HOMEGROWN MUSIC TRY SOME SLIDE GUITAR!

Image Gallery

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

TRY SOME SLIDE GUITAR!

PHOTO BY BRENT THORGREN

Marc Bristol—a homegrown musician who performs regularly throughout the Pacific Northwest—began sharing his knowledge of do-it-yourself entertainment with MOTHER-readers back in issue 50. Marc's columns have touched on everything from access information for recorded music to detailed instructions on how to make your own instruments. Marc is interested in hearing any suggestions, comments, or questions you may have about the subject of do-it-yourself music, and he'll try to write about requested topics in future columns. Address your correspondence—for this column and this column only—to Marc Bristol, Dept. TMEN, 18520 312th Avenue, N.E., Duvall, Washington 98019.

Not long after I took up playing the guitar, I was given an old musical instrument that had weathered more than a few years in a corner of my grandfather's shed. It was a guitar designed to be played on the lap . . . using a steel bar to chord the strings. Well, never having seen such a thing before, I quickly attempted to play a few songs on it in "normal" guitar fashion . . . and ended up highly frustrated. Later I learned that many of my pickin' friends had had similar experiences.

However, I soon discovered that my peculiar acquisition was actually a "Hawaiian guitar" ... a type of instrument that had been tremendously popular back in the 20's and 30's. As a result of that fad, thousands of "lap guitars", as they came to be called, were sold all across the North American continent . . . and many of them can still be found today, primarily in secondhand stores and thrift shops.

THE HAWAIIAN INFLUENCE
According to legend, a man by the name of Joseph Kekuku invented the lap guitar quite unintentionally. The Hawaiian had been humming through a comb and tissue paper kazoo one day while his guitar rested on his lap. The comb slipped from his hand onto the strings of his instrument . . . and Joseph was delighted by the sound it made.

Although the Hawaiian people have long possessed a great musical tradition, its focus—up to that time—had been on vocals ... often with some drum and seashell accompaniment. Guitars, however, had been brought to Hawaii by Mexican and Portuguese settlers . . . and, with Kekuku's discovery to inspire them (and the later development of the technique to instruct them), the islanders soon took to tuning those instruments to an "open" or "sung" chord. This style of tuning—which is known as slack key because some strings are turned down from the standard tension to achieve the open chord—simplified both the chording process and the task of tuning by ear. When a guitar is tuned to an open chord, you see, a person can simply lay one finger straight across the fret board to achieve a major chord. This allows the player to slide a steel bar up and down the neck of the instrument to create different chords and sliding notes . . . resulting in sounds that remind many folks of palm trees swaying in a tropical breeze!

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print