Jazz virtuoso Pat Metheny has been exploring the nuances of the baritone guitar for the past two decades, beginning with his 2003 release One Quiet Night and continuing through to his latest album, MoonDial.
On this new record, he plays a custom-made baritone crafted by Canadian luthier Linda Manzer. However, this latest album was also the result of his quest to discover the perfect nylon guitar strings, which ultimately came by way of Argentina – and inspired a whole new body of work.
“I use the baritone guitar in a different kind of way, where I tune the middle two strings up an octave,” he tells the BBC’s Front Row.
“I had done something similar like this with a steel string baritone guitar earlier on two other records, One Quiet Night and What's It All About. But I had always dreamt of doing it using a nylon string guitar, sort of like what a classical guitar is.”
Metheny recounted how Manzer had made a nylon-string baritone guitar for him years ago, but he had struggled to find suitable strings: “I just couldn't find strings... they either broke or sounded like a banjo, neither of which would be good for what I had in mind.”
The breakthrough came when he discovered Magma Strings, a brand based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Intrigued, he decided to give them a try.
“I ordered the strings on Amazon, and they came the next day. It was the first day of the tour, and I put them on this guitar that I'd had for a while, and suddenly this alternate universe appeared for me.”
In a personal blog post on his official website, Metheny details the epiphany he had when he first tried out these strings.
“It has happened to me a few times along the way where an instrument has instantly peeled open up a whole new range of possibilities. The initial moments spent with the Roland guitar synth of the late 70s/early 80s come to mind as another example.
“Literally, minutes after finally finding nylon strings that could handle this tuning and placing them on the Manzer guitar, I again experienced one of those revelatory flashes. There was suddenly a whole new palette of sound under my fingers, just like that.”
This all happened a mere three days before the start of his Dream Box tour. Despite the time crunch, Metheny was so inspired by the strings’ tone and resonance that he did something he had never done before – he wrote and recorded new music while simultaneously juggling a mammoth tour.
“I started using it on the beginning of this tour, and in the middle of the tour, went into the studio to record this new MoonDial record, right in the heat of battle, to go in and capture something while it was new for me.”
MoonDial marks Metheny’s 13th solo studio album and stands out as a purely solo guitar record, with no overdubs. It's also his third album recorded entirely on a baritone guitar.
In recent Metheny news, he shared the heartfelt story of meeting Jaco Pastorius and looked back on their formative years in Miami.
