Slack Key by Leonard Kwan--Manini

Leonard Kwan is one of the slack key artists who are mentioned as inspiration by many other players. Even Led Kaapana pays tribute to Leonard in nearly every show.

"Manini" really sounds like an outtake from a jam, maybe a few minutes of recording time left on the machine during a vocal session. It's a busy little demonstration of bouncing fingers in taropatch tuning. But the song is also documented in tablature in the Leonard Kwan/Dennis Ladd instruction book, so perhaps it's a more formal composition.

Over the years I've done arrangements loosely inspired by Leonard Kwan, but lately I've challenged myself to get a lot closer to the original recorded version of some of these classics. I thought "Manini" would be less a challenging piece, but the tempo and the amount of finger movement had me suffering. I'd say that I have most of the licks in the right place but I'm still a bit short of the tempo demonstrated by Leonard Kwan and his backup band.

The guitar I used for this recording is my much loved Martin OM-18GE, a masterpiece in mahogany and red spruce. I was tuned to taropatch open G (D G D G B D) from low pitch to high. I recorded with a single Audio Technica AT4050 mic into the Zoom F6 recorder. For cameras i shot using the iPhone 15 Pro Max with the BlackMagic Camera app along with a Panasonic Lumix GH5. Then I used DaVinci Resolve for all editing.