Blog Critics, Music
by David Bowling, February 2011

Randy Ellefson is an under the radar guitar virtuoso. He has now returned with two new releases. His first two albums travelled in a hard rock direction but now he has made an abrupt change in style. One album can best be described as acoustic pop and the other is classical.

The road to these new releases has been a difficult one for Ellefson. During 1996 he developed tendinitis which made it virtually impossible for him to play the guitar. It took five years to return to what was an acceptable level for him and another five years before he returned to the recording studio.

Serenade Of Strings is his acoustic release. He began the album over a decade ago and only recently has been able to complete it. He performs the entire guitar, bass, keyboards, and a lot of the percussion parts. The only other musician present is drummer Jeff Moos. He also wrote 16 of the 17 tracks.

This is not a laid back album with just some simple guitar picking. The music has punch and rhythm as many of the songs are up-tempo. His style is precise and the notes flow together well. He manages to keep the listeners attention throughout, which can be difficult for an instrumental album. Some of the better tracks are “The Gift,” “Duo,” “Tears,” “Homecoming,” and “Shades Of Blue.”

The Lost Art is an album of classical music recorded during 1995. It was not intended for general release but was meant for his personal use. While his recovery from tendinitis allows him to play the acoustic guitar, he is unable to play a classical guitar at an acceptable level, and may never be able to do so again. This fact prompted him to release this material as a separate album.

His inability to play classical music in the future is a loss as he has an aptitude for the style. It requires a precision and preciseness that not many guitarists take the time to develop. He varies the program so as to make it appealing. J.B. Loeillet de Gant Sonata No. 1, J.S. Bach Cello Suite No. 1, and Heritor Villa-Lobos are all nice vehicles for his explorations.

Randy Ellefson has released two different albums that are tied together by the talent of one person. If you are a fan of the guitar, either one should provide about an hour of pleasure.

The counterpoint section at :58 is one of my favorites on the album, and once again Jeff suggested I do the kick drums, on that one section. At some point, I added the opening lead melody but then turned it off, thinking I didn't like it. Months later I saw it sitting there, turned off, and dimly remembered this. I turned it on just to see and was surprised I'd ever turned it off. I don't know what I was thinking.

I tend to "arpeggiate" chords a lot, meaning pick through the notes one by one instead of strum them. However, if I did that in every section of every song, there wouldn't be much variation, so with that in mind, I sought interesting music to strum in the newer pieces, and this is what led to the opening music and the rest of the tune.

The recording is something of an accident, as I was rehearsing my own piece, "Menagerie", and needed something similar to practice, so I learned "Dee". When recording my piece two weeks later, I decided to record this on the spur of the moment, but didn't intend to use it. It was only when I walked into the mixing studio late one day and the engineer had it playing that I changed my mind. I didn't recognize it at first and thought it was someone else and sounded better than anything I'd done. It wasn't until Jeff said, "I forgot you recorded this", that I realized it was me! It's rare to hear yourself objectively. Anyway, I decided to include it after all.

The lead guitars are a mix of old (1986?) and new (late 2009, when it was all recorded). The entire first section is the original, unaltered. Various other sections are part of both. For example, at 1:19, the repeating melody is from 1986, but with more experience, I was now able to morph this into something more at 1:35-2:04. The next section alternates between old and new quickly. At 2:38 it's all new up to 3:41, when it's the 1986 lead again!

Jeff had limited time to prepare for the album, so he said I should peform the kick drums you hear through much of the tune instead of him taking precious time to remember where I wanted them. This also resulted in me doing two drum fills. Jeff is heard playing the main beat at 2:32.

This song is named for my late cat Floyd, who was quite suddenly admitted to the hospital one day. I was shocked to hear that, at five years old, he was terminally ill and would die suddenly, without pain, probably soon. After a very long week, we learned one morning that he could finally come home that afternoon, and in between, I wrote the twin lead guitar melodies at 2:34-3:25. It has always reminded me of Floyd, who died in his sleep five months later.

This was one of the more complicated songs to record and mix, as many of the parts could be played on steel string, nylon string, or 12-string, so I generally did them all and made up my mind which to include during mixing, but it resulted in a lot of performances to wade through and make work together.

Separating

This is also the fastest song I've ever written, being done in two hours, all parts. It was inspired literally by accident. I went to strum the lowest E major chord to see if the guitar was in tune and wasn't looking and missed, holding down an F major chord instead. The problem is some notes weren't held down on purpose, as they are "open" strings to ring, so I got half E major and half F major. Realizing my mistake, I started to correct it when I heard the open B string tension sounding like it ought to resolve upward by step to the C of an F major chord. This is now the first few strums of the song, and the rest was done quite quickly.

To write the song, I first had to draw out on paper all of the possible chords I wanted to use, as there are only four types (major, minor, diminished, augmented) and three of them were unavailable (as a three note chord) due to the absence of the minor third (no half steps!). Since I literally had to invent the fingerings I needed, it's probably the most original thing I've written from one standpoint, and in that sense it's the exact opposite of "Separating", and a kind of high point - but only because my playing has always been about finding new ways to do things on a guitar, and this is the extreme.

As a final note, I "broke" the scale on the last chord, introducing a half step for the minor last chord, purely because I saw the option, played it, and thought it sounded nice and surprising in its context.

It was 1996 when I wrote most of the other rhythm guitar parts, right up to but not including the solo section at 1:57, which remained missing for ten years because I got tendonitis a month into this and couldn't play acoustic guitar for almost a decade.

Just about every note of lead guitar was written in 2008 when I finally finished this, and little changed when I re-performed everything for the album in 2009, except that drums and percussion were added.

The song's ending was something of an accident, as I realized that the first and second of these sections, written to occur in succession, could actually be performed together with some minor alterations, resulting in a lush, layered section. I could hardly believe the result, and combined with the lead parts, this seemed to cement my "arrival" at this level of composition in June 1996; and it was only the second song, after "Shades of Blue", to ingrain classical theory into my acoustic guitar work. In 2009, I added drums and a few short harmony melodies, but this recording is otherwise identical to the original.

This piece has always stood out for one other reason, and a cruel one at that - it was the last song I finished writing and recording before tendontis stopped me from playing acoustic guitar for a decade. At least I had finished in top form.