They slap, they jam, they tap, they flam. Not words commonly used to describe acoustic guitar players. But out at the fringes of the solo zone, such words have become accurate — and essential — descriptors. At the fringes of the solo zone styles and techniques merge and emerge to create semblances of traditional guitar styles so warped that they look like a funhouse mirror might sound. Or something like that.

These fringes are the habitat of those daring souls willing to ruthlessly plunder from any and all traditions. And who are capable of adding their own unique twists. They are also willing to do these things in public, all by themselves. Preston Reed and Laurence Juber are two stellar denizens at the fringes of the solo zone. Is that dramatic or what? Hit the drum roll, Buddy.

Three decades ago originals like John Renbourn began to enlarge the vistas of the instrument both as a solo player and in ensemble. His classic Sir John A Lot album opened a lot of ears to new possibilities for the acoustic guitar back then.

Although Renbourn himself has returned to playing more traditional-sounding music, his progenies have continued to stretch the fabric. Other pickers from that era like John Fahey, Jorma Kaukonnen and Leo Kottke also helped bring the solo acoustic guitar out of the closet and into the public consciousness. That was then. Fast forward to the verge of the millennium.

Now everybody is an acoustic guitar player. "Unplugged" rockers are all the rage and the acoustic guitar is back in the limelight. And out at the fringes, the solo players are still pioneering new stuff on this venerable music box.

Actually, the instrument isn’t quite the same as it used to be. Not that it's radically different in appearance for most part. Lots more acoustic guitar makers, lots more good-to-great sounding acoustic instruments. More cutaways. Some high-tech materials. But the most radical change in the instrument has to be amplification. Kind of ironic that the vast improvements in amplifying acoustic guitars — sometimes there is nary a microphone or magnetic pickup in sight— may have had a lot to do with wrenching new acoustic possibilities out of the instrument. But that's a whole other topic for a whole other day; today, we're here to talk about Juber and Reed.

First, some similarities. Both Reed and Juber are of the male gender, both have had the good fortune of surviving as professional guitarists into their fourth decade of life, both play guitars that generate sound acoustically, both are prolific, able-bodied and tuneful composers, both are frequently seen on stage as part of Muriel Anderson’s renowned "All Star Guitar Night" gigs, both have a need to continually stretch limits, both have a single bit of jewelry installed in their respective left earlobes. But that's about it for similarities.

Laurence (don'’t call him Larry or spell his name with a "w") Juber is a mild-mannered Englishman who spends much of his time working sessions in the Los Angeles megalopolis. In an earlier musical life he was lead guitarist in Paul McCartney’s "Wings" band. In his high school and college days he formally studied classical guitar and hung out in jazz clubs where he experienced the likes of Joe Pass. It's his recent solo playing and composing, though, that's taking us to new places. Think words like jazz, rock, lead, improvise, jam, melodic. His fourth album of (mostly) solo acoustic guitar music, Winter Guitar, a collection of seasonal favorites, was recently released on Solid Air Records.

Preston Reed currently spends most of his time touring as a solo guitarist. Fifteen years ago he was a blazing, self-taught fingerpicker whose playing most recalled Leo Kottke. About halfway between then and now, inspirational lightning struck in the form of fellow innovators Eddie Van Halen, Stanley Jordan and Michael Hedges. Reed could no longer see his chosen instrument in its former light and set off in search of all the possible sounds hiding in the darker corners of the acoustic guitar. Think words like rhythm, orchestral, slide, percussive, driving, funky. Critics raved about Metal, his 1995 solo guitar album, and his latest solo album, Ladies Night, has just been released.

Strictly Reed

Towering, lanky and sporting long rivulets of blondish curls, the square-jawed Reed attacks the entire instrument in a never ending search for the orchestra he knows is lurking inside. A not uncommon response to a Preston Reed live performance is "what is he doing up there?" His two hands are a blur of unconventional activity as they simultaneously manage to create a rock/jazz rhythm section, melody line and chordal accompaniment. This does not look like guitar playing as we learned to experience it. But it sounds very cool.

"In the last couple years my playing has gotten more intensely rhythmic and percussive…and multi-voiced, multi-textural," says Reed with the fervor and zeal of a true pioneer. His 1995 album Metal was a showcase for this continually evolving style. Although Reed has always been a very rhythmic player, the rhythmic emphasis is very up front on Metal; overall it has more of a "driving" feel than previous recordings, propelled by such tunes as "Train," "Blasting Cap," "Fat Boy" and the title track, "Metal," which Playboy reviewer Charles M. Young said "will drop your jaw."

There is the heart and soul of a rock band in this collection; you have to keep reminding yourself that there are no overdubs and that the tunes were all complete takes. No digital cutting and pasting. In places, you'd swear there was a bass and drums in there somewhere. Reed manages to coax some very un-guitar-like sounds from his instruments.

A good example of these sounds can be found in one of his earliest experiments with percussion: "Slap Funk." Originally recorded on his 1991 Blue Vertigo CD (unhappily, long out of print) from Reed's major label era, "Slap Funk" also appears on Metal. Among its engaging sonic oddities are some deceptively real hand-clap sounds that are actually made with the fingerpick-clad fingers of his right hand striking the side of the guitar near the juncture of the top and side. Now you know.

Probably the strangest looking part of Reed’s playing is his left-hand-over-the-neck technique where instead of fretting in the traditional manner, he uses this hand to independently create sounds via slapping, tapping, hammer-ons and pull-offs and sliding, among other techniques.
"All I did in my first experiments in playing this way," Reed recalls, "was to just have my left hand do what would normally be done by the thumb. I have my left hand doing a simple repeating rhythm vamp and have my right hand syncopate with that. Left hand drum beating or left hand hammering or left hand anything."

Easier said than done, although Reed reports some success in teaching these novel techniques to his National Guitar Summer Workshop students.

"The first thing I would do is play 'Tribes' [a funky, rhythmic tune that appears both on Metal and Reed's popular instructional video on Homespun Tapes] and get them to do the left hand rhythm voice…to get the left hand doing its part and then get the right hand doing its part. A lot of them would sort of giggle and feel uncomfortable and awkward trying anything."

When Reed’s left hand is off doing odd-appearing moves, his right is often busy making sounds by tapping on the neck instead of picking over the soundhole. Or as Reed says more precisely: "I'm doing a lot of impact-generated sounds on the guitar."

"It's a misnomer to just call this tapping," he explains. "Tapping is one of the maybe twenty or thirty things I'm doing. In fact, for all the things I'm doing, the keyword really is expedient...you're getting several different qualities and textures out of a single gesture. You're getting the sound of the string, you’re getting the sound of your finger hitting the guitar neck as it slams the string down and that impact resonates through the body of the guitar. The whole effect of it is more 'pianistic' and more percussive."

An essential component of Reed’s orchestral playing techniques are altered tunings. A long-time veteran of non-standard tunings, Reed emphasizes the word "altered" as opposed to, say, "open" tunings where the tuning creates a chord. His tunings are designed to support the harmonic quality and playability of the particular song and may bear little sonic resemblance to a recognizable chord. You won't find anything in standard tuning on Metal. In fact, the only immediately familiar-looking tuning is DADGAD, which he uses for the propulsive "Train." In his new Ladies Night CD, most of the tunes are played in an odd tuning— CGDGGD— which Reed calls "double G."

"Rhythm propels me forward," says Reed with his characteristic intensity. "It puts me on a train, where I can pick up stuff from the side of the tracks as the train picks up speed. It's a movement kind of thing. There are lots of different ways to write a tune, but what I've been working in most recently is this kind of propulsive rhythm thing."

If you haven't heard or seen Preston Reed, you may wonder whether there might be an excessive focus on technique, rather than how the resulting music sounds. Fair question. Fortunately, Reed is a strong composer with an ability to make the odd and unusual feel natural to the listener; tuneful but not predictable. Even when he was known for being a hot fingerpicker, the tunefulness of his tunes stood out. His second and third albums from the early 1980sl — Pointing Up and Playing by Ear (available as a two-albums-on-one CD on Flying Fish) show off his composing talents as much as his playing skills. Even back then his tunes were carefully structured, intricately detailed and spiced with harmonic side trips. Despite his avowed rhythmic emphasis, he can pen soulful ballads with an unmistakable pictorial quality, rendered in a range of subtle moods and emotions. His music is not all strictly propulsive.

Reed's compositional skills have matured with time and he continues to expand his horizons, having recently finished his first film score, a work which he both composed and performed. But more on Reed later. Let's see where Juber is pushing the envelope of solo acoustic playing.

Strictly Juber

Juber is a composer and player of equal skill, but very different from Reed in both musical background and approach to the instrument. The compact, dark haired Englishman with the ready smile and charming-but-not-lordly accent is revealed as a jammer, an improviser who resents having to play a song the same way twice.

You can tell he's played a lot of electric rock'n'roll and has a love of jazz and classical music. You can also tell he has a built-in urge to keep enlarging his musical horizons: "I've been playing for 33 years and there's still this constant drive to improve, to find new ways of doing things," he observes with a clear love of the discovery process.

Surprisingly, Juber is relative newcomer to solo acoustic playing and a lot of the stuff that comes with the territory like fingerstyle techniques and alternate tunings. But Juber's music is clearly eclectic, clearly sophisticated, clearly Juber.

Although he learned classical playing techniques during his high school and college years in England, Juber admits to being unhappy with the customary classical technique using fingernails and spent much of the next few decades playing mostly with a flatpick, the basic plucking tool of rock and jazz. "I always had some facility with fingerstyle, but I really started working on it as a full-time gig in the late 80s. My Solo Flight album was three months of woodshedding saying 'I'm going to make an album that’s all fingerstyle.' That was really the beginning of this process."

Just the beginning. Having gotten comfortable with playing fingerstyle using the fleshy part of his fingers, his next challenge was getting into alternate tunings. "When I was a teenager I started getting into alternate tunings, but being that I went into being a studio musician it just was never really very useful to me."

Juber credits producer James Jensen for prodding him to explore altered tunings seriously. "Once I got it, it was a paradigm shift. I realized there were a lot of things I had in my head that I was never going to be able to do in standard tuning. It was a natural thing to just dive right in."

True to form, Juber is pressing his own envelope and "starting to develop some improvisational fluency" in altered tunings. "There's an aspect to what I do that's never the same twice and that's very important to me; to be able to do something that couldn't be repeated."

Sounding now like a true aficionado of altered tunings, he adds: "In Winter Guitar I do a number of pieces in D tuning. The next album, Mosaic, will have a number of things CGCGAD which is actually a very cool tuning to improvise in. LJ had only one standard tuning piece, which was 'Riff Raff'; just a little jam piece. Everything else was in DADGAD or Open G or G minor or C." Just a little "jam piece?"

Although Juber speaks very casually about his considerable improvisational ability, it's a side of his musical talent that separates him from many other talented solo players. Juber's substantial experience as a rock guitarist has had a marked influence on the development of his tuneful, eclectic style.

"Just the jamming aspect of it," he says in his characteristic understated manner, summing up the impact of his rock'n'roll era. "Years and years of hanging out with the likes of Tim Bogert and Ainsley Dunbar every Tuesday night at the old Central in Hollywood, playing an hour long set just to stretch out, just to explore what you can do playing long solos on electric guitar." This is experience most solo acoustic players definitely do not have.

Nor do most solo players have the opportunity to get paid to learn and transcribe Jimi Hendrix tunes, one of Juber's more novel experiences as a musician. Deep immersion into the music of this pioneering guitar icon has left a deep mark. When Juber performs his soulful acoustic rendition of Hendrix’s "Little Wings"l — always a show-stopperl — there's no mistaking that a little piece of Hendrix has grafted itself onto Juber's eclectic musical soul.

"I'm very eclectic and everything I've done in music has evolved in a very empirical kind of way. I just take what's out there and I kind of process it through my own sensibilities, one of the things I learned from McCartney. He'll just take whatever's around and it comes out his own way." These words frame Juber's approach to acquiring new techniques and putting them to work. Like tapping, for example.

"I don't sit down and think, 'okay, I'm going to write a tapping tune' It's much more like 'how do I get this' and 'how do I make these notes when I'm also holding these other notes?' Then the tapping thing kind of comes into it. For example with my arrangement of "Rain" where the tapping in that evolved because there was a story to telll — I wanted to give the effect of a rainstorm."

Tapping also found its way into parts of "Double Espresso" and "Rules of the Road," two of the many infectious tunes on Jube's LJ album which, by the way, isn't really a solo album in the literal sense. Juber plays multiple guitar parts on several cuts, including a sultry electric lead on the haunting "Diminished Returns." While Juber's guitar is backed by bass and drums or percussion on many of the tracks, the record still manages to maintain a very acoustic, very solo feel.

"It all comes down to a good tune," says Juber, bottom-lining. "People don't necessarily understand some of the inner workings and thought that goes into working out solo fingerstyle guitar pieces, but they do recognize a good tune."

Always on a quest for a good tune, Juber isn't satisfied with where he's been in the past. "My compositions are starting to be a little more expansive, a little more developed," he observes. He also credits his wife Hope with helping him find "emotional threads," getting him away from what he calls "the abstraction of guitaristic kinds of fingering things."

Guys and their Gear

What'll it be: plastic or wood? When it comes to guitars, the acoustic guitars Reed and Juber currently play represent wildly different technological approaches to guitarmaking.

Reed is currently performing with an extensively modified Ovation Adamas LongNeck instrument which has a longer scale length than a conventional guitar and is tuned a whole step lower. Waxing enthusiastic, Reed notes that "the extra string length and lower tonal range gives the guitar a rich, almost piano-like texture. Since I already use a lot of lowered bass strings in my music, with this guitar I am getting closer to the range of an acoustic bass."

The LongNeck also features a thin, flexible carbon graphite topl — actually a graphite-wood-graphite sandwichl — that Reed likens to a drumskin. This top "really works well for the percussion-based, rhythm-oriented way that I play," he enthuses. It also features a fiberglass bowl (the Ovation term for their molded equivalent of a guitar body), which Reed feels “"has a better percussive resonance than the conventional Ovation body."

Other factory modifications include leaving some of the Adamas "swiss cheese holes" in the upper bout of the guitar uncut, making the decorative epaulet into a percussion pad for Reed's drumming.

Juber's main touring guitar is somewhat more traditional: a Taylor model 514 with a cutaway, mahogany sides and back and a cedar top. For electrification, the Taylor is fitted with a Fishman Matrix Natural bridge transducer and a Crown mic; a pickup blended with a microphone. Juber says this setup gives him "the air and the body sound" he likes for doing slapping or tapping.

Reed's LongNeck is also fitted with a dual pickup system plus on-board electronics adapted from Ovation's OptiMax blender system. The electronics package includes a blender for the two pickups, high and low equalization, a "smile curve" button, and a phase switch. In addition to the standard Ovation bridge pickup, a Seymour Duncan SA-2 soundboard transducer has been added. "The main function of the SA-2," says Reed, "is to register the percussion I do on the body of the guitar. With its own preamp and special sensor material, I have found the SA-2 to have a superior acoustic tone."

Different players, different machinery, same goal: an instrument well suited to a highly individual playing style.

Strings also reflect their individual styles. Juber has "settled on GHS True Medium where, essentially, the top two and the bottom string are mediums and the rest are light gauge. They're perfect for DADGAD," he says, "because you get the extra thousandths of an inch so that when you tune down on those three strings you still have the integrity."

Reed is currently working with D'Addario phosphor bronze strings because of "the way they work with the Adamas carbon graphite top, which resonates differently than a wood top. The gauges I use are .058, .046, .036, .026, .017, and .013. The .058 gives me a big bottom end to the sound."

And Happening Now...

Both Reed and Juber have recently added freshly minted solo guitar albums to their catalogs. Juber’s new Winter Guitar collection features his sparkling acoustic interpretations of popular Christmas carols and other seasonal pieces. Familiar tunes to sing along with include "Good King Wenceslaus," "Away in a Manger," "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." And, of course, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."

Reed's Ladies Night CD continues along the rhythmic, percussive path he started down with Metal. Tunes like the title cut with its steamy sheen and the aggressive groove of Hijacker are mixed with cool, moody pieces like Mermaid Eyes to make a balanced, engaging collection. Then there's "Rainmaker," perhaps the first all-guitar drum solo ever recorded.

Upcoming, a Juber and Reed collaboration [Groovemasters on Solid Air Records...whence came the photos used in the masthead] is in the works. The concept was spawned when these two denizens of the solo zone were recently hanging out together at the photo shoot for this article, which this humble observer had the singular good fortune to attend. If the final product is anywhere near as good as the spontaneous jams I heard snippets of that day, aficionados of contemporary acoustic guitar may be in for the coolest duo set since the days of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Let's hope.

Todd Ellison