48 Wires is the name of a music performance project - a group of acoustic guitarists brought together through Guitar Craft courses. We are based in London, England, play (mostly) Ovation guitars and perform original compositions and other selected pieces arranged for the New Standard Tuning. When 48 Wires play, the musicians take their places around a circle with the audience seated in the centre, giving the listener a unique experience of how music can move around the performance space.
The music 48 Wires plays is outside of the normal acoustic guitar repertoire, and is written and arranged to be presented in this unique, 360-degree format. Some of it is very melodic. Some of it isn't. Some of it is unlike anything you'll have heard, and unlike anything you'll have heard from an acoustic guitar. Or lots of acoustic guitars.
7 October 2007
48 Wires is currently inactive, with no projects planned in the foreseeable future. If you want to be kept informed of any significant developments, let us know.
31 March 2007
Audio, photos and video from the first 48 Wires project are now available on the new media page.
5 March 2007
48 Wires attended a Guitar Craft residential (long) weekend in Derbyshire, England from Thursday 1st to Sunday 4th March. The weekend was led by Robert Fripp and Curt Golden (USA) and featured an intense four days of guitar work, focusing primarily on circulations. 48 Wires also took the opportunity to perform three times: Sardana Catalana at Saturday lunch, a D Major circulation (played with the thumb) at Sunday breakfast and G Force at Sunday lunch.
12 February 2007
48 Wires met in London for the weekend of 10th & 11th of February to record a selection of the pieces we have performed during this project. Saturday was spent rehearsing (we hadn't played together for two months), Sunday was recording day. By the end of the afternoon we had several takes of each piece to choose from. We recorded Hope, Boat To Torcello, Growing Circle, circulations in C Harmonic Minor and D Major, and some spur-of-the-moment improvisations. These will now be reviewed and tweaked and we hope to have something to make available through this site pretty soon.
There is a video of a C Harmonic Minor circulation run-through here (Mac OS or Linux users may need something like the VLC media player to play the WMV file). Note that the video has been solarised.
1 January 2007
The third and final performance of the current project took place on December 10th 2006. Click the thumbnail to see the work schedule for that day. Thirteen people squeezed into the circle - the biggest audience so far. The setlist was unchanged compared to the previous performance - the group chose to focus on improving the quality of details and dynamics.
27 November 2006
After another weekend of intensive rehearsals, 48 Wires gave the second performance of their current project to an invited audience on Sunday 26th November 2006 in London. Click the thumbnails for the setlist and a picture of the performance space...
10-12 November 2006
48 Wires attended a Guitar Craft residential weekend in rural Dorset in the south of England. We set ourselves the aim of performing all of our repertoire during the weekend, and achieved it. Click the thumbnail for the performance schedule.
The first 48 Wires project ran from October 2006 to February 2007.
