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David
Gray's guitar style is, for the most part, fairly simple. He plays
around with tunings and most often uses a capo. Most of his songs
are driven by the acoustic guitar, so they stand up quite well on their
own. He likes to throw in a good open tuning every so often, and
songs like "Flame Turns Blue," "Shine" and others can be easy to play and
fun, but they require a good but of deviation from standard tunings.
He plays most of his songs with a pick, though "Babylon" and "If Your Love
Is Real" are finger strummed, and "Tidal Wave" involves a nice bit of finger
picking. He uses his thumb a lot to mute and to create faux-barres,
so that on songs such as "Late Night Radio," normally barred F and G chords
can be played with five fingers, leaving the high E open. This, combined
with 5-stringed capo placements makes many of David's songs simple, yet
very distinctive.
For most of his songs, the acousic guitar will suffice. David plays an array of acoustic guitars, anywhere from his Lowden (his old beat up dreadnaught), to his thin-bodied Guild (which he usually keeps in off-standard tunings to play "My Oh My" or many of his open chord songs) or the new abalone-inlayed Martin D-42, which he broke out on the US tour in 2000. The electric guitar mostly shows up in studio albums, and their parts usually double the acoustic to create a more edgy sound, or create slight overlays. His piano songs are fairly easy to transpose onto the 6-string, and are not overly involved when played on the keyboards.
the web's most complete David Gray guitar tab archive!
David Gray throws his acoustic guitar for a loop and climbs to the top of the charts.
Sometimes, the best way to find out who you really are is by trying to be something you’re not. At least that’s the way it worked out for David Gray, who stumbled into the warm, semi-acoustic sound of his hit album, White Ladder only after trying to reinvent himself as a balls-out rocker.
It was the mid-Nineties, and Gray- a London-born, Welsh-bred singer-songwriter who’d turned pro only at the beginning of the decade—already had two albums under his belt. Although neither A Century Ends or Flesh had sold particularly well, they’d earned him a sheaf of good review as well as some high-profile fans, including Dave Matthews and the members of Radiohead. Clearly, it was time to take his career to the next stage; the question was how?
“I was sort of plodding away, trying to find my own sound,” he says. “Nirvana were probably the main thing then, and so, influenced by that more extreme kind of sound, I persuaded myself that perhaps the rockier side of things was worth pursuing.” So Gray strapped on his electric, cranked up his amplifier, and made Sell Sell Sell, the album that was supposed to catapult him into the big leagues.
But a funny thing
happened. Not only did Sell Sell Sell fail to make Gray a star—in
fact, it was deleted almost immediately after its release in this country—it
caused him to swear off electric guitar altogether. “I knew absolutely
that it wasn’t worth persuing, because it just didn’t suit my style,” he
says. “All the best things on the record, just about, were the more
intimate moments. That’s where my strength lies—with the more intimate,
stripped-down songs where I can turn a phrase or suck the listener in.”
“So I made a decision
to move away from that sound. I wasn’t going to have any electric
guitar on the next record. Also, I was frustrated with the sort of
standard band setup. We’d given it a go, but there were other
people doing it so much better.”
In place of the
adrenalized roar of alt-rock guitar, Gray found himself increasingly drawn
to rhythm. “There were quite a lot of ideas going around my head
that were based on a drum groove, and quite stripped down,” he says.
“Maybe a bass line and a little bit of guitar, or a bit of atmosphere.
That was the way I was moving.” It helped that drummer “Clune” McClune
had become David Gray’s chief collaborator. “Clune aided me in that
direction, because he is more dance-based than rock based, and his natural
feel is grooving the drums. So we started to work together and I
really enjoyed it.
“Things came quite
differently. We used samples or drum machines, whatever. But
the grooves didn’t interfere with the song. I mean, we did it quite
subtly on the record. Partly because we didn’t have any mikes for
the drums, the drums got a quite small sound. They don’t dominate-
the voice dominates. Whereas with two electric guitars thrashing
away, it just choked all the space up, and you don’t get as close to the
song.”
Gray admits that
he wouldn’t have been able to do this kind of writing without keyboards.
“When I write on the keyboard, I’m open to so much more rhythm,” he says.
“There’s more space to chords on the keyboard, and that leaves so much
more room for the drums or bass or whatever. So a groovier kind of
beat would be more applicable that it would be on the guitar.
“But with guitar,
the song is more complete,” he adds. “When you start with a sound,
it sort of begs for a rhythm. With guitar, there’s already a lot
of rhythm and percussion already in it. You’re kind of self sufficient.”
Acoustic guitar was, in fact, the starting point for Gray’s musical career. A friend started playing when the two of them were teens, and “it seemed so easy, really,” Gray recalls. “My dad had one that was just lying around in the house, so I picked that up. He wrote some chords down, and that was the beginning basically. I mean it’s quite an easy instrument to learn. You get sort of immediate results, albeit a little finger pain.”
Even though he
took to the instrument quickly, Gray never considered himself a guitarist
per se, and he never had any guitar heroes. “I suppose I listened
to Dylan,” he says grudgingly. “Dylan is a reasonable guitar player;
I suppose he inspired me a little. But I’ve found more inspiration
in writing songs and singing.
“I’m a rhythm
guitar player. I just strum.” In that sense, White Ladder was
a departure for Gray because it found him putting down his pick and playing
more with his fingers. “What happened was, I’ve learned to play softer,”
he says. “Playing live, you rend to get a bit overexcited at times
and thrash away like a madman. But when you’re in the quiet of the
studio, and there aren’t thousands of people shouting, it generally sounds
better when you hit the guitar softer. It rings sweeter.
“So I’ve learned
to use less pick and more fingers. And I’m a terrible guitar picker!
But I keep on because I prefer the sound of me stumbling about with fingers
and a thumb to the rather nagging sound of a plectrum strumming away.
Strumming takes all the room up in the music. It’s basically a percussive
thing, and I was looking for more space. And I was playing gentler
on this record, and singing more gently too. That’s sort of how I
adapted. The plectrum took a back seat.”
He may be playing more softly, but Gray insists that the guitar remains the dominant instrument on White Ladder. “It’s fairly to the fore on most of the tracks,” he says. “The guitar is the main rhythm instrument. Obviously, there’s more sampling and loops to this record than to my previous records. But I don’t think I’ve changed the way I play.”
Perhaps that’s
why Gray finds it funny to hear his album described as “dance-y.”
“The only people
who thing it’s that way are those with absolutely no knowledge of dance
music,” he says, chuckling. “I mean that in a nice way. But
dance music means just something with a beat. So if you add a house
music bass line, like we have in songs like Please Forgive Me, they assume
that’s dance music, because it’s using a sound they associate with dance
music. But anyone in dance music wouldn’t consider what we do to
be ‘dance’ music in any way.”
Like a lot of dance music, White Ladder was recorded using a computer and sampler—described by Gray as “The two biggest developments in the sound of music in the late 20th century”—but those tools merely helped Gray and Clune shape the material. But the songs themselves remain rooted in the flesh-and-blood immediacy of emotion.
“The whole idea is that songwriting is this transparent thing where the details are believable enough that you think, ‘Oh God, I remember feeling like that,’” he says. Obviously, the emotions that flood through my life come out in the songs. And also emotions I haven’t had yet. It’s kind of a strange process. But it’s not as simple as ‘Dave went out, fell in love, and this song is about that.’ It’s just that I tend to write love songs. That’s what I write.”
In Gray’s views,
what matters most isn’t specifics of his inspiration but its clarity.
“Please Forgive Me,” which is more about a specific feeling rather than
a particular person, is a case in point. “These were really raw emotions
captured,” he says. “That one is just charged with some kind of electricity.
I wrote the lyrics in 20 minutes flat. Then the recording was made
in just a couple of hours. So the whole thing was captured so fresh.
“What beams out
of that song is its spontaneity,” says Gray. “It’s just brimming
with emotion—I think I was bursting with it at the time. So, both
the freshness of the lyrics and the freshness of the performance make it
totally convincing. It’s one of my favourite things, definitely.”
Gray’s fondness
for working quickly is also reflected in a mostly acoustic album, Lost
Songs, scheduled for American release later this year. Consisting
of material written between Sell Sell Sell and White Ladder, it’s less
an album and more of a time capsule. “Because of the turmoil in my
career and that time, there was never a record made,” he says. “And
I doubt that anyone would have wanted to make a ‘me and my guitar’ record
anyway.
“But it’s a document
of songs that I didn’t want to get lost and be left behind. Because
I knew that when White Ladder was finished with, I wouldn’t be feeling
like going basically backwards and sorting out my archive material.”
Although Gray describes the album as “very melancholy and low-key,” it is actually more of a professional production that the homemade White Ladder. “Whereas White Ladder was recorded at my house, Lost Songs was recorded at a proper studio,” he says. “A very cheap one, but a proper studio, with an assortment of mics. A big mixing desk and a tape operator.”
Gray went the studio
route for technical reasons. “We wanted it to be easy to mic the
band up, basically, and that’s something we couldn’t do with our setup
at home,” he says. “We just wanted to go in and play live, and that’s
what we did on Lost Songs. Either I laid the track down, just me
and the guitar, or the band sat in and we went for the live takes, with
the vocals and everything.
“I wanted a kind
of moment in time, a more old-style recording technique. And it was
a very subtle, simple, acoustic record. Just a bit of performance
basically, to focus the whole thing.”
On Lost Songs,
Gray mostly relied on his beloved 1961 Martin 000-18. “I bought that
when I got my first publishing deal,” he says. “It just sounds so
sweet. I mean, acoustic guitars are quite wild, boomy things when
you get them in front of a mic. But with this Martin, it’s as if
it’s calmed down with age. Must be the wood or something. Anyway,
everything about it just fantastic.”
For White Ladder, however,
Gray opted to go with his Lowden. "It's an Irish guitar I bought about
six years ago," he says. "And though it's battered and bruised by my brutal
treatment, it's got a really sweet sound. When I first got it I wasn't
that enamoured with it. Then, one of my other guitars broke on a tour and
I had to use to Lowden as a main guitar. Ever since I've started playing
it, it's been very, very good. It has a completely different sound. It's
very boomy- it has a massive body on it."
Gray and Clune recorded
the guitar very simply, often just using a single mic, and then assembled
the tracks on computer. “We didn’t have much equipment—it was very
primitive—but you can do a phenomenal amount with a sampler and a computer
these days,” he says. “White Ladder and Lost Songs were both incredibly
cheap to make.” He contemplates the results, then laughs. “We
must be the most cost-effective outfit in the business at the moment.”
Article by J. D. Considine,
2001
Transcribed by Chris
Campbell, 2002
Article originally appeared
in Guitar World Acoustic #41, 2001