Audio

Starry Chet

By Kevin Steel ⋅ January 28, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chet Atkins playing “Vincent” by Don McLean.

We see how how Atkins took a well-known piece of music and made it more beautiful. If there is one word I would use to describe what I love about Atkins playing, it’s “restraint”; the sense that the song, the music, is larger than he is–that he could do more to dazzle us with virtuosity and technique but doesn’t because that is not what he is all about. He’s about playing the song, and the song is front and centre, not the player and his technique. After listening to this, you don’t say to yourself, “Wow, that was a hot guitar player!”–you say, “I never realized before how beautiful that tune is.”

The use of the harmonics at around moment 1:12 of the video (2:29 if you are using the backwards clock) is simple yet lovely. But it’s the repetition of the phrase right after those harmonics that gets me. Perhaps this will serve as a demonstration of what I mean by restraint. Following the harmonic–this would be in the lyric right after the second verse “Starry starry night”–there is a nice phrase, da-uh daaaa da da. This phrase was introduced right near the beginning of the piece (in the lyric it would be after “Shadows on the hill”). But when it is repeated after the harmonic, the slide is taken just a little bit higher. And then it is repeated after the harmonics again, but this time, instead of taking it even higher, Atkins simply returns to notes he used at the beginning and lengthens the relative time just slightly.