Whistle While You Work

Roy Nichols once asked Buchanan, “Where’d you get them bird sounds, Roy?” Guitar lore has it that Buchanan recorded the first pick harmonic (Buchanan called ’em “whistlers”) on “Potato Peeler,” a 1962 single he cut with Philly-based drummer Bobby Gregg. (True story: An unsuccessful online search for a reissue of the full song finally located an excerpt of the legendary moment... as a ringtone!!) Buchanan chalked up the prehistoric event to a happy accident in several of his GP interviews: “How I first did that harmonic thing was actually a mistake, and I only did it once so you have to really listen for it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was trying to hit one of those high notes that R&B sax players like Junior Walker and Plas Johnson would always hit. I thought we were going to have to do another take, but everybody was digging that one thing, so I just figured out what I did and I’ve been doing it ever since. You have to have a lot of treble to do it. As you pick the string, you let a little bit of the skin from the thumb touch the string with the pick. You’ve got to do it with pressure— you can’t do it easy—and it works best on the thinner strings.” (For the scientific lowdown on pick harmonics, see “Demystifying Harmonics,” in the May 2008 GP).

Pump Up the Excitement

While many of Buchanan’s solos culminated in wild excursions into pure sound that simply defy notation (playing above the fretboard, etc.), he had plenty of other ways to whip an audience into a frenzy. Roy envisioned building his blues solos the same way a preacher would excite a congregation. His strategy was to gradually turn up the heat every 12 bars so that each turnaround became more intense than the previous one until he finally reached a climax. (Tip: Listen to “After Hours” from Second Album. It’ll blow your mind.)

Another example is the showstopping tour de force in “The Messiah Will Come Again” (from Roy Buchanan). Following the song’s softspoken intro, Buchanan takes on the majestic, classically-inspired melody, building tension over each cycle of the 8-bar Am-G6-Fadd9- B7-E7 progression until he explodes with a barrage of sixteenth-note triplets that gliss all the way up the E string and continue off the fretboard until reversing direction just before hitting the bridge. It’s a spectacular moment.

Diversify

Buchanan considered himself primarily a blues guitarist, but his country roots were deeply embedded in the heart of the R.B. sound. Roy’s cover of the Don Gibson country classic “Sweet Dreams” (from Roy Buchanan) has remained a pinnacle of his career, a rite of passage for Tele-masters worldwide, and a widely licensed track most recently heard during the closing credits of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14