Hello Troubadourians! I’m writing this at 4am after playing a gig with my friend and brother Sven-Erik Seaholm at the Spacebar in La Mesa. Small venue, audience up close and personal, and just the two of us. No band, no tracks, no tricks… Pretty standard stuff. So, what did you mentally picture? I’ll bet it was a couple of guys playing acoustic guitars and singing songs, right? Wrong. Sven was playing an acoustic guitar, but I was playing an electric guitar with an electric guitar tone, you know, an edge-of-breakup-to-actual-dirt type of tone. A little delay to sweeten it a bit, but mostly no-shit raw electric guitar playing. I must be crazy—or clueless—to attempt such a thing (well, maybe a little of both…), but really, it is in service of the music that I do it.
Sven and I have been playing together since late ’89 or early ’90—we can’t agree on when—but it has certainly been a long time. Most of what we have played in that time has been with a full band, at the very least two guitars, bass, and drums. Electric guitars thrive in that environment and there they take on the personality that we are accustomed to: big, fat, and loud. So much fun! The bass and drums provide a solid foundation to play off of and the blending of the frequencies is the very essence of rock ‘n’ roll. In that environment an electric guitar can sing and soar, grit and grind, or chime and jangle and sound completely “natural” in doing so. Add a second guitar—usually electric, but maybe sometimes acoustic—and you have the meat-and-potatoes sound that defines multiple genres of music.
My comfort in this format is second nature, long settled over many years of repetition with many bands. Rock, blues, country, Americana, even jazz, I can instinctively dial it in and dial it up like I’ve been doing it all my life because, well, I have been doing it all my life. The same can be said for my comfort with the classic two acoustic guitars format. A parallel development arc to be sure but actually quite an easy skill to acquire. Acoustic guitars are inherently friendly with almost any instrument but especially other acoustic guitars. Ironically, electric guitars—without the support of a bass and drums—are decidedly unfriendly, especially toward acoustic guitars. I know this well. And yet, here I am gigging with Sven on acoustic guitar and me on electric guitar.
So why am I doing what I’m doing? Because as I said above, it is in service to the music, to the songs. These new songs that we’re playing, as well as some older songs, were written with the intent to be played by an ensemble, two guitars, bass, and drums at minimum. That is how they will be realized in the studio on record, and how they will be ultimately performed live. Sure, we could simply play as a duo and use two acoustic guitars. That would be easy enough, and that’s where we started, but those songs were never meant to be constrained by an instrumental approach that was easy. And we wanted to represent them as they were meant to be heard or at least as close as we were able do that. Which meant that I would have to learn to play them on electric guitar and make it blend—or not—with a single acoustic guitar.
Honestly, I resisted as long as I could… I am so comfortable playing an acoustic guitar outside of the normal expectations and constraints and I can make it sound very non-acoustic without resorting to a lot of—or any—effects or tonal modifiers, so I figured I could just do that…again. And that did work at first just to get the songs into my head. But it became clear that if we were going to play them as they were intended to be played, I’d need to commit to playing the electric guitar. To say that this was outside of my comfort zone is an understatement. To begin with, the dynamics of an electric guitar are difficult to control and still maintain the inherent versatility in tonal selection. Sure, I could just settle on a generic, clean tone and roll with it. However, I find that very boring to listen to as a player and so I project that boredom onto the potential listeners. Right or wrong, I chose to do as much as I could to harness the electric beast and wring out the tones and sounds that I’d use in a normal ensemble, just at a lower volume. Low enough, in fact, to blend with an unamplified acoustic guitar. The idea being that if I could make it work in rehearsal with no microphones for vocals and an unamplified acoustic guitar, I could probably make it blend in a live situation with a simple volume increase…
In practice, that is actually more complicated that it seems. First, you have to dial-in the amplifier. Amplifiers are notoriously non-linear. While the knobs go from 1 to 10, that doesn’t mean that whatever parameter that knob is assigned to—volume, treble, bass, etc.—is applied or removed equally at every point. In fact, amplifiers have a sweet spot—sometimes more than one—where they sound their best, while other settings can sound dull and lifeless. The sweet spots don’t always match up to the limitations of the environment where you are trying to use them. Frankly, when they sound good, they are usually too loud, and certainly too loud to blend with an acoustic guitar. Then there are whatever effects you want to use. And they can often be as fussy as an amplifier. Finally, all of this tone creation and shaping needs to be controllable from the guitar. In a duo situation, trying to do the “pedal dance” to change tones is not practical and makes you look like you are disconnected from the music. Because you probably are…
Somehow, through some combination of experience, gear knowledge, a good ear, and sheer dumb luck, I’ve been able to create a sound that works for the duo gig and is also scalable to a larger ensemble situation. Workable for now but always evolving and refining, I’m getting comfortable playing electric guitar with just an acoustic guitar as support. I can get real electric tones that complement the vocals, don’t sound out of place, and don’t dominate the soundscape. And most of all, they serve the songs and the music. Even still, I often feel like I’m working without a net…
Need to know? Just ask… Charlie (ask.charlie@hotmail.com)