
Richard Thompson received the OBE, Order of the British Empire, in 2011 for his “singular and substantial contribution to music.”
On his latest full-length, the English singer-songwriter reinforces his role as one of the 20th century’s greatest. Here, he muses on his musical roots, innovations, and rig essentials.
Any list of great British songwriters, from Lennon/McCartney, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend to Elvis Costello, must contain Richard Thompson. But any discussion of England’s most impressive, identifiable guitar players (be they Clapton, Beck, Page, or Mick Taylor) also needs to include Thompson. And it’s a coin toss which 6-string he excels at more—acoustic or electric.
Richard Thompson - "Singapore Sadie"
Today the 75-year-old boasts a loyal, nay, rabid, multi-generational following, for whom originals like “Tear-Stained Letter,” “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” and the much covered “Dimming of the Day” are classics. In 2011, Thompson received the OBE, Order of the British Empire, for his “singular and substantial contribution to music.”
If the “singer-songwriter” ID evokes an image of dead-end humming and strumming, Thompson’s ever-stunning guitar work demands taking notice. That’s been the case since his late-’60s folk-rock band, Fairport Convention, across numerous solo albums, live and studio, and collaborations with former wife Linda Thompson, and is clearly evident on his latest, Ship to Shore. As usual, moods and attitudes can be dark without being ghoulish (“If you should dream the dreams I dream / You’d never sleep again”), funny without getting cute (“A splash of Opium between her knees / Shops ’til she drops like it’s a disease”); cynical one moment, romantic the next—but most of all intelligent without being stuffy.
His Frets and Refrains guitar and songwriting retreat marks its 12th anniversary in July 2024, of which Thompson says, “It’s one of the high points of my year.”
Ship to Shore closes with an atypically straightforward ode to life on the road, “We Roll” (“We’re in this thing together, and we roll”)—somewhere on the sentimental scale between Willie’s “On the Road Again” and CCR’s “Travelin’ Band.” “You go on the road for a month and get home,” he reflects, “and even though it was musically wonderful, you’re a bit knackered. But after a week you think, ‘Can’t wait to get out there again.’ I just like playing live, and I love the idea of putting something across to an audience who’s appreciating what I’m trying to do. It’s a great feeling.”
Richard Thompson's Gear
Thompson holds an annual guitar and songwriting retreat called Frets and Refrains, which celebrates its 12th anniversary this July.
Photo by David Kaptein
Guitars
- Lowden Richard Thompson Signature with Sunrise pickup system
- Custom Stratocaster with early Rio Grande pickups
- Custom 12-string Telecaster
- ’66 Fender Stratocaster
Amps
- Ridge Farm Gas Cooker tube preamp (for acoustics)
- Divided by 13 FTR-37 with 2x12 cab (for electrics)
- Fender ’65 Deluxe Reverbs (for electrics)
Effects
For acoustics:
- Analog delay
- Vibrato pedal
For electrics:
- Divided by 13 Switchazel A/B box
- Fulltone OCD
- Fulltone tremolo
- Catalinbread Echorec
- Analog Man Sweet Sound MojoVibe
- EHX POG
- Ernie Ball volume pedal
- TC Electronic tuner
Strings & Picks
- Elixir Acoustic 80/20 Bronze (.012–.053)
- Elixir hybrid set (.008–.042) (for electrics)
For a certain generation of American musicians, their “Big Bang,” enticing them to take up guitar, was the Beatles’ appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in February ’64. But that wasn’t broadcast in the U.K. What was your Big Bang?
Richard Thompson: I had a sister who was five years older than me. When I was 5 and she was 10, she had “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley. Subsequently, she had Gene Vincent records, Jerry Lee Lewis, and was a huge Buddy Holly fan. That was kind of a moment right there. In the U.K., you had the Shadows with Hank Marvin, who got a fantastic tone out of a Fender Stratocaster. Their records still sound amazing today. Hearing their first big hit, “Apache,” was the kind of moment where you say, “Okay, we have to start playing guitar and form a band.” They were kind of a Big Bang moment. So at about 11, I was in an instrumental band.
Then there were more subtle things. With the R&B bands around London, the Cyril Davies R&B All-Stars were a very seminal band. Some of the Stones kind of went through that band; Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, same thing. Just being in London, you could hear jazz, country music, folk music, pop, R&B, any night of the week. That was a great experience.
It seems that, although the Beatles were a big deal, sometimes American musicians wanted to be more like the Rolling Stones—a certain generation did, anyway—who were a very good band, but a bit untogether for the most part. I thought in the U.K. there were better blues and R&B musicians.
People in America don’t realize how big the Shadows were globally.
Thompson: They were huge in Scandinavia, Germany, Japan, Australia. In Canada, Neil Young was a big Shadows fan. What amazes me is they were recording at EMI, basically the same studio that the Beatles were using a year or two later, and their records sound so good. The bass, the drums, everything sounds great. Hank Marvin was playing a Stratocaster through an AC15 or AC30 with a Meazzi tape echo, and just sounded brilliant. If you listen to an equivalent Ventures record from the same era, it sounds trashy and not well recorded.
“A lot of British traditional music wasn’t accompanied at all; it was just vocals. So there’s a bit of a mystery of how you harmonize it.”
Besides James Burton, were you influenced by any other hardcore country players?
Thompson: I love all that stuff. I fancy I might have been one of the earlier people in Britain to listen to imported country music. It was very unfashionable in the U.K. In Ireland and Scotland it was popular, but very hokey. I’d go to the import shop and find these really great records, like a pedal steel guitar compilation on Starday. Similarly, there’s a great country-jazz guitar compilation with people like Hank Garland and Thumbs Carllile. As for influential, it helped me to not sound like the blues guitarists who were around at the time. Players like James Burton were bending notes in more of a country way, which I thought was interesting, in some ways more relevant. I thought that the blues field when I was 18—there’s Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor—these U.K. blues guitarists were kind of slavishly imitating Buddy Guy and Otis Rush. I wanted to be a different kind of guitar player. So I took influence more from British traditional music, Celtic music, and country music.
In terms of rock guitarists who weren’t relying on blues licks, Jerry Garcia and David Lindley come to mind. But there aren’t a lot.
Thompson: To me, there’s a lot of mediocre white blues guitar players. They kind of claim the blues as their cultural heritage; that’s a bit iffy. The yardstick for me is, are they contributing anything new, and are they as good or better than the people they base their style on? Often the case is no. There are exceptions, like David Lindley and Ry Cooder, who are wonderful musicians. If you’re a great musician, you’re a great musician. If you’re saying something new or different, I think that’s a real achievement.
On Ship to Shore, Thompson explores moods ranging from dark to funny to cynical to romantic.
Were you always playing acoustic folk music and electric rock at the same time?
Thompson: Absolutely. Being in London was great for hearing those kinds of music. At folk clubs, you’d see really good acoustic guitar players, like Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, and Martin Carthy. I had a parallel interest in electric guitar as well. I suppose at the time it was more relevant, because you wanted to be a good contributor to a band.
Were you already experimenting in open tunings?
Thompson: I was, yeah. I was trying to find more elusive kinds of things, like Clarence Ashley doing old-timey music on banjo. I thought he must be tuned to a modal chord. Turns out he wasn’t, but it sounded like a suspended-4 tuning. I kind of discovered DADGAD on my own, not realizing that Davy Graham had discovered it about 10 years before I did. There are types of tunings Martin Carthy came up with, keeping the indeterminate atmosphere of a traditional song, where you don’t really know where the key is. You don’t want to nail it down; you’re killing the mood of the song. It’s nice to come upon a tuning where it sounds a bit more unresolved—not sure if it’s in D, G, or A. You can have the kind of chord shapes that suggest it’s in all three keys at once. A lot of British traditional music wasn’t accompanied at all; it was just vocals. So there’s a bit of a mystery of how you harmonize it. Having more ambiguous chords—suspended 2 or 4—helps to somehow convey the song in a more elusive way.
Your acoustic playing and electric playing don’t resemble each other in the way that a lot of players’ styles overlap.
Thompson: I’m playing fingerstyle on acoustic and electric. I don’t tend to strum too much on either instrument. I do more three-note clusters using hybrid picking. On acoustic, I’m just trying to accompany a song—whatever that requires. But they are different instruments, and I do approach them differently. I really developed my acoustic playing in the late ’70s, when I started to do solo gigs and wanted to get a bigger sound. So I started to use opening tunings and tried to develop the hybrid picking, to really try to sound almost like two guitar players, where you’re accompanying but still playing melodic figures over the top. On electric, I’ve got the luxury of having people hold down the rhythm and hold down the harmony, so I’m freer to play more single-note stuff and go where the music takes me. On acoustic, I’m a bit more chained down to what’s achievable as a soloist and what works as accompaniment.
Over the years, Thompson has mastered his sound on acoustic and electric, both of which he plays with a hybrid style of picking.
Photo by Matt Condon
Particularly on electric, you sometimes get very angular, aggressive, and even dissonant—yet you’re still categorized as folk.
Thompson: Yeah, usually [laughs]. I think I play the sum of my influences. Since I was a teenager, I listened to a lot of classical music. I started with the impressionist composers, like Ravel and Debussy. Then I worked my way backwards and forwards. Grabbing a bit of harmony from Stravinsky or Bach, or a kind of strange chromatic thing from Schoenberg is kind of normal within a folk framework, extending it.
On Fairport Convention’s third album, Unhalfbricking, we did a more extended song, “A Sailor’s Life.” It was a traditional song, but we brought it up to date. We decided to do more of that on the next album, Liege & Lief. Then I continued to do it as a solo artist. And I’m still there; it’s basically what I’m doing. If you have a strong base—I think of my base as being kind of Celtic traditional music—then I think you can extend in any direction. Remember, The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky is more than 100 years old. What we think of as dissonant should be acceptable in music in general—not just “that weird stuff.” That’s a long time to be weird [laughs]. As John Cage says, if it sounds dissonant, keep playing it ’til it sounds normal.
An extreme example of your “out there” side is your work with Henry Kaiser.
Thompson: I think he said once that his ambition was to make music that sounds like it’s from another planet. I think he achieves that [laughs]. His music is challenging, and he likes it that way. He’s starting out with some of the more discordant strains of 20th-century music. He’s an original, and really experimental, and he’s collaborated with interesting people. He went to Madagascar and to Scandinavia with David Lindley, and has a Miles Davis tribute band. His video shows are really great; the tribute to Lindley was lovely. Not enough people know about Lindley. Such a wonderful musician and a great character, too. Sometimes he’d phone me, and he’d either be himself or James Stewart or a Rastafarian—totally convincing. A fascinating human being and a really great musician.
What input did you have into your Lowden signature acoustic model?
Thompson: It’s my design, my wood choice: ziricote back and sides and a cedar top. It’s kind of loud, punchy, even-toned, and at the same time quite sweet-sounding. It’s got really good highs and lows. I’m very happy with it.
Lowden is achieving a high consistency—which I can’t say about every guitar manufacturer. I’ve got an S-32 and a Baby Lowden, which is wonderful, and a really interesting electric GL-10. It’s a solidbody electric, but the fretboard is the same as an acoustic. For an acoustic player to go electric, it’s a wonderful solution.
“What we think of as dissonant should be acceptable in music in general—not just ‘that weird stuff.’ That’s a long time to be weird.”
I’ve used a Sunrise pickup made by Jim Kaufman for about 35 years, and I’ve got a little condenser mic that sits inside the soundhole. So it’s two acoustic channels, and I put that into a Ridge Farm Gas Cooker tube preamp that I take on the road. That really warms up the signal. So the basic sound coming off the stage is the same every night.
You’ve been playing a red “parts” Strat for several years.
Thompson: My guitar tech, Bobby Eichorn, got that red Strat for me—which is fiesta red faded to kind of coral. The body and neck and pickups, which might be Santa Fe, are all from various places. It plays really well and sounds really good. Onstage, I use a Divided by 13 amp—which is sort of like a Fender circuit and a Vox circuit, and you can blend them. Mismatched speakers: Celestion Blue and Celestion Vintage 30. Ooh, I love talking technical [laughs]. In the studio, I use smaller amps, like an AC15 Vox or Fender Pro Reverb or Deluxe. I also use Headstrong amps with Celestions—basically a Princeton with a larger, 12" speaker.
Richard Thompson performs at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on April 20, 1985.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
In an online interview, record producer Val Garay, talking about Linda Ronstadt as an interpreter who never wrote songs, said he didn’t think songwriting could be taught.
Thompson: [Laughs]No, I don’t agree with that. Thinking of myself, I’m not good enough to write a symphony, and I’m not good enough to be a really good poet. But I am good enough to do a simpler form of lyric and a simpler form of music, and write songs. The combination of those two skills make you a good songwriter.
I hope it can be taught; otherwise, our camp is a complete waste of time. I don’t think we nail it down where you have to use this rhyme scheme or your subject matter has to be this or that. We have guest songwriters demonstrate their own methods, and that can be inspirational. Sometimes they teach broader points, so it’s up to you as a would-be writer to kind of find your own way. Point you in the right direction, rather than beating you over the head. The other thing we do is listen to attendees’ songs, and without getting too formalized about it say, “Just tweak this a tiny bit, and it’ll be in much better shape.” Somewhere like Nashville, it’s very formulaic: “If you want to be a good Nashville songwriter, this is what you do.” We try not to do that, and keep it looser.
The biggest difference I notice between professional and amateur songwriters is the hook lines. It sounds crude to say, but you can have a fairly abstract song, but if it has a really strong hook that people can remember, it makes a huge difference. The other thing is, if you’re going to write about your life—your pains, your sorrows—make sure it’s interesting for other people. So often people are kind of self-indulgent when they write songs—staring-at-your-shoes kind of songs. Don’t waste people’s time unless you really are finding some interesting commonality between you and the listener.
“I like to meet the muse halfway, in that sense. I don’t wait for lightning to strike.”
Does the guitar side of the retreat encompass all levels of expertise?
Thompson: Absolutely, from beginner to intermediate to advanced. And we teach mostly fingerstyle, to get people beyond just the strum, strum, strum, which is a bit boring. If they know how to strum, adding fingerpicking just gives more possibilities. You can do something more interesting, like a Maybelle Carter thing where you’re picking out the tune in the lower strings. If you can fingerpick, you can play whole melodic things.
You’ve written so many great songs. Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Thompson: Every day [laughs]—or every week anyway. Sometimes I’ll go a month without writing, and it’s frustrating. It’s part of the process. You feel frustrated, and then there’s suddenly a sense of release when you write something. To get around that, sometimes I just work on a few things at once. It might be a song I’m desperately trying to finish, but I’ll try other projects as well. If you hit a brick wall as a songwriter, you can stay there for weeks. If you’ve got three songs on the go, then you hit a brick wall and say, “I’ll just sidestep that and work on this other song.” Working on an album, I might have 12 songs in various stages of completion. And I like the fact that I can sit down every day, go through everything, a little bit here, a little bit there, and say, “That one’s finished; don’t need to touch it anymore.” I like to meet the muse halfway, in that sense. I don’t wait for lightning to strike.Richard Thompson 'Money Shuffle' (live acoustic performance)
Thompson’s vibrant, hybrid picking style, smart interpretation of traditional folk songwriting, and powerful vocals are on full display in this live performance of “Money Shuffle” at Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham, England, in 2010.
YouTube Search Term: Richard Thompson ‘Money Shuffle’ (live acoustic performance)
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The Brian May Gibson SJ-200 12-string in the hands of the artist himself.
Despite a recent health scare, guitarist Brian May cannot be stopped. With the Queen reissue project, he’s celebrating his legacy, and with his new SJ-200—a limited edition signature Gibson acoustic guitar—he looks to the future.
Long lasting instrumental relationships are something we love to root for. Neil Young and Old Black, Willie Nelson and Trigger—those are inseparable pairings of artist and instrument where, over the course of long careers, those guitars have been shaped, excessively in both cases, by the hands that play them. Eddie Van Halen went steps beyond with Frankenstein, assembling the guitar to his needs from the get-go. But few rock ’n’ roll relationships imbue the kind of warm-and-fuzzy feelings as the story of Brian May and his dad building Red Special, the very instrument that hung around his neck for his rise to superstardom and beyond.
Together, with a legion of Vox AC30s and a few effects, May and his homemade Red Special have created some of the richest, most glorious guitar sounds that have ever been documented. It is with that guitar in his hands that he’s crafted everything from his velveteen guitar orchestras to his frenetic riffs and luxuriant harmonies to his effortlessly lyrical leads, which matched the dramatic melodic motifs of Freddie Mercury in one of the most dynamic lead singer/guitarist pairings in rock music.
Although it has a smaller role in his body of work, overshadowed by such an accomplished, prolific electric guitar C.V., May’s acoustic playing is a major part of the story of his music. His bold opening strums of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” are some of the most recognizable D-major chords in the classic-rock canon, and his supportive work on “Spread Your Wings” adds lush dimension between Freddie Mercury’s arpeggiated piano chords and his rich electric guitarmonies. The multi-tracked 12-string figure that opens “’39”—his “cosmic folk song”—is among his most recognizable.
It’s a surprise, then, that when I ask May about the acoustic guitars used while recording with Queen, the most notable is his Hallfredh acoustic, a “cheap as hell” guitar from a virtually unknown brand. “My little old acoustic, which I swapped with my dear friend at school,” he reminisces. “The strings were so low on it that everything buzzed like a sitar. I capitalized on that and put pins on it instead of the bridge saddles, and you can hear that stuff on ‘The Night Comes Down’ [from Queen]. I used it all the way through Queen’s recordings, like on ‘Jealousy’ [from Jazz] years later and lots of things.” He also recalls his Ovation 12-string and some others, but the Hallfredh remains in the foreground of his acoustic memories.
The cosmic inlays on the Brian May SJ-200 represent the rock legend’s work in the field of astrophysics, in which he holds a PhD.
In recent years, May has been performing the 1975 ballad and emotional Mercury vehicle “Love of My Life,” which appears on A Night at the Opera, as an acoustic tribute to the late singer. May and his acoustic 12-string sit center stage each night as he leads the crowd through a heartwarming rendition of the song, joined at its climax by a video of Mercury. For that powerful, commanding moment, he’s relied on “a number of guitars we won’t mention, but it just came to the point where I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t sounding as good as I would like it to.’”
At one concert, a Gibson representative who was around piped up and offered to make him a guitar to his specs specifically for this piece. “I was surprised that they would notice me in the first place,” May recalls, “because part of me never grew up.” A surprising take from a rock star of such stature, but he explains, “I’m still a kid who was reading the Gibson catalogs and not able to afford anything, seeing the SGs and the Les Pauls and dreaming of being able to own a Gibson guitar. I now have a couple of the SGs, which I absolutely love, but, of course, I made my own guitar and I now have my own guitar company, so I went a different way. But to me this was a joy that they would offer to make me a guitar, which I could take out onstage.”
After building one for the guitarist, Gibson created a limited edition run of 100 instruments of the new model, called the Brian May SJ-200 12-string. Featuring a AAA Sitka spruce top with a vintage sunburst finish, AAA rosewood back and sides, a 2-piece AAA maple neck with walnut stringer, and a rosewood fretboard, it’s a top-of-the-line acoustic. The most noticeable feature on the SJ-200 is probably the string arrangement, which is flipped—as is most commonly found on Rickenbacker 12-strings—with the lower string above the higher string in each course. May has made that modification on other 12s, because he likes to string the high string first when fingerpicking. “You get an incredibly pure sound that way,” he points out. “‘Love of My Life’ is a good example—if it’s strung the other way, it sounds very different.”
On its pickguard, all seven of the other planets in our solar system are etched. The shaded one, close at hand, is Mercury, a tribute to the Queen singer.
May’s aesthetic customizations draw from his astrophysics work and add a personal sparkle to the large-bodied acoustic. The pickguard features a custom design with the seven other planets in the system, which is to say, not Earth. Mercury sits close at hand, a tribute to the singer. The fretboard and headstock include 8-point star inlays—to give a “more cosmic feeling”—that are made from agoya shell, as are the bridge inlays.
“It became a discussion about art and science, which I love,” May says of the design process. “That’s probably the biggest thread in my life, this path trodden, some people would say, between art and science. But I would say that they’re the same thing. So, I just tread among art and science.”
May’s own Gibson has already appeared in concert during the “Love of My Life” segment of Queen’s show, and occasionally for “’39.” On social media, where May stays active, many fans caught a glimpse of the guitar when he posted a new song for Christmas Eve. “I just wanted to say Merry Christmas, and that’s the way it came out,” he says. “It was incredibly spontaneous. I wanted it to be a gift. I didn’t want it to be, in any way, a way of advertising or making money or anything. It was just a Merry Christmas gift to whoever wants to listen to me.”
“It became a discussion about art and science, which I love,”
While that was one of the first things created with the new Gibson, he has more plans. “I’ve been playing around with it. In fact, we’ve been dropping the D,” he says, hinting at some future plans with guitarist-vocalist Arielle. “I have quite a few songs with the bottom D dropped. I haven’t normally played them acoustic or 12-string, but I’m discovering that some of that sounds really good. It gets such a lovely big clang and a big depth to it.”
Recently, May spent a great deal of time looking back as the band prepped the Queen I box set. The remixed, remastered, and very expanded version of their 1973 debut, Queen—they’ve added the “I” here—which was released last October, encompasses a rebuild of the entire record, plus additional takes, backing tracks, a version recorded specifically for John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show, and a 1974 live concert recording from London’s Rainbow Theatre.May says of his new Gibson: “To me, this was a joy that they would offer to make me a guitar."
Revisiting this early document over 50 years later, it’s amazing to hear how well-developed the guitarist’s sound already was—full of the propulsive riffs and harmonies that would become part of his signature. May concurs, “You go back into these tracks quite forensically, and I hear myself in the naked tracks and I think, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that I could do that at that point.’ It must have happened very quickly.”
Reflecting on those formative times, he continues, “I think there’s a period of just exploding, knowing what it is in your head, and striving to make what you play match what’s in your head. But I see it in other people, too. Sometimes, I go back and listen to the first Zeppelin album, and they were pretty young when they made that. But I think, ‘My God, how did they get that far and so quick?’”
“I thought guitars do work as primary orchestral instruments, so that’s what I want to do.”
Before Queen, May had already recorded a two-part guitar solo on the song “Earth,” a late-’60s track recorded with his earlier band, Smile, which also featured future Queen drummer Roger Taylor. While that lead certainly points toward the ambition in May’s later work, its raw untamedness doesn’t quite show evidence of his ultimate precision. But he says he had it in mind from early on. “There weren’t any more tracks to do three parts” when they recorded with Smile, he says, “but I always dreamed of it. It goes back a long, long way to hearing harmonies in other ways from the Everly Brothers, from Buddy Holly and the Crickets, from all sorts of things that we were listening to when we were kids.
“I wanted to make the sound of an orchestra just using guitars, and there’s other little inspirations along the way,” he continues. “Jeff Beck was an inspiration because there’s that wonderful track, ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining,’ which Jeff hated. But there’s one bit where he double-tracks the solo and in just one point it breaks into a two-part harmony, probably by accident. I guess I should have asked him—damn well wish I had. But that sound echoed in my head, and I thought guitars do work as primary orchestral instruments, so that’s what I want to do. I could hear it in my head for a long time before I could make it actually happen.”
Brian May and his Red Special at a recent concert.
Photo by Steve Rose
Though the Queenrecording sessions gave the guitarist his first opportunity to explore the larger harmonized sections that would become part of his signature, many of the sounds on the record left the band dissatisfied. Recorded at Trident Studios in London, the young band could only afford to use the room during downtime. Over the course of four months, they had sessions, usually at night, with in-house producers John Anthony and Roy Thomas Baker, both early supporters. However, the Trident style and sound wasn’t what Queen had in their collective ears, and they’ve remained unhappy with the sonic quality of their debut all these years.
The drums were the band’s primary issue, which Taylor describes as having a “very dry, quite fat, dead sound.” May’s tone is recognizably his own. “Well, I’m a very pushy person,” he laughs. “But nevertheless, it was difficult for me, too. Because of this Trident style of recording, the intention was not to have room sound on it. I kind of pushed, I suppose, to have a mic on the back of the amp as well as the front. That gave me a bit more air. I did feel a little hampered and the change is more subtle on the guitar, but it’s there.
“Jeff Beck was an inspiration because there’s that wonderful track, ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining,’ which Jeff hated. But there’s one bit where he double tracks the solo and in just one point it breaks into a two-part harmony, probably by accident.”
“It’s funny because it changed radically as time went on,” he continues. “And I can remember by the time we got to Sheer Heart Attack, Roy is putting mics all over the room and miking up windows in the booth and whatever to get maximum room sounds. It’s certainly nice to go back and make everything sound the way we pretty much would’ve liked it to sound at the time.”
With Queen I out, a new Queen IIset is in the works, which May calls “a very different kettle of fish.” The drum sounds on their sophomore effort were more in line with the band’s original vision, but the dense layers of overdubs that famously appear on the record came at a cost. “I think it is the biggest step musically and recording-wise that we ever made,” says May. “But there’s a lot of congestion in there. There’s mud because of all this generation-loss stuff [caused by overdubs], and because we liked to saturate the tape, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It made it sound loud. But if you disentangle that and get the bigness in other ways, I think Queen II is going to sound massive.”
The AAA rosewood back and sides of May’s signature acoustic are stunning.
At 77 years old, May certainly seems to keep his schedule packed with music work—not to mention his animal advocacy and scientific endeavors. In May of last year, though, everything came to a halt when the guitarist suffered a stroke. “I couldn’t get a fork from the table to my mouth without it all going all over the place,” he recalls. “It was scary.” Luckily, things began turning around quickly. “After only a few days, it’s amazing what you can get back. By sheer willpower, you just start retraining your muscle.” Not quite a year on when we speak, May estimates he’s regained 95 percent of his abilities, which, he says, “is enough.
“The short answer is, ‘I’m good,’” he assures.
May is in great spirits and appears excited about all his recent projects, finished and in-progress alike. In this time of looking back on his earliest works, I ask him to think about his beginnings, when he would gaze at Gibson catalogs but had to build his own guitar out of necessity, because, as he points out, he “couldn’t afford anything else.”
So, what would young Brian May, stepping into an afterhours session at Trident, making his band’s debut, think about his new limited edition signature model Gibson acoustic? He takes a long pause. “It would have been …” he pauses again, “unthinkable.”
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There’s so much to explore when you decide to dip your toes into altered tunings.
There’s so much to explore when you decide to dip your toes into altered tunings. The jangly beauty of DADGAD and the new shapes found in open E and open C offers new inspiration. Caitlin Caggiano teaches you not only the easiest way to get into these tunings, but also a few handy shapes that will kickstart your playing today.
An imperfectly perfect routing job.
Take a moment to appreciate those quirks in your instruments that reveal their maker’s hands.
Let’s talk about obsessions for a minute. They come in all sizes and shapes; some are benign and harmless, while others can be cruel, crippling, or even life threatening. Members of 12-step and self-help programs remind us of how insidious our own self-delusion can be, which intrigued me enough to take a look at my gear and, ultimately, myself.
I took stock of any compulsive behaviors or things that kept me up at night. I tabulated items that pushed my buttons or irritated me. In the end, I had to admit that I’ve got issues—I’m obsessed. I can’t help myself, but I don’t want to either.
There are names and acronyms for what I have, but it all boils down to one thing: I’ve been obsessed with the little details. The little stuff that most people can pass by without a second thought. That candy wrapper teetering on the edge of the waste bin; I wonder, who could possibly tolerate that? That screwdriver with a worn tip? I’ve got to replace that! A small gap between a maple top and the binding? We can’t let that go. An uneven seam? To the bandsaw it goes, and then the dumpster. Those are the little glitches that make a statement individually and add up to a total that is less than what it could be. No, make that should be. Or should it?
The ancient Greeks were fascinated with the concept of arete, which refers to excellence or virtue. Arete represents the highest quality or state that something or someone can achieve. The German auto designer Ferdinand Porsche considered it almost a religion—indeed, the company’s motto has been interpreted as “excellence is expected.” I’m not imagining that I have the chops of a Porsche engineer, but we all have goals.Of course, there is a limit; otherwise, I’d never get anything done. I’m not crazy. So, in order to save myself, and possibly you, I encourage embracing a get-out-of-jail-free concept of sorts known to the Japanese as wabi-sabi.
Wabi-sabi plays a profound and integral role in Japanese culture and traditions, influencing various aspects of art, philosophy, and daily life. This aesthetic concept, ingrained into Japan’s culture, actually celebrates imperfection, impermanence, and simplicity. Some of the aesthetic principles of wabi-sabi include appreciating asymmetry, valuing roughness and simplicity, recognizing beauty in natural things, and embracing natural wear and tear. I think those of us who appreciate a real road-worn vintage instrument may already be part of the way there!
“As much as I don’t want my toaster to project sloppy construction, I do want beautiful instruments to approach perfection, while leaving little breadcrumbs that are evidence of the maker’s hand.”
For me as a musician and builder, I’ve come to soften my obsessions to appreciate and even look for the little “mistakes” in music and craft that tell me that a human being actually created those things. Things like off-mic banter in studio recordings, or fret buzz. As much as I don’t want my toaster to project sloppy construction, I do want beautiful instruments to approach perfection, while leaving little breadcrumbs that are evidence of the maker’s hand. Of course, under the microscope anything can be dissected and proclaimed imperfect, but there is a beauty to something that says, “This is as good as you need it to be.” Furthermore, you could say it’s beautiful the way it is because it has character shaped by virtues and flaws, just like a human being.
So, before I jump to a conclusion or judgement on a guitar, song, or most anything that is created by humans, I take a breath and consider character and personality. You might say that a perfect execution of lutherie might be flawless, but it’s the cold, sterile presence of the totally immaculate that I find flawed. When I look at the flatness of the finish on the top edge of a Collings headstock, I marvel at the determination behind it. But it’s not the entire beast, for that same guitar has telltale marks that prove it was made by people, not an alien force. They are the wabi-sabi—the maker’s mark.
I once owned a vintage Telecaster that was stunningly mint, but had a tiny knot in the maple fretboard, just past the 12th fret. Would I have returned it as unacceptable if I had been the original owner? Even at the time, many decades ago, I recognized the character that birthmark brought to my guitar. Even though it’s long gone from my collection, if I ever saw it again, I’d recognize it like an old compadre. And that, my friends, is what makes our instruments real to us. And I’m now obsessed with that.
Club- or festival-provided stage amps can be hellish or angelic. Here are some of the devils and angels Premier Guitar’s editorial director has encountered along the road.
I have a slight allergy to backline amps. I shouldn’t, because I’ve played through a lot of them at clubs and festivals over the years, and most of my experiences have been fine, but I think a few bad combos and unfathomable heads put me off to a degree I can’t quite shake.
One of the first times I got the backline shivers was in the ’90s at a New York City club gig supporting John Sinclair, where I was told we would not need to bring amps. Awaiting me was a severely scarred Peavey Bandit combo with nary a knob left on its face, and the EQ and pre gain didn’t even have posts left. I just twisted a few stumps and gave up on the rest. How was the sound? Like an amplified fluorescent light bulb. On the other hand, I’ve never met a backline Peavey Classic series amp I didn’t like. Or, really, almost any backline amp that got the TLC it deserved, along with the heavy use. I once plugged into a right-out-of-the-box amp delivered to a club in Geneva by a then-emerging European manufacturer that sounded great during soundcheck, but its transformer died on the first chord of the first song in my band’s set. Luckily, they’d sent two, so we had to stop, open a box, mic the new amp, and jump back on the horse.Another case: I like a little drive, so imagine my dismay to find a backline at a satellite tent at a major festival with zero master volume amps. At the time, I wasn’t using effects—just a Strat and a Tele. So I plugged into a big blonde Fender and just turned up. The stage volume was brutal, but I had my tone so it was great. At least for me. I hope the drummer who played with me that day can still hear.
Sometimes, even speccing the backline doesn’t help. While playing a series of gigs in France, I requested either Vox or Marshall amps, such as an AC30 or JCM800, and at one big stage I encountered a fresh-looking JCM 2000 Triple Super Lead atop a 4x12. I must confess, I took one look at both decks of buttons and push-pulls and my heart sank. I was out of my comfort zone at the time. Try as I might, I could not get anywhere near the mocha, mid-ripe sound I get out of my ’72 Super Lead without turning up to a stratospheric level. I felt terrible. Not for the audience. It was an outdoor stage with plenty of open space. But for the stage crew. When one of them shouted, “Ted, es-tu psychotique?” between songs, I didn’t need to consult Google Translate to know what he meant. I was embarrassed and regretful about the volume, but had a great time playing, nonetheless. (Sorry, crew!)
“Awaiting me was a severely scarred Peavey Bandit combo with nary a knob left on its face, and the EQ and pre gain didn’t even have posts left.”
Over this summer I played a voter registration benefit, and the large venue that held it sent a really appealing backline list, with a Deluxe and a DeVille included. When I got there, there was a Deluxe but no other guitar amp per se. I had to play through a bass amp, and it was okay, thanks to my pedals, but a decidedly less-than-magical experience.
I feel like I’m whining, but like most of you I’ve spent years chasing a particular tone, and when I have my own rig it’s as delicious as German chocolate cake. So maybe I’m spoiled. And there are some backline amps I’ve coveted at gigs—like the humble Blues Junior at Nashville’s Eastside Bowl that’s been upgraded with a Deluxe transformer. It speaks eloquently.
There have been many other funky, hard-to-manage (at least for me) backline amps I’ve wrestled with over the years. After all, I’ve played in a lot of juke joints and roadhouses. And I used to sweat about it. But I finally made my “whatever” peace with backlines thanks to some advice from Luther Dickinson: “No matter what an amp sounds like, you have to stay out of your own head.” Just let the music fly.
In that spirit, two of this issue’s gear features deal with backlines. One is a public service: If you’ve never played through a backline, here’s what you should expect; or if you’re putting one together, as I’ve had to do many times, here’s what to consider. The other piece polls eight heavyweight guitarists on their own backline gear specs—lending insight on how established pros ensure that they sound like themselves under any circumstances.
So, if stage life throws you a lemon for an amplifier, just plug in and make it as juicy as you can. Don’t worry, because there’s another gig down the pike where you’ll sound exactly like yourself.