Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

Everyone from Papa Roach to Fleetwood Mac, I guess...

https://killerguitarrigs.com/best-songs-in-drop-d-tuning/

lenker's suggestion of starting new guitar players with open tunings is such a good idea

i always assume anyone playing a slide is in an open tuning

Drop D is fairly common in pop music, much more so than full on open tunings. "Everlong," "Dear Prudence," "Harvest Moon," "Heart Shaped Box" are a few I've learned that use Drop D.

― Indexed, Thursday, February 17, 2022 11:48 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also dozens upon dozens of grunge and metal songs

i'm talking the high string

If I may go back to "Symbol" for a moment, there is so much going on with this song! The alternate tuning - "Low C", which I personally had never seen and she doesn't even talk to in that video. The picking pattern that was also new to me; not sure if this is her creation or not -- the thumb is used on eighth notes 1,2,4,5,and 7. The syncopation in the verse's vocal melody -- which makes it a bitch to sing and play simultaneously, at least for me.

Then there's the internal rhyming in these lyrics, which looks more like rap:

Fly make flea, make haste, make waste, eight makes infinity
Times I've tried to make breaks, embrace for the enemy
Meet my face to face, time try to find the diamond
Counting time as time counts me, the river to the island

Fly/ti/my/ti/try/fi/di/is

haste/waste/brace/face

make/eight/brake

Low C is kind of a variation on DADGAD:

CGDGAD

that's more UK/celtic folky

open C (also the "Sun Tuning") which I referred to upthread is similar:

CGCGCE

that's like basically ground zero of american primitive/post-john fahey stuff, an excellent tuning to play around with, almost impossible not to sound good in that tuning

though in both you have to tune the low E past drop D to a low C, which as I said can be a challenge for some guitars if there's not enough string tension and also kind of hard to intonate properly, not that it's ever stopped me

Congrats you just managed to be rockist against Keith Richards, that is high level shit

i had a hearty lol at this

this is very classically "open c" sounding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep3YHeYP1AM

I cannot believe that Joni Mitchell did not have the resources to have multiple guitars tuned to different alternate tunings and a guitar tech to hand them to her as needed for the next song

I saw a claim that she has written for at least 50 guitar tunings. Found this:

The new influence at work is an electric guitar that Mitchell’s old friend Fred Walecki built for her to alleviate her ongoing frustrations with using alternate tunings--one of the reasons why she stopped touring in 1983 and was on the verge of quitting the stage permanently in the spring of ’95. Walecki, of Westwood Music in Los Angeles, designed the Stratocaster-style guitar to work with the Roland VG-8--the Virtual Guitar--a very sophisticated processor capable of electronically creating her tunings. While the strings physically stay in standard tuning, the VG-8 tweaks the pickup signals so that they come out of the speakers in an altered tuning. This means that Mitchell can use one guitar on stage, with an off-stage tech punching in the preprogrammed tuning for each song.

"This new guitar that I’m working with eliminated a certain amount of problems that I had with the acoustic guitar," Mitchell explained. "Problems isn’t even the right word; maddening frustrations is more accurate. The guitar is intended to be played in standard tuning; the neck is calibrated and everything. Twiddling it around isn’t good for the instrument, generally speaking. It’s not good for the neck; it unsettles the intonation. I have very good pitch, so if I’m never quite in tune, that’s frustrating." Over the years, Mitchell has learned to slightly bend the strings to compensate for the intonation error, but that effort is still often defeated by the extreme slackness of her tunings. "In some of those tunings I’ve got an A on the bottom or a Bb, and it’s banging against the string next to it and kicking the thing out of tune as I play, no matter how carefully I tweak it." The VG-8 sidesteps all these problems: as long as the strings are accurately in standard tuning, she can play all over the neck in the virtual alternate tunings and sound in tune.

xp lovely. Where would you recommend starting with Fahey? His discography looks intimidating.

xp Wow... how did that VG-8 work? Do other musicians use it?

(i.e., how well does it work / was it successful for Joni?)

xp lovely. Where would you recommend starting with Fahey? His discography looks intimidating.

― Indexed, Thursday, February 17, 2022 12:35 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

imo:

https://www.discogs.com/master/18614-John-Fahey-Volume-5-The-Transfiguration-Of-Blind-Joe-Death

https://www.discogs.com/master/98895-John-Fahey-The-Yellow-Princess

xpost The rest of the piece I found was this:

In every gig since the 1995 New Orleans Jazz Festival, Mitchell has used the VG-8, using its effects to build a guitar sound reminiscent of her Hejira era. But the VG-8 is having a much more far-reaching impact on her music than just providing a workable stage setup. In composing and recording the songs for her next album, she’s thrown herself into a heady exploration of the VG-8’s sampled sounds. "Sonically, it’s very new," she said of the tracks recorded so far. "I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s my impression, in a way, of ’40s music. Because I don’t like a lot of contemporary music--it’s just so formulated and artificial and false--I kind of cleared my ear and didn’t listen to anything for a while, and what emerged were these vague memories of ’40s and early ’50s sounds. Swinging brass--not Benny Goodman and not Glenn Miller but my own brand, pulled through Miles (Davis) and different harmonic stuff that I absorbed in the ’50s. Because this guitar has heavy-metal sounds in it and pretty good brass sounds, I’m mixing heavy-metal sounds with a brass section, so it’s a really strange hybrid kind of music. I’m a bit scared of it sometimes, you know. I don’t know what it is."

The richest irony of Mitchell’s VG-8 experience thus far is that this guitar rig, which was intended to make her alternate tunings more practical and usable, has in fact driven her to write her first song in 30 years in standard tuning! A technical barrier is responsible: the VG-8’s samples were created to be used with a guitar in standard tuning, and they’re not accessible (without programming modifications) in conjunction with her alternate tunings.

Here she is using a Parker Fly through the VG-8 (so basically just like Adrian Belew!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7YGPv3xeNY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgSS2fHbB7g

Imo ... it sounds like a guitar synth.

I recall watching Lindsey Buckingham's rig run-down. He uses a lot of alternate tunings, too, but he had one acoustic guitar with a Roland synth pickup by the bridge, which they can use to dial in or trigger a few synths or other sounds to beef up the string.

yellow princess and death chants, breakdowns and military waltzes IMO

if i could only pick one though it would be legend of blind joe death

xpost - Evan's Fahey picks are right on. I would add Days Have Gone By, Vol. 6 and Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes

Yellow Princess was my first

I'm going to stop because if I go further I'll just end up listing most of his discography and contending that some of the lesser loved ones are *actually underrated*

for someone still living among us, Glenn Jones is brilliant and probably is the closest to carrying on Fahey's work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13kYsBVErmI

Thanks all!

I'm slowly falling in love with this record. Even better that it's led to a discussion about tunings and Fahey recommendations!

Adrianne seems like a total dude and her dog has excellent bone-chewing skillz.

xxp ah that's from my favorite glenn jones album, and never seen that vid. lovely

I love how Lenker walked away from this whole teen-star thing her dad tried to build for her and has almost certainly ended up a bigger star (of sorts) — playing weird music with her weird friends — then he ever could have made her.

Glenn played my wedding and I consider him a friend, so I'm sorry but I need to put one more youtube clip of him in here along with ums, but I promise it is on topic because every song he does is in a different tuning, and in this clip he is using a partial capo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3L-acWwioE

amazing how songs on this record you didn't really give too much thought to hit you so hard all of a sudden. fuckin dried roses man...

Just had that feeling with Blurred View. I cannot get enough of this album, I think every song is my favourite until the next one comes on.

No Reason though lads...

Never heard them do anything so warm

or so damn catchy

and the flute

Also: "I wanna be the vape that gets you high" is such a great line

(different song, obvs. Just so many great moments on this album)

Yeah, I listened again today - separated the record into its 4-1/2 sessions in a playlist instead of listening to the album proper, and so many new chunks of awesome leaped out at me - songs I hadn’t thought about hit me harrrrd - and altho Topanga is as great as expected, each other session was just as grebt.

what's the story on adrienne's dad trying to make her a star?

https://www.discogs.com/release/12550569-AdriAnne-Lenker-Stages-Of-The-Sun

I can't work out if this album is Tusk or if it's Exile but I already prefer it to both. I literally love this album and I only heard it yesterday

I have an idea!

Yeah this album is absolutely stacked but lately I can't get past "Change" without re-listening like three times in a row. The elegant restraint of the arrangement; the way it lyrically zooms in scale from the cosmic to the personal; Death, like space / The deep sea, a suitcase.

It's even more magical knowing the album version was the very first rehearsal take they played in the studio; they didn't even know it was being recorded

Let's not compare it to other double albums!

I mean, to my ears it's a more tuneful John Martyn album, like, say, One World.

she's told the 'dad wanted me to be a teen star' story in a lot of interviews but this one is the most detailed telling i've seen: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1482-big-thiefs-adrianne-lenker-has-seen-some-shit/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJdqBKDzl_4

this is the only song from her teen album on youtube but i think the rest of it is pretty easy to track down

I almost posted about the flute on No Reason yesterday. Yeah, so many great hits and pieces throughout.

the two extended breaks in "no reason" are so good, really transcendent stuff

richard hardy plays the flute on it, he's some old session guy who played on a lot of carole king albums in the 80s. he was apparently just playing flute in a lookout tower near the studio & they heard it and loved it and asked him to come play with them on "no reason"

I spent the last two days listening to everything in Lenker's catalog on Spotify, and every bit of it is good to great. I thought I didn't like the first two Big Thief albums but they're both awesome?

haha, yeah, after some of the posts above about preferring the first couple albums - which i totally get! - i listened to them again and found myself aching to come back to the new one

I've heard these guys on podcasts and in mixes before, but I wouldn't have thought to give the album a spin without this thread. It's amazing. "No Reason" is as good as anything I've heard in the past five years.

it must be the sauce!

that's my grandma!

whatsa gonna taaaaaaaaaaaaaake

"Change" too

god, i hope that i have the strength and patience and wisdom to not blow-up when, 40 years from now, i'm watching whatever television is and an ad comes on, and it's bbq ketchup ("original 1992 formula!") and then the jingle goes "whatsa gonnnnna taaaaaaaaaaake? (to ketchup?!), and it's such a bastardization of the original but I know that either the musicians or their families will get that money, and also that i'm confident that the bbq ketchup is pretty good because i trust big thief to at least approve of the product

Probably one of the better albums to feature a teddy bear’s butt on the cover, for sure

haha, yeah, after some of the posts above about preferring the first couple albums - which i totally get! - i listened to them again and found myself aching to come back to the new one

My entry point was U.F.O.F., and the other night I put on that and Two Hands — both of which I like a lot — and they already felt like precursors, not quite fully formed things.

man ... when's the last time we had a thread that was this universally positive about a new album? i realize there have been some ILM love-fests, but this is some kind of reaction.