Nick Drake: why???

£35 for the normal version might well be pricey but fair

£150 for the 10" single and the fancy version?

Think I'll hang on for the illegal download or whatever

"Road" is oftentimes my favorite Nick Drake song and is also proof that Nick Drake has the most incredible fingerpicking technique of anyone ever.
― Curt1s Stephens, Saturday, June 2, 2007 4:23 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is accurate. did he use three fingers in addition to his thumb? trying to wrap my mind around some of his patterns... pretty mindblowing stuff

i think i've read that nick used his right pinky at times

that would make sense. his thumb also sounds good at repeatedly striking the same string. would be hard if you're like me and used to octave-style string patterns.

so clean and droney. i love it. and this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IevsddOcJ7o

yeah he's just so metronomic, unflappable. makes it seem like no big deal, but it obviously is.

Nick Drake: how???

haha yes

Nick Drake: wtf???

"Road" is oftentimes my favorite Nick Drake song and is also proof that Nick Drake has the most incredible fingerpicking technique of anyone ever.
― Curt1s Stephens, Saturday, June 2, 2007 4:23 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is accurate. did he use three fingers in addition to his thumb? trying to wrap my mind around some of his patterns... pretty mindblowing stuff

― global tetrahedron, Monday, February 23, 2015 4:30 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know about "anyone ever" -- I mean, classical guitarists all use three fingers and thumb in pretty complex patterns (and non-patterns).

is there any known footage of him playing?

nope

& yeah, classically trained people do all kinds of wild technique things on guitar, might be the fact that drake was untrained that takes it into a different realm.

^ yeah, makes his style more sui generis/idiocyncratic. i'm sure there are 'schooled' players who are technically superior but his chops are just kinda mysterious

Where was it that I read that all those weird tunings he used is partly what made him such an awkward performer, and in turn heightened his depression? He'd play a song, then spend five minutes tuning, then song, tune ... etc. That supposedly is something the also forced Joni off the tour circuit. I know dudes like Richard Thompson generally try to stick or adapt to only a couple of tunings (standard and drop D, typically) with lots of capo use to get around the issue.

that sounds a bit mythologized imo, like tuning can be annoying but it doesn't have to take five minutes. don't doubt that he was awkward though

"schooled" just means someone showed you how to do something in person

it means you just get owned a lot

I mean I think Nick Drake is a great guitar player, I just don't buy into the "untrained" vs "trained" mythology. I have no idea whether he ever took a paid guitar lesson, whether he ever looked at a guitar book, or whether he ever sat down with other fingerpickers to learn picking patterns.

he probably did all of that -- i just meant that he wasn't someone who was a classically trained guitarist. he mainly learned from listening to records, afaik.

I dunno, I've seen people take five minutes to keep a guitar in standard. If he was using a whole bunch of weird open tunings and doing it by ear, shit adds up. I read that Joni would have needed something like 35 tunings for her ideal set, since so many of her songs are in a tuning. She apparently got one of those Parker guitars and a MIDI box to artificially alter everything for her.

http://www.guitarplayer.com/artists/1424/under-investigation-joni-mitchell-complete-so-far/50383

Says her songbook breaks down into 42 (!) tunings. Dunno how many Drake used.

surely joni could afford 42 guitars

She obviously could, but reportedly travelling with so many and keeping them in tune was just a constant pain.

Apparently Drake used 12 tunings: http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/tunings.html

just buy another guitar, hire a friend to tech, and prepare your 'nick drake still hasn't made it blog post' where you complain about paying your good friend and guitar tech.

Does anyone here have the Scott Appel (?)recordings? Been trying to hear these albums for years. Way out of print . I think there's just one or two tunes on YT?

<i>Where was it that I read that all those weird tunings he used is partly what made him such an awkward performer, and in turn heightened his depression?</i?

That was in the otherwise forgettable Joe Boyd book in fact.

Otherwise forgettable? Not the White Bicycles one then?

Yeah, White Bicycles, filled with insights like 'my generations white blues revival was better than yours' 'Nick was a genius' and other less than earth shattering insights.

huh, i thought that book was good
anyone read the new nick drake book?

I just don't buy into the "untrained" vs "trained" mythology.

Indeed. Who trained Bert Jansch? Or Davey Graham?

Wondering if he used fingerpicks -- his articulation was very strong

here he is -- looks like he had long fingernails
http://i2.cdnds.net/13/11/618x462/music-nick-drake.jpg

Awkward!

I played in a band with guys who used a bunch of different tunings, and it made for a lot of awkward pauses in the set. Sometimes we managed to put together a set list that optimized the tuning changes (especially if we also brought an extra guitar or two), but it didn't always work.

That's the point at which you need to have a chatty, relaxed rapport with the audience. I have a feeling that might have been a problem for Nick Drake.

"Hello, I'm Nick Drake. Please don't look at me."

I saw a Steve Earle/Shawn Colvin show last year, and as she was tuning she told a story about opening for Sting. She said something along the lines of every folk singer needs to know how to talk while tuning, to keep people engaged, and how she stuck to that even while playing arenas opening for Sting. She would stand there and talk and tune. Then one day she got off stage and there was Sting, who just sort of frowned at her at said "you know, you can just buy a better tuner and get it over with faster."

those are my least favorite folk singer moments. for example, the stuff neil young says tends to not be very funny. but everyone laughs, and it's just awkward!

... it's how Billy Connolly (and numerous other less stellar and talented folkie turned comedians) got started!

That's the point at which you need to have a chatty, relaxed rapport with the audience. I have a feeling that might have been a problem for Nick Drake.

Did you ever see Bert Jansch live? Chatty and relaxed he most certainly wasn't!

whereas john martyn had more rabbit on him than chas and dave's pet rescue

He (usually) had Danny Thompson with him also.

xposts: i saw jansch play an outdoor mini-folk festival type thing when he toured nz in the nineties, think his only comment was that the rain and surrounding terrain reminded him of scotland!

what a dumb thread concept

"drake fans have provided no satisfactory arguments" like wtf, it's pretty folk songs

yeah it's like he or she is reviewing a technical manuscript

feels like you rarely hear the "the boy was smoking mountains and mountains of weed" angle when people talk about why Nick Drake was so hopelessly withdrawn and depressed and anxious around people

i mean he must have brought at least 2 joints with him on each of his night drives across Great Britain right

are you suggesting he had been smoking too long?

The 'smoked too much weed' angle is central to Trevor Dann's biography 'Darker than the Deepest Sea' (which I haven't read). A review of it here mentions heroin use too:

Dann reveals that Drake was such a good customer that his Cockney heroin dealer bought him a car ("he's gotta 'av wheels"). Catastrophically, in terms of his mental health, he smoked "industrial quantities of cannabis", and Dann unpicks the details of Drake's disputed "suicide", pointing out that he could have taken only slightly more than double his customary dose of antidepressants; it's not hard to imagine someone in his state of mind doing that by accident.

Reminds me of the Billy Fury documentary where people kept saying he was sort of vague and not quite there a lot of the time, oh and that's right he'd been smoking shitloads of weed since the early 60s.