Let's start from your last CD "Returning". It is supposed to be a solo album for guitar, a favourite solos album. Which are your favourite and why?

I am not being lazy here, but essentially what I wanted to do with Returning was to record my favourite solos over 35 years of composing. There was one duet with my long time friend David Cullen as well. So many of the pieces date back to a very early part of my career and listening to the original versions now I hear a very scared boy in the studio who is just trying to play the notes in right order. The emotional depth that I play them with today. The dynamics of volume and tempo are very even and unexpressive in the earlier versions and no where near what the pieces sound like today in concert. In the simplest terms, I wanted to record these songs from the perspective of many years of knowing them and knowing their potential. There are also the issues of the very guitars I'm playing and the quality of the technology I can now employ to record the pieces which makes a huge difference too. There is such a limited dynamic range in the early recordings by contrast to these new recordings and these issues too needed to be corrected on returning.

Isn't it a long time you haven't been recording album for solo guitar?

Yes, but all the while most of my concert giving has been solo, so I've not really left it behind. In 1998 I recorded a CD called The Sound of Wind Driven Rain which I needed to do to prove to myself that I could compose and record a record where the guitar was very self-sufficient in terms of melody. In much the same way that Turtle's Navel, It Takes a Year and Childhood and Memory were early in my career. Though there was some other instrumentation in this CD, I felt that I had made this into a real guitar record again. It was important for me to come full circle on this issue before branching out on Hearing Voices, the CD that followed The Sound of Wind Driven Rain. I think this experience also put me back in touch with how important an expression the solo guitar was and while it freed me up to do the experimental Hearing Voices it also reminded me of how essential to my career the solo voice of the guitar has been.

Tell me how you decide to produce Returning at yours Imaginary Road Studios.

The entire project was produced in my Studios. All sessions were engineered and co-produced by my long time friend Corin Nelsen. We recorded the project from January of '04 through late April of '04 on a Pro Tools HD System (24/96). We used Hemmingway preamps, as always. We were anticipating a 5.1 surround mix which we are going to be releasing in the us, so I used 5 inputs: a matched pair of Claus Heine modified Neumann 256 mics as the basic stereo pair with a matched pair of U67 mics back about one meter and then with a DI pickup as the fifth input. We chose to use the pickup as opposed to a room mic because there simply wasn't enough signal left to make the room mic anything but a sourse of noise. The DI, by contrast, offered us a powerful signal that we could modify with effects as we later saw fit, offering us an opportunity for various sound textures to decorate the various pieces with for contrast in the program.
The recording was mixed by Bob Ludwig at Gateway mastering as always. I did do something different here, though. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I asked to have the master run through a set of analogue heads in a final phase of mastering. It was an odd request that had Bob wondering what I was thinking. I'm not quite sure what I was thinking, but Corin, Bob and I all preferred the master that had been run through the analogue process. I think this is a very important experiment, though what all the ramifications are I'm not quite sure yet.

I had thought that this would be the easiest recording of my career. It proved to be the hardest. I knew these songs so well that I expected more of them (and myself). I mean this honestly. The project forced me to find emotional connection to these songs on a level that new work doesn't demand of you. I also was very conscious of this being an historic recording for me and I wanted to get the music that had represented my 35 years of recording right.

Tell me about your studios. They combines natural materials but also windows on woods and digital items too.

I've spent too much of my life in basements of urban places making music. The whole point of Imaginary Road was to retain natural light and to offer inspiration in the mountains, the forest and the west river of Windham County Vermont where Imaginary Road is located. I don't think it's healthy to remove music from the world. At least the music I'm working on. We also have miles of hiking trails, mountain bikes, kayaks and places to swim in the summer and ski in the winter to balance mind and body a bit. On a purely practical level, I think it provides everyone working there with more energy and keeps the everyone's mood more positive even in the pressure of production.

Did you build them by yourself?

Yes, every stick. In many cases the wood in the studio started as trees. We fell and mill all of our lumber in Vermont. Even the hardwoods like maple and cherry. The building was designed and built by Corin and myself and Corin did all the wiring himself.

We all can remeber the very high standard of Windham Hill productions in all the De Grassi, Winston or Michael Edges. On the technical side which was the secret of that clearness? The first records supposed to be based on an analogic system.

The evolution of Windham Hill's sound was really an evolution in my learning and demanding more and more quality as I learned of the possibilities. The early recordings were actually very rudimentary, but quickly improved. This is why a lot of my early solos sound so tiny and inexpressive to me. Before long we were using Studer machines with 1/2" tape at 30 ips and using quality mics and preamps that required very little if any noise reduction (which was always a compromise I hated to make). We did one of the first ten experiments in digital recording through the cooperation of Sony in 1979-80 when I recorded Passage on the Sony 1600, two track recorder.

We quickly adopted digital (though I recognized that it was in need of improvement) and bought our one and only Sony 3324 which we named Bud Costanza. Bud only died last year. His Apogee filters made for one of the finest digital sounds I've ever heard. We are now experimenting with summing devices and other modifications to improve the sound of Pro Tools (especially in the mixing phase).

Talking about Windham Hill, how was it born and how did it end?

Windham hill was born really only to release my own first record. There was never a plan or even a hope that it would go beyond that. No one could have been more surprised than I that records of solo guitar recordings could have an impact on a record market place dominated by disco and later punk rock.
Windham Hill ended up documenting a very vital, very real musical movement and it was blessed by being at the right place at the right time and run by a musician who understood musicians. In an odd way, I think that Windham Hill's success is what finally killed it for me. Almost 20 years after founding Windham Hill, it had come to be a real corporation doing 30-40 million dollars in business a year with over 100 employees in a score of offices around the world. It was wonderful fun in the beginning and became a business in the end.
The business side was good too, of course. It provided a livelihood for a large group of very talented players and created a market for a form of music which has all but disappeared from the mainstream. I'm very proud of all this and without the success (and the financial freedom it gave us), our impact would have been less. For me personally, though, it was time to move on in may of '92 when I sold the company to BMG.

Imaginary road records were in a way supposed to be a new Windham Hill style label?

I didn't want it to imitate Windham Hill and hoped we could branch out even further than Windham Hill in terms of musical styles, but the company was a victim of one of the many corporate mergers that constantly take place. It was a joint venture deal and when Polygram was sold, all joint ventures were terminated.

Windham hill was identified like the expression of the growing new age movement. Do you still believe in this horizon?

I'd like to being with a quick explanation of my dislike of the term New Age... I'll make it brief.

1. Life Style. There is absolutely no value judgment in this at all, but the term "New Age" does carry with it a lot of rather ill-defined life style connotations. The group of artists who comprised Windham Hill were a varied lot socially and politically.... there was no simple unification of belief which pre-existed or, God forbid, was imposed upon them. If people want to believe in the vortexes in Sedona, I'm fine with that, but we weren't selling that nor exploiting that belief. We were making music, plain and simple, and I wanted the music to stand on its' own merits.

2. By 1982 Windham Hill was enjoying great success and the major labels jumped into that world with the mistaken belief that if a small label could sell a gazilliion records, they could sell exponentially more. Everyone joined the party in a very short period of time. Windham Hill was courted by all the major labels and I remember the disappointed head of one major record label telling me after we'd rejected the offer that "we don't need you... all we need is a piano and a lot of white on the cover." I think this is pretty much how the labels saw the grass roots phenomenon of Windham Hill; in typically cynical terms which ignored the care and detail that went into the entire process of Windham Hill (and other independent labels). Suddenly every label had a Windham Hill-like division and they absolutely flooded the market place with questionable and undifferentiated product and diluted the impact of what had been an utterly sincere musical movement up till that point. The major labels created the "New Age" chart at Billboard and compromised the sincerity and quality of the genre at the same time.

3. This is pure ego talking and I admit it. I created a magazine ad in the early 80s which now looks like genius, but really was only born of frustration. Everyone (record stores, writers, radio stations) was asking me what kind of music we were making. I took the words "folk" "classical" "rock" and "folk" and drew lines through them with the name Windham Hill at the bottom. The implicit point being that what Windham Hill was producing was, well, Windham Hill music. It would be ridiculous to say that we were the only label making good music in this genre, nor would it be accurate to portray Windham Hill as the inventor of this new instrumental music: there were certainly seminal influences I could point to easily, but we were rather the flagship of the emergence of this music into the mainstream and, frankly, I resented being subsumed into the greater genre of "New Age," a term I already felt compromised by for the reasons above.
Hence my quote in the LA Times that "if I catch the guy who coined the term I'll nail his forehead to the wall." Time tempers everything and I feel much less reactionary than I did at that time. These things happen and worrying about the sweep of history and public perception is a slippery slope... In short I think I've become more philosophical. Would I like to win the Grammy for my new record in any genre including New Age. You bet I would!

What's the meaning of the term acoustic in your opinion? As in nowdays lots of people use the word umplugged? Which is the difference for you?

There's probably not much difference. I don't really care whether an instrument has electronics involved or not. I think that Windham Hill in the early days sounded so different from everything else because of the lack of anything electronic, but for me it was more importantly about intimacy. About being close to the instrument and player. I still strive to convey this sense of proximity and closeness in even the more complex and layered productions I do. It's almost beyond my ability to explain how this works, but sometimes I hear a complex mix of a song and feel like I'm hearing just layers for no purpose. Then I hear a track by Peter Gabriel and realize that it's every bit as complex, but somehow retains an intimacy and directness that connects the listener to the musician. That intimacy is the point to be and is what I try to achieve however complex a piece becomes.

Which are your favourite guitars you got?

My principal instruments are by Froggy Bottom guitars. I currently have five one. My favourite instrument on earth and in my complete experience as a guitarist is a guitar I call FB3. I have new baritone guitar that Michael and Andy built for me which has completely changed my performances. lmost without exception, the pieces I perform are capoed to the 2nd or 5th fret. The result is a clear, ringing high end which has been a trademark of mine for years. The compromise in this situation, however, has always been the loss of bass. The baritone guitar, with it's larger strings (which somehow still have a very light action), return the bass to the songs, offering a far better balanced performance. It's actually been stunning for me to hear the bottom end of a piece like Bricklayer's Beautiful Daughter. A real revolution for me. I have a Martin Parlor guitar that is a very important part of my touring and recording. This was a gift from Michael Hedges. I also have a Martin M36, a Laravee, a wonderful guitar by Steve Klein and a 12 string by Ron Ho.

Italian version on "Strumenti Musicali", n281, 2004: "William Ackerman. Chitarrista e costruttore" di Michele Coralli
© altremusiche.it / Michele Coralli
I n t e r v i e w s ' I n d e x
Su am: vedi la recensione del concerto di W.Ackerman a Sant'Agata Bolognese