This is how we do it

A trip outside Greensboro in 2015 leads to musical bliss

Guitarist Wayne Krantz is one of a kind.

Time stood still for me one Sunday in a perfectly engineered listening space built somewhere in the woods outside of Pittsboro.

The space is called The Miraverse at Manifold Recording Studio. It’s about 15 miles outside of Chapel Hill on a country road off US 64. I was heading that way just after noon on Sunday, taking US 421 south out of Greensboro before picking up the six-fo’ in Siler City. In the back of the car I had my most inexpensive electric guitar, a $400 Ibanez, an SG knockoff with double humbuckers I picked up at a pawn shop in Lynchburg, Virginia one day on an extended break from covering a murder trial of some sort.

I trolled this pawn shop on my lunch break from time to time and had noticed this one Ibanez. I decided to buy it at the time because it had incredible natural sustain. That was back in 2002. I’ve since rebuilt a decent guitar collection after having sold all my gear to return to college in 1999.

So on this day, heading toward a guitar clinic with jazz-rock icon Wayne Krantz, I decided to bring the pawn shop Ibanez because of the bitter cold temperatures. I could have lugged the $90 Yamaha classical, but I feared for the natural wood and I felt the Ibanez would be safe in the gig bag.

Turns out, we didn’t use the guitars at all. We listened, in awe I might add, to Krantz talk for the two hours about what he’s into now, how he got started on harmonizing chord scales into suspended bliss, and the advantages of “slowing down to play the music that is there.”