
The Malian master blows Bill Frisell's mind. The technique, tone, and conceptual breadth of his debut album, Mande Guitar, will astonish you, too.
Boubacar "Badian" Diabaté's debut release, Mande Guitar, will shatter your preconceptions about what the instrument is truly capable of. Don't believe me? Then take it from Bill Frisell, the sonic groundbreaker who practically reinvented the jazz guitar playbook. In Frisell's words, "Boubacar 'Badian' Diabaté blows my mind. He's doing things I've never heard anyone do before."
Comprised of mostly solo guitar gems with occasional overdubs and a smattering of guitar duets (with Badian's brother Manfa Diabaté and producer/African music historian Banning Eyre), Mande Guitar is a musical kaleidoscope, imbued with unexpected moments of jaw-dropping virtuosity. While the album's instrumentation is stripped-down, the original plan was even more austere. Eyre had wanted Badian [that nickname translates as "tall father"] to record a strictly solo guitar album. Along the way, some compromises were made, including the addition of percussionist Baye Kouyaté, who plays tama (talking drum) and calabash on one track, "Fadento." "Some people like to just listen to one instrument, but others like to hear the ambience of an interaction between players, so I wanted to touch both things and strike a balance," says Badian. "Also, when you play solo, you have to cover everything—you have to keep the line, the harmony, and the rhythm, whereas when someone is accompanying you, you're freer to do a lot of things that you can't do if you're playing alone."
Badian Diabaté et Goussou Kouyaté
In Badian's circle of musicians, the cultural norm is that everyone is raised to be an adept multi-instrumentalist. We know that most guitarists can dabble on bass, but in Badian's clique, it's the real deal—there's no faking it. "I usually perform with two or three additional musicians, and we'd switch instruments from song to song. It's very normal to start with one instrument and then move on to another and to experience the music from these different directions. The musicians I play with can play multiple instruments: guitar, ngoni (a 4-string instrument), tama, etc. If I have a drummer, he can typically play the calabash. I've actually made recordings in Mali where I've played all of these instruments. In concert, I mostly play guitar, but I would also play some ngoni or some tama."
A Rich Musical Tradition
Guitar geeks might tune into Mande Guitar for its fretboard fireworks, but for Badian the album serves a greater purpose. "I wanted to show the world the value of this culture," he says. "There's rock 'n' roll, there's jazz. Everything's out there and people know those things, but they don't know that this rich culture exists."
Boubacar "Badian" Diabaté (left) recorded Mande Guitar with his brother, Manfa (right), at Afropop Worldwide's Studio 44 in Brooklyn, New York. In Diabaté's circle of musicians, everyone is a multi-instrumentalist and able to switch duties from song to song. "It's very normal to start with one instrument and then move onto another and to experience the music from these different directions," Diabaté says.
In Badian's case, his rich musical culture dates back several generations. "I was born in a griot family. In the world of griots, people grow up in an environment where music is a traditional profession—my mother was a singer. My father was a functionary, an official in the government of Mali. Although he was a griot, he did not play guitar. It's a world where music is 'the thing' and you're surrounded by all of these instruments." His first instrument, when he was very young, was the tama. From there he went to the ngoni, which a lot of Malian guitarists start on. "Ngoni is the principal instrument of griots in Mali, along with voice," says Badian, "The ngoni is also the closest [traditional] instrument to guitar in Africa, so the natural instinct of a guitarist in the tradition is to try to imitate the ngoni. The guitarist improvises with the sound of the ngoni in his ear." Baidan switched to guitar when he was about 10, after hearing the music of Mande guitar great Bouba Sacko.
"The ngoni is also the closest [traditional] instrument to guitar in Africa, so the natural instinct of a guitarist in the tradition is to try to imitate the ngoni."
The origins of Mande Guitar began in 1995, when Eyre went to Africa to study guitar with Djelimady Tounkara for six months. One day, Badian came over to the house and was introduced by Tounkara, who, with a slight mix of (as Eyre put it) "disapproval and awe," described Badian as a "young player who will surpass me one day." Eyre had a Hohner G3T that Badian really wanted, so Eyre proposed giving Badian the guitar in exchange for permission to film him. "I realized he was a unique talent," Eyre says. A deal was struck and Eyre filmed a two-hour session of Badian playing in both solo and duet (with ngoni) contexts, all taking place in a construction site repurposed as a studio.
Boubacar “Badian” Diabaté’s Guitars
Diabaté has a fondness for electrics without headstocks, and this Steinberger SS-2F, which replaced a Hohner G3T, is his current plugged-in mainstay.
- Steinberger SS-2F
- Traveler Guitar
- Seagull 12-string
Badian and Eyre remained friends, and Badian reached out to Eyre when he came to New York with his wife, singer Nene Soumano, in 2010. Numerous times over the years, Badian asked Eyre for help recording an album, and in 2021, when Eyre launched Lion Song Records, his request was fulfilled. Eyre pegged Badian to record Lion Song's debut offering, Mande Guitar.
Remaking Malian Music
Eight of the cuts on Mande Guitar are traditional Malian songs, and the challenge for Badian was in trying to inject his own diverse musical personality into them while keeping true to the tradition. "I went to the Institut National des Arts de Bamako, which is the best music school in Bamako [Mali's capital], and there I learned Western pop music and jazz, pentatonic music, because there's a lot of pentatonic styles in Mali that's branched from the blues," says Badian. You'll hear such blending in "Bayini," the jazzy chromatic phrases in "Miri" and "Korosa," and some repeating short fragments in "Sakonke" played at hyper-speed à la Carlos Santana. He and Eric Clapton are Badian's favorite Western guitar heroes.
Dressed for his role as griot—a traditional artist who preserves and shares oral history through music, poetry, or storytelling—Boubacar "Badian" Diabaté cradles his Seagull acoustic 12-string. While he also plays 6-string, Diabaté may be one of the finest 12-string acoustic players on the planet.
You'll also hear some unexpected cross-cultural influences on Mande Guitar. "My favorite track is 'Bayini,' which starts with a Mande feel, then jumps into a Spanish flamenco feel," Badian says. "That's to show that Mande music can be fused with any kind of music, because music is universal. But for this record, I wanted to stick mostly to the Mande folklore. You might hear some of that stuff here or there, and on other projects I would bring in a lot more of those influences. But here I went for traditional Mande guitar."
"I wanted to show the world the value of this culture."
Exemplary Technique
In keeping with the traditional right-hand technique of Malian guitar players, Badian plays using his thumb and index finger. This method can look unusual to uninitiated Westerners watching the guitarist use his index finger to pluck in both directions. But Badian plays with an exemplary version of this technique that is impressive and incendiary. "I'm going up and down like a pick," he explains. "The fingernail becomes like a flatpick, and just with the thumb and forefinger I can play four strings. The thumb plays the tonic of the key, which is very defining to the atmosphere of the piece. The thumb's main role is to keep that in the picture at all times. It's not exactly like playing a bass line. Rather, its main role is to emphasize the tonic. However, there are times when the thumb will also contribute to a melody."
TIDBIT: Producer Banning Eyre originally wanted Diabaté to record a solo guitar album, but the guitarist insisted on overdubs and a few duets to add additional colors.
There are a few unusual tunings on Mande Guitar, like F–A–D–G–C–E, but most of the album is in standard tuning, and the album was recorded live with no click track. The only overdubbing was on tracks where Badian accompanied himself.
"The fingernail becomes like a flatpick, and just with the thumb and forefinger I can play four strings. The thumb plays the tonic of the key."
Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
"Right now, I just have two guitars: a 12-string Seagull acoustic and a Steinberger electric," says Badian, whose penchant for headless guitars creates a conundrum of sorts. Double ball strings, as used on the Steinberger and his previous Hohner G3T (which got its neck broken off after being loaned to Badian's brother), are hard to find even in music capitals like New York City and Los Angeles. But where there's a will, there's a way. "Even now, there's no store in Mali where you can buy these kinds of strings. The first thing to do is try to get someone that's going to France to bring you some," explains Badian. "But sometimes I would just make my own double-ball strings. I would cut strings and attach a new ball to them. You take the little ring off another string and wind it very tight."
This Seagull 12-string and Steinberger SS-2F are Badian's only two guitars. Getting strings for the Steinberger is nearly impossible in Mali, so he has them shipped from friends and family in New York or France, or jerry-rigs his own double-ball-end strings.
Badian also sometimes relies on a care package from family for accessories. "I get strings from my brother in New York, and I just use whatever he sends. My preference is medium gauge strings, but I'll work with whatever comes in." His resolve to make any piece of gear work is the antithesis of how GAS-stricken gear nerds roll, and Badian is living proof that tone is, indeed, in the fingers. "When I play a gig, I'll rent an amp, and I'll work with whatever I get. As long as it works, I'll make it sound good."
YouTube It
With transcendent elegance and virtuosity, Boubacar Diabaté, on 12-string, and kora player Ballaké Sissoko team up for a performance at a Parisian festival. Prepare to be blown away by their improvisational genius. It's that simple.
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After eight years, New Orleans artist Benjamin Booker returns with a new album and a redefined relationship to the guitar.
It’s been eight years since the New Orleans-based artist released his last album. He’s back with a record that redefines his relationship to the guitar.
It is January 24, and Benjamin Booker’s third full-length album, LOWER, has just been released to the world. It’s been nearly eight years since his last record, 2017’s Witness, but Booker is unmoved by the new milestone. “I don’t really feel anything, I guess,” he says. “Maybe I’m in shock.”
That evening, Booker played a release celebration show at Euclid Records in New Orleans, which has become the musician’s adopted hometown. He spent a few years in Los Angeles, and then in Australia, where his partner gave birth to their child, but when he moved back to the U.S. in December 2023, it was the only place he could imagine coming back to. “I just like that the city has kind of a magic quality to it,” he says. “It just feels kind of like you’re walking around a movie set all the time.”
Witness was a ruminative, lonesome record, an interpretation of the writer James Baldwin’s concept of bearing witness to atrocity and injustice in the United States. Mavis Staples sang on the title track, which addressed the centuries-old crisis of police killings and brutality carried out against black Americans. It was a significant change from the twitchy, bluesy garage-rock of Booker’s self-titled 2014 debut, the sort of tunes that put him on the map as a scrappy guitar-slinging hero. But Booker never planned on heroism; he had no interest in becoming some neatly packaged industry archetype. After Witness, and years of touring, including supporting the likes of Jack White and Neil Young, Booker withdrew.
He was searching for a sound. “I was just trying to find the things that I liked,” he explains. L.A. was a good place for his hunt. He went cratedigging at Stellaremnant for electronic records, and at Artform Studio in Highland Park for obscure jazz releases. It took a long time to put together the music he was chasing. “For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do,” says Booker. “I just wasn’t interested in it anymore. I hadn’t heard really that much guitar stuff that had really spoke to me.”
“For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just wasn’t interested in it anymore.”
LOWER is Booker’s most sensitive and challenging record yet.
Among the few exceptions were Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and Dave Harrington from Darkside, players who moved Booker to focus more on creating ambient and abstract textures instead of riffs. Other sources of inspiration came from Nicolas Jaar, Loveliescrushing, Kevin Shields, Sophie, and JPEGMAFIA. When it came to make LOWER (which released on Booker’s own Fire Next Time Records, another nod to Baldwin), he took the influences that he picked up and put them onto guitar—more atmosphere, less “noodly stuff”: “This album, I was working a lot more with images, trying to get images that could get to the emotion that I was trying to get to.”
The result is a scraping, aching, exploratory album that demonstrates that Booker’s creative analysis of the world is sharper and more potent than ever. Opener “Black Opps” is a throbbing, metallic, garage-electronic thrill, running back decades of state surveillance, murder, and sabotage against Black community organizing. “LWA in the Trailer Park” is brighter by a slim margin, but just as simultaneously discordant and groovy. The looped fingerpicking of “Pompeii Statues” sets a grounding for Booker to narrate scenes of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Even the acoustic strums of “Heavy on the Mind” are warped and stretched into something deeply affecting; ditto the sunny, garbage-smeared ’60s pop of “Show and Tell.” But LOWER is also breathtakingly beautiful and moving. “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” and “Hope for the Night Time” intermingle moments of joy and lightness amid desperation and loneliness.
Booker worked with L.A.-based hip-hop and electronic producer Kenny Segal, trading stems endlessly over email to build the record. While he was surrounded by vintage guitars and amps to create Witness, Booker didn’t use a single amplifier in the process of making LOWER: He recorded all his guitars direct through an interface to his DAW. “It’s just me plugging my old Epiphone Olympic into the computer and then using software plugins to manipulate the sounds,” says Booker. For him, working digitally and “in the box” is the new frontier of guitar music, no different than how Hendrix and Clapton used never-heard-before fuzz pedals to blow people’s minds. “When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time,” he adds.
“When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time.”
Benjamin Booker's Gear
Booker didn’t use any amps on LOWER. He recorded his old Epiphone Olympic direct into his DAW.
Photo by Trenity Thomas
Guitars
- 1960s Epiphone Olympic
Effects
- Soundtoys Little AlterBoy
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe
- Soundtoys Little Plate
“I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary. I wanted a little bit of ugliness.”
Inspired by a black metal documentary in which an artist asks for the cheapest mic possible, Booker used only basic plugins by Soundtoys, like the Decapitator, Little AlterBoy, and Little Plate, but the Devil-Loc Deluxe was the key for he and Segal to unlock the distorted, “three-dimensional world” they were seeking. “Because I was listening to more electronic music where there’s more of a focus on mixing than I would say in rock music, I think that I felt more inspired to go in and be surgical about it,” says Booker.
Part of that precision meant capturing the chaos of our world in all its terror and splendor. When he was younger, Booker spent a lot of time going to the Library of Congress and listening to archival interviews. On LOWER, he carries out his own archival sound research. “I like the idea of being able to put things like that in the music, for people to just hear it,” says Booker. “Even if they don’t know what it is, they’re catching a glimpse of life that happened at that time.”
On “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” there are birds chirping that he captured while living in Australia. Closer “Hope for the Night Time” features sounds from Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market. “Same Kind of Lonely” features audio of Booker’s baby laughing just after a clip from a school shooting. “I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary,” says Booker. “I wanted a little bit of ugliness. We all have our regular lives that are just kind of interrupted constantly by insane acts of violence.”
That dichotomy is often difficult to compute, but Booker has made peace with it. “You hear people talking about, ‘I don’t want to have kids because the world is falling apart,’” he says. “But I mean, I feel like it’s always falling apart and building itself back up. Nothing lasts forever, even bad times.”
YouTube It
To go along with the record, Booker produced a string of music videos influenced by the work of director Paul Schrader and his fascination with “a troubled character on the edge, reaching for transcendence.” That vision is present in the video for lead single “LWA in the Trailer Park.”
Note the cavity cover on the back, which houses the components of Andy Summers’ mid-boost system.
We’ve covered Andy’s iconic guitar and what makes it so special, so now we’ll get to building our own.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage for the second installment of the Andy Summers Telecaster wiring. We covered many of the details of this unique guitar last time, so now we’ll jump right in to assembling your own.
In general, you can use any Telecaster and convert it to Andy Summers’ specs. If you want to stay as close as possible to the original guitar, the way to go is an alder body—just like Andy’s, which is 2-piece—with a 3-tone sunburst finish and white double binding.
The neck should be quarter-sawn, 1-piece maple with a C profile, 21 vintage-style frets, and a 7.25" fretboard radius. Of course, you can choose your own specs here, too. The original guitar has a brass nut rather than bone or plastic, and it should be no problem to find a brass nut blank for a Telecaster. You will need different tools to work on it compared to bone, plastic, or graphite, so keep this in mind. If you do not have the right tools or don’t feel comfortable making nuts, you should leave this task to your local guitar tech. Summers’ guitar has Schaller M6 tuning machines, which are still available from the German Schaller company, and two chrome butterfly string trees. You may not really need two of them—usually one for the B and the high E string will do the trick, especially with a well-made nut.
The original has a heavy brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles, which will increase overall weight significantly. You can still buy this type of brass bridge from several companies, but there are much lighter bridges on the market.
The stereo output jack is installed in a rectangular chrome plate, like on a Les Paul, which I think is superior to the typical Telecaster jack cup. Interestingly, the plate on Summers’ guitar is only held by two of four screws, but do yourself a favor and use all four to make this spot as strong as possible. You should attach the plate really tight, especially when you use an output jack with a tight grip for the plug.
“Electronically, there is nothing too specialized that you will need for the controls.”
The rest of the hardware is chrome and standard: two regular strap buttons, a standard Telecaster control plate, ’60s Telecaster flat-top knobs, a black ’60s-style top-hat switch knob on the 3-way pickup selector switch, and two flat-lever mini-toggle switches. You should have no problem getting all of these parts from any guitar shop. The pickguard is a 3-ply mint green pickguard with a standard humbucker routing for the neck pickup.
Electronically, there is nothing too specialized that you will need for the controls: a standard 3-way pickup selector switch, two 250k audio pots for master volume and master tone, a gain control pot for the booster, and two additional mini DPDT on-on toggle switches for switching the booster on and off and for the phase control of the bridge pickup. The resistance of the gain control pot depends on the booster you want to use: e.g. for the Fender Clapton mid-boost kit, a 500k type will work great.
For the bridge pickup, there is a standard early-’60s-style Telecaster single-coil pickup, and every pickup company will have something like this in their catalog. Because the bridge pickup is installed to an out-of-phase mini-toggle switch, your pickup will need three conductors, with the metal base plate separated from the pickup’s common ground, and a third wire that connects the bridge plate individually to ground. If you have a regular two-conductor model, you need to break this connection, soldering a third wire directly to the base plate.
Interestingly, the bridge pickup on Summers’ Tele is installed directly into the wood of the pickup’s cavity. I see no reason why you shouldn’t install it the regular way on your guitar.
Here’s a close-up of the bridge on Summers’ historic Tele.
Photo courtesy of Ten-Guitars (https://ten-guitars.de)
In the neck position, there is a ’59 PAF humbucker with a conventional two-conductor wiring installed directly into the pickguard in the standard way, with the open pole pieces facing towards the neck. The choice of late-’50s PAF copies has never been better than it is today. You can buy excellent versions from a lot of companies, just make sure to choose the correct string spacing, which is usually called “F-spacing” or something similar, and is usually 2.070" (52.6 mm). (Gibson spacing, or G-spacing, is 1.930" or 49 mm.)
You’ll need humbucker routing on your body to make it fit. If you don’t have a body with humbucker routing and don’t want to get your Tele body re-routed, you can consider one of the numerous stacked humbuckers that will fit into a standard Telecaster neck pickup cavity. My experience is that there is a noticeable difference in tone compared to a full-sized humbucker, and it will be a compromise.
Next is the active booster. Finding a good booster module and wiring it up is much easier than fitting it into the tight space of a Telecaster body. There are a wide range of available booster options. There are complete DIY sets available that include the PCB and all of the necessary parts to build your own, and there are also drop-in PCBs that are already populated, like the well-known Fender mid-boost circuit kit. You can also find mini-sized booster modules using high-quality SMD parts, which only require a fraction of space compared to the regular PCBs.
“Finding a good booster module and wiring it up is much easier than fitting it into the tight space of a Telecaster body.”
The available options include treble boosters, mid-boost circuits, full-range boosters, etc. Choose what you like best. The problem will be that you need to stuff it into a Telecaster body. As you know, there is not much space inside a Telecaster, and you need to add the booster itself, the 9V battery, an additional pot for controlling the booster, and two additional mini-toggle switches—one for turning the booster on and off, and the other to get the bridge pickup out of phase. This is a lot of stuff! On Summers’ guitar, this problem was solved by adding a large cavity on the back and closing it with a plastic back plate, as on a Gibson Les Paul.
A look inside the cavity for the mid-boost unit.
Photo courtesy of TeleManDon from Vancouver Island, BC (https://tdpri.com)
You can clearly see the two big routings for the booster’s PCB and the 9V battery, plus the additional pot to control the amount of boost as well as the mini-toggle switch to turn the booster on and off. If you are not afraid of routing two big chambers into your Telecaster’s body, this is a suitable way to go.
On a Telecaster, there are not many alternatives I can think of to fit all these parts. One possible way of saving space would be to use a stacked pot with two 250k pots for volume and tone, so you have the second hole in the control plate available for the gain control pot of the booster. Between the two pots, it should be no problem to place the two mini-toggle switches. Or you use a push-pull pot for the gain control to save one of the mini-toggle switches. The guitar will look much cleaner, at least from the front side. But you still have to put the booster PCB and the battery somewhere. A customer of mine did this by completely routing the area under the pickguard. But even with only a regular single-coil neck pickup, it was a really tight fit, so with a regular-sized humbucker, it will be close to impossible. So, you or your luthier will have to be creative, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a company offers Andy Summers Telecaster bodies with all chambers already routed.
Here we go for the wiring. Wherever possible, I tried to keep the diagram as clean as possible. The wiring of the booster is only an example and depends on the booster you want to use, but the basic wiring is always the same.
Here’s a helpful schmatic of the Andy Summers‘ Telecaster wiring.
Illustration courtesy of SINGLECOIL (www.singlecoil.com)
That’s it. Next month, we will take a deep look into guitar cables and wires, what really makes a difference, and how you can use this to reshape your guitar tone. So stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
PG’sJohn Bohlinger caught up with Moak at his Nashville studio known affectionately as the Smoakstack.
Grammy-nominated session guitarist, producer, mixer, and engineer Paul Moak stays busy on multiple fronts. Over the years he’s written, played, produced and more for TV sessions (Pretty Little Liars, One Tree Hill) and artists including Third Day, Leeland, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. But most recently he’s worked with Heart and Ann Wilson and Tripsitter.
Time Traveler
Moak is most loyal to a 1963 Stratocaster body that’s mated to a 1980s-vintage, 3-bolt, maple, bullet-truss-rod, 1969-style Fender Japan neck. The bridge has been swapped as many as four times and the bridge and neck pickups are Lindy Fralins.
Cool Cat
If there’s one guitar Moak would grab in a fire, it’s the Jaguar he’s had since age 20 and used in his band DC Talk. When Moak bought the guitar at Music Go Round in Minneapolis, the olympic white finish was almost perfect. He remains impressed with the breadth of tones. He likes the low-output single-coils for use with more expansive reverb effects.
Mystery Message Les Paul
Moak’s 1970 L.P. Custom has a number of 1969 parts. It was traded to Moak by the band Feel. Interestingly, the back is carved with the words “cheat” and “liar,” telling a tale we can only speculate about.
Dad Rocker
Almost equally near and dear to Moak’s heart is this 1968 Vox Folk Twelve that belonged to his father. It has the original magnetic pickup at the neck as well as a piezo installed by Moak.
Flexi Plexis
This rare and precious trio of plexis can be routed in mix-and-match fashion to any of Moak’s extensive selection of cabs—all of which are miked and ready to roll.
Vintage Voices
Moak’s amps skew British, but ’60s Fender tone is here in plentitude courtesy of a blonde-and-oxblood Bassman and 1965 Bandmaster as well as a 2x6L6 Slivertone 1484 Twin Twelve.
Guess What?
The H-Zog, which is the second version of Canadian amp builder Garnet’s Herzog tube-driven overdrive, can work as an overdrive or an amp head, but it’s probably most famous for Randy Bachman’s fuzzy-as-heck “American Woman” tone.
Stomp Staff
While the Eventide H90 that helps anchor Moak’s pedalboard can handle the job of many pedals, he may have more amp heads on hand than stompboxes. But essentials include a JHS Pulp ‘N’ Peel compressor/preamp, a DigiTech Whammy II, DigiTech FreqOut natural feedback generator, a Pete Cornish SS-3 drive, Klon Centaur, and Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man.
PG Contributor Tom Butwin dives into three standout baritone guitars, each with its own approach to low-end power and playability. From PRS, Reverend, and Airline, these guitars offer different scale lengths, pickup configurations, and unique tonal options. Which one fits your style best? Watch and find out!