Slack-Key Guitar

Slack-key guitar (ki ho'alu in Hawaiian) detunes the standard guitar strings into open chord tunings, lowering string tension and producing a soft sustained ring. Players sound the bass with the thumb while picking melody on the upper strings — the outline resembles classical guitar fingerstyle, but the harmonic centre and rhythmic feel are different. Gabby Pahinui's playing has the quality of someone humming a tune rather than reading one. Tempos are unhurried.

Guitars arrived in Hawai'i in the early nineteenth century with Mexican-Spanish vaqueros brought in to manage cattle. After the vaqueros left, Hawaiian musicians retained the instruments and developed open tunings — slack key, ki ho'alu, the slackened keys. For most of the next century the tunings were closely guarded family secrets, taught only within ohana. Gabby Pahinui's recordings from 1946 onward opened the tradition outward, and the 1970s Hawaiian Renaissance positioned slack-key as a central icon of Native Hawaiian identity. Ledward Kaapana, Keola Beamer and Cyril Pahinui carried it through the 1980s and 90s.

On Gabby Pahinui's Hi'ilawe (1972), the bass thumb pattern and the melody work in parallel, and the open tunings produce sympathetic resonance around the played notes — a haze. On Ledward Kaapana's later recordings the audio quality is cleaner and the right-hand articulation is easier to study.

Hi'ilawe by Gabby Pahinui is the canonical track. Headphones in a quiet evening reveal the resonance.

Slack-key tunings number in the dozens — Taro Patch, Mauna Loa, C Wahine, others — each opening a different modal world. Many remained family-secret tunings into the late twentieth century; some players still don't write them down.