Welch even commented how great it sounded in there. Most of the folks came for the headliner. Many around us asked who the two were? But even the uninitiated were impressed with the singing and guitars and a few songs with banjo. Bright Eyes were good. But after three or four songs, it was an early exit for us old folks. I've seen them once-- David is a terrific guitarist. What I find interesting is that suddenly, this el-cheapo archtop model he uses is unavailable. If one turns up, it's already sold- and for a good price!
Not wild about David's sound I do like the approach of just mic'ing the guitars. I have a whole box of them and any one is just like the next. I wouldn't usually use one for live mic'ing a guitar, but it seems to serve the purpose well. I wonder if they get paid the same for a concert? I mean, she's the headliner, but do they split the pot???? That's a 40's large body. His little Olympic is a small bodied model I believe. I know someone who sells archtops on line, and he says these old cheap Epis have mostly disappeared- or tripled in price.
Another thing that Gil and Dave have popularized is that vintage tweed case they carry to their shows. If you've got one of these in your attic or basement, you're smart to sell it on eBay right now Gibson Acoustic. The skinny on David Rawlings' guitar There are certain passages of crosspicking I learned from him that fueled my ideas when Gillian and I were arranging our first songs together. How do you hold your pick and attack the strings?
I tend to grip the pick primarily with my second finger and thumb. The first finger is a support. I kind of hold it like a pen. I play with the back of the pick, not the tip—the fat edges. I anchor with my palm behind the bridge a little bit and my pinky is resting on the top of the guitar. I tried it and it gave me a really fat tone, so I immediately took to it. You have an affinity for dissonant intervals and passages.
What drew your ear to these sounds? Those notes sound pretty to me. When I was at Berklee learning about harmony and the language of music, I was happy to learn the names for it. I often think of those things visually, envisioning an arrangement as a panorama.
Do you use open or alternate tunings? To me, getting into an alternate tuning was playing mandolin. I liked the way the mandolin made the song move, so I went with that. But the solo at the end just sounds like me making the same choices I would make on the guitar. When I play organ, I usually find I play the same notes I would play on the guitar. How do you and Gillian determine which of you will cut the songs you write together?
Even in our earliest days, when people like Emmylou Harris and the Nashville Bluegrass Band were cutting our songs rather than us, we considered a song to be its own creature. We thought about it more like songwriters than performers. You do want to be the best vehicle for the song. You play Hammond B3. What other instruments do you play? I play drums, although not very well. I have a couple fills I do okay. My greatest honor as a drummer is that John Paul Jones had me play on a track he was producing for [songwriter] Sara Watkins.
I play a little lap steel, and a tiny bit of fiddle. I played saxophone when I was a kid and can still play a bit of that. I can play a little piano, relying on musicality rather than technique. Most guitarists think of vocals as their weak card, but you and Gillian seem to harmonize effortlessly while doing some complex, intertwined picking.
How did you arrive at that place? The earliest part of learning to sing harmony is singing along with records. When I was a kid in the car listening to music, I would always add a tenor or baritone part.
Gill played guitar and sang lead and I concentrated on a good harmony part. The key is to not do more than you can until you can. In this recent clip, performed immediately after accepting a Lifetime Achievement in Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, David Rawlings displays his penchant for picking and strumming the middle strings on his Epiphone Olympic.
How different is your approach to electric versus acoustic guitar? Overdrive and sustain change my playing more than anything else. I usually play flatwound strings on an electric.
I do hear myself sounding more like Neil Young when I play electric. Rig Rundowns. Riff Rundowns. Why I Built this. I just thought that was pretty. I lay on them, because I want to hear them.
Rawlings Yeah, that? I think she was in sawmill tuning, that modal banjo tuning. And then she started playing it on guitar with her B string tuned down to A. She was doing this [Example 10]. And I was just aware that I wanted to take that fifth-y thing and go further out with it. The third pulls it back in , a nd I thought [plays first two beats of Example 9]. I wanted it to be very simple and bell-like. So then I thought [Example 11] , which was relentless and annoying, but also very wide and it created atmosphere instantly.
Because when you get [Example 12], when you get from here to there [Example 13], that makes me very happy. I like that it lingers awhile, it gives you some time to mess around with some other stuff and maybe make a few mistakes and some wrong moves as long as you come back. Tthey always go from the 4 to the 2 to the 1. Rawlings They never let you know where you are. The other thing that I was aware of, sometime through this time period, and that I was crazy about, is Chet Baker.
I listened to that stuff incessantly. There are these really long passages in his solos, where he just works in this one palette. Jerry Garcia does it in a very different way. Jerry will almost never loudly play the one on the downbeat. He does it more with syncopated rhythmic stuff where he keeps things bubbling. The interesting thing to me about improvising is that you have to have a certain amount of power for it to work.
You want to take a good solo? Number one: be loud! Bill Murray, who was there, said something about the guitar playing.
And there was the moment where we wanted it to get crazy introspective, and it did. Here he tells the story of that fortuitous meeting:. He was a good friend and a good mechanic. But the guitar is completely covered with sawdust. It has to have been lying there for four or five years. Somebody had got it at a yard sale and sold it to Earl. I like the sound of boxes, and it sounded clear as a bell. I really liked it. I just had some thought about midrange and some thought about the way Gill played, and I thought it would be cool.
I love that thing. I go into Boston the next day and go to Allston Music and there amongst the amps is a silver Bandmaster Reverb head!
And he did. You found it? I take it back to Nashville. It changed everything. To have this guitar and to be playing with mics is when it started to have a sound that I understood and liked.
0コメント