Guitar Bones – Adrian Legg

This album is about simplicity – hence its title - and the chance to play a charming little acoustic without spoiling it with pick-ups. I seem to have come almost full circle to small acoustic and solo takes, and have collided once again with the huge separation that has occurred between a real acoustic guitar and the stage versions. Another realization was just how far we’ve come from the simple way we used to record music, and how much a kind of compressed over-production has become a part of the "acoustic" vernacular.

1/ Uncle Adrian

Steve Vai called me Uncle Adrian during a tour we did (T3 – the Tight Trousers Tour – they threw me on first to see if anyone was going to shoot). I thought Uncle was pretty funny at the time, but now five people are entitled to call me Grandpa, it seems more apt. And now here I am on the lad’s record label. Who’da thunk it, eh? The piece was one that came out of a period of looking for tunes in alternate open and stopped strings. It’s in standard tuning and played on a Brook Creedy guitar strung with bronze 12s. Phil Hilborne put a couple of Rødes and a Beyer in front of it. He says he can hear my feet tapping, and in a couple of places in the album I can hear where I moved.

2/ Jam Tomorrow

Yeah, right… An amalgam of a couple of twelve (ish) bars I doodled with now and again for a warm- up. Flip Scipio wondered if I was ever going to do anything with them beyond his kitchen. I might take another look at the first section, but this is where it’s up to at the moment. Played on the Creedy again, same strings, same mikes, standard tuning.

3/ La Giga Anziana

When I wrote it I imagined an elderly Italian couple dancing gently. It means The Elderly Jig, and as it’s elderly, it’s a little slower than a younger person might legitimately expect a jig to be. The Creedy, same mikes, same strings, tuned to DADgad

4/ The One-Eyed Turk

Named for the owner of a kebab shop on Shepherd’s Bush, around the corner from where I live. It’s open into the small hours, seems to have been there as long as I’ve been working, and has supplied my supper many a night after a London gig. For a while, some years ago, I was looking for a resonator guitar, but couldn’t find one that had the sound I had in mind. To be honest, I found a lot of stuff with escalated "vintage" prices that sounded pretty gutless.

I’d pretty much given up when I saw this one in a dealer’s wall. I heard it breathe somewhere around F over middle C as I walked up to it. It’s insufficiently old to be vintage, and is thoroughly nondescript. It also has a round neck, but an unplayable l.h. finger action, so at the time it was pretty cheap. I wondered about adjusting the neck angle, but was nervous of losing its voice, so I just keep it around to play a little slide on now and again for my own amusement. It has 013 to 060 strings on it, and I had to put a lot of gunk on my nails to make it through a take. Same mikes for the recording, and a very chipped ceramic bottleneck. The instrument is tuned DGDgbd.

5/ O’Malley & Delacey

Two London Irish musicians I worked with over different periods, and within whose various bands I learned much of my trade and earned an honest crust. Austin O’Malley I haven’t heard of or from for years, Pat Delacey died twenty years ago. I think my proudest moment with them was when we did a wedding party that ran on for five hours. We didn’t repeat ourselves once, except for doing The Kerry Dancers (an old waltz) as a quick-step to make up a dance set, and then we did it in three-part harmony – sax, guitar, and fiddle. I don’t remember how I got home – the best man attended to our lubrication very diligently. The Creedy, same strings & mikes, the tuning is DADgad.

6/ Short Story

When I wrote this the melody suggested a lyric saga so depraved I thought I’d better leave it as an instrumental. It’s played on the Creedy, tuned CGDgad, same strings & mikes.

7/ St.Mary’s

I first recorded this years ago, but we made it far too grand. I played my childhood instrument on that track too – an ancient oboe whose wood had swelled and bore contracted, flattening the pitch. I had to use a very hard reed and lip up the pitch almost a semi-tone after years neglecting my embouchure - a dizzying experience. I took another couple of swings at it on Wine, Women and Waltz – one on a high-strung, the other on a twelve-string. Neither seems right to me with hindsight – one slightly brassy and baroque, the other too Latin for the idea. This version is more a small parish hall than a cathedral, and it feels better for it. The Creedy in standard tuning, same mikes/strings, plus viola, flugel, bassoon, and arco bass

8/ Jam Today

Another of the warm-up twelve-bars. This was a straight take on the guitar Bill Puplett made, off an Ovation pick-up, through some scrappy older stage fx into a G3 PowerBook. It’s in standard tuning and I didn’t edit the clams; I’m too fond of it as a scruffy old friend to make it wear a suit and tie

9/ Old Friends

The piece comes out of being alone on the road too often. Steel guitar was one of the sounds that really turned me on to playing country in my very early days. I still love the simple harmonic structures and the sneaky little pedal harmony changes inside them. I used some excerpts from this piece (while I was still working on it) on the How To Cheat At Guitar video for Homespun to illustrate how harmonically versatile these little three note blocks can be. There are some alternate stopped and open strings phrases in here as well.

It was recorded on the guitar Bill made, using the Ovation pick-up buffered by a Fishman Pro EQ into a Yamaha AG Stomp. I’d tweaked the AG a bit to cope with the average soggy live p.a., but we found the first factory pre-set had the tone I wanted. We used that except for reverb and echo, ran it stereo into a tube mike pre and Phil used his reverb on the track.

10/ Ghosts In The Hills

Some American friends have told me about the sense of history they feel in England, the sense of paths well trodden over the years. In some parts of America, around the Appalachians, around the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee, I get the same kind of feeling, but it relates more to musical ancestry. There’s a reference to Juneapple in the uptempo section – how close this is to American versions I don’t know. I got the bones of it from the banjo player for whom I wrote Coging’s Glory.

This is done on Bill’s guitar again, fifth fret capo, tuning (at capo) GCGcea – you can probably hear where the 1st/a is retuned to g, and later back to a in the piece. It’s the same patch on the AG as on Old Friends.

11/ Een Kleijne Komedye

This was named after a little theatre in Amsterdam where I did one of my first significant solo gigs. The name is the old Dutch spelling. It’s an old solo recording, from a vinyl album that was recorded in a day, sold very few and then vanished as the record company went bust. They didn’t think the compact disc would catch on. I recorded it on a guitar that was gradually destroyed as I hacked it around experimenting, looking for sounds. I made the guitar itself from a neck from an Adamas that had been badly damaged, and the body from a nylon strung prototype Adamas that had been put together for John Williams. He had declared it too vulgar to have anything to do with, so I got it in a deal as payment for demonstrating something or other at a London musical instrument trade fair. I got some more parts for it – the treble side epaulette marquetry for the extra sound- holes I’d cut into the top, and a few other bits and bobs, from a written-off fire-damaged Adamas that was abandoned in my workshop. I think I still have the bridge somewhere, but the rest of it is gone and I have used the good parts elsewhere. The tuning is DGDgbe.

We recorded all the tracks except Jam Today & Een Kleijne Komedye at Phil Hilborne’s WM Studios in Pitsea, Essex in a couple of sessions, the first in February 2002, the second in May 2002.

Adrian Legg, London, January 2003