Kenneth E. Whisler, Luthier & Performer
Classical Guitars made & played.
Getting my feet wet on this whole “vlogging” thing. I should have turned the lamp off. Oh well. The take was too nice to trash. My arrangement of “Wild Mountain Thyme”, or “Holy is His Name” when I play it in church, either way a timeless Celtic melody. Performed on the most recent guitar built by me.
I’ve started transcribing this into notation. As soon as it is done, I will post it here.
Sacred melodies freely arranged for solo classical guitar. I’ve had this idea brewing in my head for decades. The ideas started flowing to manuscript and to my fingers about 2 years ago. Last September, my son, Joey, and I took a pair of Neumann KM184’s, an RME Fireface UC, and a laptop running Reaper into St. James Catholic Church, a century old midtown parish in Kansas City, MO. After Joey METICULOUSLY positioned the microphones for optimum room and guitar sound, we recorded through the night over the course of 2 days. This album is the result of those 2 nights. There is no reverb or echo of any kind added to the recording. The reverberation that is heard on the recording comes entirely from the room itself and where Joe chose to place the microphones.
The album is available at CDBaby, iTunes, and Amazon.
On Amazon:
Wish I had that tone and feel when I was 15….. Jonah playing Whisler #27
The award winning film composer and guitarist Joseph LoDuca records with one of my guitars. When Joe received a handcrafted classical guitar from me a little over a year ago, he took it to Angel Studios in London and recorded this for the movie, “The Edge of Love” starring Kierra Knightley:
joseph-loducafire-to-the-stars
He used the same guitar for cues in the TNT movie, “The Librarian: the Curse of the Judas Chalice”. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Please pay Joe a visit at http://www.loducamusic.com
The 1st recordings from the original website:
Want an idea of what one of my guitars sounds like? Help yourself to any or all of the free music selections here. I took one of my guitars, just prior to it’s sale, into a friend of a friend’s recording studio, asked him to turn off any and all dsp’s and eq’s, set all tonal controls “flat”, and then I proceeded to play live into a pair of condenser mics, the mixing console acting only as a preamp into an ADAT. While cutting out the riff raff and mixing down to a cd, the engineer begged me to let him add a touch of reverb. I conceded, as it was quite dry. But other than that, this is as honest of a recording as one can get.
note from Ken: the following recordings were made with guitar #4, a cedar top braced with an open 5 brace fan using sitka spruce, SE Asian rosewood was used for the back and sides. Shortly after the recording, a ban was imposed on the export of rosewood from that region, and only recently has it been made made available again. Of course the price has increased considerably!
The first 4 tracks are from Oscar Chilesotti’s “Six Lute Pieces of the Renaissance”. Tracks 5 and 6 are by the baroque guitarist Ludovico Roncalli. Tracks 7-11 are 4 studies from Matteo Carcassi’s famous collection of 25 Estudios. Tracks 12 and 13 from Segovia’s (in)famous collection of 20 Sor studies. And 14 and 15 are a couple of Romantic era chestnuts from Francesco Tarrega. Enjoy!
Another film composer and guitarist, Steve Allen, sent me this recording of a cedar/indian classical guitar I built in November of 2004:
please visit Steve at http://www.myspace.com/stevenrayallenguitar
These recordings were made 10 days after initial stringing. 2 copies of each are included here, one dry and one with reverb added.
