Acoustic Blues Lab - Acoustic and Electric Recording Guitars

THE ABL STORY... IT BEGAN WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION.

OR SO I THOUGHT.
How did the music of a few impoverished rural African Americans evolve into the world's most powerful music? To find out,
I built a project studio and named it the "Acoustic Blues Lab."

It was where I learned early blues history.
The hard way. By attempting to play it.

Well, that didn't work.
Backgrounds? Or destinies? I eventually realized, studying early blues records was not helpful. The first blues recording artists were genius
pro entertainers. But they were not the originators. I tried to intuit blues music before the early recordings. But instead, my rock and classical backgrounds resurfaced. Mashing it all into long experimental studies.

The unfinished lab tracks.
Why were the lab studies never finished? In 2014, due to Seattle's booming tech scene, my music studio and apartment rents abruptly doubled. Which ended the Acoustic Blues Lab project studio.

In the lab's last three nights, I made three improv long form recordings. And then I went back to electric guitars.

Was I ever able to answer my "simple question?"
In fact, yes. Genius is often born out of necessity. And the blues had boatloads of that. Music that went straight to our shared destinies.

Fellow early blues obsessionists. Any left?
After eons of self-debate, I decided some of the ideas in the ABL studies might be of interest to other early blues obsessionists. If any still exist. So I uploaded a few of the lab's tracks to Bandcamp. There are links to these tracks in the Guitars For Sale descriptions (when available).

The end of the end.
Correct. The entire ABL project studio adventure crashed due to Seattle rents. There was nothing left but some unfinished test tracks that didn't fit any genre. But I did occasionally rationalize, maybe the best part of the lab was it ended before I could ruin it. How? By using these test tracks as sources for more conventional blues recordings.

I thought I'd blown it.
Until I remembered the saying, "be careful what you ask for, you just might get it..." And there it was. What I'd asked for. Raw freeform expressions of blues. Not the blues. Yet. But capable of becoming
the blues. It was what it was. What could be called "pre-blues."

The blues before before the blues.

Last words.
In other words. The lab's last tracks were freeform themes of blues. Explorations. In spirit. Maybe something like plantation field worker Henry Sloan waiting for the "yellow dog" train on the Tutwiler railroad station platform. Whiling away his time by playing his slide guitar with
a knife. And twenty feet away, African American composer and band leader W. C. Handy was taking it all in. Around 1903 or 1904. Handy would later become the first author to describe what he'd heard. And what I did my best to play.

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Martin 6 and 12-String Guitars For Sale!

NOTE: THE SOLO ACCOUSTIC GUITAR RECORDINGS WERE HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL. THAT'S WHAT THE LAB WAS FOR.

For info on acquiring these instruments, please email Rod Guevara: elhotrod32@yahoo.com ________________________________________________________
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