Pat Metheny

Patrick Bruce Metheny (born 12 August 1954 in Lee's Summit, Missouri USA) is an American jazz guitarist and leader of the Pat Metheny Group.

Guitar Innovations

Continuing the tradition of jazz guitarists borrowing tones and techniques from their rock counterparts, Metheny has made considerable additions to the jazz guitar tone palette.

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Twelve-String Electric Guitar

Pat Martino had used the electric twelve-string guitar on a studio album, Desperado, and John McLaughlin had famously used a double-neck electric guitar as a sort of electric sitar, but Metheny was arguably the first significant user of the twelve-string electric in jazz. (Ralph Towner had previously introduced the acoustic twelve-string to jazz, most notably as a sideman to Weather Report on the album I Sing the Body Electric.) Metheny unquestionably introduced alternate 12-string tunings to jazz; these can be heard to wonderful effect on tunes such as "Sirabhorn" (from Bright Size Life) and the jaw-dropping "Icefire" (from Watercolors).

Related Topics:
Pat Martino - Twelve-string guitar - John McLaughlin - Sitar - Ralph Towner - Weather Report

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Six-String Electric Guitar

Metheny's tone on six-string guitar is arguably copied more widely than that of any other jazz guitarist (including Wes Montgomery and Grant Green), although the copying is usually done by smooth jazz players instead of "serious" jazzers. His tone, which is heavily influenced by Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead and Steve Howe of Yes, makes heavy use of compression to create a smooth, sustaining lead sound that is virtually devoid of piercing treble yet is able to cut through a dense mix. By using digital signal processing, he also created a "chorused" sound that is very difficult to describe, but instantly recognizable.

Related Topics:
Wes Montgomery - Grant Green - Smooth jazz - Jerry Garcia - The Grateful Dead - Steve Howe - Yes - Compression - Digital signal processing

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Metheny is known to disdain reverb. During his brief tenure as an instructor at Berklee, he put this animus to productive use when testing guitar students. Using a Fender amplifier with two discrete channels, Metheny would plug the student into the reverb channel, reserving the clean channel for himself. Metheny would play a complicated passage, and the student would have to play it back note-for-note; the heavy reverb would amplify any technical errors or hesitation on the student's part.

Related Topics:
Reverb - Fender

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Guitar Synthesizer

Metheny was also the first jazz guitarist to make heavy use of guitar synthesizer. While John Abercrombie and Bill Frisell also used it heavily in the 1980s, Metheny is the only one of the three who still uses the instrument on a regular basis. Unlike many guitar synth users, Metheny limits himself to a very small number of sounds; in interviews, he has argued that each of the timbres achievable through guitar synthesis should be treated as a separate instrument, and that he has tried to master each of these "instruments" instead of using it for incidental color.

Related Topics:
Guitar synthesizer - John Abercrombie - Bill Frisell

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