X-rated Bob wrote
Right Of Passage Martin Carthy.
I wish I could my guitar to sound like that. Forget about being able to play like Carthy, just SOUNDING like him would be so cool.
I've been listening to this on headphones this morning. That guitar sound is really getting to me.
It's the same sound I heard a couple of years ago in the King's Head pub in London (the same room where Brent would have seen Martin Simpson and WHEN are we going to hear about that?). I remember e-mailing a friend the next day and saying that I always think that good acoustic players have a "ring" in their sound, and that in Carthy's case the "ring" was like somebody smacking big church bells with a very expensive hammer.
Part of the sound is due to the tuning he uses - CGCDGA (low to high) which is very slack keyed. Part of it is down to his use of a metal thumb pick. But I think the largest part of it is down to him being Martin Carthy.
Again I remember that night in the King's Head and the things that struck me so clearly in the first few minutes. There was this TONE, and then there was the way he used it, letting the strings ring and ring and ring and then stopping them dead and very cleanly. This lends a percussive quality to his playing and the effect - especially on those not expecting it - is almost hypnotic. Very seductive.
On the same holiday I met a guy Roger Bucknall who makes guitars (Fylde) and also has done a lot of repair and set up work for Carthy over the years. He told me that Carthy worked very hard to get his tone right, that he first conceived it in his head and then figured out how to make it all happen. Bucknall said the zero fret is important to the tone. Carthy's famous Martin 000-18 is modified with a zero fret. The Martin Carthy signature 000-18 has a zero fret (Bucknall says Martin don't know how to do it properly) and his back up live guitar (a Fylde) has a zero fret too.
