On this day · 47 years ago · 1979
47 Years Ago Today: Fingerstyle Guitarist Kaki King Is Born
She started on drums, not guitar, and only came back to the instrument in college. Within a few years she'd turned a single acoustic guitar into something that sounded like a full band, tapping, slapping, and detuning her way onto Rolling Stone's list of new guitar gods.
By Tommi, Acoustic fingerstyle desk · Edited by Sleuth ·
Kaki King, born Katherine Elizabeth King on August 24, 1979, in Atlanta, is a fingerstyle guitarist known for a percussive technique she calls fanning, blending flamenco-style body slaps with two-handed tapping on acoustic and lap steel guitar. Her 2003 debut, 'Everybody Loves You,' led Rolling Stone to name her the sole woman on its 2006 New Guitar Gods list. She has recorded with the Foo Fighters and Eddie Vedder, scored film work with a Golden Globe nomination, and designed her own signature Ovation Adamas model.
Drums first, guitar almost by accident
Katherine Elizabeth King was born August 24, 1979, in Atlanta, the first of two daughters. Her father noticed her musical ear early and handed her a guitar at four, but by her own account it didn't stick. "I guess my dad was hipper than most," she told GuitarPlayer's Jude Gold in a 2003 interview reprinted in the magazine's Kaki King retrospective. "Instead of sending me off to piano lessons with all the other kids, he forced me to play guitar, and I hated it. I took a few lessons and quit." Drums became her focus through high school. Guitar only pulled her back in at New York University, where she studied with instructor Bill Rayner and, per her Wikipedia biography, busked in the subway to build up her playing. She graduated to a small deal with Velour Records in 2002 and released her fully acoustic solo debut, "Everybody Loves You," on April 22, 2003.
Fanning: making one guitar sound like a band
That debut introduced the technique King calls fanning: flamenco-style percussion struck on the guitar's body, layered with two-handed fret-tapping, so a single acoustic guitar can carry rhythm, bass, and melody at once. Critics immediately compared her to fingerstyle innovators Michael Hedges and Preston Reed, and Reed, whom she met at North Carolina's Swannanoa Gathering, became a direct mentor. "He tapped riffs, hit his guitar and, like me, tuned down a whole step or more," King said. "He even played the exact same guitar as me, an Ovation Adamas." The style, and the acclaim that followed it, led Rolling Stone to name her the sole woman, and the youngest artist, on its February 2006 "New Guitar Gods" list, edging out Derek Trucks by two months on age alone.
Open tunings, DADGAD, and staying restless
King rarely plays standard tuning at all. "You can become overly dependent on open tunings," she told GuitarPlayer. "For example, you can be in DADGAD and play lovely things forever, but eventually it's going to stop sounding interesting. The trick is to keep searching out new tunings and new ideas." That restlessness runs through her catalog: a shift toward full-band post-rock on 2006's "...Until We Felt Red," a guest spot on the Foo Fighters' "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners" after Dave Grohl invited her to play on it in 2007, film-scoring work alongside Eddie Vedder on Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" that earned a Golden Globe nomination, and a 2014 multimedia stage piece, "The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body," that projects imagery directly onto her guitar's body. Reviewers haven't always followed her past the acoustic solo work that made her name, but King has been consistent that the instrument itself, not any one style, is the point. "The guitar is a shapeshifter," she says. "Something that plays all types of music and really fills all kinds of roles. It's not always the six-string guitar that we all know and love."
Her rig, and a modern way into her tuning
King is a longtime Ovation player and designed her own signature model, the Adamas 1581-KK, which she still plays on tour. She strings it with Elixir's Light-gauge acoustic strings (typically .012 to .053) and appears as a featured artist on Elixir's own site. If you want to try the open, ringing DADGAD sound she keeps returning to, our closest match on Elixir's own Light-gauge line is the Nanoweb Phosphor Bronze.
Nanoweb Phosphor Bronze Light (.012-.053)
Why this one: Matches the Light gauge King's own site and Elixir both document her using, a coated set built to hold tone through the aggressive body-slap playing her fanning technique demands.
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