Laurence Juber, DADGAD Excellence (interview) (Full Article)
Laurence Juber, DADGAD Excellence (interview)
| POSTED BY: Jens | POSTED ON: 03/04/07 22:14:42 | ||
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Laurence Juber is well-known for his time as lead guitarist with Wings and for his beautiful arrangements of Beatles songs, but Laurence Juber is so much more. We had the chance to talk to Laurence at the 15th Guitar Festival in the Medieval town of Soave in Italy, where he did workshops and played concerts along with Tommy Emmanual and Pete Huttlinger. How to you approach arranging fingerstyle versions of other people’s songs and records? Well, just making music on the guitar, and try to be as true as possible to the original music, but within the character of the guitar, and so much of it comes from an understanding of harmony and how the bass notes relate to the melody and to be able to have all those musical ingredients be transparent, so the listener is hearing a performance inspired by something else along with the memory of the original record, or a picture that I paint with the arrangement. Do you know from the beginning which tuning to use and which feeling you want to obtain when arranging a song like Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”? The feeling of the piece is very clear, and I also have the image of Strawberry Fields itself, which is the place that inspired John Lennon. I have the sound and the feeling of the original Beatles record and I try to work out where it is going to sit on the guitar. My arrangement of the intro of the song is right out of the book, just as you hear it on the original record, but what makes it unique is the DADGAD tuning that just has this strong sound. What is special about some of the fingerings I use is that the highest string is not the highest note in the chord and that means that the highest strings are still ringing when I change chords and each phrase connects to the next phrase and that makes it very ‘guitaristic’ but not necessarily a typical guitar arrangement. Has Paul McCartney heard your record “One Wing” which is a recording of arrangements of Wings songs? Yes, he heard “One Wing” and he really liked it. He actually asked for me to do that record when we gave him a copy of my record “LJ Plays The Beatles”. Paul asked me; “Well, what about Wings?”, so in a certain way “One Wing” was a gift to him. Paul likes it when people do his tunes. But it is very important to him that people don’t just do copies of his songs, but that they interpret the songs and he recognised that I was bringing my interpretations into the arrangements. Apart from doing albums with arrangements of other people’s songs you also compose a lot of original material. How do you decide when it is time for your own compositions? Well right now I am a doing an album of composition by Harold Arlan who wrote the music for “The Wizard of Oz”, “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Stormy Weather”, you know, really great standards. When deep into projects like that it doesn’t really give me much time to work on my own stuff, but sometimes I’ll be sitting at the airport, waiting for a plane and pull out the guitar and start working on own of my own tunes. Sometimes a new song takes 10-15 minutes to write, and other songs may take up to a year. Eventually I will have enough material to start thinking about making a new CD. After I finish the Harold Arlan project I want to do another DVD with new music so I have a lot of writing ideas for that. How to you approach composing original material? When I work with my wife Hope, who also produces me, we work on telling a story because all the musical stuff, the mechanics of music and guitar playing are secondary from a performance point of view to the ability to tell the story, but it is important to pay attention to the detail of the music in order to do it effectively. Often the story we work with as a base for the composition is something I will not repeat, just a story I have in mind when playing. But other times, as with the song “White Pass Trail” about a place in Alaska, the music is painting a picture, like in the 19th Century when composers would write to tell a story. So something like that is very specific to the composition itself, where as other times with f.ex a song like “Fountain Jumping”, the images are there to help me shape the music and not specifically telling a story. Another example “Love at First Sight” from the album “Guitarist” is inspired by when Hope and I met, and it is kind of a song but without words, just communicating an emotion. It is also important for me to have an instrument that can really “sing”, because I have learned that so much of my music comes out of the inspiration of the sound. I listen to all kinds of music, although I don’t listen much to guitar music. The problem with listening to guitar music is that you have a very narrow focus. You hold your guitar in a special angle when you play… I hold the guitar at a 45 degree angle to my body. If you hold the guitar so you can actually see the fingerboard you have a problem, because then your left wrist is working too hard, and doing stretches become more difficult. If you hold the guitar parallel to you body, or tilting it slightly forward the guitar is much more accessible and gives me more to play with. The body size is important because you need to have your right arm and elbow free, and with the OM size, which is identical to the vintage triple-o, your elbow doesn’t get pushed out too far. OM sized guitars are perfect for fingerstyle playing. Do you practise every day? I practise a lot but not in the conventional sense. My practise is composing and arranging. I don’t practise technique for the sake of technique, but if I have a figure that is part of an arrangement I might practise that in order to feel comfortable with it and to learn. Repetition is very important for learning, but I don’t practise scales very much. I play every day to stay familiar with the guitar and to keep the fingers moving. Do you believe that fingers have a memory? Yes, absolutely, but you to connect that with the emotion of the music as well as with the ear and with the understanding of music. So it’s a combination of muscle memory, emotional memory, imagination and sound. I play in a lot of different tunings, so I can’t rely on remembering where things are with the left hand. I also have to remember the sound and the relationship between that sound and the understanding of the harmony. Apart from the DADGAD tuning that you use extensively, what are your other favourite tunings? Yes, apart from standard tuning I use the DADGAD a lot, but also CGDGAD which gives me a very extended range. I use that tuning for my arrangement of Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme”. The CGCGAD tuning has such a rich voicing, almost like a piano, which opens for a whole new spectre of harmonics. Would you recommend beginners to dive directly into alternative tunings? What should come first is the understanding of music because that is the key to understanding other tunings, otherwise it just becomes muscle memory. There are many guitar players who use DADGAD, but only play Celtic music, which is great, but it can be used for so many other things. You can get fantastic results from exploring, but in order to explore you have to understand what you are exploring. You need to understand keys, because if you are in DADGAD you may only be playing in the key of D, because it is a very ‘D-centric’ tuning, but if you play it in the key of F, it suddenly has a whole other character. For me the beauty of playing in altered tunings is the ability to play music in a way that you can’t do in standard tuning. Some of these things you can actually do in standard tuning, but you really have to look for it and you still need to understand the music in order to do that. I always recommend that you start in standard tuning and learn the music theory, and then you can go to an altered tuning and have a better understanding of how it works. As long as you understand the music you don’t have to know how to read music. Many great musicians do not know how to read music. Reading music is a good method of learning, but it’s not essential. You use a lot of different techniques, such as slapping and harmonics. Where does that come from? Well simply just because I need it, and slapping is a rhythmic element that is very useful and expressive. It isn’t just technique for it’s own sake. It is technique in order to enhance the groove. The bonus of slapping is that it makes a great performance as well, but that is not the main reason, it is not just about being flashy, it actually has to serve a musical purpose. Sometimes a song has an empty space and I need to find a way to fill it with something that can give it more dynamics, which is very important. Using the guitar as a rhythmic instrument by hitting the top can be very effective and you can see that the top of my guitar shows signs of this. Maybe not as much as on Tommy Emmanuel’s stage guitars. He is more extreme in his use of the guitar as percussion, but guitars should show signs of wear. When did you start working on your signature model with Martin Guitars? Well, it started with me ordering a custom shop guitar five years ago, which was an OM18 and it turned out so well that they asked me if I wanted to do it as a signature model. Martin had the first proto type ready in January 2002 which they launched at the NAMM show. After a couple of years they said that they wanted to do it again, this time as a herringbone OM28 in Brazilian rosewood as well as in Indian rosewood, and now it is available as a custom shop edition in Madagascar rosewood. What were your requests apart from the choice of wood? A big part of it was having an adirodack top, and I wanted them to make me a guitar with the sound of an early 1930ies guitar with a 2 1/4″ string spacing which is a bit narrower than the typical 2 5/16″ vintage string spacing. The 2 5/16″ makes it more difficult playing bar chords higher up on the neck. The 2 1/4″ spacing is just right, so that the high and low E’s don’t go off the fingerboard. Your OM28 custom guitar is stripped of ornaments… I didn’t want to have my signature on the fretboard, and the OM18 had three dots, but my concept is that it should be like a steelstring classical guitar, and when you play you don’t look at the fingerboard. Maybe if I’m teaching or doing a workshop it may help to have the dots, but for me it’s enough to have the dots on the sides. What else do you need…and I think it kinda looks cooler. I’d rather put the value into having good wood and good sound. The retail price is US$ 5.600 which is very good for the types of wood that are used. This one I am holding now is actually number 2 in the series, but it is identical to the ones you can buy in the shops. It works perfectly with the GHS signature bronze strings that were designed for me, and they are cryogenically frozen to last longer, because I “kill” normal non-treated strings very quickly. The GHS strings are quite bright when they go on, but they keep the sweet ring to them. The ones that I have on the guitar here now, are the ones I used for the concert Friday night, and today, Monday they are still sounding good with a strong even harmonic balance. I use strings in True Medium gauge (13,17,24,32,42,56) which suits me well and they are perfect for the DADGAD tuning. I have tried coated strings like Elixirs but they don’t ring. When I play I like to hear all the harmonics and coated strings sound too muddled to ring out strongly. What are the 3 most important things to keep in mind for young guitarists approaching fingerstyle guitar playing? Practise, practice and practise. Practise music, practise imagination, and practise guitar. It is so important for young guitarist to really understand music and not approach the guitar just in “how many licks can I play?”. Interview by Jens Christensen, first published in Acoustic Magazine (UK)
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