This weekend we were fortunate to have a very personal encounter with a great musician – JIMMY LUTTRELL is a multi-style, multi discipline guitar player – he’s been recording guitars and vocals for a CD of self penned love songs that he will release soon.

Over casual chats, he slowly revealed the “guitar king” that he is, the projects and musicians he has been involved with and OH BOY – it was like a story telling session “HISTORY OF GUITAR and GREAT GUITAR PLAYERS” – straight of the horse’s mouth. Among other things, he taught Jimmy Hendrix how to play behind the back guitar – NOW that was blast of a revelation to a music fan like me.

JIMMY must be at least 70 years old but it doesn’t seem that he is slowing down – he’s so prolific with his musical ideas and precise with hiseach guitar take was a keeper. He made my rather nondescript Peavey Predator strat style guitar sound like different guitars; a Gretsch country gentleman, a GIBSON Les Paul and even an old Ibanez hollowbody. And I was about to throw that guitar away!

I asked if he wanted to plug into an amp but he preferred going straight to the board. I hooked up a POD – dialed a clean amp setting, NO DRIVE, just a touch of compression and a bit of REVERB. I did not touch the tone controls but the guitar was sounding different for each track – all the musical magic and sound scuplting was coming from JIMMY’s hands and fingers. SIMPLY AMAZING! In this case, it’s really the player – not the guitar. 😀

Session notes:

• Acoustic guitar: Ovation elctric acoustic guitar
• Electric guitar: Peavey Predator via POD v2 straight to 002
• Vocal microphones: RODE K2, AKG C414

More about Jimmy’s Luttrell on his Guitar King web site.

Tags: recording guitars in studio, Jimmy Luttrell, Acoustic guitar recording