Unusual Guitar – Old Old Song – Silver Threads Among the Gold

Welcome to Kaleponi Records, my musical home on the web. My name is Fran Guidry, and I play kika ki hoʻalu or Hawaiian slack key guitar.

Kaleponi is the Hawaiian word for California, where I live. Ki hoʻalu, or slack key, has a direct link to California history. The guitar was carried to the Big Island of Hawaiʻi by vaqueros from California. You can read more about the history of slack key guitar on the Dancing Cat Records web site.

Slack key guitar is named for the retuning that characterizes the style. Most of these new tunings feature loosened, or slackened, strings which give a deep rich sound.

My personal slack key history goes back to 1999 and my first visit to Hawaiʻi. When we turned on the TV in our Waikiki hotel room I was captivated by the playing of Keola Beamer. I knew in an instant that I had to learn to play this beautiful music. Over the years I've learned from great players and teachers like Ozzie Kotani, Keola himself, Patrick Landeza, Kevin Brown, Cyril Pahinui, Kawika Kahiapo, Raymond Kane, Dennis Kamakahi, and Ledward Kaapana.

Unusual Guitar – Old Old Song – Silver Threads Among the Gold

Saturday, August 24th, 2013

Kathy Wingert is one of the elite among custom luthiers, she builds exquisite instruments of the very finest materials and has a gift for unusual visual approaches. For this year’s Healdsburg Guitar Festival she built four remarkable instruments including a dramatic harp guitar, a dainty but ferocious little parlor guitar, and two that showed the influence of the steampunk design movement. Kathy stopped by on her way home from the guitar festival and I took advantage of the opportunity to play one of the steampunk guitars and shoot a little video.

Since the steampunk concept starts with late 19th century technology and literature I immediately thought of one of the very oldest songs I play, Silver Threads Among The Gold first copyrighted in 1873. This song was brought into the slack key repertoire by Leonard Kwan and his version became a standard. I learned it with the help of Maui’s Kevin Brown and it’s one of my favorites.

The guitar I used for this video is built from some extraordinary curly koa for the back and sides, with a German spruce top. These fine materials combined with Kathy’s talent and experience resulted in one of the most playable and musical guitars I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying. It demonstrates amazing dynamic range while maintaining a lyrical voice at every volume level. I hope some of these qualities come across in the video.

By the way, the audio in this video was captured using the XY mic module of my new Zoom H6 recorder. You can catch my review of the unit over at the Homebrewed Music blog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 24th, 2013 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.