scott Christian, Greg Wyard, Joe Power and Nick Wyard, Beatles experts or acolytes all.  We haven't played as a band for several months but with a few soundcheck screw-tightenings we were back at our capacity as a fully-functioning Beatles records reproduction machine. 

Most of the songs required me to play electric guitar, something that is always a tone quandary for me when it comes to Beatles performances.  Let me disclose now that I think of the Beatles as classical music, with really no irony.  First of all, they were the best band in the best era of popular music in recent memory (though I think overall the 1920s were the best era in the 20th century for popular music), which is best attested by their continued strong popularity even as all other sixties megabands and solo artists have waned.  Thus, their music should be reperformed as perfectly and as slavishly as possible, or ideally not at all.  I remember being introduced to this idea waaay back in around '92 by the great drummer, producer and Beatles psycho Dave King.  I couldn't understand why he, a huge Beatles fan, wouldn't want to play any Beatles songs in our bar trio of the time.  It was because we were a trio and could never reproduce the two-guitar arrangements.

Back to my tone quandary.  It consists in the fact that I don't have a proper Beatle guitar, for one thing.  The approved guitars are, for John Lennon, a Rickenbacker 325 in black (seen above) and later an Epiphone Casino.  For George, a Gretsch Country Gentleman in black and later an Epiphone Casino (though to be sure George, probably advised by Eric Clapton, played Fender products on many late Beatles sessions).  For Paul, a Hofner 500/1 violin-shaped bass and later a Rickenbacker 4001 bass.

And those are just the basic arsenal of any self-respecting Beatles tribute.  Good thing that I'm not doing a Beatles tribute - at least not in any way that would require the purchase of winkle pickers or a wig fitting.  This wikipedia article goes into satisfying, torturous detail on the many models of guitars that the Beatles used less iconically.  Even better is the coffee table labour-of-obsession Beatles Gear, written by Chesterfield Kings guitarist Andy Babiuk.  I had a chance to read/skim this book over a week a while ago and it went into very great detail about every piece of equipment that they used.  Another branch of this obsession is the body of research on Abbey Road's recording equipment and techniques as they pertain to Beatles recordings.  I was given a copy of Mark Lewisohn's Beatles Recording Sessions book and it is a classic of the genre.  I remember consulting it in the studio with the Munday Nuns back in the early nineties for recording ideas.

My Beatles tone MO has been this: for acoustic guitar, a midrange boost in the PA to approximate the honkiness of John and George's ladder-braced Gibson J-160Es with flatwound strings (thanks to David Love for this tidbit).  For electric guitar, I've settled on a Les Paul Junior copy that Brian Bennie built for me years ago.  It has P-90 "soapbar" pickups and thus can supply a thick, midrangy signal to the compressor, which does the work of the tube mics and tube mixing board that the Beatles so loved to overload to breaking point.  For early Beatles, a fuzztone does the job for "Paperback Writer", "Taxman" (guitar solo, played by Paul, is one, like "Stairway", that everyone should learn).  For later Beatles, it's amp overdrive - Abbey Road and Let It Be are the sound of hard-driven Fender Deluxe (only 22 watts, a small club amp), so I use a Boss Blues Driver to approximate a light overdrive.  Very early Beatles doesn't use tape overload and is in fact for the most part conventionally recorded early sixties pop.  It's when I'm playing songs like "All My Loving" or "She Loves You" that I'm really glad that I have the super-clean Fender Twin amp.  But let us turn our attention to one of the great Beatles guitar songs, "The Word," which we played last night:



"The Word" was, according to Lewisohn (p. 68) recorded on November 10, 1965 and mixed for mono and stereo the next day.  By the third take it was in the perfect form in which we receive it.  The guitar part consists of a chorus with repeated D7#9 chop (and subsequent similar blues progression) that foreshadows "Taxman," and a doubled low-string riff in the verses.  Alan Pollack beautifully deconstructs the form and other musical aspects here.  My hunch is that it's George on both parts, playing a Stratocaster (I could be completely wrong about this.  To be more sure, I would need to consult the magisterial book boxset Recording The Beatles, which rings in at a cool $144.95 US plus tax).  John, Paul and George don't yet have their matching Epiphone Casinos (Revolver was the beneficiary of this surprisingly surf-band-like matching instruments moment) and the Rubber Soul sessions seem to have been a searching time for the lads, guitar-wise.  The snarling tone, complete with low-action rattle amplified by Abbey Road's much-abused compressors, suggests the bridge pickup.  There is also some turned-up beefiness from the amps.  Geoff Emerick, in his pleasurable memoir as Beatles' chief recording engineer for many of their glory years, remembers the engineers spending a lot of time in this era futzing with the amps, trying to get just the right amount of volume and saturation.  The guitar tone in "The Word" is a classic example of this rather aristocratic tone alchemy. 

All of this obsessiveness was reduced last night to the 'brown guitar' (the LP Special I mentioned earlier) and the Twin.  I forgot the compressor at home, after all of that. 

Organized Sound.

"Looping Pedal Roundup!"

I've been using a looper pedal, specifically the blue two-pedal Digitech Jam Man, for about six months now.  It's pretty limitless what you can do with this pedal, at least in theory.  I'm still getting used to the tone degeneration that is inherent in surrendering your guitar signal to a 44.1 kHz, 16 bit digital converter.  And the looper, probably to my ultimate benefit, exposes certain weaknesses in my playing.  But somehow, its basic ability to record and play back, in an infinite loop if I want, anything I play into it on the fly keeps me coming back.

What this magical technology confers on the player is the capability of creating and controlling anything from a simple rhythm guitar part to a multisectioned guitorchestra.  Really, any sound could be included in the loop - the looper includes a second input (XLR instead of quarter-inch) and onboard mixer.  I was making loops last night where I overdubbed harmony vocal pads a la the Beach Boys, just using my pedalboard and an amp.

The archetypal looping god is, of course, Robert Fripp, whose Frippertronics made live guitar looping almost a household word in the eighties.  Here's Fripp himself, complete with pompous spoken introduction, demonstrating Frippertronics:



He does sound great, though. Nobody rocks a black Les Paul Custom like RF. These days Fripp has abandoned the electronics for a kind of human Frippertronics, his army of Guitar Craft students.



Another variation on late-career solipsism is Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project, currently on tour in the U.S.




Guitar Player Magazine has a "Looping Pedal Roundup!" posted where you can compare the different ones if you're in the market.  And there's always the Harmony Central user reviews if you're hardcore.  My experience with the Digitech device has been mostly positive.  The first time I used it live, I stepped on the left pedal and it came off and clattered to the stage.  It snapped right back on, and it never happened again, but I always have that traumatic experience in the back of my mind when I use it now.  But I use it all the time when I play solo, and though I'm still rather unambitious with it in front of actual people, it's really my most fun gadget.

Bob Taylor invents the 12-fret guitar.

http://www.vintageguitar.com/newswire/detail.asp?newsID=2484

When Taylor Guitars, a company known for revolutionizing the guitar industry by popularizing computer-assisted guitar design and construction for high-end acoustics, goes back to a pre-war design, you know that you're looking at a genuine retro trend.  I would argue that the interest in outmoded acoustic guitar designs has its roots in the parlour guitar rage of a few years back, when companies like Larrivee and Martin introduced successful updates of the little ladies' guitar of the turn of the (twentieth) century.

From Taylor's website, on their use of computer-assisted manufacture:

CAD/CAM: CAD is an acronym for the "computer-aided design" software used in art, architecture, engineering, and manufacturing to assist in precision drawing. CAM stands for computer-assisted manufacturing. At Taylor, both come into play in a big way. We use CAD, and specifically 3D geometry graphic software, to design just about everything we need, including the guitars. All computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) Fadal fixtures, shaper jigs, side benders, body molds, inlay patterns, and every part of the guitar (especially the neck and neck pocket) are drawn in the computer using some type of 3D graphics program.
After the geometry is drawn, CAM toolpath programs are written to actually carve, cut, and shape the parts, using CNC machinery that includes the Fadals, lasers, and NC routers. Even our factory layouts are drawn in the computer. At any given time, seven or eight Taylor specialists are using CAD/CAM technology.

Now Bob Taylor discovers the superiority of 12-fret guitars (it only took until 2009!), but only after his own company produced one.  I've preferred that design since I played my first Gibson L-OO at the late Dan Achen's house of vintage guitars.  I couldn't afford the L-OO and eventually found an early 1930s Kel Kroyden (one of the depression-era off-brands manufactured by Gibson) and now play a Larrivee SD-50.  When the body joins the next at the twelfth fret instead of the fourteenth, the shape of the soundbox is altered in a way that seems to allow more warmth and sustain.  I'm not quite sure how it works acoustically, but the difference is definitely there.

If I sound skeptical about Taylor's 12-fret guitar it's because I am - I've never been much of fan of Taylor's guitars.  I've played a few in stores and as backline on the road.  They're fine amplified, and sit nicely in the mix with a loud rock band, but I always find them acoustically disappointing - lacking in midrange and low in volume at the higher frets.  I'd love to have my mind changed though.  Consistency in manufacturing could potentially be a wonderful thing, if there was only a reproducible design worth being consistent with!

Dangerous curves.

I've seen some interesting guitars in museum collections, including the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, as well as a general instrument collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that included some early lutes, viheulas and guitars.  One that I'm sorry that I missed is the Museum of Musical Instruments Dangerous Curves guitar exhibit, which toured in 2000-2001.

This link takes you to a slideshow of the featured guitars, and they really got some of the most historically significant guitars together in one place, including an 1830s Stauffer by C.F. Martin's luthiery teacher, the Gibson O Model and guitars belonging to John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.  On the downside, the scans are of low quality so the sumptuous construction and appointments of some of the instruments are hard to appreciate.  There are a few pieces missing, judging at least by the montage - the Electro String Instrument Corporation's (later Rickenbacker) "Frying Pan" lap steel, the first commercially marketed electric guitar.  Oh, and there's the Log, Les Paul's first experiment in solidbody electric guitar building.  They probably should have had Paul Bigsby's late '40s guitar for Merle Travis as well.

I could probably go on and on, but the montage is a fun five minutes in any case.  For the real, coffee-table format goods, seek out Tom Wheeler's American Guitars.

Nick Lucas, Tin Pan Alley troubadour and guitar hotshot

Near the end of the "Rude Songs" episode of Tony Palmer's epic film history of popular music, All You Need Is Love (UK 1976), we see and hear Nick Lucas, an elderly but still handsome and dapper man playing a small black guitar and singing "Tip Toe Through The Tulips".  He punctuates his chord strums with snappy little bass runs, in a way not entirely different from his 1920s contemporaries Jimmie Rodgers and Riley Puckett.  In his later years Nick Lucas (1897-1982) would be contextualized by Johnny Carson as an important influence on Tiny Tim.  Tiny Tim (1932-1996) became a household word on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In television show by doing a vocal cross-dressing act with a high falsetto voice, singing many of the same old-time standards that were Nick Lucas' stock in trade.  His popularity had peaked in the late twenties and early thirties, but Nick was still working up almost until his death, a Tin Pan Alley troubadour from bygone days.





Interestingly, Nick Lucas began his recording careers with two 1922 guitar instrumental sides for Pathe, "Picking The Guitar" and "Teasing The Frets."  These records feature worked out guitar set pieces with piano accompaniment, of the kind that would have been thrilling to the country people that formed his core audience on the American vaudeville theatre circuit in the teens and twenties.  I hear in "Picking The Guitar" many of the licks that would find their way to bluegrass and later country guitarists like Lester Flatt, Hank Garland and Chet Atkins.  But listen to how he alternates a bumptious cross-picking major-key hoedown with the almost fey European ornamentation of a minor-key theme.



"Teasin' The Frets", the B-side, is quite a bit jazzier and recalls nothing so much as the ragtime banjo recordings of Vess Ossman and Fred Van Eps, the two early 20th century masters of the form.



Nick Lucas is probably best known today among guitarists as the name behind one of the first celebrity endorsed guitar models.  The Gibson Nick Lucas Special was marketed from 1926 to 1941, outliving Lucas' broad popularity by around ten years.  Bob Dylan played one on his 1965 British tour, and that resonant guitar can be heard and seen on the legendary Dylan documentary Don't Look Back.  Gibson revived the model from 1991-1992 and again from 1999-2004.  I've played one of the newer ones and it's probably my favorite newer Gibson acoustic.

Nick Lucas, along with the movie cowboys like Gene Autry, forged the contemporary image of the singer-guitarist.  We can see him as a forebear to Elvis, Bob Dylan and John Lennon.  But he was also, by adapting ragtime banjo licks, among the first jazz guitarists, as heard especially on "Teasin' The Frets."  For this achievement alone so early in jazz recording history, Nick Lucas can challenge Eddie Lang as the pioneer of jazz guitar.

Eddie Lang and Jeff Healey

When I was in the first year of my masters' degree I asked Howard Spring, Guelph University music professor and guitar freak, what I should write about in my first graduate essay, for Bob Witmer's jazz seminar.  He suggested Eddie Lang.  I had read Jas Obrecht's 1980s Guitar Player article on Eddie Lang, the first jazz guitarist to gain prominence, but I knew little else about him.  Over the next few weeks, I researched (pre-internet, mind you!) Lang as much as I could.

Eddie Lang was born in 1902 in Philadelphia as Salvatore Massaro, the son of a mandolin builder.  He grew up playing violin in orchestras alongside Joe Venuti, who later became a great hot jazz violinist and worked as a duo with Lang.  He took up the banjo and switched to guitar in the early 1920s.  Moving to New York, he gradually became the first-call session guitarist and worked with most of the best white jazz musicians of the day - Frankie Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke and Adrian Rollini, as well as doing sessions with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.  He was retained by the Paul Whiteman organization, the best-known dance band of the era, and at the end of his life in 1933 he was the accompanist and right-hand man to the rising star Bing Crosby.  He died of an embolism during a routine tonsillectomy.

Lang's style was a sophisticated blend of bass note/strum alternation with quick runs and cascades of chords.  He was at the vanguard of 1920s jazz harmony, incorporating diminished and whole-tone scales and pedal point.  His single-note solos were simple and elegant.  Lang never got the chance to use an electric guitar - it was not yet available in his lifetime - so he got the most volume and tone possible out of a Gibson L-5 archtop, using a stout pick and, by today's standards, ridiculously heavy strings beginning with a .15 on the E string and including a wound (!!!) second string.
(Tech. note: if the embedded video won't start, click on it once and hit the space bar to start and stop)



He is credited with setting the groundwork for jazz guitar style and providing the impetus for thousands of dance-band banjoists to make the switch to guitar.  His hundreds of recordings are still treasured today by a small worldwide community of enthusiasts, many of whom study and emulate his style and sound.




Incidentally, it was my research into Lang that led to my first meeting with Jeff Healey back in 1994.  Bob Witmer suggested that I get in touch with him, since he was known to possess thousands of 1920s jazz 78s, many of which had never been reissued on vinyl or CD.  At the time, reissued recordings of Lang were few.  I put in a phone call to Healey's record company and was told by the secretary that Jeff was on tour, and would probably get back to me in a couple of weeks.  Jeff called back within five minutes, excited to have me over to listen to Lang records and talk about his music for a couple of days.  He made two 90-minute cassettes of rare Lang recordings for me.  This was the first time that I got a sense of Jeff's incredible knowledge and computer-like memory for information.  We even traded a few Lang licks on my guitar.  I didn't see Jeff again for a few years after that, but those couple of days were the foundation of our friendship and musical work together.