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AcousticGuitar.com 5
CONTENTS
10 The Front Porch
48 Holiday Gift Guide
80 Marketplace
81 Ad Index
January 2016
Volume 26, No. 7, Issue 277
On the Cover
Glen Hansard
Photographer
Manfred Pollert
18 Music from the Melting Pot
Rustic folk artist Woody Pines
steps from the street to the stage
By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
20 Hard Labor
The heartfelt fierceness of
Christopher Paul Stelling’s
Labor Against WasteBy Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
26 Ramblin’ Man
Irish troubadour and Once
creator Glen Hansard returns
to his busking style
By Kenny Berkowitz
30 Made to Order
Custom-built guitars can provide
a personal touch at (almost)
any budget
By Adam Perlmutter
Features Miscellany‘Some people
rely on their lyrics.
And some rely
on their voice.
I rely on my
guitar playing
as the vehicle.’
CHRISTOPHERPAUL STELLING, p. 20
J O
S H U A W O O L
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6 January 2016
CONTENTS
NEWS
13 The Beat
Jewel returns to her folk roots;
Dylan ’65–’66 boxes;
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band turns 50
16 Five Minutes With . . .
Gary Clark Jr. on his acoustic side
PLAY
37 The Basics
Everyday Rhythm:
3 ways to lock in solid time
38 Weekly Workout
How to build unconventional
jazz voicings from open strings
Songs to Play
44 JambalayaHank Williams’
country-Cajun classic
46 Ol’ 55
A sentimental ballad by Tom Waits
54 Pride and Joy
Stevie Ray Vaughan’s
blues powerhouse
AG TRADE
61 Shoptalk
Inside the Woodstock Invitational;
Tascam 4X4 production studio;
new Radial Acoustic DI
64 Guitar Guru
Stiff vs. active backs
66 Review: RainSong SMCX
Thoughtfully designed carbon
guitar sounds clear and robust
68 Review: Faith FMSB45-BNC
A parlor guitar with rich,
woody tones
70 Review: Henriksen’s
‘The Bud’
A powerful, portable
acoustic-friendly amp
82 Great Acoustics
The buzz about the Bee Guitar
MIXED MEDIA73 Playlist
The Legendary Shack Shakers’
The Southern Surreal exposes
their weird Americana roots; also,
Jon Stickley Trio’s Lost at Last ,
the compilation Legends of Old-
Time Music: 50 Years of County
Records, Kinky Friedman’s The
Loneliest Man I Ever Met , the Oh
Hellos’ Dear Wormwood , and The
Acoustic Blues & Roots of Duke
Robillard . Also: John Renbourn’s
The Attic Tapes unearthed
RainSong’s
carbon-fiber
SMCX guitar,
p. 66
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8 January 2016
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AG ONLINE
Enjoy a recent Acoustic Guitar Session episode with psych-folk guitarist
Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance. Visit acousticguitar.com/sessions
to check out interviews with and performances by Richard Thompson, Ani
DiFranco, Seth Avett, Peter Rowan, Della Mae, Bruce Cockburn, Valerie
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10 January 2016
attentive, considerate, humble, and imbued
with a seemingly boundless curiosity.
He reminds me of a younger version of
Richard Hoover, the founder of Santa Cruz
Guitars, who has an almost saintly aura. There
may be people who know Richard better than I
do who might cringe at that assessment, but
I doubt it—even amid the controlled chaos of
the NAMM showroom floor, Richard displays a
level of calm and caring that is most refreshing
in this mechanical world.
During his visit, Andy and I passed his
guitars back and forth, and talked about the ways
in which guitars reflect the personalities of theirmakers: The almost zenlike presence of Richard
Hoover, the sharp intelligence of luthier and AG
contributor Dana Bourgeois, for example. I asked
Andy how his own personality is reflected in his
guitars. He hesitated and humbly said that he’s
probably not the best person to evaluate that. I
will say that from the innovative instruments he
brought along from the Taylor shop, the remark-
able improv he shared on camera, and his unflag-
ging enthusiasm, this former surfer-turned-guitar
builder, whose fingerstyle playing is gentle and
joyous, appears to be on the verge of game-
changing things. And that’s darned nice.
Play on!
—Greg Cahill
There are times when it looks like the AG
editors are just goofing around on the job.
When I’m not planning coverage, editing copy,
checking facts, chasing sources, tracking down
gear, answering emails, fielding subscriber inqui-
ries, or policing Internet trolls, there are inter-
mittent moments of, well, fun. Recently, those
have included trading stories with Robert Earl
Keen, who dropped by our studio for AG Sessions
(you can watch it on acousticguitar.com/
sessions), chatting at length via phone with
Martin historian Dick Boak (always an educa-
tion), and testing a pair of interesting new
Fender acoustic amps with a co-worker (you canread about those in the February issue).
Last week, Taylor Guitars master luthier
Andy Powers dropped by to share a few instru-
ments he’s been working on. I can’t go into
details—some of those guitars will be pre-
viewed at the 2016 Winter NAMM and AG soon
will be presenting video demos of them—but
his visit underscored one of the things that is so
great about this job: You get to meet excep-
tional people in this business.
Some are really smart, others really indus-
trious. Andy is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever
meet. He’s also smart and industrious and atalented guitarist and a gifted luthier with a
creative mind always reaching for innovation.
But, beyond that, he’s also warm, optimistic,
AcousticGuitar.com • AcousticGuitarU.com
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Editor at Large Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
Managing Editor Blair Jackson
Associate Editor Whitney Phaneuf
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Contributing Editors Kenny Berkowitz,
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Orville Johnson, Richard Johnston,
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Jane Miller, Greg Olwell, Adam
Perlmutter, Rick Turner, Doug Young
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Taylor Guitars
master luthier
Andy Powers
THE FRONT PORCH
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AcousticGuitar.com 13
NEWS
I n Picking Up the Pieces (Sugar Hill), folksinger Jewel decided to return to her roots,both thematically and in the raw, stripped-
down, emotional intensity she’s honed in her
20-plus years as a singer-songwriter. The
album—her first collection of new material
since 2010 and a companion to her multi-plat-
inum debut Pieces of You—finds Jewel harking
back to the marrow that launched her career—
her voice and her guitar.“When it came to producing and putting
this record together, shutting the fear out was
really just having to unlearn or at least be
willing to ignore what I know about the busi-
ness,” says Jewel, over the phone from Nash-
ville. “There’s just too many things that, over 20
years, you get taught that don’ t necessari ly
make honest music. I had to learn to shut all
that out and just say, ‘I know this isn’t an
uptempo record.’
“I know it doesn’t really have a genre. It’s
somewhere between folk and Americana. I
don’t know what to call this. This doesn’t sound
Pieces de ResistanceJewel returns to her folk roots on ‘Picking Up the Pieces’BY ANNA PULLEY
14 The Beat Dirt Band marks 50th Anniversary
14 The Beat New Dylan ’65 & ’66 bootlegs in a box
16 5 Minutes With . . .Gary Clark Jr. reveals
his acoustic side
THE BEAT
CONT. ON PG. 16
‘NEVER BROKEN’
like anything on the radio right now. I had to
let all of that go and just make a record that
was very uniquely me and very honest and my
style of songwriting and poetry.”
The self-referential bookend to her 1995
debut includes new songs like “Love Used to
Be” and “Mercy”—both driven by a plaintive
acoustic-guitar melody—longtime live show
favorites like “Nicotine Love,” “Everything
Breaks,” and “A Boy Needs a Bike,” plus collab-orations with Rodney Crowell and Dolly
Parton.
Helping Jewel strip away the veneer on the
14-song collection was an A-list session band. “I
tried to surround myself with people who had a
real sensibility for rawness and grittiness,” she
says. Those folks included Neil Young collabo-
rators such as drummer Chad Cromwell, as well
as award-winning pedal-steel guitar player Dan
Dugmore. It’s a sort of ode to Ben Keith,
Young’s sideman who died in 2010, and who
produced Pieces of You.
M A T T H E W R
O L S T O N
“I should probably not be here
today. I should probably not
even be alive,” begins the
foreword of Jewel’s new memoir
Never Broken: Songs Are Only
Half the Story (Penguin Random
House) released September 15,
the same week as her new
album Picking Up the Pieces.
The book, which takes its name
from a lyric in her hit song
“Hands,” is a blend of candid
stories (she once felt up Bob
Dylan’s nose with the aim of
sculpting it one day), poetry
(her first poetry collection,
A Night Without Armor , came
out in 1998), and personalphilosophies.
“I wrote a lot about pivotal
shifts in my thinking,” Jewel
told AG. “These sort of paradigm
shifts that helped me be less of
a victim [and] be the architect of
my life instead of just reacting to
life. I go into a lot of detail about
how I really believe that what
you perceive and how you
respond, that’s what builds your
life. It starts in your mind and
then your mind goes to actionsand then your actions build
a life. So if you’re not aware
of what you’re thinking or
conscious of what you filter,
you’re really going to be reacting
to a life instead of creating one.
When I was homeless, where
you’re stripped of everything
but your mind, you really start
focusing on your mind. It’s
really all you have left.”
—Whitney Phaneuf
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14 January 2016
THE BEAT
The album was recorded live in Nashville to
help her “get back to what my bones have to say
about songs and words and feeling and
meaning.” It evokes the stark storytelling she’s
known for onstage. “We did the very old-school
style of recording where we put a microphone inthe middle of the room and pushed record, and
it’s one live performance,” she says, “so it’s very
honest.”
Jewel credits part of the unvarnished feel to
her decision to produce the album herself. “I feel
like you can’t help but be interpreted through
somebody’s filter as a producer, no matter how
transparent they try to be,” she says. “And I do
think me producing this left things undone
enough and raw enough and imperfect enough
that the emotion and the heart was able to shine
through, because it wasn’t about the craft, the
perfection, and the gadgets and the gizmos that you’re using. I couldn’t have made a different
record. If you gave me all the money in the
world and said, ‘Make a dif ferent record,’
I couldn’t.”
Jewel dedicated Picking Up the Pieces to her
grandmother Ruth, a poet and opera singer
who moved from Switzerland to escape the war
and start a new life in America. “[She] took me
aside with tears in her eyes and told me it was
worth it for her to give up her dreams to see
them come true for me,” Jewel explains. “She
made such an amazing sacrifice, and my dad
sacrificed. I wrote ‘My Father’s Daughter’ for
both of them.”
You have to love these official bootlegs.
There are Bob Dylan fans who would arguethat he reached his career apex with three
masterpieces released in quick succession in
1965 and ’66: Bringing It All Back Home , the
record where he famously “went electric” for
the first time (though half of the album is
acoustic guitar-based), and the fully electric
Highway ’61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.
Those hardcore Dylan acolytes are sure to
love The Cutting Edge 1965 & 1966: The Bootleg
Series Vol. 12, a new box set packed with rari-
ties, including unreleased demos, alternate
takes, and rehearsals of songs from those three
albums.There are three versions of Vol. 12 to choose
from: The two-disc The Best of the Cutting Edge,
offers multiple takes of such classics as “Love
Minus Zero/No Limit,” “She Belongs to Me,”
“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and others
(many of them acoustic); the six-disc edition
features multiple takes of “It Takes a Lot to
Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” “Desolation
Row,” and “Visions of Johanna,” to name just a
few; and the massive 18-disc set includes
“every note recorded during the 1965–66 ses-
sions, every alternate take, and alternate lyric.”
The Cutting Edge 1965 & 1966 is available
on bobdylan.com, Amazon, . —Blair Jackson
DYLAN FORTHE CURIOUS& COMPLETISTS
NITTY GRITTYKICK OFF 50TH
ANNIVERSARY TOUR
To commemorate its 50th year as a leading
voice in American roots music, the Nitty GrittyDirt Band will hit the road this spring and
release a PBS-TV special scheduled to air
during the national pledge drive, March 5–20.
The PBS special, which was filmed at Nash-
ville’s Ryman Auditorium on September 14,
featured all-star guests, including John Prine,
Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Jerry Jeff Walker,
former Dirt Band members Jackson Browne
and Jimmy Ibbotson, plus Jerry Douglas on
resonator guitar, Sam Bush on mandolin, and
Byron House on bass.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founding member
Jeff Hanna tells
Billboard: “We’ve got a lot ofplans that we are really excited about doing—
some big-event shows. I doubt that we’ll be able
to bring everyone from the Ryman out on the
road with us, but we’ve got a lot of music to
celebrate and stories to tell.”
In a cultural watershed, the band helped
nurture the then-burgeoning Americana move-
ment: With the release of 1972’s Will the Circle
Be Unbroken—featuring bluegrass, country, and
old-timey notables—the Dirt Band bridged the
generational gap between young and old by
introducing traditional music to a mainstream
pop audience.
For tour updates, visit
nittygritty.com. —W.P.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
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©
2 0 1 4 P R S G u i t a r s / P h o t o s b y M a r c
Q u i g l e y
PRS Acoustics
The PRS Guitars’ Acoustic Team.
A Culture of Quality
Born in our Maryland shop, PRSacoustics are heirloom instrumentswith remarkable tone and exquisiteplayability. A small team oexperienced luthiers handcrafall o our Maryland-made acousticinstruments with passion andattention to detail.
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16 January 2016
Which would you rather write on:
acoustic or electric guitar?
Most of my songs start on acoustic, because I
really can feel it that way. If I take the time to just wander around the house, try out different
rooms, and really zone out, I can hear the way a
song sounds bouncing off the walls. Then I plug
in later, dial some things in, and turn it up a bit.
Why is it better to begin on acoustic?
When I’m playing acoustic, I’m just trying to
figure out the chord progression, the structure,
come up with a melody. As I become more
comfortable, the song grows in my head, and I
get to a place where I start playing within the
chords, dancing around a little more. But the
acoustic is really the rock in all of this. Theroot. There’s something special about finger-
picking an acoustic guitar, the way it resonates
in your lap, and I just feel grounded. To me,
there’s nothing more raw and stripped-down
than playing acoustic guitar, sitting out in the
middle of a field somewhere. It makes me think
about the musicians that inspired me to pick up
the guitar, my teachers in a sense, and play
with them in mind.
Like who?
Elizabeth Cotten. Lead Belly. Son House. Skip
James. Robert Johnson. Charley Patton.
Making It CountPowerhouse blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr.
reveals his acoustic side
BY KENNY BERKOWITZ
5 MINUTES WITH GARY CLARK JR.
Since winning a Grammy for
his 2012 debut Blak and Blu
(Warner), 31-year-old Texasbluesman Gary Clark Jr. has
opened for the Rolling Stones
and Eric Clapton, sat in with
the Foo Fighters on Austin
City Limits , and won back-to-
back Blues Music Awards for
Best Contemporary Blues Male
Artist. Now, on The Story
of Sonny Boy Slim (Warner),he’s returned with an album
that’s even stronger, showing
a tighter focus on soul
influences like Curtis Mayfield
and Pops Staples, and two
songs—the gospel-tinged
“Church” and the gutbucket
“Shake”—that reaffirm
his roots in acoustic blues.
I hear an echo of Charley Patton in ‘Shake.’
Was that a conscious decision?
There was a Quaker Oats can turned into some
sort of three-string guitar that was hangingaround the studio. I was admiring it, then
miked it up, and “Shake” just happened. I
didn’t even check the tuning.
And the song ‘Church’ seems rather
impromptu. Was it?
I was wandering around the studio with a ’47
Martin 00-18, and the song came to me in a one-
take situation. I sat down in front of the micro-
phone, the guys pushed the record button, and
“Church” came out. It was one of those inspired,
in-the-moment things.
What was the inspiration?
Oh, man, just thinking about being out on the
road and ending up in a hotel room in some
foreign place. Spending a lot of time out on the
road, being gone, being away from family.
Has becoming a father changed
the way you think about guitar?
It definitely has. I went through a whole transi-
tion when I was in the studio, focusing on every
note. You know, trying to lead by example,
pushing myself to be better. If I’m gonna play it,
I’ve got to make it count. AG
Gary Clark Jr.
performs at the
Bridge School
benefit concert
in October.
J A Y
B L A K E S B E R G
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18 January 2016
FROMTHEMELTINGPOT
Rustic folk artistWoody Pines
steps fromthe streetto the stage
By Jeffrey
PepperRodgers
L to R
Skip Frontz Jr.,
Woody Pines,
Brad Tucker
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AcousticGuitar.com 19
or three years in the early 2000s,
Woody Pines spent nearly every day
busking in New Orleans’ French
Quarter with his band at the time, the Kitchen
Syncopators. With Pines playing a cheese
grater, measuring cups, kazoo, fiddle, and other
colorful instrumentation, and Gill Landry
(future member of Old Crow Medicine Show)
on a National guitar, the band knocked out
blues, jug-band, and hillbilly songs—and got an
education in performance. “You learn when you need an upbeat song,
and then you learn actually you can suck in
[audiences] by playing a slow song,” says Pines,
in a conversation before a show in upstate New
York. “You learn to project and play with a little
bit more energy that gets that nice, authentic
sound with strings buzzing on frets—really
trying to get your instrument out there, com-
peting with a garbage truck and a parade that
goes by, the blues band on the other block. You
don’t necessarily need to scream and shout, but
then, a few hollers don’t hurt.”
Pines carried those lessons over to the soloact he launched after the Kitchen Syncopators
disbanded. Now based in Nashville, Pines tours
all over, playing a beat-up National along with
Skip Frontz Jr. on rockabilly-style slapped
upright bass and Brad Tucker on electric lead
guitar. The rollicking sound of that trio is fea-
tured on Woody Pines’ new self-titled album on
the Muddy Roots label; the collection spans Hot
Club-style swing (Irving Berlin’s “My Walking
Stick”), honky-tonk (“New Nashville Boogie”),
folk fingerpicking (the Elizabeth Cotten-esque
“Little Stella Blue”), and blues (“Make It to the
Woods,” from the Mississippi Sheiks, mashed
up with some lyrics from “Keep Your SkilletGood and Greasy”).
A big influence on Pines’ repertoire is North-
west fingerpicker, record collector, and resona-
tor-guitar aficionado Baby Gramps. Pines grew
up in the remote hollows of northern New
Hampshire, but headed west after high school.
He tracked down one of his other heroes, U.
Utah Phillips, but found that the legendary folk
singer, rambler, and rabble-rouser “didn’t really
Fhave interest in hanging out with us dirty
hobos.”
By contrast, Gramps took Pines and his
friends under his wing. “Gramps seemed to stay
up all night and loved showing us how to play
‘Ragtime Millionaire’ or saying, ‘This is how
Riley Puckett did it,’” Pines says.
All along, Pines was not only learning old
songs but writing his own. With the Kitchen
Syncopators, he says, “We were forced to write
upbeat songs that kind of sounded like theseblues juke-joint songs. Back then a lot of the
stuff was slower and wasn’t really designed for
the street.”
Pines wrote several songs on his new solo
album with his old friend Felix Hatfield, who
was also a member of the Kitchen Syncopators
and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
“We get together every once in a while and
lock ourselves in a kitchen and get a bottle of
whiskey and say we have to come up with ten
songs, 20 songs,” Pines says. “He’s really pro-
lific, so he drives me to write.”
Pines’ touring circuit these days—at festivalsand on real stages as opposed to sidewalks—
allows for a different type of songwriting.
“When we started indoors,” he says, “and
even the venues changed from honky-tonks to
[music halls] where they’ll be silent, you can
really take people deeper.”
fter our conversation, Pines and his
trio take the stage at the Nelson
Odeon, a century-old grange hall in
the tiny town of Nelson, New York, and quickly
win over the crowd with high-energy, joyous
grooves, and ripping solos by Tucker. The per-
formers and the audience are clearly having fartoo much fun with this music to think about
what to call it.
“I don’t really pick apart the styles of Ameri-
cana,” Pines says. “I come from the Harry Smith
school, where you’ll put a Cajun tune back-to-
back with a gospel tune, and then a white hill-
billy tune next to a sea shanty. They’re all forms
of American music. It’s still a very new, lively,
fermenting melting pot.” AG
WHAT
WOODY
PINES
PLAYS
When people ask Pines how
old his well-worn National is, he
likes to say “turn of the century,”
by which he means, turn of this
century. It’s a 1998 wood-bodied
National Estralita, amplified with
an external mic and a K&K Pure
Resonator pickup (left) through
an L.R. Baggs Venue DI.
He uses D’Addario phosphor
bronze strings (swapping in
an Ernie Ball nickel G string that
he says lasts longer), a Shubb
capo, and the heaviest Dunlop
fingerpicks he can find (two
fingers and a thumb). He
switches between Mississippi
John Hurt-style fingerpicking
and using the thumbpick
like a flatpick.
A
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20 January 2016
HARDWORK
Christopher Paul Stelling shows his fierce chops on ‘Labor Against Waste’
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AcousticGuitar.com 21
J E N N S W E E N E Y
hen he was 24, Christopher Paul Stell-
ing lived in Asheville, North Carolina,
in a friend’s closet, spending his nights
creating guitar instrumentals with looping
pedals. But one day, he recalls, “I just decided,
this is not my direction, and I took all of my
pedals to a pawnshop to get rid of them.” At the
shop, a guitar caught his eye: a 1964 Gibson C-1
nylon-string with a $200 price tag. After an hour
of playing it, he resolved to go home with the
guitar rather than the much-needed cash.
“My plan to pay rent that month was foiled,”
Stelling says, “but my fate was sealed.”In the ten years since then, the C-1 has been
the 33-year-old Stelling’s constant companion,
as he’s forged a singular style that blends folk-
and blues-rooted songwriting with agile finger-
style guitar. (Think blues guitarist Kelly Joe
Phelps with a classical guitar, and you’re in the
ballpark.)
Last summer, Stelling took a big step into the
spotlight: He released his third album, Labor
Against Waste, on the Anti- label; taped a Tiny
Desk Concert for NPR Music; and made his debut
at the Newport Folk Festival—a dramatic set that
ended with a standing ovation and an onstageproposal to his girlfriend, singer Julia Christgau.
A few weeks after Newport, in the midst of
a breakneck tour that had taken Stelling to nine
countries since the beginning of the year, he
stops by my home studio in upstate New York,
accompanied by Christgau, for an interview
and performance that was webcast live on
Concert Window.
In jeans and a black t-shirt, with a tangle of
bracelets on his right wrist, he opened his case
and pulled out his guitar.
The C-1 is quite a sight. It has a hole
scraped through the top by his hard-driving
right hand, and an array of other cracks,gouges, and carved decorations, including
“CPS” in block letters above the fingerboard.
Held together—barely, it seems—with applica-
tions of superglue, tape, and wood screws, Stel-
ling’s Gibson has become the most memorably
battered guitar since Willie Nelson’s Trigger.
“My story as a songwriter and as a per-
former and the guitar’s story are synonymous,”
Stelling says, warming up with speedy classical-
style arpeggios up the neck.
In conversation, he comes across much like
his music—soft-spoken, serious, and deeply
thoughtful, with a sometimes startling intensity.
By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
W
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22 January 2016
EXPLORING FINGERSTYLE
Stelling grew up in Florida, drawn early on tothe stripped-down sounds of folk. He remem-
bers listening to collections of ’60s songs as a
teenager and was particularly taken with Dave
Van Ronk’s Folksinger and the way the gruff-
voiced guitarist roamed over the landscape of
American roots music. “One second he sounds
like Winnie the Pooh,” Stelling says with a
smile, “and in another he sounds like a fire
truck.”
Stelling discovered he had an aptitude for
fingerstyle guitar, and eventually a fellow
player recommended he check out the Takoma
and Windham Hill guitar scenes. That led to an
immersion into the music of such pioneering
acoustic-guitar instrumentalists as John Fahey,Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, and Alex de Grassi. A
pivotal point came in 2006, when Stelling
attended de Grassi’s guitar camp in Northern
California. De Grassi asked Stelling if he ever
sang or wrote songs. “I wanted to be an instru-
mental guitar player, but there’s been so much
done with it and they’re all so good,” Stelling
says. “I got the vibe that he saw a path for me.”
Though Stelling started off playing steel-
string, he has found that a nylon-string guitar
has a lot of advantages for his style. “Nylon
strings are very comfortable, and I think you
get a lot more dynamics out of them. You can
WHAT CHRISTOPHER PAULSTELLINGPLAYS
Christopher Paul Stelling plays
a 1964 Gibson C-1. In his early
20s, he worked for a luthier in
Boulder, Colorado. It was an
experience that encouraged
Stelling to make a number of
unorthodox repairs to his guitar
while on tour, such as using tiny
screws to secure a loose brace
and sealing raw areas of the
top with a coat of superglue.
Stelling amplifies the C-1
with an L.R. Baggs iBeam Active
Pickup for classical guitar and a
Baggs Para Acoustic DI box. At
the time of the interview, he’d just
started using a Shure wireless
guitar pedal, which doubles as a
tuner and allows him to roam into
the audience during a show.
The guitarist uses Savarez
Red Card strings and a Shubb
capo. Following advice from
Alex de Grassi, Stelling has
acrylic nails on three fingers and
his thumb; he has them applied
once a month at a nail salon.
At larger shows, Stelling uses
a boot board he made with a
piece of plywood, lifted up on
one side by a wooden dowel,
and a contact mic in the corner.
The signal goes into an EQ
pedal that cuts all but the bass
frequencies to get a kick-drum
thump in the house PA.
CHRISTOPHER PAUL STELLING
really pop them,” he says, giving the high
E string a quick free stroke with his acrylic fin-gernail, “and there’s a natural compression that
happens. Especially for going into different
tunings, they are much more durable. I always
found with steel strings, it’s not really the
playing that breaks the strings; it’s the changing
of the tunings.”
Stelling has become more restrained in his
use of tunings over the years. “They’re a slip-
pery slope, because you can get kind of lost in
them, and you can’t really find your way out,”
he says, tuning to open E for the song “Warm
Enemy.” “But using them in conjunction with
standard tuning is fine.” In addition to “Warm
J O S H W O O L
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24 January 2016
CHRISTOPHER PAUL STELLING
Enemy,” two other songs on Labor Against
Waste are in alternate tunings: “Castle” is also
in open E (E B E G B E), and “Dear Beast” is in
open –E minor (E B E G B E).
Open tunings were crucial for Stelling in
developing his picking hand. With help from deGrassi, Stelling learned to play polyrhythms
while mainta ining a steady alternating bass.
“I feel like open tunings taught me how to fin-
gerpick, because I could stop worrying about
my left hand and just focus,” he says. “There
was a long time when I would just tune to an
open chord, capo it up, and sit on the couch
and maybe watch a movie or stare out the
window and let the fingers roll and find their
place.” While Stelling’s guitar style has clear roots
in folk-blues fingerpicking, he also draws from
the vocabulary of Spanish guitar, with touches
of flamenco-style rasgueado strumming,
classical tremolo, and the like. His use of these
demanding techniques suggests some kind of
formal study, but Stelling says he picked them
up mostly by woodshedding.
“If I had a method, it would be to help teach
people how to find their own method, becauseeverybody has their own unique rhythm,” he
says. “It has to do with the way your brain
neurons fire and the way your heart beats. I
just think making that time available to sit and
find it is key. It’s what worked for me.”
BUILDING SONGS
Seated in my home studio in front of a photo
gallery of maverick musicians—Tom Waits, Ani
DiFranco, Utah Phillips, Chris Whitley—Stelling
kicks off his online set with “Warm Enemy” and
describes writing it. Like many of his songs, this
one began as a guitar improvisation that hecaptured on a portable recorder. While driving,
he listened back to his improv and took note of
some ideas he liked, and later he recorded
another take. Again behind the wheel, he
started singing along with the second improv,
gradually finding a melody and some words.
The result is a song with a guitar part that
could stand on its own as an instrumental, with
a vocal overlaid—sometimes in unison with the
guitar melody, sometimes in counterpoint.
“I rely on my guitar playing as the vehicle,”
Stelling says. “Some people rely on their lyrics
as the vehicle, and some people rely on their
voice. For me, because I’m interested in thelyrics and I’m interested in the guitar, the actual
quality of the voice is less interesting. Some of
my favorite singers have some of the most
unorthodox or untrained voices—everybody
from Ethel Merman to Tom Waits. It’s all about
the delivery.”
When it comes to finding lyrics, Stelling
uses a journal and free writing to help generate
ideas. “Free writing is great,” he says. “The key
to writing is just always write more than you
need, because it’s way easier to edit it down
than it is to add after the fact.”
As Stell ing’s songwriting and guitar craftevolve, he finds himself looking to the past for
inspiration—following the trail of influence back
to artists like the early blues guitarist Geeshie
Wiley, whose eerie 1930 recording “Last Kind
Words Blues” he obsessed over for years. “I’m not
very interested in what’s going on now,” Stell-
ing says. “Maybe I will be in 20 years—I’ll be
looking at what’s happening in 2015. But with
every passing generation there’s so much
history that I feel like is required listening,
required reading.
“There’s a lot to take in. We’re blessed and
overwhelmed with that.” AG
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26 January 2016
RAMBLIN’
MAN
ByKenny
Berkowitz
‘Once’
creator
Glen
Hansard
returns
to his
busking
style
on his
second solo
effort
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28 January 2016
or Hansard, happiness has come in a
cluster. He’s also happy to be celebrat-
ing 25 years with the Frames, whose
new album includes a song that didn’t seem
right for Didn’t He Ramble, though it’s hard for
him to describe the difference between GlenHansard with the band and Glen Hansard
without the band. He’s at peace with his role in
The Commitments, thrilled to have reunited
with his mates for the film’s 20th-anniversary
celebrations, and pleased he’s still touring with
part of the horn section.
He misses “the Horse,” the battered Takamine
NP15 he’d played for years, and he’s angry that
when he plays it now, all he hears is the sound of
glue and varnish stabilizing the body. He’s
replaced it with four newer NP15s, including one
that’s almost as battered as the Horse was in its
prime, about five years ago. Hansard says he’snot getting much better as a guitarist, but he
doesn’t seem to mind; as rough as it can be some-
times, he has all the technique he needs to
deliver his songs in his best busking style.
“I never really wanted to be good at guitar
playing,” Hansard confesses. “I love being a gui-
tarist, of course I do, but I often felt that if I
ever got too caught up in what my fingers were
doing, then something in my soul would be
restricted. So I don’t want to know how to do
the fancy chords, because then I’m going to go
onstage and concentrate on the fancy chords,
and not on what is going on inside me.
“It would be great if I could do both, likeMark Knopfler, play amazingly and sing amaz-
ingly and mean it and own it. But, for me, the
instrument has one job, and that job is to
present the song. After that, if I happen to pull
a fancy riff, or do something good on the guitar,
then great. But the job of the guitar is to say the
song and nothing else.”
And what about the song he started this
morning?
“Well, if I’m diligent and I stay with it, it’ll
become a song that I’ll play at these upcoming
gigs,” Hansard says. “If I play it at these gigs, it’ll
become a song on my next record—well, maybe.There are songs you write when you’re just
about to release a record, that were too late to
make the last record and too early to make the
next one. They tend to go through the cracks,
but I’d like to think this song has something.
We’ll see. It’ll either start running around my
head and haunting me or I’ll just forget it. But if
the song is good enough, it’ll haunt you.
“At the end of the day, what should dictate
whether a song is worth singing or not is whether
you can mean it,” he adds. “Can you own this?
Can you sing this? Can you sing this with the
right intention? If you can, then it’s right!” AG
GLEN HANSARD
Feight, and an ending, then I’d be impressed,
because I would have written a song in under
an hour. But all I have now is a bit of a shape, a
sketch, and that’s frequently where the song is
at its best, before all the changes and move-
ments and rethinks and rewrites. Because it’s atits most free in that moment; its most unteth-
ered, its most undefined.”
Didn’t He Ramble ’s first video, the Dylan-
esque “Winning Streak,” started as “You Are My
Friend,” which became “May Your Losing
Streak Find an End.” After a few more itera-
tions, Hansard transformed the piece into the
more affirming “May Your Winning Streak
Never End.” The soulful “Her Mercy,” which
features the Commitments’ horn section, was
one of the easiest songs he’s written, coming in
a flash after reading a biography of Leonard
Cohen, the song’s unnamed subject. The folk-trad “McCormack’s Wall” came on the morning
after a night of carousing at the birthplace of
tenor John McCormack and the grave of Irish
Republican rebel Wolfe Tone.
The album’s opening cut, “Grace Beneath
the Pines,” arrived while Hansard was waiting
at a baggage claim in New Zealand. “This line
was just going around my head: ‘There’ll be no
more running around for me, no more backing
down,’” he says. “And oftentimes, that’s when
music comes to you, when you’re at your least
conscious, when you’re doing something really
banal, like waiting for your bag to come out. In
my head, I was enjoying the fact that it soundedlike a prayer. It sounded like something old. It
felt natural and easy. But when I took out my
guitar, because my knowledge of the instru-
ment is so limited, I applied these really bog
standards, average chords for this ethereal
melody, and I ended up going, ‘God, this is a
dreadful song.’”
Then Hansard decided it wasn’t a dreadful
song, just a dreadful guitar part. He was
touring at the time, so he tried a punched-up
version of the song with horns, which he sings
into the telephone, punctuating the rhythm
wi th shou ts of, “Buh! Buh! Buh!” But toHansard, it felt like a pose, and no matter how
many different arrangements he tried, it
sounded dishonest until he reached the final
sessions, which has him singing over a droning
C chord, the barest piano accompaniment, and
a couple of muted horns at the end as he
chants, “I’ll get through this, I’ll get through
this, I’ll get through this, I’ll get through this.”
It’s the kind of performance only Hansard can
deliver, filled with hope and despair, strength
and vulnerability, and after all this time and all
those different attempts, he’s happy with the
final version.
WHATGLENHANSARDPLAYS
GUITARS
“The Horse [Hansard’s old Taka-
mine NP15] is out to pasture. I
haven’t used it for a while. It
stopped sounding good because
I beat it too hard. Like any tool,
like any person, it just got old.
That’s where the Horse is right
now: It just sounds spent. And I
feel really sad about it, but that’s
just the way it is. So I got
another Takamine [NP15] that’s
beginning to look almost exactly
the same as the Horse, and it
sounds great. To me, Takamine
is the best guitar, because when
I hit it hard, it doesn’t choke. I
don’t know quite what it does do,but it doesn’t choke. It’s a work-
horse, a working guitar, and I’ve
really gotten used to it.”
STRINGS
“Lately, I’ve been using the Elixir
Nanowebs, which last about five
times longer than the strings I
used to use. The way my hands
sweat, the old strings used to go
completely dead after half a gig.”
PICKS
Jim Dunlop orange tortex
plectrums, .60mm
EFFECTS
1994 Sovtek “Green Russian”
Big Muff, Line 6 DL4—Green
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DI
Radial JDI-passive
CAPO
Shubb C1 original brass finish
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30 January 2016
MADETOORDER
Custom-built guitars canprovide a personal touchat (almost) any budget
By AdamPerlmutter
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AcousticGuitar.com 31
n the summer of 2012, Brooklyn-
based guitarist Ben Wood, a Gypsy
jazz aficionado, made a pilgrimage to
the Django Reinhardt Jazz Festival in Samois-
sur-Seine, France. Wandering the tents popu-
lated by instrument makers displaying theirlatest creations, Wood happened upon the
finest guitar he’d ever encountered, both soni-
cally and aesthetically. It was a Manouche-style
guitar built by the luthier Vladimir Muzic.
Wood decided to commission one for himself. “I
wasn’t even in the market for a new guitar,” he
says. “But I ordered one on the spot.”
When Wood returned to the tent in 2013, he
discovered that Muzic not only had built him a
doppelgänger, but the luthier also reserved the
original guitar. After spending a weekend visit-
ing and revisiting the tent, playing both instru-
ments and agonizing over which guitar to takehome, Wood settled on the older one. Two
years later, the instrument remains Wood’s
workhorse, inspiring him in ways that a produc-
tion guitar never could. “I can play better
because of the guitar. Everything is so clear—I
can really push it, dynamically and otherwise,
and it allows for complex chords that haven’t
been available to me on lesser guitars,” says
Wood, who now lives in St. Louis, Missouri,
where he plays in the ensemble Franglais.
Wood is among a growing number of guitar-
ists who have found handmade instruments that
meet their specialized needs. In the late 1960s
and ’70s, when luthiers like Michael Gurian andWilliam Cumpiano set up shop, there were few
artisan alternatives to factory-made steel-string
acoustics. But today, thanks to informational
resources widely available on the Internet, thou-
sands of independent luthiers around the world
make superfine guitars in every style imaginable.
They can provide everything from customized
combinations of tonewoods to bass-bout bevels to
decorative inlays.
EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITIES
Most guitarists are happy with stock instru-
ments, but many choose to seek custom-madeguitars. Paul Heumiller, who owns the boutique
shop Dream Guitars in Weaverville, North Caro-
lina, says the latter typically fit into two camps.
“Some experienced players know exactly
what they need and have not been able to find
it in an existing instrument,” Heumiller says.
“This could be [a set of] physical dimensions to
custom-fit a player’s hands or body, a custom
voicing to suit your particular music, or a com-
bination of the two. Other players just want
something unique—it’s great fun for them to be
able to choose their own woods and design ele-
ments for a highly personalized guitar.”
Whatever your reasons for wanting a cus-
tom-made guitar, there’s no shortage of enticing
photographs and demonstrations of fresh offer-
ings on luthiers’ websites, in online shops, or on
discussion boards. But to really get a sense of
what instrument type, size, tonewood combina-tion, or individual luthier are right for you, it’s
best to audition guitars in person. An excellent
way to do that is to visit a shop like North Caro-
lina’s Dream Guitars or Mighty Fine Guitars, in
Lafayette, California, both always stocked with
nice representations of artisan-made instruments
and expert staffers. “Someone who has extensive
experience with a wide variety of luthiers, who
has heard all the wood combinations and com-
pared many guitars to one another can definitely
help guide you,” Heumiller says.
Another great way to learn about custom
options and luthiers is to visit a guitar showsuch as the Woodstock Invitational Luthiers
Showcase, held each October in Upstate New
York, or the Memphis Acoustic Guitar Festival,
launched last June. At either show you’ll find
hundreds of independent guitar makers exhibit-
ing flattops, archtops, and everything in
between. You can get a good sense of a luthier’s
work and even start a conversation about a
custom order, with the added benefit of the
guitar maker getting the opportunity to assess
your playing style to determine what specifica-
tions would be best for you.
Harvey Leach, a Northern California luthier
known for his detailed inlay work and forinventing the Voyage Air travel guitar, says
getting to know his customers is hugely helpful.
“Whenever possible I like to see and hear a cus-
tomer play one of my guitars,” Leach says.
“Because then there is a basis for [knowing]
exactly what things like ‘loud’ and ‘balanced’
and ‘rich’ really mean [to individual guitarists].
I find a lot of times customers will say some-
thing like, ‘I have a mahogany-and-spruce
guitar and I want something fuller and richer.’ I
get that, but it can be hard to find out what
kind of spruce they have or how the guitar was
braced or what kind of finish it has. If it’s myguitar I know exactly what I did to get where
their observations are coming from.”
HANDMADE OPTIONS AT ALL PRICES
Many factors go into pricing custom-built
guitars, including the luthier’s level of experi-
ence, overhead, demand for the instruments,
and costs of the materials (which can be pricey
in the case of precious tonewoods like Brazilian
rosewood). “Custom guitars from builders with
adequate experience start at about $3,000, with
some of the top makers selling guitars for
$20,000 to $50,000,” Heumiller says.
I
Inside job: Montreal’s Indian Hill
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32 January 2016
At the higher end of the price spectrum are
luthiers like William “Grit” Laskin, who will
design a guitar complete with your personalnarrative inlaid across the fretboard in a photo-
realistic way. Then there’s John Monteleone,
who makes ultra-luxurious archtops.
On the other end are handmade guitars that
fall in about same price range as good produc-
tion-model instruments. Todd Cambio, the
Madison, Wisconsin-based luthier behind Fraulini
Guitars, makes modern reproductions of early
20th-century guitars, with period-correct materi-
als like hide-glue and varnish finishes, starting at
$3,300. In Montreal, Mike Kennedy of Indian Hill
Guitars builds elegant steel-string, nylon-string,
and tenor guitars starting at $5,000.
CUSTOM MAKERS
Stevie Coyle, owner
of Mighty Fine Guitars,
which specializes
in handmade instruments
“I build about five or six guitars per year,”
says Kennedy, a protégé of the Canadian luthier
Sergei de Jonge. “I customize each instrumentto suit an individual player by adjusting the top
thickness and deflection, and tuning based on
the desired string gauge and the tension those
strings are going to impart. The real tricky part
comes with wood selection and voicing the top.
I’m not a huge believer in ‘this wood sounds
like that,’ but there are certainly some broad
generalizations that seem to be valid, particu-
larly with the top wood.”
At a time when many high-quality, factory-
made guitars are available at modest prices,
numbers like $5,000, let alone $50,000, some
customers are wary of. But it’s not exactly fair
to compare an instrument made on an assembly
line to one crafted by hand, from start to finish,
by a single artisan. And compared to orchestralconcert-level stringed instruments, luthier-
made guitars are relatively affordable. “Even
the most expensive guitars are very cheap com-
pared to custom-built violins, violas, and cellos,
which commonly go for $100,000 to $300,000,”
Heumiller says.
FROM TRADITIONAL TO RADICAL
The typical luthier works with a handful of
basic designs, offering many options and varia-
tions in terms of wood selection and detailing.
For instance, in his Oakland, California work-
shop, Ervin Somogyi makes six main types of
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AcousticGuitar.com 33
a Model E for a client who desires a 426 tuning,
his variation on the 432Hz tuning, which some
people find to be more restful. I used a different
scale length, moved the soundhole dramati-
cally, and built it with a 12-fret neck. I believe
he will be pleased,” she says.Leach has accommodated similarly uncon-
ventional requests, and in one case, it led to the
development of his patented line of travel
guitars. “Interestingly enough,” he says, “the
inspiration for Voyage Air came from a custom-
er’s request for a guitar with a removable neck.
I built him the guitar and that got me
thinking.”
Even if you’ve got a wacky design in mind,
it’s possible you’ll find a luthier who can realize
your instrument. This was certainly the case
with the strange four-ne cked instrument,
dubbed Pikasso, that the Canadian luthierLinda Manzer made for the jazz guitarist Pat
Metheny in 1984. (It was the first instrument to
feature the Manzer wedge, in which the body is
thinner on the bass side, in the interest of
player comfort.)
“I love a challenge. It’s an adventure for
both of us,” Manzer says. “After a client tells me
their overall concept, I ask a lot of questions
and try to get a total sense of the design in my
head. Then I put on my engineer’s hat and try
to figure out if it can even be made; it has to be
sturdy enough to withstand string tension but
playable and ergonomic. Once I determine it’s
possible, I start to design the guitar. That’s where it gets tricky and fun, balancing stability
with sensitivity.”
FROM CONVERSATION
TO COMPLETED INSTRU MENT
The process for commissioning a custom guitar
usually starts with a deposit and a dialogue
between luthier and musician—a conversation
in which the builder gathers the data needed to
build and fine-tune the instrument, discussing
different constructional aspects and tonewood
options and, in many cases, sending photo-
graphs of wood sets for a client to choose.The discussion can be terse or protracted.
“One of the interesting things about custom-
guitar orders is that the process of exchanging
all the information required to build a guitar can
sometimes be more time-consuming than actu-
ally building the guitar!” Leach says. “I had one
customer with whom I exchanged over 60
e-mails and several phone calls—probably over
two weeks’ worth. On the other hand, I once had
a client buy a very expensive guitar and our total
correspondence was only three emails.”
The highly anticipated wait for the arrival of
a custom guitar can be as little as several months
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rather than uses shell inlays to create elaborate
motifs and pictorial representations, makes
each instrument unique.
Some luthiers are open to realizing clients’
visions—subtle or radical—even if they depart
from the makers’ ordinary templates. Recently,
Kathy Wingert, a luthier based in Southern
California, was working on an instrument
tweaked to match her customer’s nonstandard
intonational preferences. “On my bench now is
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34 January 2016
or as long as a few years. Some luthiers keep
clients apprised of their instruments’ progress
through emails and photos of build progress,
while others prefer to work without the distrac-
tions that these updates create. Players who’ve
done their homework, like Ben Wood or Al Pette- way, the Grammy-winning fingerstylist, tend to
fall in love with their luthier-built guitars.But
there are exceptions. Guitarists sometimes get
fixed ideas about what their completed guitar
will sound and feel like, and experience disap-
pointment when the finished creation doesn’t
conform exactly to their vision. “It’s important to
have some degree of flexible expectations when
ordering a luthier-made guitar,” says Erich
Solomon, an archtop maker in New Hampshire.
“After all, instrument making is an organic
process, and of course even two identical hand-
made instruments made from all the same woods won’t sound and perform exactly alike.”
Not all luthiers have failsafe systems when it
comes to documenting orders, so it’s not a bad
idea to make sure to get all of the specifications
for your custom guitar in writing. That way you
can avoid any unwanted surprises when the
instrument is completed. “I once ordered a
custom guitar and specified the wood for the,
top, back, and sides, as well as the basic body
size and shape. When the guitar was almost
finished, the builder called to tell me and
described the guitar. The body size and shape
were correct, but the wood for the back and
sides was wrong, as was the wood for the fin-gerboard,” says Petteway, adding that he ended
up bonding closely with the botched guitar.
Luckily, most builders will provide a refund
to a dissatisfied customer, so long as the guitar
can be sold to someone else. Leach, for
instance, once built a figured mahogany and
bear-claw Sitka spruce guitar for a customer
who ended up finding these woods too fancy
and asked for something simpler—a guitar
made of the plainest mahogany and streaky
Adirondack spruce, along with an inlay of his
name. The customer rejected this second guitar
as being too homely for the price he paid. “Long story short, I ended up taking the
guitar back and refunded his money minus the
cost of replacing the inlay work,” Leach says. “I
then resold both guitars to new customers and
they are both convinced they have the best
guitar I’ve ever built. I always say, no guitar is for
everybody but every guitar is for somebody.”
Then there are the magical custom guitars
that everybody seems to like. “At every gig, I
invariably get asked about my guitar,” says Ben
Wood. “And any musician who picks it up
usually says what a great-sounding guitar it
is—and that it plays like butter.” AG
CUSTOM MAKERS
THE CUSTOM-SHOP OPTION
Custom-made guitars aren’t just
in the domain of individual build-
ers. Within their factories, some
of the major guitar companies
have custom shops in which
small teams of luthiers make
built-to-order variations on their
standard designs.
Martin was the first major
manufacturer to start a custom
shop, formally opened in 1979
with the order of an employee
guitar—essentially a D-41
with a D-45 neck, gold Schaller
tuners, aging top toner, and
a Barcus Berry under-saddle
pickup. “It was Martin’s first offi-
cial custom guitar—a detail for
which I am most proud,” writesthe guitar’s owner, Martin’s Dick
Boak, in his autobiography, Dot
to Dot: The Creative, Comical,
and Covert Adventures of Dick
Boak . “Many more guitars
followed through the Martin
Custom Shop. Each was an
attempt to stretch the boundar-
ies of what a guitar could
or should be. The process of
conceptualizing instruments on
paper and commissioning the
experts to do the work set thestage for what would become
my real value and contribution
to Martin”—and, by extension,
the rest of the guitar industry.
Martin’s Custom Shop cur-
rently employs craftsmen and
craftswomen who build guitars
using the same processes as
Martin employees of the 1930s
and ’40s. The guitars are priced
from $1,999 list and incorporate
options and materials from every
standard line—and far beyond.
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AcousticGuitar.com 35
Bottom
Inspector Chris Eckhart
does the final setup on a
Martin Custom Shop 000.
Top
A neck being shaped
at the Martin Custom
Shop
Opposite
Martin’s first official
custom guitar,
built in 1979
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THE BASICS
After a few steps you will find yourself wanting
desperately to resume a normal pace or tempo.
And there’s the key: You, by nature of being
human, walk in perfect time, each step
perfectly matched to the next. You are walking
the downbeat to any rhythm you choose; if you
count in groups of four as you step, you are
now a walking example of four-four time. Payattention to what it feels like so you can call it
up in your mind and body when playing. Now
count in groups of three and note the differ-
ence in feel from four.
IT’S ALL MIXED UP
With the downbeat in place it’s time to add a
different rhythm over it with your rhythm
hand. You can either tap on the side of your leg
or use something portable like a set of keys for
this work. Either tap or shake the keys in your
hand twice for each step you take, making sure
each tap is equal to its partner. You are now
R hythm is inherent in every facet of day-to-
day life, though you may not be conscious
of it. Take a minute and pay attention to the
sounds and movement around you—the hum
of an air conditioner, the whir of a lawnmower.
Bring that same attention to your own body
and place a hand over your heart so you can
feel it beat. You are, in fact, a living andbreathing metronome, something important to
remember when finding and keeping the
downbeat becomes a struggle.
Before you decide to throw in the rhythmic
towel or stomp the metronome into bits, take a
moment to put down the guitar and pick up a
pair of sneakers. Finding your natural sense of
groove is as easy and accessible as going for a
stroll.
WALK THE LINE
It is impossible to walk consistently out of time.
Try it and see how long you can keep it up.
Walking in Rhythm3 ways to lock in solid time
BYOCTOBER
CRIFASI
tapping eighth-notes in sync with the down-
beat of your feet. Don’t overthink this. Just walk and see if you can keep the two going
simultaneously. Using your rhythm hand
provides the same physical motion of strum-
ming, which will provide a direct physical
recall of the experience when you’re actually
playing the guitar. Go ahead and start trying
out other rhythms like triplets or 16th notes.
If your hand falls out of time with your
steps, stop tapping and just walk until you feel
ready to try it again. If actual counting throws
you out of sync, forget about the numbers and
think of it as the strum pattern “down-up,
down-up, down-up, down-up.”
If mobility is an issue, the same work can bedone with just the hands tapping your legs. The
fretting hand keeps the down beat or quarter
note and the rhythm hand taps eighth notes,
and so on.
SAY IT TO PLAY IT
Talking rhythm is an excellent tool as well,
especially if paired with the physical activity of
walking or clapping. If counting out loud is a
challenge, turn the rhythm you need into
words, names, or phrases that share the same
feel. For example, the words “peanut butter”
provide the equivalent of “one-and two-and” ortwo beats of eighth notes. Say it twice and you
have a full measure in four-four time. Add the
words “I like” to it and you have “one, two,
three-and four-and.” You can also use strum or
finger-picking patterns (“down, down, down-
up, down-up”).
The nice thing about these techniques is
that you can use them anywhere and incorpo-
rate them into just about any activity. Get cre-
ative. The point is to get connected to the
rhythm you already have. By getting rhythm
physically into your entire body, it will eventu-
ally find its way onto your guitar. AG
PLAY38Weekly Workout
Learning from
a jazz giantays
44Acoustic Classic
A Texas bluesclassic—unplugged
54Acoustic Classic
Tom Waits’ode to the road
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AcousticGuitar.com 39
BEGINNERS’
TIPLearn to play a couple
of Monk’s easier,
blues-based tunes—
“Misterioso” and “Blue
Monk,” for example.
1
BEGINNERS’
TIPGet to know Monk’s
signature tune
“Round Midnight”
by listening to
as many different
recordings
as you can find.
2
sauce, you may use these tangy sounds as gen-
erously or as sparingly as you like.
Ano ther idiosyncratic aspec t of Monk’ s
music was his approach to motivic develop-
ment. He could develop any small musical idea
could be developed into a much bigger, bolder
statement. This is apparent in his improvisa-
tions and in many of his compositions. Since
motivic development is a great musical tool—
regardless of style or era—that’s where this
Monk-inspired Weekly Workout course begins.
Then write your own 12-bar blues—in any
key—using just one motif throughout.
WEEK TWO
Another signature sound in much of Monk’s
music is the whole-tone scale—a six-note scale
constructed symmetrically, using consecutive
whole steps (as shown in Ex. 2a, which starts
on the note B). Monk frequently peppered his
compositions and improvisations with whole-
tone flourishes as well as chord clusters built
from the scale. Play the scale here ascending
and descending a few times, doing your best to
get some momentum going in both directions.
Monk could—and often did—play through
WEEK ONE
Play Ex. 1, a 12-bar blues based on Monk’s
composition “Misterioso.” One interesting
quirk here (as in Monk’s original) is that the
melody played over the I chord (bars 1, 3, 4, 7,
8, and 11) contains the note G . This note
implies an Amaj7 chord, whereas dominant
chords are by far the most typical chords used
in blues. This unusual quality is one of the
things that makes “Misterioso” sound like no
other blues tune in the jazz canon. Notice how the simple motif—a sixth inter-
val, stair-stepping up and back—is used over
and over through the entire piece. Some other
composers may have been tempted to use more
variety when writing a tune such as this, but
Monk apparently found something compelling
about tenacious repetition. Think about this
when composing your own music. Instead of
forcing something new into every measure, see
how much music you can make out of one
simple idea. Your twofold assignment this
week: Practice Ex. 1 until you can play it
smoothly at the prescribed tempo (80 bpm).
fragments of this scale quite briskly. Ex. 2b–d
illustrates some of the Monk-esque chordal
sounds that can be created from the whole-
tone scale in this key.
Because of the symmetrical nature of the
whole-tone scale, chords built from it can be
harder to name than the chords you find in con-
ventional major-scale harmony. For instance, Ex.
2b might be considered a C7 with an augmented
5, or A(add9) with an augmented 5, or something
else altogether. Ex. 2c and 2d are equally mercu-
rial. Generally speaking, assume that the lowest
pitch is the root when naming these chords, but
don’t overthink such sonorities. A little bit of
mystery is fine in the whole-tone universe.
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40 January 2016
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WEEK 2
WEEKLY WORKOUT
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