You can listen to Chris’s Tunes here – chrisjusticeguitar.com is a survey of 40+ years of original 6 & 12 string guitar music.
If you scroll down this page, you will find playlists with some of the 300 or so guitar pieces I have written over the years. Further down the page, you can find info on the full library of my archived recordings.
If you like this music, PLEASE let me know by using the Contact Me form. I would be delighted to upload more music, I have a lot of it to share!!! This music has been a labor of love and is still a work in progress.
P.S., you can watch Videos of my music, and there are blog posts with new music and videos too!
Enjoy.
Ivan’s Choice Part I
Ivan’s Choice Part I is a play list featuring 14 tunes played on the Taylor 555 12 string in a couple of my favorite tunings, all written in 1986 – 87 while I lived in Buffalo, NY. and was working on PhD in mathematics. I never finished the math dissertation but did nail maybe 50 or 60 songs down including this play list.
At this point things had started to fall into place in terms of the musical ideas, guitar technique and a recording process and sound.
Ivan’s Choice Part II
Ivan’s Choice Part II is a play list with 18 songs also played on my Taylor 555 12 string.
This is a very jolly merry happy collection mostly using a sunny major key open tuning. I would say its a G tuning, but my guitars have all been liberated from anything vaguely approaching concert pitch within 24 hours of leaving the guitar store. So its “G” in a quantum relativistic sort of ideal Platonic sense.
Because of the relativity in play here, listeners with perfect pitch may wish to take a Midol or similar before listening to my music.
Like Ivan’s Choice Part I, mostly written in 1986 – 87.
Ivan’s Choice Part III
Ivan’s Choice Part III includes 16 songs written and recorded in 1986-1988. They reflect a variety of tunings spread between the Taylor 555 12 string and the little mahogany Martin OO-17.
All New Voobah Part 2
Evangeline is a favorite – this version was recorded on the Rickenbacker, the skinny neck makes managing the bass notes played with the left thumb a little easier.
Several songs on the little mahogany Martin are also top of list for me, they all were in a common tuning and exploit the big deep sound this guitar projects in recording. You can watch a more recent version of track 10, Sleeping Dogs in the video section of this website.
The song Numinous is one of the few I have ever written in the standard EADGBE guitar tuning. It came out in one sitting more or less without any tinkering. That is magic when that happens!
Studies, Sketches and More Songs, Part 5
The first 7 songs on this playlist reflect a loose remembrance of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. His brand of kindness seems sadly in short supply these days. I didn’t set out to put anything like this together but things seemed to fit nicely like one of those little jig saw puzzles you give to a 5 year old to assemble and where 2 pieces get kicked under the couch and the dog nibbles and drools on another.
The next 5 sketches are also “of a piece” and make for a nice picture.
The last song, Dog Heaven, was one that I completely lost track of over the past 20 years since I wrote it. I re-discovered it when I was going through the archives last spring – it was a pleasant surprise and seems like a good fit to end the cycle.
Listen to My Music
I have roughly 250 musical junkballs in the archive, and more in the works. You can listen to these tunes on the embedded music players on this page and the blog posts. Think late-career Frank Tanana. My wife would say its just the same damn song with 200 different titles. Whatever. The Blog/Home page will highlight and annotate a sprinkling of these songs as a feature them in future blog entries.
“Anybody’s best pitch is the one the batters ain’t hitting that day.”
– Christy Mathewson
I have divided my tunes into three buckets:
– Ivan’s Choice (Parts I – VI)
– All New Voobah (Parts 1 – 4) and
–Studies, Sketches and More Songs (Parts 1 – 7).
Ivan’s Choice
The six parts of Ivan’s Choice follow a rough recording chronology from 1985 through 1988, give or take an anachronism here or there. The recordings were primarily made in my bedroom in Buffalo or at the Duffy Club down the street, when I was house sitting for Ed the Crusher.
All but a couple songs were recorded on my first decent 12 string – a used Taylor 555 – which I bought from the String Shoppe in Buffalo in 1985 for what then seemed like a princely ransom of $750. The proprietor dissuaded me from buying a jumbo Guild 12 string – he dryly remarked that “the Taylor is better” – and with the benefit of hindsight he was right. The 555 has a large but balanced tone and you can easily coax the details out of busy passages. It had decent mileage on it by the time I acquired it, so it is old enough Bob Taylor may have actually passed hands over its construction.
Otherwise you hear the all-mahogany Martin 6 string from Boyd’s Music in Burlington, VT; that was a guitar that my roommate Doug encouraged me to purchase because he thought it wouldn’t be as loud as the battered Yamaha 12 string I had been hammering on for 3 or 4 hours a day. At the time I routinely broke strings – big and small gauge on either guitar – with a vigorous picking attack, so I think this wishful thinking on his part. I have a somewhat lighter touch these days, although I am told its still too loud to be in the room with for more than three and a half minutes.
This guitar came into its own when I got a neck reset at Elderly Instruments in Lansing, MI and figured out it sounded really nice in a very dropped B or C tuning. That seemed to make it louder. Ha.
Note: Count Ivan is my underemployed cartoon character (i.e, Count Ivan von Bullsuits, a.k.a. Mister Ook-Ook) of nebulous middle European ethnicity who has been a marginalia item since my freshman year in high school. I will feature him in blog posts as opportunity allows! For better or worse he’s not Russian, so there is no need to cancel him, at least on that account…
All New Voobah
All New Voobah is a collection of 60 or so songs that were mostly recorded in Dearborn, MI, after the Ivan’s Choice “sessions”.
A majority of the songs in the 4 parts of All New Voobah were not included in Ivan’s Choice collection, but there are definitely a handful of alternate takes of songs featured in Ivan’s Choice playlists. A few selections in fact are significantly reworked versions or earlier song incarnations.
Similar to Ivan’s Choice and All New Voobah, I will release these playlists over time and highlight particular songs in blog entries.
Studies, Sketches and More Songs
In the course of curating my tape library, I discovered a considerable accumulation of fully worked out songs that I had lost track of over the years. It has been a series of pleasant surprises to be reacquainted with these orphans again.
There are also a couple dozen small studies and sketches included that are in listenable shape, Close enough for government work anyway. I will selectively revisit these to refine the music and master their little technical issues in a more polished fashion. In the mean time you can take them as a down payment on bigger and better things.
The 7 playlists in this set have 87 tracks (77 new songs, plus a handful of songs that were featured in the IC or ANV playlists above, but for which I discovered interesting versions). This material spans the past 40 years, with some pieces written and recorded when I was an undergraduate and a couple recorded and or written in early 2021, and the majority written from 1990 to 2000.