If you're a fan of inventive open tuning fingerstyle guitar, add Jamey Faulkner to your personal playlist. Faulkner extends
the innovative arc that traces back to his his teenage influences in the '80s - Windham Hill alums Will Ackerman, Alex
DeGrassi and Michael Hedges, each of whom expanded the acoustic guitar's sonic palette through their use of alternate tunings
and exploration of rhythmical texture. Faulkner, founder of the Guitar Institute of Indianapolis, has always had an appetite
for tonal and harmonic experimentation, and his guitar work threads an expressive line that connects abstraction, melody, and
harmonic resonance.
In addition to his formal schooling (including a master's in music technology), Faulkner says spending time with Stanley
Jordan helped him rethink music entirely; and meeting Hawaiian master slack key guitarist Cyril Pahinui at a workshop helped
him improve his energy and focus (not to mention exposing Faulkner to a C-tuning he now uses). Other sources of inspiration
include his teachers, Richard Savino and Ron Purcell, and the "young guys," talented fingerstyle contemporaries like Jason
Dennie and Sam Pacetti.
Faulkner says open tunings are for him "a doorway to new harmonic resonance with every alteration. Playing in open tunings
has helped me play in standard tuning more intuitively and creatively. They have freed me to listen to the instrument,
understand its harmonic response to certain techniques and articulations in different tunings."
Faulkner studied classical guitar extensively, but says his formal schooling left him "a bit unsatisfied" with the instrument.
He turned to the steel string in '95 (sustain is a beautiful thing), and says his music unfolds by following melodic contour
and harmonizing melodies.
12 Stone Row was recorded with no editing or overdubs, all complete takes. Faulkner admits that hearing the occasional blemish
on the recording hurt, but after talking to musician and avant-garde instrument designer William Eaton, he decided it was the
right choice ("The right notes balance it out."). Faulkner and Eaton have also discussed building a "mixed media" guitar, with
drumheads and diapasons, which would expand even further the tonal parameters of the acoustic guitar.
In his liner notes for 12 Stone Row, Faulkner writes that his 12 tracks "emerge like weather… vibration unfolding in a 'tune
unique' manner." Sensitive, evocative, and spacious, Faulkner's compositions thrive on subtle resonance, often flow with fluid
languor, and interact gracefully with silence. The open tunings give Faulkner an expressive musical vocabulary that he uses to
create a personal voice, articulate with introspective eloquence. For appreciative listeners, it may be like listening to the
rich sounds of a foreign language that is somehow both exotic and familiar. Despite their almost neoclassical structure,
Faulkner's songs have an expansive freedom. "I try not to dissect how I write too much," says Faulkner. "It tends to break
down the process. I listen."
