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.