Authenticity

Hello Troubadourians! I’d like to pull a few threads from last month’s and previous columns. I’ll start with the concept of “sounding like yourself.” I think that should be the eventual goal of every musician, but few of us have an easy path to achieve it. Everyone starts by copying their favorite players, and that is a good thing. It puts us in touch with the history, the roots of the music that inspires us and keeps the music alive and relevant. But we and our music have to grow beyond our influences, or at least we should. And in doing so we will develop our own sound. Whether we like how we sound or not, is up to each of us to decide for ourselves. So, let’s think about that for a while… I’ve said many times that my first influence on the guitar was Chet Atkins. I desperately wanted to play just like he did. I even asked my guitar teacher to teach me how to do that. Lucky for me, he refused, telling me, “You’ll never be as “Chet” as Chet is, but you can certainly be excellent at being Charlie.” At that point in my development I’d only been playing for less than a year so the idea that I could play like Chet was rather far-fetched. Chet was an accomplished guitarist before he heard Merle Travis and decided to play like Merle, but of course I had no way to know that at 12 years old in 1971… But there it is, my hero wanted to play like his hero, and actually didn’t. Merle played with his thumb and one finger. Chet had to play with his thumb and two fingers in order to for him to hear from himself what he was hearing Merle play. With that small change, he developed beyond his hero and created his own style. I could go on about every other time I wanted to sound like that for any number of guitar players, but I think I’ve made my first point.

My second point is: what makes a player sound like they do? Does their sound come from their fingers or their gear? During my Chet phase I was convinced that if I had a Gretsch guitar like Chet, it would be my ticket to playing like him. An embarrassing story: there was a beautiful Gretsch Super Chet guitar at a local music store that I desired more than anything. I asked my parents to get it for me for Christmas, and I was truly shocked when it wasn’t under the tree on Christmas morning. This was a $1000 guitar back then, so you can imagine what a financial impossibility that would have been. I was so naïve… Truth is, Chet could—and did—sound like himself even if he was playing a Telecaster or a cheap nylon string guitar. It took me a long time to understand that concept. And that went beyond my initial influence. Every subsequent guitarist whose playing I chose to emulate carried an accompanying obsession with the gear they were using. That’s too much to list here—and too embarrassing—but trust me when I tell you that I spent a ton of money on guitars, and gear that in the end brought me no closer to sounding like those players. So, what did get me to where I could play and sound reasonably like my influences? Simple. Learning to play better, learning to hear/listen better, and learning that I could change and manipulate my sound with just my hands. When I was finally able to pull out of an unamplified acoustic guitar a reasonable imitation of the kerrang you get from a Marshall Plexi, I knew I was going in the right direction. I could authentically sound like anyone I wanted to, but more important, I could authentically sound like me.

My third point is: What makes me—or you—sound authentic? It’s in the hands. Once you learn to manipulate the guitar to make it do different things, sound like different players or different instruments, you are on your way to authenticity. But this still bears some examination. Each player should define what authenticity means for themselves. For me it means that I can hear every note, and so can the audience, whether or not that audience is live and in the room, of if I’m playing to a recording device capturing my performance for posterity. And it doesn’t matter if I’m playing an electric or acoustic guitar, subtly or aggressive, clean or dirty, chords or leads, you can hear what I’m saying through the music. The music is the language, the note choices are the syntax, and the tonality is the accent. The instrument and the gear are only the conduit for communicating what I want to say, authentically…

I’ll close with some questions: Where does your sound come from, your fingers or your gear? Or maybe some of both? And are you happy with your sound? If you are, that’s cool. Keep doing what makes you happy. Make choices to enhance what you already do. But I have to ask, if you rely on your gear to make the sound that you want to make, consider this: what if the gear fails or is unavailable? Can you still make the music you want to make? And is it authentic? You’ll have to answer that one for yourself… If the answer is yes then cool, keep on playing. But if there is even the slightest hint of no in your answer, then what do you do? You could be draconian like I did once early on in my playing and rebuild everything. But you’ll probably be okay with making changes to enhance—or alter—what you already do. Try compartmentalizing the things you like and the things you don’t like. Work on them one at a time. You can start wherever you want to start. Make what you like even better, or work on the things you don’t like until you do like them. Take however much time you need. There are no rules or wrong answers, except maybe, “I have to have that piece of gear to sound like me…authentically.”

Need to know? Just ask… Charlie (ask.charlie@hotmail.com)

Charlie Loach has played guitar in the San Diego music scene for many years, primarily with the power-house original rock band the Wild Truth and the elegant Americana ensemble Folding Mister Lincoln, performing and recording several CDs with both bands. More recently, he has performed with the vocal trio the Outliers. Charlie is an accomplished session player who is well versed in multiple genres of music from bluegrass to rock to country, and his playing is both smooth and tasteful whether on electric or acoustic guitar.