Tinsley Ellis broke onto the national blues scene with his early ’80s band, the Heartfixers. By late in the decade, when the Atlanta-based guitarist and singer began releasing albums under his own name, he also became a fixture in the genre’s international club and festival circuit. Over the years he's earned a reputation for full-throttle live shows and well-crafted albums that hinge on his powerful singing and on his playing, which is based in tradition but packed with signature moves like deft finger slides, the use of open, ringing strings in single-note solos, and bends borrowed from B.B. King but laden with his own emotionalism and rock 'n' roll energy.
Ellis has been a seemingly tireless road warrior—at least until Covid. But even the pandemic couldn't slow his songwriting, and he penned more than 200 new titles while in lockdown. You can hear 10 of those tunes, including 6-string bonfires like “Slow Train To Hell,” on his new album Devil May Care—the 20th in his catalog. Back on the road this year, Ellis stopped at Nashville’s 3rd & Lindsley on March 3, where he showed Premier Guitar his rig and told stories of close encounters with B.B. King and other greats after soundcheck and, that night, delivered a sermon on the power and glory of blues. His current run continues until the end of May, and Ellis has just been nominated in the 2022 Blues Music Awards for Blue-Rock Entertainer of the Year.
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Meet the Fleet
Tinsley Ellis favors classic tone flavors, and he gets them through classic guitars. At the 3rd & Lindsley gig, he relied on his 1959 Fender Stratocaster, his mid-’60s Gibson ES-345, a 1930s National resonator, and an ’80s Gibson Moderne. He also travels with a Les Paul and another Strat when the mood or need arises.
A Fine ’59
Here's a close-up of that 1959 Strat. It's been one of his companions for decades. When asked if he’s concerned about traveling with such a superb vintage instrument, he replies: “I own ’em to play ’em.” And indeed he does, eliciting a wide variety of classic single-coil tones from its barking pickups as he dances over its rosewood neck. One snag: the middle single-coil is a replacement, because the original was swiped years ago when he brought the guitar in for a repair. Ouch!
Tinsley's No. 1
Dig that Varitone switch—which means this 1967 Gibson is an ES-345. It's Ellis' main axe and sounds killer through his double Fender amp setup and under his hands. “I bought this guitar in the ’70s, because I wanted to sound like B.B. King,“ he says. He loves the way the Varitone works as a filter, giving him that B.B. King Live at the Regal tone on demand, and even taking him into Peter Green turf. You can see every road mile on the ES’s beautifully weathered face. This guitar and the Strat are featured throughout the Devil May Care album, along with a Les Paul and several other carefully curated axes.
A Unmodded Moderne
Although Gibson designed the Moderne in 1957, along with the Flying V and Explorer, it was not produced—save for a few prototypes—until 1982. Even then, few were made over just two years, although the guitar returned to Gibson's catalog in 2012. Ellis keeps his stock Moderne tuned in open D, primarily, for playing slide, and the guitar seems to have an affinity for Elmore James’ material.
Where's Pokey?
Note the Moderne's very un-Gibson-like “Gumby” headstock!
Take a Shine to This!
This is a 1932 National resonator, with its chrome body decorated by an oasis motif on the front and back. Ellis keeps this little doggie, a recent acquisition, mostly tuned in open G, and when he plays Muddy Waters' “Can't Be Satisfied,” laying his bronze slide on its strings, it's impossible to not be carried back to the days this guitar—and the blues genre—were young.
Silver Beaches
Here's the backside of Ellis' National.
A Super Super Reverb and Its Deluxe Sidekick
Ellis is a die-hard Fender amp fan and runs his vintage Super Reverb and reissue Deluxe in parallel to achiever his widescreen tone. This Super Reverb is a little more super than meets the eye. Ellis purchased the 40-watt wonder from Thom Doucette, who played harmonica with the Allman Brothers on the classic 1971 album At Fillmore East. Doucette owned two Supers, he and told Ellis he either played this one or its sibling—he no longer remembered exactly which he'd used—on the nights the album was recorded. Oh, and one more thing: This amp was also used by Stevie Ray Vaughan whenever he sat in with Ellis, who told us he hasn't changed the settings—volume at 6, treble just past 8, mid at 6, bass at 3, and reverb just past 2—since the first time SRV plugged into it. “When I heard Stevie play though that amp, I thought, ‘Aha, that's how it's supposed to be set!'”
Basic Burners
Ellis keeps his pedalboard simple. There’s a Boss TU-2 chromatic tuner and a BBE Soul Vibe rotary speaker emulator—way easier to carry than the Leslie heard on Devil May Care—followed by a Nobles ODR-1 Natural Overdrive and a Real McCoy Custom Wah.
It goes without saying that curiosity is essential for any artist. For guitarists, it’s often curiosity that leads us to spend our time noodling around on our instruments, recording songs, starting bands, searching far and wide for the perfect piece of gear, and it’s probably the thing that led us to pick up our instruments in the first place.
Talking to Marisa Anderson, it becomes quite clear that her music has been the result of her own curious nature since day one. At 10, she exchanged her recorder lessons for classical guitar lessons in her hometown of Sonoma, California. After eight years of study, Anderson was ready to move on and discover more creative ways around the instrument and dropped out of an undergraduate classical guitar program. She explains, “When you get into a more involved classical guitar piece, it does the same thing as a crossword puzzle. It taps into something that I like, but at a certain point the payoff wasn’t enough. I was meeting all these people who were jamming on Neil Young songs and stuff like that, and I was like, ‘How do you do that? How do you just play a solo in the middle of a song?’ I had no idea how to do that. So I dropped out after a year and started pursuing my own thing.”
After a couple years of lessons with Bay Area guitarist Nina Gerber, Anderson gained what she calls a “three-dimensional understanding of the guitar neck” for improvisation, and she began making her way through a string of bands. From country groups to a circus band to an open-minded jazz band and much more, Anderson has had a broad range of first-hand musical experiences—all of which seem to come through in some form throughout her solo work. To put it another way, listening to Anderson’s albums, it’s clear that she has the history of guitar music in her fingertips.
Anderson’s most recent effort is this year’s The Quickening, an improvised duo album with drummer Jim White, best known for his work with Dirty Three as well as a veteran of many high-level collaborations with artists from Jim O’Rourke to PJ Harvey to Marianne Faithfull. The Quickening documents the first recorded improvisations between Anderson and White, who decided to work together after Anderson toured as an opening act for Xylouris White, the drummer’s band with Cretan laouto player and singer, George Xylouris. Anderson explained the genesis of her collaboration with White as such: “It was very informal, based on friendship and a mutual admiration for each other’s style of playing and a musical curiosity: If I play with Jim White, what comes out in my playing?” The result is a remarkable conversation between two master instrumentalists exploring and creating a shared musical language.
In a time when live, improvised musical collaborations are rarer than ever, The Quickening is truly a treasure, so we called Anderson at her home in Portland, Oregon, to discuss this album as well as her thoughts on improvisation, alternate tunings, and lots more.
In 2015, you were touring as an opener for Xylouris White. How did the idea of forming a duo with Jim White arise?
We just became friends and said that it would be fun to play together someday, as you do. The tour was probably three weeks long, in a van—George, Jim, and I and a driver—so we got to know each other pretty well and hit it off. After that tour, we just stayed in touch, and “someday” became a little more tangible and it happened.
Was there anything new that you found did come out in your playing with Jim?
I played much more texturally, which really surprised me because he’s such a textural drummer. I kind of expected that I would veer in a different direction.
Yeah, Jim has such a good way of using the frequency range of the drums to great effect.
One thing that Jim and I geek out on is that we both love technique, and how making a slight adjustment to your technique can open up a whole new world of sound. He’s a master of that.
Were there any ways that you played with a different technique on this album?
There are a couple songs, and it goes back to that textural thing, where I was trying to play a chord that would put the guitar in unison or fifths as much as it possibly could be and get this amorphous wall of some tonality that you can’t tell what it is. Stuff like that—weird, geeky, theory tricks just to steer away from scale or even melody. Obviously there’s some melodic pieces as well, but [I was] trying to figure out how to fill space in a similar way that he does.
You recorded in two sessions and hadn’t played together before or between. Have you played since?
We had the two recording sessions, and afterwards we played a show in Portland and a show in Chicago. This year we were going to play a bunch of shows and tour around. Hopefully, it’ll happen in the future.
What guitars did you use on The Quickening?
I was a little bit limited, because we recorded [the second session] in Mexico, so I couldn’t bring everything that I would normally bring. The main guitar on that is a Gibson ES-339, a newer one, and I have a handmade nylon-string guitar by Ramos-Castillo.
I can’t remember which guitars I had for the first session we did, which was in Portland. When I hear one of the songs, I hear a Bigsby, which means I was using this weird Gretsch that I got at a pawnshop years ago, which is basically not a Gretsch anymore. It’s some kind of ’50 Anniversary model, semi-hollow, thin with humbuckers installed in it—the tone controls don’t work on it anymore. It was a pawnshop mutt. I do often hold the body and shake the neck, so it could be me doing that but I feel like there’s one song where it could be that Gretsch.
While this album is improvised, it’s hard for me to tell how much of your previous albums are improvised. They all seem to have their own approach to the material.
Some of them are and some of them aren’t. The first two guitar records, The Golden Hour [2011] and Mercury [2013], are improvised with maybe one exception on Mercury. Obviously, for Traditional and Public Domain Songs [2017], I didn’t write the songs. They exist. Into the Light [2016] was fairly improvised, but it was multi-tracked, so at a certain point you’re committing to a thing that already exists. I think that record was me just trying to teach myself to play pedal steel a bit better. It was the first time that I multi-tracked. I never charted anything, it was all happening spontaneously, and the same with [2018’s] Cloud Corner.
TIDBIT: Marisa Anderson and Jim White entirely improvised their new album in two sessions—in Portland, Oregon, and in Mexico. “The songs start off much more improvised than they become,” Anderson says. “If they get adapted into a performance version, I tend towards keeping those performance versions more structured.”
In light of your background with classical guitar and improvisation, do you have any thoughts about why improvisation is important to you?
More than important, it’s natural. It doesn’t come natural to me to commit to the same thing every time. That just feels like having a boss. When I’m performing, I’m playing songs that are based on the songs on the record—at a certain point they do take a form and I do play to that form. I’m free to do it or not do it as I wish to. Most of my stuff is built with some launchpads in it, so if on any night I’m like, “I’m gonna go over here for a little while,” it’s great to do that.
The songs start off much more improvised than they become. If they get adapted into a performance version, I tend towards keeping those performance versions more structured, for sure. I like improvising in front of people, but not solo. That requires collaboration for me. I’ve done it solo and that’s how I know that I don’t think it makes my best show, and I want to put on a good show. We all listen to records and are like, “I like that song,” so it’s nice to get in front of an audience and be like, “Here’s that thing you like.” Maybe it’s a little different than what it sounds like on the record, but I think that’s awesome, and, personally, I would prefer that as a listener.
Recording, for me, is a very in-the-moment, heartfelt, spontaneous, exciting process, and if I go into that process already knowing exactly what I’m going to do, that just takes the fun out of it. I’m making music that feels fun and that’s what I like to do—make it up as I go. After this many years of doing it, I feel like I apply some critical thought to my technique and to my compositional chops, so it’s not just free jamming.
I never have something in my head that I think it’s supposed to sound like. I think the process of recording is the process of revealing what it does sound like.
Since you grew up playing classical guitar, what got you into playing electric?
It’s about sustain—that’s the main thing to me with the electric guitar. The notes ring out for so much longer, and that provides all these sonic possibilities.
At some point probably 10 years ago, in my solo work, I left standard tuning and pretty much haven’t been back. I mostly play in open D or D minor, and part of that is so I can really take advantage of drone strings and sustain. I really try to not play the tuning and play songs, so you might listen and not realize I’m not in standard. That’s the goal that I have for sure.
When I wrote my previous column, which outlined how the COVID pandemic has dramatically altered music instruction [“There’s Nothing Like a Crisis for Guitarists,” August 2020], I wondered if the new limitations would be ancient history by the time the column was published. Unfortunately, there has been no reversal to the good ol’ days yet, and we’re all instead settling into the new abnormal: rules and protocols that we’ll have to live with for some time.
But what does this mean for the typical guitarist? Even if Average Joe has adapted to Zoom lessons and workshops, he’s still looking at a rather bleak landscape when it comes to public performances or open-jam sessions, while in the past he could put recently honed licks and techniques to the test. Joe has practiced hard, he was making real progress, but then the pandemic pulled the musical rug out from under him. How will he keep the energy flowing? He is a guitar player, so bets are Joe won’t shove his dreadnought or Strat under the bed and switch to online chess.
The most obvious and immediate indication of how homebound guitarists like Joe have been using their extra time and energy is the increased sales of home-recording gear. Some stores have been unable to keep audio-to-digital converters in stock. Sales of large amps, which have actually been slow for some time, have reached the “are you kidding?” stage. And small, compact amplifiers are judged not by their rattle-the-windows headroom, but by their tone quality when the attenuator is dialed down close to zero. After all, there may be someone trying to sleep in the next room. Acoustic guitarists are the winners in this new less-is-more thinking, since even a big jumbo can be strummed quietly. And if that isn’t enough, stuffing a hand towel in the soundhole is a cheap fix.
Thanks to all the types of music that utilize a barely-altered guitar, there are lots of low-cost options Joe can explore. For adding some extra sizzle to a home recording, adding a high-strung (aka Nashville tuned) track will only cost him three additional guitar strings and the time it takes to change them. To experiment with slide guitar, the only cost may be the slide itself, although some guitars will benefit from a few tweaks to raise the string action a bit, such as loosening the truss rod slightly. If Joe is feeling even more adventuresome, converting a guitar for playing square-neck-resonator style isn’t much more expensive. That said, he might want to use a second acoustic, since converting a guitar back for conventional playing takes a little longer. (And if this second guitar has a neck that’s so warped it’s almost unplayable, so much the better!) The combination of a riser nut, the bar (or steel), and an extra set of strings for the low tuning can still be had for under $50.
Converting an acoustic guitar into a completely different-sounding instrument can be done easily with just a few inexpensive items.
For a lot of guitarists, however, this new wealth of extra time is inspiration to expand what instruments they play, including some they might never have considered just a year ago. The most surprising of these, at least at the music store where I work, is the open-back banjo. There’s no celebrity I know of who poses for their Instagram followers with a banjo, and no current pop hit that features banjo licks. So, what’s their motivation for electing to pick up a banjo?
Although they have no intention of leaving the guitar behind, the segue from guitar to banjo is powered by the fact that if you play one fretted instrument, others are not as intimidating, despite their differences. The new tunings and playing techniques certainly take time to learn, and the weird drone string and all-downstrokes strumming needed for many open-back banjo styles is a far cry from pentatonic scales and CAGED chord positions. But even taking up open-back banjo seems like less of a leap when there are hours of additional free time to get over the new hurdles.
The key word here is time. While all of us miss the now-limited—or even cancelled—activities and options from our pre-COVID lifestyle, it’s a good time to stretch out and try to play different music that our busy schedules too often didn’t previously allow. Go for it!
