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This
history was written in 1999, as the quaint technical/computer
descriptions will attest. I decided to leave it as it is, as
opposed to updating it.
THE
ARBITRARY AND COINCIDENTAL BEGINNING
In 1974, I moved from my native state of Oklahoma to
Minnesota. I had been playing electric and acoustic guitar and banjo in
Arkansas and Nashville, had been on the road a lot, and was very tired
of travel, hot weather, flat treeless terrain and anti-hippie
sentiment. Since I had roots in Minnesota, my mother being from St.
Paul, Minnesota was a logical relocation choice.
Shortly after my arrival, Garrison Keillor, who had started
A Prairie Home Companion at about that time, decided that he wanted
an actual consistent house band, instead of calling whichever musicians
happened to be on the show on any given day “The Biscuits.” Look up
serendipity in the dictionary and you will find the story of how I came
to his attention:
I was working at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. A
performance of mine there was recorded. My first wife Sherry was
managing a deli where street singer Jerry Rau would customarily come for
a free cup of coffee and some conversation. One morning, Sherry was
playing a tape of my Guthrie performance. Jerry, who was during that
time doing the booking for the legendary Coffeehouse Extempore, heard
the recording and started booking me there as a solo act. Local
musicians heard me, and when Garrison started asking around as to who
might work well on guitar and vocals, my name came up.
What followed was three years of weekly work and touring with
the Companion as part of “The Powdermilk Biscuit Band.” We were
a string band, and were responsible, in the role of house band, for
instrumental “bumper” and background music as well as the requisite
vocals. The instrumental music generally took the form of fiddle tunes,
and I found myself learning new tunes at the rate of two or three a
week. (I was aided in this by two bandmates, Bob Douglas and Dick Rees,
who are startlingly prolific collectors of fiddle tunes).
To learn these tunes, I would tab them out during our first
weekly rehearsal and learn them before our second rehearsal and the
show. When, around 1978, the number of tunes in my notebook reached
250, I started entertaining thoughts of assembling them into a book. I
perceived a need for a large collection of flatpick tunes, along the
lines of the Cole’s and O’Neill’s collections, but in
tablature instead of standard music notation.
I further realized that, because of the wide variety of music
the Biscuit Band played, mine was a very interesting collection of
tunes. I had proven, in front of thousands of people, that they
(usually) worked well on the guitar, and yet, far from being the same
old same old, there were tunes of all types from all over the place,
especially reels, jigs and hornpipes from America, Canada and Ireland.
(I have long believed that we flatpickers draw from a repertoire that is
far too limited: there’s a lot more to the flatpicking world
than Red-Haired Boy.)
THE
ORIGIN OF EASYTAB
I didn’t set out to develop a style
of tablature different from what is commonly used. Easytab was
originally just a shorthand way of notating the tunes in my rehearsal
notebook: it obviated the need for all of those note stems, which made
for a cleaner easier-to-read document. When book composition started,
it was clear to me that it would be much easier to present the tunes in
the condensed Cole’s-style format I desired if I continued with
this form of notation. And, if I didn’t condense the tab style, the
book would be four inches thick. (The reason Easytab works so well for
fiddle tunes is that fiddle tunes are made up predominantly of eighth
notes, which, as the default in Easytab, don’t need identifying stems.
It makes for a much less cluttered, and yet more compact, presentation.
A
BOOK IS BORN
The first edition of Granger’s Fiddle Tunes for Guitar
came out in 1979. It was, to say the least, a rustic item: a glorified
Quik-Print publication. The printer accidentally left out my page
numbers, so the book had to be hand-numbered in a series of “numbering
parties”, events which separated my friends from my enemies.
Immediately, I began to get requests for recorded versions of the
tunes. In response, I recorded some two hundred of the tunes on three
sixty minute cassettes. These were as rustic as the book; they were
recorded and dubbed on funky equipment, but they were functional and
sold well.
By the time the first printing of GFTFG was exhausted,
I had a partner. Paul Christianson, a retired pharmacist, was a student
of mine. He came aboard initially as a backer of the second edition of
GFTFG and stayed around to become an equal partner. He does the
accounting, the shipping and receiving, the billing, the phone-answering
and much more. He has also become a good friend.
With Paul aboard, the second edition was soon ready to go.
The tablature, while still handwritten, was better and was more neatly
laid-out. I added informational and instructional appendices and had a
better printing job done on better paper. The second edition also had a
much better cover (and, in response to requests, a waterproof one:
apparently GFTFG was used by more than one picker as a beverage
coaster).
It wasn’t until the second edition of GFTFG that I
even thought of naming the tab style, whereupon I came up with the
moniker “Easytab” and the deliberately-cornball slogan: “Like regular
tab—but easier!”
Paul and I didn’t do a copyright search on the name “Easytab”,
and we assumed that we would run across it in a nonmusical context or
two. This happened sooner than we expected, however. On literally the
same day as we received the first printing of 3000 copies of,GFTFG,
I walked into my pantry, picked up a box of pretzels, opened it, and saw
on the “tab-into-slot” box flap the word “Easytab.” The pretzel company
has never said anything and neither have we.
Drawing upon the success of the first tapes, I decided early
on to record all 508 tunes in the book for the second tapes, and to use
better equipment. Studio time for a project such as this would have
broken me, so I did the best I could using consumer technology available
at that time. I recorded five ninety-minute cassettes on a Tascam 424
through a Shure microphone, playing my 1987 Santa Cruz Tony Rice model
guitar.
I then mastered onto DATs (digital audio tapes), and those
were sent to the duplicator. Starting about 1994, I began to get
requests for this collection in CD form. It seemed, of course, like a
great idea to me, but the then-$12,000 price tag to get the collection
onto CD was prohibitive for as modest a company as ours, and we had to
answer such requests with a wistful “some day”.
THE
MARCH TO CD!
“Some day” arrived in late 1998, when my good friend, computer
and audio expert and guitar and mandolin picker Bill Nicholson, came to
a party of mine bearing with him the gift of an out-of-print album of
mine duplicated onto a CD. He had just gotten a good CD burner and was
anxious to put it and the assorted software associated both with it and
with digital audio production through their paces.
This was hardly Bill’s first contact with GFTFG: He
was at the numbering parties mentioned earlier, he can play most of the
tunes in the book, he typeset the second edition and helped me design
the companion cassettes and a lot of the early advertising. It was even
his DAT that I borrowed to master the recordings.
Despite all of his past experience with GFTFG, Bill may
not have realized the enormousness of digitally mastering 508 separate
pieces of music, but he did the job, and, as always, he did it well. He
finished the job the night before being placed in the Minnesota Home for
the Musically Befuddled (his wife called the authorities after she heard
him humming fiddle tunes in his sleep). Ever the loyal friend, I visit
him regularly.
The tunes were converted, in the digital mastering process, to
MPEG files, then transferred back to CD masters, which were then
commercially burned. (“Burning” is a term for duplicating CDs in a
noncommercial manner. Instead of using a glass master and manufacturing
the CDs, which have to be done in lots of at least 500 and are thus too
expensive for a project such as this, CDs can now be digitally copied.
This makes small-run jobs such as this financially viable for the first
time).
These CDs, then are, in production parlance, A-D-D:
“analog-digital-digital”. They were initially recorded on tape (ergo
the “analog”), then mastered onto DAT (the first “digital”) and finally
mastered into MPEG files (the second “digital.”)
WHAT’S
IN THE FUTURE FOR GFTFG?
The third edition of Granger’s Fiddle Tunes for Guitar
is due around 2015 or so. The biggest change in this edition will be
that it will be typeset. I have never been an apologist for the
handwritten tab in GFTFG, and won’t start now. It’s legible;
it’s functional; and anyhow, it was the only game in town at the time
I did it.
I have, using Pagemaker 6.5, and with tips from Flatpicking
Guitar publisher Dan Miller and Bill Nicholson, developed my own
Easytab tablature program. Since I use it in the column I write for
Dan’s magazine, many of you are no doubt familiar with it. This is the
program which I will use in the third edition of GFTFG.
THE
END
That’s the story of Granger’s Fiddle Tunes for Guitar.
It may be much more than you need or want to know. There are those
among us, though (such as musicologist Patrick Sky, who exhaustively
researched the Cole’s collection) who are curious about odysseys such as
this. Maybe some day, around, say, 2100, some budding young PhD
candidate will come across this narrative. . .
© Adam Granger 1999; slightly
revised 2010 |
