When I shipped off to college and the competitive reality of undergraduate violin studies, it was the guitar that kept me sane. I couldn't really put a rock band together surrounded by classical music geeks, but I returned home the next summer to discover my old friend George had created a basement recording studio.
"The studio was centered around two Sony ElCaset machines purchased for about $50 each from a Hi-Fi store my friend's father owned," he recalls. "I quickly discovered that even though I COULD record, I had nothing TO record, and so my own songwriting career was born as well!"
Songwriting had already become inseparable from guitar playing for me, too, but multi-track arrangements, a quest to find sounds that not even Hendrix could have made with analog synth filters, and gutsy attempts at vocals brought out our best:
https://soundcloud.com/#gregory-ts-walker/allison
When it comes to the Hendrix sound, the torch-bearer in the 1970s was an ex-Procol Harum, six-stringed poet named Robin Trower.
Like Hendrix and Johnny Winter, Trower is also a bluesman at heart with an immense tone that's pretty much capable of swallowing a listener whole. Unlike those two, his most renowned work involved James Deware, a man's man of a vocalist who, during his all-too-brief life, was capable of singing a single word and pulling your heart out through your ears: "Hannah."After 4:02, in the distance, see if you can hear - in response - the greatest note in guitar history!
