Music is language that resonates with guitarist

Unlike some musicians, Jake White was not pushed into music — not by parents who made him practice the piano, not by teachers who saw potential.

He was pulled in by the sound of a guitar.

"I was about 14 and at a barbecue." White said. "I saw a friend playing a Hawaiian guitar, using a slack-key technique. I got so excited about that sound."

So White asked for a guitar for Christmas. "And I just started playing around. I'm largely self-taught."

He started listening to Eric Clapton, Nirvana, Metallica. "Then I saw Michael Hedges at Kingsbury Hall, and I was blown away by his style. It opened up a new world for me. I realized there is a whole lot more you can do with this instrument. I just had to figure it out."

White has studied some music theory, mostly he just experimented with various techniques. "What's different about my music is that I do a lot of tapping and percussive work. I come up over the top of the neck, which is all pretty rare on an acoustic guitar, and then I use different tunings for everything I do.

"Some of the things I do — well, you can tell that at some point in my life I had too much time on my hands to experiment."

White has been performing his music locally for quite awhile — everything from wedding gigs to corporate events to opening for local acts that come to town. He's been especially popular on what he calls the "university theater scene."

Then last fall he was approached by pianist Paul Cardall. "He thought it would be fun to do a CD of some of my original stuff, as well as some traditional hymns and Christian songs with my arrangements."

White already had a couple of tunes that he had arranged, but once he sat down to work on more, "I was amazed at how quickly they came. It was like they were waiting inside the guitar; they wanted to come out."

Arranging hymns for instrumentals is an interesting business, he said. "With vocals, you can repeat the melody because the words change, but with an instrumental arrangement, you don't just want the same thing over and over, so I added interludes and flavors and bridges that give the song a flow."

Another thing that is different about his arrangements, he says, is that they are for solo guitar. "A lot of guitarists will lay down a track and then record another track on top of it. I don't do that. I just play the guitar, even though it sometimes sounds like there's a whole band on stage. I can do bass, drums, snares, bongos. There are just a lot of fun sounds."