FIND WHERE THE GUITAR WANTS TO BE
TUNED
Browne owns enough acoustic guitars
that he can not only keep some in different tunings but can exploit
the way different guitars ring out uniquely in identical tunings.
"Some guitars are in the same tuning," he says. "The way they make
you play is different." And that becomes another way he matches
guitars with songs. "I play in Eb-major tuning [Eb Bb Eb G Bb Eb] a
lot," he explains. "This G tuning that's got the C on the bottom [C
G D G B D] is a favorite, and I can also do that in G#. I have these
Gibson CF-100s that sound so great with the Trance Audio pickup I
use, and once I realized how cool the first one sounded, when I
found another I'd get it. I finally had three—one in Eb, one in D,
and one in C#. At one point I thought, `Hmm, the one in D sounds so
good, I wonder if I could play the Eb one in D?' because it was
starting to pull up. When I tuned the Eb to D, it didn't sound
nearly as good as the D guitar. And when I tuned the D up to Eb, it
didn't sound as good as the Eb guitar. It's an organic, holistic
process of finding out where the guitar likes to live.
"My friend Martin Simpson goes in
and out of all these different tunings, and he's got this guitar
that serves that way of playing. I've learned so much from watching
him play, but if I did that [on one guitar], I'd be there all night
trying to get the guitar back into the tuning it wants."
When Bonnie Raitt joined Browne
on-stage in San Francisco for a couple of songs, she looked at her
pal's guitar arsenal and commented, "This is the best use of wood,
these guitars played by Jackson Browne." Browne agrees. "It is a
good use of wood. If you love guitars, there's never any end to
them." Nor is there apparently any end to the mindfulness Browne
devotes to the tones certain guitars and woods will produce.
Hawaiian luthier Mickey Sussman (www.anaholastringedinstruments.com)
built Browne a koa small-body guitar. "When I play my solo-acoustic
shows, that guitar winds up being like an amplified electric
guitar," Browne says. "It has this incredible voice. I've got
heavy-gauge strings on it. You can play Pete Townsend windmill
chords and it sustains like crazy."
Sussman is also making Browne a
copy of a Gibson Roy Smeck model. "I've got a couple of Roy Smecks
and nothing sounds like them," Browne says. "They were made as
Hawaiian guitars to play lap-style solos on, so there's a projection
to them—a very big tone, especially when you tune them down." He has
commissioned other guitar makers to make replicas, as well, because
he's curious about how different they might sound from the original
Gibsons. "In my mind's eye, that Smeck has a koa top," Browne says.
"But that's way too much hardwood on top of a guitar. This guitar is
going to have an Adirondack spruce top. The face is so big, it
wouldn't be the best use of the architecture of the guitar to have a
koa top, but it sure would look cool."
USE THE ONES YOU LOVE
Browne's passion for his
instruments compels him to use his favorites in live performance.
"Other people have great guitars that they don't take on the road,"
he says. "I was opening for Tom Petty a lot [in 2002] and I really
got into the panache, the style, and the flamboyance of that band
and their guitar collection. That's a band that takes out their real
guitars. There are no dummy guitars up there. It's the real stuff,
which makes it joyous for them to be there, playing all the real
instruments. For me it's the same."
Still, the bottom line for Browne
is what he's able to say in his songs. As he puts it, "My singing
and my guitar playing always serve the lyric writing." The solo
acoustic setting just allows him to put across his message more
tautly. He cites "Lives in the Balance" as an example. The song,
written in response to US interventions in El Salvador and
Nicaragua in the 1980s, confronts listeners in language still
relevant today: "You might ask what it takes to remember / When you
know that you've seen it before / Where a government lies to its
people / And a country is drifting to war." "This is one of my more
succinct songs," Browne says. "It's a very pointed line of
reasoning, and either you're going to listen to it or turn it off.
You're not going to tune it out and let it keep playing. I think it
succeeds in engaging people whether they agree or not. This solo
acoustic version is as compelling as the orchestrated one because
there's no place to go but to listen to the lyrics."
WHAT HE PLAYS
Acoustic Guitars:
Two 1930s Gibson Roy Smeck Stage
Deluxes, one kept in Eb standard tuning (standard tuning down a half step), the other played
in D standard (D G C F A D), sometimes with the sixth string dropped
to C, sometimes with the fifth string dropped to F;
1994 Gibson Roy Smeck Stage
Deluxe reissue;
three 1950s Gibson CF -100s kept in D , Eb, and C# major tunings (D A D F# A D tuned up or down a half step);
1950s Gibson CF-100E in G tuning with dropped C (C G C G B D);
1950s Martin 00-17 in G# modal tuning with dropped C# (C# G# D# G# D# D#);
1970s Martin D-41 in Eb standard tuning;
1966 Epiphone Troubadour in Eb minor tuning (Eb Bb Eb Gb Bb Eb);
Roy McAlister 14-fret David Crosby model in standard tuning;
Roy McAlister version of a Roy Smeck in Eb standard for fingerpicking;
Kevin Ryan Mission Grand Concert in G tuning with dropped C;
Anahola small-bodied koa guitar in G# tuning with dropped C#.
Strings: D'Addario phosphor-bronze in a variety of gauges mixed and matched
to specific guitars.
Onstage Amplification: Browne's rig runs directly into the house PA. His acoustic guitars
are fitted with Trance Audio Acoustic Lens T3 transducers; the
signal runs into a Trance Audio  Talisman or Amulet two-channel
preamp, and a Klark Teknik DN3600 programmable EQ; for solo shows
only, he adds a Neumann KM184 microphone for the guitars. He sings
into a Neumann KMS105 vocal mic. Gibson CF-100E played through a
Bandmaster amp with tremolo effect.
Picks: Jim
Dunlop medium flatpicks.
Capos: Bird of Paradise by Digital Revolution, Inc.; Shubb. |
