Thursday, March 28, 2013

the greatest note in guitar history


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!

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