Playing Style and Technique
King had an intuitive style, often creating guitar parts with vocal nuances. He achieved this by using the open string sound associated with Texas blues and the raw, screaming tones of West Side Chicago blues. In his early career he played a gold top Gibson Les Paul with P-90 pickups through a Gibson GA-40 amplifier, later moving on to Gibson ES-345 guitars, using a plastic thumb pick and a metal index-finger pick to achieve an aggressive finger attack, a style he learned from Jimmy Rogers. He had a relatively more aggressive and creative style of improvisation than others such as, B.B King and Albert King, considered by many to be a more exploratory and less traditional approach.
King's later years (after 1970) were marked by a shift towards more of a hard, rock-like style, presumably in an effort to reach white audiences better. He also largely quit performing new material in lieu of simply covering songs from B.B. King and other blues musicians.
Read more about this topic: Freddie King
Famous quotes containing the words playing, style and/or technique:
“Lovely,
this plowman’s son
with the good-looking wife
has gone so thin over you
that the woman,
though jealous,
is playing the go-between herself!”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
“I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the actor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.”
—Viola Spolin (b. 1911)