Acoustic Nation with Dale Turner: The Dazzling, Altered-Tuned Fingerstyle Work of Laurence Juber

These videos and audio files are bonus content related to the May 2015 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now or at the Guitar World Online Store.

When Paul McCartney came calling in 1978, Laurence Juber scrapped a lucrative career as a London-based studio musician and joined McCartney’s Wings as lead guitarist.

When that band folded in 1981, Juber moved to the U.S., resumed his session career (playing guitar on TV shows like Happy Days and Family Ties and film soundtracks like Splash and Dirty Dancing) and also found success as a film composer (World Gone Wild, Little Sweetheart, A Very Brady Christmas).

From 1990 onward, however, Juber channeled most of his energies into solo acoustic guitar playing, resulting in an incredible string of creative-arrangement albums (LJ Plays the Beatles, Henry Mancini: Pink Guitar) and original compositions, nearly half of which he performs in DADGAD tuning, for which the low E, high E and B strings are tuned down one whole step. Let’s examine some of the ax man’s awe-inspiring “unplugged” output.

In 1990, LJ issued his solo acoustic debut, Solo Flight, which features “In Your Arms,” a composition built around an A minor chord with different harmonic colorations, not unlike FIGURE 1.

For the rest of this column, including the tabs, check out the May 2015 issue of Guitar World.

Dale Turner

A singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/film composer, Musician's Institute instructor, and author of 50+ transcription/instructional books, Dale Turner is also Guitar World's "Hole Notes"/"Acoustic Nation" columnist, and the former West Coast Editor of Guitar One magazine. Some of Dale’s old, weird, rare, and/or exotic instruments are featured in his score for WEEDS, the first animated short completed within the Filmmakers Co-op at Disney Feature Animation. His most recent CD, Mannerisms Magnified, was praised by Guitar Player magazine for its "Smart pop tunes that are crammed with interesting guitar parts and tones ... Like what the Beach Boys might do if they were on an acid trip that was on the verge of getting out of control. Yeah!"