EQ Magazine Online Edition
The science and art of recording acoustic guitar
String Theories
By Will Romano | August 2007

ELITE LITTLE SET
Composer/guitarist Ben Verdery (chair of the guitar department at Yale University School of Music) had written a three-part composition that appears on Places Between, entitled "Peace, Love and Guitars," and recently recorded with Police guitarist Andy Summers, a longtime friend and one-time recording partner of Etheridge. "All four of us met in London," Verdery says. "I was playing there [in '05] and met with John Williams and John Etheridge to get an idea of Etheridge's sound for the piece [I'd write]. Andy happened to be in London on business . . . It was a guitar lovefest!"

After performing an Ingram Marshall-composed, Balinese-based concerto for electric and classical acoustic guitar ("Dark Florescence"), Verdery and Summers began recording their own collaborative effort at Summers' Divine Mother recording studio in Venice Beach, CA. Summers, a jazz man at heart, used an electric Steve Klein guitar to play off Verdery's fingerpicking style, odd tunings, Bach chord progressions, and even the zither-like pings of Thai and Japanese chop sticks striking an acoustic 12-string. "The style of the music we were playing was different than I am used to, which is generally jazz-based music," says Summers, in a pre-Police reunion interview. "The improvisation wasn't necessarily jazz as derived from bebop, although it was liquid. It was more operatic, more romantic and European."

The project, titled First You Build a Cloud (at press time), struck a balance between acoustic and electric, improvisation and structure. "For these tracks I was recorded acoustically using two AKG 440s in a Figure 8," says Verdery, who uses a Smallman & Sons classical guitar. "We played live and we both used headphones to hear each other. The AKG 440s were placed a little to the right, facing sound hole, capturing as much of the sound emanating from the top, or soundboard, of the guitar. There were sound baffles in front of me in a 'V' shape."

Summers used his longtime Mesa Boogie setup and a number of effects, and also dabbled with a National Steel guitar. "I used a TC Electronics 11210 chorus, a Lexicon PCM70 effects processor, and a Klon Centaur [stompbox] for a little bit of dirt if I wanted it," Summers says.

"Given the way we recorded - Andy's amps in another room being miked and my guitar being miked in the studio, thereby not having any "bleeding" issues - there was never any problem with the balance, thanks to engineer Dennis Smith," says Verdery.

Who knows? Maybe Etheridge, Williams, Verdery, and Summers will get together again and, this time, record their soirée. "It's funny: I played with John Etheridge; Etheridge is now playing with John Williams; Ben played with John Williams and has now recorded with me," Summers says. "It's really an incestuous little set going on."

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