Free Form Guitar

Free Form Guitar

by Tim Wood

Free Form Guitar is a seven-minute cut from the Chicago Transit Authority album featuring nothing but other-worldly sounds produced by Terry Kath and his Stratocaster. Some would call Free Form Guitar an example of electronic or experimental music. But admittedly, it's mainly for guitar nuts and those who want to hear something out of the ordinary. Some folks, after listening to it, might want to be Free FROM Guitar for a while. For what it's worth, Chicago considered it significant enough to put on the Kath tribute album.

It originated when Kath started fooling around with his guitar and amp setup during a lunch break. Engineer Fred Catero was intrigued by the sounds Kath was producing, so he opened some microphones and rolled tape. Kath does some interesting things on this performance. There is an example of "two-handed tapping," a technique that some guitarist named Edward Van Halen would use to great effect. The use of the Allied Knight PA amp feeding a Fender amp produces some awesome sustain and feedback. If you're a guitar player, you might scratch your head wondering how Kath got those sounds.

Former Chicago guitar player Dawayne Bailey, who is a huge fan of Kath's playing, had this take on Free Form Guitar:

"Terry's Free Form Guitar to me was a direct spin-off of the classic Jimi Hendrix creation, Third Stone From The Sun from his Are You Experienced album (1966-67). Jimi changed the world and Terry felt that influence as well as every other guitarist with a tab of acid in their brain and a Marshall stack screeching feedback out to the universe in the mid to late 1960's.

"I thought Terry's performance was a creative contrast to the amazing variety of styles on that first Chicago album, but it wasn't groundbreaking-that was Hendrix's doing 3 or 4 years before CTA came out. Regardless, I still loved Free Form Guitar and consider it a classic still today. "