I must admit I didn’t know Sonny Landreth until yesterday, so when I found an article about him on npr.org naming him a guitarist’s guitarist, I just had to find out who this guy was.

Also, I am not a big fan of slide guitar, I like to listen when used in a good song but I am not much into it, I guess also because of the alternative tuning. Whatever. But Sonny Landreth got my attention with his style of playing right from the start. As npr.org says:

Most guitarists rest the slide on the strings over the frets to create a quavering, fluid sound. They pluck the strings above the guitar’s sound hole. Landreth does that, finger-picking in a Chet Atkins style, but he also plays chords, as he says, on the “wild side” of the slide — up on the neck — creating what John Hiatt calls “ghost notes.
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But there’s more. Landreth has perfected a tremolo using the palm of his hand as a baffle over the sound hole, which he combines with the notes behind the glass. “Kind of an accordion effect,” he says. “So you can manipulate the sound with the motion of your palm.”
(Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95101083)

This made me dive a bit more into this guy and I looked for him on YT. I found a couple of videos that are quite amazing, him playing with Eric Clapton, with Jeff Beck, with Mark Knopfler and also a lot other great solo performances. Actually he released 9 CDs of his own already so he has a lot to say I guess in a solo performance.

Maybe some of you know him, maybe some other don’t, so here are two YT videos, pay attention to his right hand….

PS: I really like the song in the first video and I also like his voice. In the beginning I wanted to only add a video, then I’ve got charmed by this song so I just put both here.

Also, here’s Sonny Landreth’s site, www.sonnylandreth.com.

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