OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 24 August 2011

AMERICAN guitarist Preston Reed was already a well-established musician in a blues-based finger-picking style when he began to develop his visually and musically spectacular “hammering on” style of playing in the late 1980s.

Motivated by a desire to create more of the music that he was hearing in his mind when composing, he took a playing style that had antecedents – he usually cites Michael Hedges, Jeff Healey, Eddie Van Halen and Stanley Jordan as the four very different players using the method when he started to explore it – and developed it in a direction that is all his own.

Preston Reed

It is at root a percussive style, and the rhythmic power in his music was always to the fore in this excellent concert. The Girvan-based guitarist (he settled in Ayrshire after meeting his wife-to-be at the Kirkmichael Guitar Festival) drew on material from all points of his four decade long career.

His hammering-on style is a potent combination of playing with both hands on the fret board and drumming on the body of the guitar. It is both musically breathtaking and highly theatrical to watch (check him out on the videos on his website, or on YouTube), and his compositions in that mode tend to be fast, percussive and highly energised – titles like Blasting Cap and Tractor Pull give a flavour.

He employed a similar approach on Train, an earlier composition which he now plays using a delay pedal – he claimed he was considering re-recording it using the delay, but this time as Delayed Train. Elsewhere, he treated us to other facets of his playing, including finger-picking on a 12-string guitar, and a more jazz-fusion derived style on a hollow body semi-electric guitar.

He uses a high level of amplification and effects on his acoustic instruments much in the way an electric guitarist might, although the reverberant metal-work in the OneTouch meant that the theatre had a tendency, as he pointed out, to play along with him, and was not ideal for his set-up.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2011

Links

• Preston Reed