Virtuoso of fingerstyle Richard Smith has a signature model available at Kirk Sands.
The luthier makes the nylon-string acoustic-electric guitars popularized by Chet Atkins and his legions of dedicated fans.
What sets the Richard Smith model apart from other Kirk Sands guitars is the traditional round sound hole. Most of Sands’ models do not have a sound hole.
As with other Kirk Sands guitars, “the Smith” is available with various options. According to Kirk Sands:
I collaborated with British guitar virtuoso Richard Smith on this model. Richard had been playing my guitars for many years, but was interested in an instrument that had a soundhole for acoustic gigs, yet had the great electronics and flexibility of my electric models.
The Richard Smith model was born. It has the Sand design cutaway for maximum access to the upper frets. The Rosewood body is slim and easy to hold. Models run between 3.5″ and 3.75″ deep. Perfect for standing with a strap, or sit down play.
Either Sitka or Englemann spruce is used on the soundboard. Indian rosewood back and sides are standard. Brazilian rosewood is available at an upcharge.
This instrument has all the features of a fine concert classical guitar. Ebony fingerboard, Rosewood binding, soundhole rosette, wood purfling all around, with Abalone trim optional. Any nut width, neck size and scale length are also available.
You may not play as well as Richard if you own one of these instruments, but it will put you one step closer to that goal!
Steel String Version Available
Sands now offers a Richard Smith steel string model! It has a belly bridge and different neck joint to accomidate the extra string tension.
Few musicians have absorbed as many sources and genre of music and then given it back to the world in as unique a style and talent as Tommy Emmanuel.
Emmanuel grew up in Australia playing in a family band, starting at age 6. A year later he heard Chet Atkins on the radio for the first time and his own personal yellow brick road was laid before his little feet. Today he is one of the most admired guitarists in the world.
By the time he was 20 he was was making his living as a studio musician and performing in popular bands, as proficient on the drums as the guitar. His solo career took off in the late 1980s, although he continued ensemble work as well. He now lives in Nashville, touring constantly with his trusty acoustic guitars, although his years playing in country and rock n roll groups continues to influence his amazing one-man-band arrangements.
He still gets together with brother Phil when he can. And their duets are a sight to behold and be heard. Here’s something from the days before Tommy went global.
Finally, this video gives a little insight into Emanuel’s personality as an artist and performer, before he wow’s the crowd with his version fo Amazing Grace, inspired by a Chet Atkins arrangement, but taken out beyond new horizons.
With 2 Grammy awards and 22 albums featuring his mastery of the acoustic guitar, Laurence Juber continues to expand his repertoire, resume, and renown.
From a formal musical education, Juber went on to ignite stadiums of fans with his blazing rock n roll solos, years before he demonstrated priceless vintage instruments at the Smithsonian Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Laurence Juber began his career straight out of music school, playing primarily electric guitars as a member of Paul McCartney and Wings. After Wings disbanded, he moved from London to New York and ultimately Southern California, where he became one of the entertainment industry’s most sought-after studio musicians.
The varied voices of his guitars can be heard on the soundtracks of countless television programs, feature films, and albums of the top recording artists. He has even scored musical comedies for the theater. But Laurence Juber’s true musical love is solo fingerstyle acoustic guitar, something he does as well or better than anyone else on the planet.
Only a Paper Moon by Harold Arlen, arranged by LJ
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Juber’s own compositions meld jazz, blues, rock and even classical styles and technique. They are often deeply personal, like Catch, which was named after the NYC club Catch a Rising Star, where he met the other love of his life, his wife Hope.
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LJ’s arrangements for solo guitar of some of the world’s best loved music are rich with texture, capturing the spirit of the ensemble pieces with just one instrument and his two hands. His two albums of Beatles tunes and another of later McCartney compositions are very popular with Beatles fans as well as lovers of world-class guitar playing. Here is My Guitar Gently Weeps, recorded unplugged.
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LJ’s most recent studio release, entitled Under the Indigo Sky, was recorded as a mood album, conceived and intended to be enjoyed late at night when the lights are low. It includes Juber’s sublime arrangement of Cry Me a River.
When I went looking for a video of this tune, I found three good examples, each recorded with a different guitar. Juber has played various makes and styles of guitars though the decades. Since 2001 he has performed with one of his C.F. Martin signature models, of which there have been several editions, an honor no other artist has yet to receive.
They were made in mahogany, Indian rosewood, Brazilian rosewood, Madagascar rosewood (seen in the videos above) and a maple edition that included a version of the D-Tar Wave-Length pickup system that Juber uses on stage, although he blends in an internal microphone as well. And in 2011 a very limited edition was made in Hawaiian koa, expressly constructed with as light a build as possible for optimum responsiveness, using animal hide glues throughout.
So here are three versions of Cry Me a River, preformed on a mahogany Juber model, followed by Brazilian rosewood, and the hide glue Koa edition. Each has an Adirondack spruce top. Although the mix between pickup, mic, and PA varies, the personality of the individual guitar and tonal coloring from each tonewood comes through very nicely.
In memory of the late Stan Jay, we feature one of his all-time favorite guitarists, the fingerstyle master, Pierre Bensusan.
May those in need of solace, find peace of mind and spirit in this evocative and moving music.
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Algeria was still a French colony when Pierre Bensusan was born there in 1957. At the age of 17 he signed a recording contract in France, which resulted in Près de Paris, which went on to win the Grand Prix du Disque at the Festival at Montreux. He has continued recording and performing ever since. And in 2013 he released a three-disc live album entitled Encore. And while earlier recordings and tours have included the use of various effects peddles to extend the sound of his exploratory music, he shows just how transporting his compositions can be when played on an acoustic guitar with no amplification or electronics what so ever. Here is The Alchemist.website
His mutual admiration shared with Michael Hedges resulted in the Hedges composition Bensusan, on the record Ariel Boundaries. After Hedges died in an automobile accident, Pierre Bensusan responded So Long Michael.
The pioneer of guitar playing with the most influence upon fingerstyle is Merle Travis.
In fact, long before the term fingerstyle became popular, the technique where the thumb plays an alternating pattern on the bass strings while melody and harmony are played in upper register was known as “Travis picking.”
Guitarists from Phil Ochs to Leo Kotte, Paul Simon and James Taylor to John Mayer and Bonnie Raitt, Mary Flowers to David Lindley all owe a great deal to the boy from Kentucky who took a picking style rooted in Black blues music and expanded it to include elements from ragtime, Western swing, jazz, offering a rich tapestry of tones deceptively subtle in its complexity.
Here he is circa 1951 playing one of his most well known compositions, on his equally famous Martin D-28, which he had altered to include a neck based on the electric guitar that he designed and had built for him by Paul Bigsby in 1948.
The direct lineage leading to Merle Travis includes fingerpickers like Blind Blake, as well as local musicians from his old Kentucky home. The direct lineage of Travis pickers that followed include luminaries such as Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed. But while such players and their own musical disciples use a similar syncopation, they tend to play a single bass note on the 1 and 3 beat, where Travis often played two bass strings at the same time. And where most fingerstyle players use two or three, and sometimes four fingers to play above the bass line, Travis used only his index finger to create such intricate arrangements.
This video is from 17 years later and gives a clearer view of his typical picking style.
Merle Travis was equally at home on electric guitars, favoring large Gibson hollow body models like the Super 400, before and after his solid body Bigsby period. And like George Barnes before him, he had a signature model built by Carlo Greco at Guild Guitars during the 1960s, known as the Merle Travis Soloist. And like the Barnes model, only a handful was ever made.
Here he is with his son Thom Bresh pretending he hadn’t seen or played Cannonball Rag before.
Bresh has carried on his father’s legacy, while establishing his own reputation as a world-class guitarists. He will get his own Guitarist of the Week in due time.
Finally, here is Merle Travis and Chet Atkins together. No video, but a couple of old hands doing what they do best, play guitar.
Sometimes it seems barely a year since Michael Hedges died, back in 1997, untimely failing to navigate the curve of a mountain road near his California home.
His music is just so alive, timeless, and perhaps even from another time if not another dimension.
Michael Hedges was an enormous influence and inspiration who opened vistas of possibility for guitarists everywhere. Also, he forever ended the argument that 14-fret dreadnoughts like his 1971 Martin D-28 were only for Country Western and Bluegrass.
They are also for boogieing…
And for trips to inner-space, as Ariel Boundaries is my all-time favorite piece of music to listen to while melting away my cares in a steaming hot bath.
Here he is playing Bach on his vintage harp guitar.
Michael Hedges also sang and did interesting covers of popular songs by artists he admired. And here for those who want more, is a full public performance, the very last one captured on video before he passed away too young and far too soon.
Michael Hedges, an original, often copied but never replaced.
Born 93 years ago today, George Barnes the best guitarist you (thought) you never heard
When George Barnes was 17 he was hired by NBC for their WLS Chicago affiliate and became the youngest conductor and arranger in the network’s history.
When I was 17 George Barnes died of a sudden heart attack. He was 56.
That same year I discovered a double-album at the local Public Library called The Guitar Album, featuring a list of names I had never heard of. It turned out to be from a 1971 concert of Jazz guitarists at Town Hall in New York City. Being a rock fan, there was very little of interest on it for me.
Then, I heard the duets of George Barnes and Bucky Pizzarelli. I was enthralled with the musicality of the tunes, the breathtaking licks, the slower passages of glistening, liquid tone. For some reason I assumed the suave, James Bond looking guy with the colorful name must have been doing all the exquisite lead playing. Only later did I realize it was the squat, cigar-chomping George Barnes who was tripping the light fandango in such a transcendent manner.
He had a lot of practice, as it turned out.
George Barnes – Whiz Kid
It is believed that Barnes was the first person to play an amplified guitar, wired up by his brother when George was 10 years old. He joined the Musicians Union at age 12 and at 16 he became the first person to record with an electric guitar, on a March 1, 1938 waxing of two Big Bill Broonzy performances.
According to John Fordham, senior Jazz critic for the Guardian, “In 1932, a musician called Gage Brewer began performing on one of the first electrically amplified Hawaiian guitars. The idea soon appealed to guitarists rendered almost inaudible in big swing bands, but six years passed before a jazz guitarist, George Barnes, first recorded on a Spanish instrument with magnetic pick-ups in 1938.”
A master of touch and tone, Barnes could play any style required as a hired gun. He spent his adolescence recording with the top Chicago bluesmen and playing on NBC’s popular show, NationalBarn Dance, where he pioneered the sound that was copied later by many Country and Western guitarists and earned his place in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
While he always enjoyed playing country music, his true forte is a mixture of whimsical Swing and elegant Jazz, which retain their bluesy roots but are a far cry from the Grand Ole Opry.
Drafted in 1942, his trained ear allowed him to become the first person among half a million candidates to get a perfect score on the Army’s speed code test. He spent the remainder of the war in the basement of the Pentagon, transcribing enemy code.
Barnes returned to Chicago in 1946, where ABC gave him a live 15 minute time slot, with complete artistic control over a new octet that gained him many fans, including Bing Crosby, who asked Barnes to join his band in 1947. But, according the guitarist’s daughter, Alexandra Barnes Leh, “Dad wanted to make solo recordings, not back up a crooner.”
The octet’s “Standard Transcriptions” was once a hard-to-find collectable record, but it can now be downloaded for less than $10 at Amazon.com.
Decca Records’ Milt Gabler heard Barnes on the radio and signed him to a comprehensive recording contract. In May 1951 he moved to New York City, the recording capital of the world at that time. There he began to make his solo recordings, as well as appearing on countless other records as a studio top gun.
Les Paul, Charlie Christian, Merle Travis, Herb Ellis and Chet Atkins have all cited Barnes as a major influence.
This is how it’s done, Son
Chet Atkins pays close attention
First Major Guitar Duo
Kress and Barnes
Black Tie Jazz
Barnes and Pizzarelli
The Prolific Perfectionist
George Barnes played on more recording dates for more people than any musician in the union’s files. He appeared on some 100 Blues records in the 1930s alone and the 1950s found him on another 100 albums of everyone from Frank Sinatra to Louis Armstrong to Homer & Jethro. He was even the first person to play an electric guitar on a Bob Dylan recording (the unreleased 1962 track, Mixed-Up Confusion) and he played bass on the album TheFreewheelin’ Bob Dylan. However, Barnes was never content strumming in the typical rhythm section that permeated popular music, so he continued to forge a career as a featured soloist, leading combos of various sizes. Still, he remains unknown to many and only recently has some of his best music made it into the digital world.
The Guitars
For the most part, Barnes played Gibson guitars throughout the 1940s and 1950s. That was all to change in 1960.
In the words of Alexandra Barnes Leh, “Al Dronge, the president of Guild Guitars, courted Dad at the suggestion of Guild player Carl Kress. Dad said he’d go with Guild if they’d build two guitars according to his designs: The Guitar in F (so he could write guitar parts as if he were writing for a horn section) and The George Barnes Acousti-Lectric (so he could play one guitar acoustically and electrically).”
So, Guild built him the small guitar with the extra-short scale that achieved notes five steps above a normal guitar. Barnes made two LPs with it for a series on the Mercury label that demonstrated their new “High-Fidelity” technology. Only a handful were made, now among the most collectable electric guitars.
Barnes often wrote 11 parts for the tracks, his daughter said, “but he only played the solos (trading off on different tracks with horn soloists Al Cohn, Hank D’Amico and Clark Terry) in the Mercury albums, Guitar Galaxies (1960) and Guitars Galore (1961). The other players — his live 10-piece “horn” section — were Bucky Pizzarelli, Carl Kress, Billy Bauer, Don Arnone, Barry Galbraith, Art Ryerson, Everett Barksdale, Al Casamenti and Allen Hanlon. And the 35mm recording technique Mercury tried at that time was called “Perfect Presence Sound.””
Guild also built him the full-size signature model. Based on their largest archtop model, but it had no F-holes, which Barnes believed were the major source of feedback issues. Instead, the acoustic ports are placed around the pickups. With a back and top hand carved by master luthier Carlo Greco, the Guild George Barnes Acousti-Lectric model was an exceptional example of guitar making. They remain highly sought after. But fewer than 20 were ever made. A pity.
The Technique
Barnes was left-handed, but played a right-handed guitar. He felt the work at the fretboard should have the advantage of the strongest hand. He also played with the heaviest strings he could get, and the thickest picks, which he said were essential for good tone. He always picked or strummed with a downward motion, which is pretty amazing when you hear his rhythm work and the amount of notes he was able to produce when playing fills and lead guitar.
It is said Barnes had originally wanted to be a horn player, and his approach to melody and arranging retained that sensibility. He was best known for single-note melody lines that related closely to the actual tune being played, and a style of trilling that he learned from watching violinists, where he would begin with relatively slow hammer-ons and then increase the speed and attack as the sympathetic harmonics started to bloom. But no matter how jazzy the music, he often found ways to incorporate string bends and bluesy licks that would start in one position and glide up to resolve at the next octave with a flourish of vibrato.
The Music
George Barnes was considered a cutting-edge progressive when he first appeared on the music scene. He was often the only white person at the Chicago Blues recording sessions he frequented as a teenager, and for some years even established music journalists assumed he was black. He experimented with the earliest multi-track recording techniques, and continued to try out new technologies.
In his later years, he made a point of performing arrangements of contemporary popular selections, but he remained dedicated to the music of pre-Bebop composers like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He felt that the Jazz community would pay lip service to their legacy, but never actually played their music. He became an elder statesman of Swing well into the era of Rock n Roll.
Collaborating and Creating to the Very End
His close friendship and good-natured rivalry with Les Paul continued throughout the Fifties and Sixties, and they recorded Les Paul Now! together in 1967-68, while living under one roof for 8 months. Les would play one lead track, while George played everything else. Barnes spent most of the Sixties recording and performing with various top-shelf partners, including guitarist Carl Kress, pianist Ralph Sutton, and violinist Joe Venuti.
In 1970 Bucky Pizzarelli brought his new 7-string guitar to Barnes’ studio to see how it sounded on tape. Their jamming led to a year of performances including the Town Hall concert of Jazz guitarists aimed at showing “young people” that the guitar had been around before the Beatles. This was the recording that introduced me to Barnes in the first place.
The Ruby Braff / George Barnes Quartet was simply a matter of fate. Barnes’ one major influence was Louis Armstrong. Horn man Ruby Braff could say the same and did. “All of us studied with Louis and none of us ever graduated.”
As Alexandra puts it, they “formed after George Wein of the Newport Jazz Festival asked them to play in an All-Star lineup, and Ruby and Dad were tired of that play-8-bars-and-you’re-off kind of gig. They formed the BB4 to open for Benny Goodman’s quintet at Carnegie Hall, and blew them out of the water.”
Afterwards, they made several recordings, including some with Tony Bennett, whom they also backed up on some live gigs before they hit the road. The volatile marriage of Braff’s in-the-moment improvisations and Barnes’ meticulous arrangements sparked a chemical reaction that gave birth to the darling of every club and Jazz festival they played in the U.S. and abroad. They divorced after three years due to irreconcilable differences.
Barnes and his wife Evelyn moved to California 1975, where he put together the George Barnes Quartet. After two decades playing with partners from whom he eventually split over finicky artistic differences, he finally took center stage all by himself. There, he generously featured his band members, but no one forgot who was the star of the show.
Featuring Benny Barth on drums, Duncan James on guitar, and veteran bassist Dean Reilly who felt Barnes’ love of classical string quartets greatly influenced the proceedings, they rehearsed for a year, with all four musicians playing specific parts of intricate arrangements written by Barnes, which had to be memorized – no music stands allowed on stage. They performed much like a chamber orchestra, but with room to stretch out during solos and the freedom to respond to what was going on in the ensemble at any given moment.
No one could have guessed it would all soon be over.
George Barnes – the Legacy
Countless musicians across many types of music have been influenced by the man with the big blonde guitar. Even if they had never heard his name, the amount of blues, rock n roll, folk, country, and jazz recordings he had a hand in would fill a large catalog. Many young guitarists playing today were inspired by guitarists who were inspired by other guitarists who were directly inspired by George Barnes.
Fortunately for us, there are some excellent George Barnes recordings now available. I could recommend many. But I will start at the end, as there were two superb live performances of the George Barnes Quartet captured on tape and eventually made available on CD.
One of them, George Barnes Plays So Good, provides an intimate hearing of a late set at a small club in San Francisco.
But if you only buy one George Barnes record, let it be Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, which contains the entire concert at the Willows Theater, Concord, California on July 27, 1977. It was his last public performance, and it is a doozy.
David Grisman originally put it out for release, after the engineer who recorded it gave him a listen. And now, just this year, they are offering a download of the entire concert in super Hi-Def audio.
Should you come to know the record well, I believe you will appreciate it as much as I do for the sheer joy which exudes from the performance captured therein and for the masterful way George Barnes wrings, tickles and caresses such melodious tones from his guitar.
Even if black tie Jazz isn’t your scene, the sheer excellence in the musicianship is sure to win you over. But, at times, you may think you are about to make an entrance on a 70s talk show, due to the genre of music. Somewhat ironic, since Bucky Pizzarelli was the guitarist in the orchestra on NBC’s Tonight Show.
And that is one man’s word on…
George Barnes – the first electric guitarist (in so many respects.)
A very warm thank you to Evelyn Barnes and Alexandra Barnes Leh for corrections and extra details!
Here is one of the two sides cut on March 1, 1938, featuring an electric guitar on a commercial recording for the first time in history, played by George Barnes.
A “late-night” record of fingerstyle artistry, Juber’s Under and Indigo Sky is …
Languid, lovely, evocative… a melt into a sumptuous sofa, and the sonic equivalent of isolated pools of low light playing off facets of cut crystal and opulent aperitif, close sensuous voices, soft laughter bittersweet with memory at the end of an evening. A warm, layered and very human scene painted entirely with one acoustic guitar drenched with resonant chords, clear and unhurried melody lines, and shadowy blue bass notes that rise or fall in pitch or pace like a melancholy pulse. An exquisite piece of music played on an exquisite guitar, exquisitely.
And that is just the first track on Juber’s Under an Indigo Sky, the latest CD from the two-time Grammy winner.
It was mixed by Al Schmitt, who has won 19 Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.
On the CD, the slightest string vibration, creak of the guitar’s hide glue joints, or wave of Juber’s “virtual whammy bar” technique used to coax out every drop of resonance is heard clearly and in three dimensions. The vinyl version must be breathtaking.
As impressive as the vibrant playing is, it is the more languid performances, such as Cry Me A River with its sustained chords and un-struck string glides that truly show off the mastery of the engineer and the exceptional qualities of the guitar. While both the mellow and the vigorous selections reveal the mastery and exceptional qualities of the guitarist.
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