Fingers & Thumbs – Adrian Legg

Lunchtime at Rosie's

I opened for Eric Johnson on a tour he did the year before last right after the first G3, and we did this piece together at the end of my set, along with Roscoe and at that time, drummer Brannen Temple. One night I screwed up and Eric and I ended up on the half beat. It is a tribute to Roscoe and Brannen's skill that they rescued us before it all collapsed in an ignominious heap in front of a rather worried audience.

My regular stage guitar d.i.'d after the stage pedals with the reverb turned low.

Eric Johnson played a Martin d.i.'d with an undersaddle pick-up.

Roscoe Beck - bass, and Tom Brechtline, drums.

Recorded by Richard Mullen at Eric's studio in Austin,Texas, on 16 track analogue, and transferred to Adat in Nashville for mixing at Bobby's. And.... I'm sorry Tom. There really wasn't a fluff on the snare at all. We made it up. You were just too happy, that's all, and we were mean because you got to go home while we still had to do stuff.

Written around 1980 during a lunchbreak originally to try out a four track cassette recorder that was obsolete before it ever got near the market, the piece was used by the company I then worked for with the sound turned down to make the lights on the machine flash at a musical instrument trade show in London, England. Nobody bought one.

Not Remotely Blue

Regular tuning until the intro is repeated as end tag, then the 6th drops to D.

Solo one shot track. Regular stage guitar directly off piezo pick-up (no pre-amp) through old Japanese Boss compressor (CS3), through Peavey valverb with no reverb set. Actual track reverb set on Roland SRV2000. Recorded to Adat. In studio guitar monitoring done on 2 Trace Acoustic TA50s via usual stage pedals - DD2 (old Boss echo pre weedy Taiwanese socket period) & Peavey SRP 16 reverb pedal (sadly, discontinued).

This piece originally written in less developed form in 1974 and promptly abandoned when I realised my Englishness predisposed me to depression rather than any convincing blues. Rewritten 1998 when I no longer cared.

Hymn for Jaco

Tuning C,G,D,G,B,E

Solo piece. Top E drops to D for first and last passages. Regular stage guitar into Boss compressor on lightest setting, to d.i.. Sitaring done by filing flats into tops of saddles. SRV2000s on mix, some flanging, and some signal fed through old Boss Dimension C (DC2). Jaco Pastorius transcended the bass in the same way Mohammed Ali transcended boxing.

Written in 1997

McPherson

Built multi-track. Prime guitar: regular stage guitar through CS3 & cheapo plastic volume pedal (Bespeco ?). SRV2000 on mix.

Picking guitar - same.

Rhythm guitars - same, no compression.

Fuzz guitar - same via Sans Amp.

6 string bass, tuned to A, d.i.. Magnetic pick-ups, single coil with no humcancelling so guitar had to be lined up on precise compass bearing to reduce r.f.noise. Used for first solo, duet passage & chord reinforcement in later part of piece.

Bobby redid the first solo because he said mine was off tempo. I think he just likes playing that guitar and did it to impress the company he got it from. Just to be a bitch I made him play my original solo note for note. Bass - Bobby's old short scale Ibanez, d.i.. This is Bobby's take. I got fed up because he hid the Snickers and my tempo went to hell. I don't eat them any more because I think they've got genetically modified crap in them.

Synths - Flip Scipio's Casio guitar synth., which he kindly lent me. It's got lots of character, and sometimes does a note all on its own because it is so enthusiastic. The extra note it does is surprisingly difficult to turn off. It must really mean it.

Whizz-bang gratuitously flash hot licks towards the end on regular stage guitar through compressor and turned down exciter, except the one after the last chord, which is just d.i. with no exciter.

Vocals in last verse (heavily disguised by proximity of phony organ on Flip's Casio) me and Bobby - two parts double-tracked and swapped over to disguise horrible tone and wheezing.

Written in 1997

pace Doc

Regular stage guitar d.i.'d, regular tuning. Fith fret capo just because I like the sound.

Pace is Latin. Nobody is still alive to tell us how to pronounce Latin, so English English pronounces this "pah-kay", but American English Italianicises it as "pah- chay". It means 'with due deference to what has been said on the subject (by...)'. Thank-you, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Written in 1997.

Shorelines

Solo regular stage guitar d.i.'d, tuned to DADGAD.

Photos made around the Lleyn Peninsula, North Wales; the Thames, London, and various very nice bits of America.

Written in 1998 from bits written for t.v. programme on coastal erosion. Since this recording I finally made it up to Spurn Point on the Humber Estuary, which featured in the programme, and got up before dawn two mornings running to photograph it. It was foggy both mornings, but I got a couple of nice moody 6x7s on an elderly Pentax. It was pretty dangerous. I needed to get a couple of white carrier bags that had blown into the scrub out of the frame and I nearly fell into the most viciously spiky gorse I've ever encountered.

Cradle Songs

Solo, regular stage guitar d.i.'d; regular tuning; C5.

Written 1998

Tracy's Big Moment

Joe Satriani was very enthusiastic and encouraging about this piece when I played it live, so I took another look at it. The original English acoustic recording was a little bit weak, so I redid it on Bobby's 6 string bass - well, I guess it's a baritone really. I realised too late it was a pretty silly idea - this thing has strings that would pull a semi out of a ditch and a scale length that goes from the bridge to the mail-box.

Bobby's beautiful and wonderfully strong daughter Bree is training as a masseuse, and I am profoundly grateful to her for putting my shoulders back where they're supposed to be, and for getting the tick out of my bikini line (she worked in a vet's office for a while). Without her, and her teacher Jane Paul's, expert ministrations, muscle manipulations and massages, the rest of the album would have been trashed and I would have some kind of bad deer disease.

Rocking Horse

Solo, tuned to DADGAD with some flutes and brass added with Flip's Casio. I added some six-string bass chords to firm up the low brass, which is not too good on the Casio and has a very relaxed post-prandial embouchure.

Just when you think your kids have left for good and you've got your home back, they visit with their own kids and expect you to baby-sit. So all the stuff that had gone up out of reach of trashing toddlers years ago and which had gradually worked its way down again has to go back up, and you have to remember all the nursery rhymes, games and songs.

"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with 'kuh'."

"Lettuce !! Yeah!!!"

"No - 'kuh' - lettuce begins with 'luh' . I'll give you a clue. She bit you this morning when you kicked her."

Written 1997

Tiddles

The acoustic triangle is in regular tuning.

This is a warning. Unless this album is a hit, I'm going to become a full-time poet.

Written in 1995

Mdrundgum

Various guitars, slides, wah-wahs and percussion. I am indebted for the title to Martin Simpson, who failed to identify the percussion, but then he does come from nearly 200 miles north of me, and is consequently virtually a foreigner to us English southerners. We've had thorough-going civil wars in England over distances a quarter of that. Mind you, most of them seemed to be between eastern northeners and western northerners... I suppose this track comes out of reading too many Boys' Own Adventure stories when I was a kid.

Written 1998