For his fantastic two-CD album Gregg Miner: A Christmas Collection, Miner somehow discovers how to play 100 rare and vintage musical instruments. And he doesn’t just play the instruments, he is awesome! This feat is more than many musicians hope to accomplish in a lifetime, so how does he do it in fewer than five years?
Miner’s Guidelines for Recording 100 Rare and Vintage Instruments in His Christmas Collection
Miner says structure and discipline were key to getting this project done. From the beginning, he set down several rules for himself.
First, he knew he wanted to play all of his instruments, or as many as he could. After settling on this goal, he earnestly began filling in his collection with groupings and families of stringed instruments.
“At the beginning, I would guess I had about three dozen of the instruments,” estimates Miner. “I collected the rest of the 100 over the next four and a half years. Literally, the last month of recording was when I came across the last instruments.”
As for Miner’s second rule, he tasked himself with learning to play each instrument authentically. In other words, he would string, tune, and play the instruments as they were intended to be strung, tuned, and played — not as a bunch of open string guitars. This rule necessitated hours and hours of historical research.
Finally, Miner decided the 100 vintage and exotic musical instruments should each appear only one time across the album. “It could have gone on and on and on and I could have filled in each piece with bigger and bigger orchestration,” Miner says. “Really, the only way to do it and to make it fair to the concept was to plan on only using each instrument once.”
How to Learn and Record 100 Musical Instruments in Fewer than Five Years
For nearly five years, Miner says he put everything into the project, but never once practiced. “Basically,” he explains, “I grabbed the instrument off the wall that I had an interest in tackling that month. When it was strung and ready to go, I would experiment with it a bit. I was researching records or seeing people play it. As I was experimenting, I was coming up with an arrangement in my head. After a week, I was starting to record and still learning the instrument. It was literally doing it on the fly. When the recording was good enough, I was done. At that point, I hadn’t quite learned to play the instrument, but I got a usable recording out of it.”
Out of necessity, Miner bypassed learning the fretboards and practicing scales on all 100 instruments. “They say it takes at least six years to learn an instrument well,” he laughs. “Of course, six times 100 would be ridiculous.” His goal wasn’t to master each instrument entirely; he just wanted to become familiar enough with each to play one song extremely well and authentically. To accomplish this goal, Miner applied his knowledge of music theory mathematically to each instrument and then learned the technique for playing it.
Each time Miner started learning a new instrument, he cleared his head of everything he’d done earlier. “It’s quite difficult to switch,” he explains. “If I played guitar or lute before, that had to be out of my head. Now it was just me taking on this crazy zither.”
Even though Miner had played guitar since his teens and was accomplished on concert harp, several instruments and playing techniques still threw him for a loop. “The sitar on volume two and the German zithers on volume one were very, very hard to play,” he remembers. “Slide guitar was both fun and difficult. I was well aware of that music, but really hadn’t played much of it at all. I arranged the tunes and taught myself Dobro and Hawaiian guitar in a few short weeks. It was extremely challenging.”
Gregg Miner and His 100 Rare and Vintage Musical Instruments Today
Though Miner still owns and has even doubled his collection of vintage, rare, and exotic musical instruments, he admits there isn’t time in a day for all of them. “A few of the instruments, I’ve continued to play,” he says. “Some I haven’t touched since, and some of them, I would never want to play again.”
Miner regularly runs into musicians specializing in one of the 100 instruments featured on A Christmas Collection. These musicians are invariably convinced that Miner plays the particular instruments as well as they do. Miner is the first to admit this is not the case. “I couldn’t just pick it up,” he says. “I would have to relearn it for several months.”
Miner says his unusual recording techniques were the only way to get this project done. He still puts out recordings for the label Harp Guitar Music. The difference today is that he often finds himself practicing a song every night for a year straight before recording.
Though now, Miner describes his musical pursuits as “pretty much all harp guitar all the time,” it wouldn’t take much arm twisting to bring one of the 100 instruments from A Christmas Collection to the forefront of a new project. “If the opportunity presents itself,” he remarks, “I’ll be happy to play anything.”
Interested readers can check out similar articles covering -
The story behind the vintage instruments and recording of Gregg Miner: A Christmas Collection,
The equipment Miner used to multitrack 100 musical instruments in his home recording studio,
Miner’s thoughts on restoring, recording, and collecting vintage instruments,
And the Miner Museum of Vintage, Exotic, and Just Plain Unusual Musical Instruments.
Quotes taken in conversation with Gregg Miner, January 2011.
Marcy Paulson - From the moment Marcy Paulson picked up a recorder in fourth grade music class, she was hooked. Since then, her passion for music has ...
