Michael Adam Hedges (December 31, 1953 - December 2, 1997) was an American composer and acoustic guitarist born and raised in Enid, Oklahoma. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential solo acoustic guitarists of all time. His music features his own unique performing style which features harmonics, fingerpicking, knocking and slapping. Michael Hedges was a conservatory composition major who applied his classically trained musical background in combination with radical innovation to "reinvent" the steel string acoustic guitar. ...show more

Michael Adam Hedges (December 31, 1953 - December 2, 1997) was an American composer and acoustic guitarist born and raised in Enid, Oklahoma. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential solo acoustic guitarists of all time. His music features his own unique performing style which features harmonics, fingerpicking, knocking and slapping. Michael Hedges was a conservatory composition major who applied his classically trained musical background in combination with radical innovation to "reinvent" the steel string acoustic guitar.

He combined many unusual techniques on the acoustic guitar with a wide range of musical styles, and was also considered a dynamic performer in concert - in short, a "Paganini" of the guitar. He is known for extensive use in several pieces of two handed tapping techniques (nearly a contrapuntal style of multiple voices). He used the fingers of his right (typically picking) hand to slap harmonic "chords" at the 12th, 7th or 5th fret (or elsewhere). He made use of right hand hammer-ons, particularly on bass notes, and often used the left hand for melodic or rhythmic hammer-ons and pull offs, as well as unusual strummings, that played, as mentioned, independent voices to the right hand.

These techniques tended to convert the guitar into a quasi-keyboard like instrument for certain musical purposes. He also made extensive use of string dampening as employed in classical guitar, and was known to insist strongly on the precise duration of sounds and silences in his pieces. Other facets to his playing were percussive slapping on the guitar body and extensive use of artificial harmonics. He also played guitar-variants like the Harp Guitar (an instrument with additional bass strings that Hedges used to play Bach's Prelude to Cello Suite #1 in G Major in its intended key), and the Trans-Trem Guitar. ...show less