This album is about the guitar but it’s also about my personal history with stringed instruments and guitar styles, from classical guitar through blues, rock and slide guitar to jazz guitar, traditional music tunes, songs and accompaniment, Renaissance lute, Appalachian fingerpicking, open tunings, Sahel music, North Indian Raga, Pibroch, European and American east and west coast minimalism. Underlying all of this is a deep and loving engagement with microtonality, hand-made instruments and electroacoustic music, music made with recorded sounds.

I like the sound of the guitar, the allusions to both popular and less well-known styles. I like when the guitar sounds like a guitar and I like that every guitar sounds different from every other, otherwise I wouldn’t waste my money buying so many.

All the pieces on this album were recorded in single takes without overdubs. The music is played fingerstyle. I want to make the best of all those years of classical guitar practice and more recently an intensive spell of Piedmont woodshedding. Plus I’m warm to Segovia’s idea of the guitar as a mini-orchestra and for me fingerstyle honours that notion. The pieces are part-composed, part-improvised, more accurately improvised from a few preconceived ideas.

It’s taken me a long time to understand how to use pedals. This album was made using lots of pedals set out in two lines from an Ernie Ball Stereo Pan Volume Pedal fed into two amplifiers, a Fender Princeton Reverb and a Vox Valvetronix VT40+. You’ll hear the lines panning slightly left and right. The main guitar is a Yamaha Revstar, 'the best guitar in the world’ (obviously). I also used a cheap Ibanez 335 copy which is more or less 'the second best guitar in the world’.

Let’s leave the open tunings for another day.

The music was recorded in the summer and early autumn of 2023 in my quiet, comfortable and well padded front room. For this project I used a matched pair of Audio Technica 3032 omnidirectional microphones set up in a DIY head-spaced parallel barrier array, fed into a Sound Devices MixPre-3. Because I’m using omnis you’ll hear the clicks of the pedals as I work through some of the pieces. Never mind. This headspace rig has served me for over two decades, from field recording to studio projects to live performances. If you like the sound of the microphone set-up have a look at Curtis R. Olson’s pages: www.trackseventeen.com/mic_rigs.html