Leo Kottke's "Times Twelve" on Taylor LKSM-12

Описание: This is the one that started it all for me. I'd never even heard of this Leo Kottke person before flipping to the local PBS station one night where I happened to catch him playing this at the very end of his appearance on Austin City Limits in 1993. I remember thinking, "Wait a minute -- hasn't anyone told this guy you can't play a 12-string like that?! What the hell is he doing?" Once I got over my shock, I realized that I had to play this music. It took me forever just to find out what the name of this damn song was -- 1993 was, more or less, still pretty much pre-internet, mind you -- and I had no idea where to even start searching in what was, at the time, Leo's 25-year-strong catalog. I was literally walking into guitar shops with a handheld tape recorder, playing the song and asking the dude behind the counter if he could identify it. No luck. Miraculously, many months later, I randomly stumbled across Mark Hanson's LEO KOTTKE TRANSCRIBED in a music store in Daly City. Seeing that there were only four songs transcribed, I thought "ah, what the hell" ...taking a gamble, I bought it on the spot, tore off the shrink wrap, and flipped around from song to song until I saw, in tablature, that unmistakable ascending scale which begins the piece. Ah-ha! ...there it was. And "Times Twelve" was its name, apparently...which seemed weirdly appropriate for some reason. I couldn't believe my luck -- I mean, what were the odds? From then on, I was pretty much a slave to this stuff, and my social life and college studies all took a distant back-seat for a good couple years as I locked myself in my room and learned The Kottke.

So anyway..."Times Twelve". The version I play here is most like Leo's 1993 ACL performance in both arrangement and feel, the only difference being that I double the length of that super-staccato middle passage. Everything else is pretty much identical to that performance. I'm playing my nearly-brand-new Taylor LKSM 12-string, the same axe Leo used in '93 on ACL, and which -- for the next 16 years -- would become my dream guitar. The audio is running directly from the Taylor Expression System into the mic inputs of one HVX camera, which was then EQ'd and mixed together (in Final Cut) with a stereo signal which came from a pair of AKG C1000 mics in an XY configuration running into a second HVX.

Eagle-eyed viewers can take a gander at what other Kottke songs I play and help me decide which one to tackle for my next YouTube video.