{"id":145848,"date":"2024-10-27T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-27T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=145848"},"modified":"2024-10-25T12:25:04","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T19:25:04","slug":"pat-metheny-explores-baritone-guitar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/pat-metheny-explores-baritone-guitar\/","title":{"rendered":"50 Years into His Career, Pat\u00a0Metheny Explores a New Landscape of Sound on the Baritone Guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Pat
Photo: James Katz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last fall Pat Metheny kicked off a tour unlike any he\u2019d done before, surveying the sounds and approaches of his diverse solo projects going back to the 1970s. I caught the tour opener in Homer, New York, and while Metheny was alone onstage, the show was anything but small. Over the course of the evening, he performed with a dozen guitars\u2014acoustic, electric, nylon-string, steel-string, archtop, even the 42-string Pikasso guitar\u2014building from intricate fingerstyle solos to live looping with additional guitars mounted on stands to the crescendo of the Orchestrion: his mad-science mechanical band, including an acoustic drum kit, controlled by his guitar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it happened, on that night Metheny debuted a special guitar: a Manzer nylon-string baritone that he\u2019d just decided to try with the third and fourth strings tuned up an octave\u2014a setup he\u2019d used in the past on a steel-string baritone. Metheny became entranced with the possibilities and challenges of the nylon baritone in this tuning, and as the tour continued he immersed himself in it, onstage and off. And just a few months later he decided to capture his discoveries in the studio, resulting in the new album MoonDial<\/a><\/em>\u2014a gorgeous, meditative journey on the solo baritone, from original pieces to reimagined settings of Chick Corea\u2019s \u201cYou\u2019re Everything,\u201d the Beatles\u2019 \u201cHere, There, and Everywhere,\u201d and the traditional \u201cLondonderry Air.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Metheny keeps breaking ground in this way, 50 years into his career as one of the leading jazz guitarists of our time, will come as no surprise to anyone who\u2019s followed the trail of this restlessly inventive artist. Though he often plays electric guitar, Metheny\u2019s acoustic-oriented projects have been impactful, spanning the folk fusion of New Chautauqua<\/a><\/em> (1979), duets with bassist Charlie Haden on Beyond the Missouri Sky<\/a><\/em> (1997), and the solo steel-string baritone excursions of One Quiet Night<\/a><\/em> (2003) and What It\u2019s All About<\/a><\/em> (2011).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Metheny\u2019s acoustic work since the \u201980s, Canadian luthier Linda Manzer has been a vital partner, creating dozens of custom instruments to fulfill his wide-ranging and sometimes fanciful requests (see \u201cBuilding the Dream\u201d sidebar below). What\u2019s remarkable is that no matter what type of guitar is in Metheny\u2019s hands, or what style of music he\u2019s playing, his voice and touch are always instantly identifiable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the summer I caught up with Metheny over Zoom, and then by email, where he shared these thoughts on his latest solo ventures\u2014<\/em>and why every one of his 50-plus releases feels like a single album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What led you to explore the nylon-string baritone guitar?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The journey into the world of baritone for me began with the memory of a tuning that a guy in my little town in Missouri had shown me. He told me he was building a double-neck guitar for himself, a regular guitar and a baritone guitar, and he mentioned as I was leaving his garage where he was working on this instrument, \u201cThe only way a baritone guitar works is if you tune the middle two strings up an octave.\u201d At the time he told me that, I really had no idea what he was talking about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many years later, Linda [Manzer] had a client she had made several guitars for, Craig Snyder. She made her first baritone guitar for Craig, and Craig had it in a studio where we happened to both be working. I\u2019d never seen anything like that. I played it, and I was like, \u201cOh, man, I\u2019ve got to ask Linda if she would make one of these for me,\u201d which she did. And then, honestly, like everybody with a baritone guitar, you don\u2019t quite know what to do with it, because it doesn\u2019t really fit in a lot of situations, not to mention that a lot of the normal voicings in a conventional baritone tuning are almost too low. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I then remembered what I had heard [about the octave tuning] when I was 12 or whatever and thought, Oh, I\u2019m going to try that. So I tuned the middle two strings up an octave\u2014you know, found the correct strings and so forth\u2014and really not knowing what I was doing, I made that record One Quiet Night<\/em>. Most of it was improvised on a single night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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