Here we go, another blog piece from me that has far too much waffle in about guitar players I like, please bear with me, it gets tone related toward the end! So, I had a rare treat last week – it’s not often an artist with the pedigree and reputation comes close to where I live, but this year appears to be bucking that trend… It started with Joey Landreth in February and in April I get Adrian Legg. Perfect.
As always, I’m going to bore you with the history (there is always a history, isn’t there?). I was blissfully unaware of Adrian the first time I saw him live, I was 19 (this was February 1993) and if it wasn’t Vai or Satch I didn’t give a crap. Acoustic players were pointless, they just strummed and I was right and if I was wrong I didn’t want to be right. So, I rocked up to see Satch on the Extremist Tour with my Brother and my mate Graeme full of excitement and ready to be transported away to fly in a blue dream (etc).
We got there a little early, took our seats and found out that there some bloke called Adrian Legg in support… Lights went down and this (what appeared to be a) little middle aged guy came out the curtain and sat in a chair on the stage with an Ovation and said “Hello”. My brain groaned and I sat there already bored of this man… And then he started playing. Within seconds I was converted, this guys was incredible. My socks were blown clean off… I’d never seen or heard anything like it. I was wrong about the acoustic guitar!
Fast forward to 2008 or so, Facebook was taking off and up in my feed came “Adrian Legg”, I looked, it was him, so I sent him a request and he accepted. This was before I started with Wampler so I had no reason to talk to him, didn’t want to be a fanboy so I just left him there, he would comment on my status now and then, I would on his (we are somewhat politically aligned and view a lot of things the same way), and it went on like that for ages… then I started with Wampler and we started to talk about tone. During these conversations I sent him a couple of my own pedals for him to try and he loved the Black ’65, he gigged it for years… then came the Faux Tape Echo and finally the Tumnus… With touring in the way he does everything is about size and weight so out reaching out to the mini market really appealed to him.
After all these years I’d never had the chance to see him perform again, he attended the only NAMM show I’ve not been too since 2012, a couple of dates in the UK didn’t line up but out of the blue he was booked in a town about 25 miles from me, in a glorious old church hall, so I snapped up a couple of tickets instantly.
I finally saw Adrian perform again last Saturday April 22nd 2017. Just over 24 years after the first and last time I saw him. I arrived just as he was about to start, sat with an old friend of mine who is a fan also, and we thoroughly enjoyed every second. I had asked Adrian to do my favourite song (if he could) a few weeks before and about 4 songs in, Mrs Jack’s Last Stand was played, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t tears.
During the break I wondered forward and I finally met the man I’d been a fan of all these years, the man who had changed my view on acoustic players, the man I could now call a friend thanks to the beauties of social networking. I got a friendly hug from Adrian Legg. Win!
Adrian’s tone and playing was exquisite all the way through, his guitar is not really an electric and not really an acoustic, with a magnetic pickup and piezos, mixed together at times. The Tumnus brings out the harmonics of both pickups beautifully, the lower mid hump (that we think is about 800-1k) just makes everything sound alive and ‘there’, right in front of you. When he kicked it in, the guitar appeared to jump out at you tonally, it was quite the experience to hear it played that way, not pushing another drive pedal, not pushing an amp, just making the guitar jump up and out. Once again, that little gold pedal surprised me. Kinda thinking we should market it as the worlds first 3D guitar pedal!
