Salomila & New Opihi Moemoe Slack Key with Led Kaapana

Both Ledward and Leonard Kwan recorded CDs on the Dancing Cat label. Leonard's "Ke`ala's Mele" is the only project I know of that he recorded using acoustic guitar. The CD cover shows Leonard with a Martin dreadnought rather than his traditional Gibson archtop jazz guitar. In his earlier recordings he played the Gibson through an amplifier but in this CD it's just the Martin and a microphone and Leonard's fingers.

When Ledward was putting together his wonderful "Black Sand" CD for Dancing Cat he invited Leonard to play a duet, but with a twist. Instead of two versions of the same song they played two different instrumental pieces at the same time. Ledward played the traditional "Salomila" while Leonard dished up a slight variation on his composition, "New Opihi Moemoe #3." The interplay between the two guitars makes for hours of listening fun, following first one and then the other as they each present their side of the story.

I've been going to school on Leonard Kwan lately and one of the pieces I taught myself was "New Opihi Moemoe #3" and I realized that I had an opportunity to pay tribute to this two-song-duet if I could get Ledward to join in. I'm happy to say that he was up for the project, but there was a bit of a change. These days when Led plays "Salomila" he often adds a verse or two of "Lili`u E" to create a medley and add some variety. So I spent a couple of days developing a tweak to Leonard's song that would match the chord structure of Ledward's medley arrangement. The whole project turned out to be a big barrel of fun.

The techie details are similar to most of our recordings when I'm visiting O`ahu: Led plays his number one guitar, the Martin 000-16 vintage long scale model while I use my Composite Acoustics OX. A pair of Shure KSM141 mics are plugged into the Zoom F6 recorder. In this case we are using slightly different tunings - Ledward is playing in taropatch open G (D G D G B D from low pitch to high) while I'm using a G wahine (D G D F# B D). I'm using a pair of iPhone 15 cameras, a Pro and a Pro Max. I tweaked the audio with REAPER then built the video in DaVinci Resolve.