Interview with Laurence Juber
PART 2
August 2010
PART 2
Dr. D: As a proud owner of a Laurence Juber Signature Martin guitar – with Madagascar Rosewood back and sides – I was particularly interested in the new model that you played on your most recent tour, with Maple back and sides. Is this another step along your path in search of the perfect guitar? Or is it more a differentiation in the line?
LJ: It’s a differentiation - I don’t know if there is a perfect guitar.
Dr. D: Yes, no one guitar can do everything. I was kidding a bit about something you said in another interview about questing for the perfect guitar.
LJ: Yeah. There is an appropriate guitar. And the one thing that all of these guitars have in common is the body size, the cutaway, the dimensions, and the Adirondack Spruce top. And that’s a big part of it. I will trade off for various reasons. It takes a few years for these guitars to mature, for their real personality to emerge. The Madagascar guitar is coming up to five years, I think – I think I got this one in 2005. So it’s coming to a nice phase of its growth. And as much as I truly love Mahogany, I don’t like to travel with mahogany guitars. Because I’m fairly rough on my guitars on the road. Like, I walk off stage and I walk into a door or something. [laughs] The Mahogany guitars are very light and they are not quite as robust. The Madagascar Rosewood is I think for me is a splendid compromise between that really kind of vintage sound of Brazilian Rosewood Martin. But the Brazilian [LJ Signature] Martin that I have sounds very 30’s. It’s a great guitar, and it’s a great flatpicking guitar too, but I don’t think it’s quite as versatile as a Madagascar for me. It’s a great voice but I always listen to it and think: “Wow, you know that sounds like an old guitar. It sounds like a 30’s instrument.” Which is good when you want that sound, which is a very desirable sound. But this Maple guitar, well the thing about it is that it’s still a baby. I’ve had it only a little over a year. It’s a very articulate instrument, but it’s an infant. It just got a re-fret, the jack went bad on the pickup so I’ve got to replace it, so right now it’s not the main road guitar. I’ve actually been travelling with the Madagascar. But I just killed a couple of the tuners on that, so I’ve got to replace those. Pretty soon the Maple will settle down from its re-fret and will go back into circulation, because I really like Maple. I think it’s great. I used it on a couple of tracks on the album: “No Reply”, “I Feel Fine” too.
Dr. D: Wow, I would not have thought those were the same guitar.
LJ: Yeah, they are. And then Michelle was done on a Brazilian Collings OM. That’s probably the most sophisticated of those particular guitars that I own. “The Long and Winding Road” was played on my original Collings Mahogany Sitka OM1 that I used for a lot of LJ Plays The Beatles Vol. 1. So it was a bit of a tip of the hat to that. It’s also a very sweet, totally in-your-face kind of sound. It doesn’t have that broad spectrum. It’s a much more ‘framed’ kind of sound.
“Here, There and Everywhere” was the Martin Brazilian Rosewood – not in its vintage mode, more than anything else, in its clarity kind of mode. I did “Dear Prudence” on that guitar too. So I just disproved my own theory! Typically I take that guitar to a party if I expect to be playing Django-style stuff with a flatpick. [laughs] But equally I could take the Maple too, because it does that really well.
Dr. D: Is there a release date yet for the music and tab book that accompanies the CD?
LJ: I have to finish it. I’ve been so busy, I’m still working on transcriptions. I don’t expect it before the New Year. With any luck, if I can get it all done by the end of September we should be able to get it into production fairly quickly, but things keep getting in the way. I think I have a clear week to do something and then [snaps his fingers] it’s all gone. I just have to finish whipping it into shape. Most of it’s done.
Dr. D: Is transcribing enjoyable for you or is it a chore?
LJ: I do enjoy the process. but it’s time consuming, and therefore it’s a chore, because anything that sucks up time is a chore these days.... [laughs] But I learn from doing it.
I’m always happy to have some music in front of me because it just keeps that skill alive. Also, what’s helping me, is that I got a “Magic TrackPad.” That helps, because I’m no longer using a trackball. It’s better.
Dr. D: And you are on a Macintosh, right?
LJ: Oh yeah, I’m a Mac guy. Have been for years. Before that I was an Atari ST guy.
Dr. D: Yeah, I had an ST too.
LJ: I had a 1040. I had a TT at one time too. With a big monitor. Whew, Cubase on that was pretty spiffy! Ooh! Then I ended up moving over to Mac, and Cubase on the Mac, and then Digital Performer, then finally ended up with Logic.
Dr. D: So do you do your recording in Logic?
LJ: Logic and ProTools. And for notation, Sibelius, but I have to use Sibelius 5 and 6. Hal Leonard won’t take it in [version] 6, they want it in 5.
Dr. D: That’s odd considering that Sibelius 6 has been out for quite a while now.
LJ: Well typically institutions are slower to upgrade.
Dr. D: You have mentioned a jazz-blues album in the works. Will that be your next CD?
LJ: There are two others in the pipeline first. There’s a live album, with an accompanying DVD. And also, I did a documentary score recently for an NBC Dateline show called Children Of The Harvest.
Dr. D: Yeah, I saw the Dateline clip online. I put a link to it on my blog.
LJ: James [Jensen of Solid Air Records] wants to do a CD of the soundtrack. We’ll actually release that as a CD. That was a fun project.
Dr. D: How long did the score take you?
LJ: About 10 days. And then I had to make some changes because they kept re-editing the picture, because they could. So certain things got stretched out a little bit.
Dr. D: Is the whole score solo guitar?
LJ: There’s a little bit of keyboard here and there, but minimal. Most of it was guitar and dobro. I played lap dobro.
Dr. D: I didn’t know that. Do you play piano too?
LJ: Yeah, I play ... badly. But I can score on a keyboard, In fact I only think I only ever used the keyboard on one cue and I’m not sure it made it into the final cut. Actually it was using the Strawberry Fields [Mellotron] flute patch. [laughs] There was some electric guitar on there. My goal was to have, as much as possible, just sounds coming from guitars. So there was some percussion stuff where I hit the guitar. I got a kick drum out of it. Just took that sample, dropped it an octave , EQ’d it and it sounded like a kick drum. But it was just me hitting the body.
But it wasn’t a particularly dense texture. A lot of it was solo guitar, or the guitar and dobro. I also did some dobro stuff for the video game StarCraft II, which recently came out. I did some dobro stuff on that as well, on a lap dobro not a National-style one. A bluegrass style dobro, except it’s more a kind of rustic blues. And then some electric things, where I needed some textural delay stuff, like panning delays where I would play a note and it would rhythmically go from one side of the stereo to the other. Stuff like that is nice to set up a texture without getting too dense harmonically.
Dr. D: From what I saw it seemed to be in a rural setting, so the acoustic and dobro makes sense.
LJ: Well they wanted a rural quality but they didn’t want it to be too Spanish-sounding. They wanted to still keep it Americana.
Dr. D: I would guess that it would be easy to fall into cliché if you did typical guitar-type things. Did you have to watch out for that?
LJ: Oh, always. My compositional technique for that kind of thing is just to go for it, to commit to whatever I’m doing. There’s a reason to play what I play and I try not to waste anything. So I like to get a sense of where it’s going and just nail it and move on. Most of the time you don’t have time to re-write stuff anyway, especially when you’re doing the performances too. If I’m writing stuff down on paper and I know there’s an orchestra in it that’s different method of doing it. But for something like that, it was very performance-driven. You’ll hear it on the CD. It was fun.
Dr. D: What is your recording process like?
LJ: The recording process was pretty straight ahead. I have my mics set up and I just sit down in front of them and play.
Dr. D: Do you have a goal that you strive for with your recordings?
LJ: From the guitar player’s perspective, my goal with all this stuff is to find that nexus of the guitar, the music, and the iconic cultural end of it and to do it in a way that engages a listener. But also to satisfy myself as a musician and as a guitar player. And it’s a challenge that I enjoy. It’s a challenge that I relish, because otherwise, if I wasn’t pushing myself to do this, then I’d just be repeating the same stuff and I’m not willing to do that. Because the artistic side of me has always driven the guitarist side of me – outside of the pure professional “OK, I’m a studio musician. I’ve got the right gear. I’ve got the right pedals. I’ve got the right sensibility.” But once I became an artist I realized that the thing that I was always trying to do, even as a studio player, was inject something of my own into it. And now, by having established myself as an artist it gives me the freedom to make an artistic statement. But in doing so, I find myself making a guitaristic statement too. And this is what I was saying [about tunings] that no matter how much I try DADGAD always kind of calls to me, because there is some guitaristic imperative. Sometimes it will just propel me out of my seat when I’ll discover something on the guitar and it’s like: “YES!” Those Eureka! moments. It’s almost like you go through the wormhole. I find myself getting sucked into this moment of revelation, and then it’s like: [very calm, almost bored] “OK, figured that one out. Next?”[laughs] But the joy of it is to be able to go to that place in performance. To be able to go to a place where it’s like: “Oh yeah, I remember that moment where the inspiration happened with this, and let me at least communicate my feeling of that and incorporate that feeling into the performance. Because none of this matters without an audience. And what’s really gratifying is that I find my audience is growing. So as long as that keeps going on, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.
Dr. D: I think what I like most about your playing is that you don’t just cobble together some tried-and-true guitar clichés with a new chord or melody idea, but you create music that you then play on your instrument of choice, which happens to be the guitar.
LJ: [laughs] Well because the guitar’s not playing me, in that sense. I’m using the guitar as the vector, the vehicle for having musical expression. A long time ago, I chose as a teenager that that would be the voice, and that I wasn’t going to master the piano, or learn how to conduct, or any of those things. I was going to use the guitar because that’s what I fell in love with. That was my entree to musical self-expression and it’s still my priority. And I’m blessed to be married to a woman who loves the guitar, and who is not only actively encouraging me, but has the artistic sensibility herself to be able to offer me direction which I am most willing to take. And so there’s a collaborative aspect that takes it that much further. And I don’t think I would be doing what I do if not for her. I would be doing it in a different way. And I would probably be approaching it more from the more technical studio-musician end of things.
Dr. D: Thank God for Hope!
LJ: Yes, thank God for Hope.
Dr. D: It strikes me that you have had a great impact on writing for the guitar, and what it is considered capable of. You have given the steel-string acoustic repertoire of a quality that used to be only available to classical guitarists. I have said before that many of your compositions would not sound out of place in a classical guitar recital. You have really pushed the envelope in terms of composing for the steel-string acoustic guitar.
LJ: I appreciate that you would see it that way. For me, I’m in the middle of it. I didn’t know I had a “voice”, a recognizable sound, until people started telling me that I did. Because you don’t know. You’re in the eye of the hurricane as it were. I’m in the middle of it, and I do what I do. And it’s certainly gratifying to have my ambitions in this regard come to some fruition, but of course whatever ambition one has, you’re always looking to the next phase. So it’s like: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that. Now what’s next?”[laughs] But I think that in terms of pushing the envelope with the instrument, I just do what comes naturally. I think that there are players out there who have a better technical command of the instrument than I do. And I give them as much credit as I possible can. For example, Tommy Emmanuel is not only a superlative performer, he’s also a supremely accomplished guitar player. And it’s always a pleasure to find myself sharing a stage with him, or Frank Vignola, or these other players who are just masters of the instrument. In a similar way that I would kick myself when I was on stage with Paul McCartney and say to myself: “Wow, that’s Paul McCartney over there!” I have similar feelings about some of these players because there is such a level of mastery that it’s just very gratifying to find myself in that company. But I recognized a long time ago that I wasn’t going to pursue technique for technique’s sake. I wanted to just use technique just as a way of accomplishing a musical experience. So, if what I’m doing is pushing the envelope it’s because of the imperatives that music provides to the guitar. It drives the guitar side of it. And if that strikes new areas and new ground, that’s great but it’s almost like I’m not truly responsible for that. It’s because I’ve just chosen to combine those elements.
Dr. D: I think that these are really profound decisions, and one that fledgling artists really need to pay attention to in order to decide their future direction. There are just so many players who are dazzlingly fast but their playing just leaves most people cold. There’s a great technique, but very little music.
LJ: Because you’re not getting the dynamics, and I’m not just talking about dynamics in terms of loud and soft. I’m talking about dynamics in terms of textural change. After all, fast is only fast in relation to slow. Otherwise it’s just fast-fast-fast-and-fast. There’s no light and shade to it. And I’ve learned a lot from hanging around theatre, from being involved with musical theatre and working with performers. For example, if I want to watch somebody truly virtuosic, I’m probably not going to go see a guitar player. I’d rather go to The Magic Castle and watch a magician. Because you get somebody who uses sleight of hand to entertain, and clearly has an enormous amount of practice, and skill, and technique but it has nothing to do with music. So I don’t have to be then analyzing something analytically or musically. It’s in a different arena, but a similar level of skill. And there’s always something to be learned from people who are just great at what they do, but are not guitar players.