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Stories   >   Acoustic Guitar visits with guitarist, producer, and Windham Hill founder: Will Ackerman

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Acoustic Guitar visits with guitarist, producer, and Windham Hill founder: Will Ackerman

Posted: August 21, 2022

Acoustic Guitar's Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers writes…..It’s hard to picture a more idyllic environment for making music than Will Ackerman’s Imaginary Road Studios in Windham County, Vermont. The studio building, part of a rustic compound constructed over many years by Ackerman himself with lumber from the surrounding forest, overlooks a hillside thick with sugar maples. In contrast to the cave-like atmosphere of many studios, the recording rooms at Imaginary Road bask in natural light, with windows and sliding doors that open for fresh air.

“It’s a nice, healthy way to work,” says Ackerman, sitting in the studio’s upstairs lounge, where arched doors open to a deck and expansive view of the West River valley. “People who record here, pros like [bassist] Tony Levin, they all comment on how working in this studio is not tiring.”

Ackerman bought this land in southeastern Vermont circa 1976, around the time he released his first album, a set of alternate-tuning-driven gutitar instrumentals called The Search for the Turtle’s Navel, inaugurating his own Windham Hill label. Working at the time as a carpenter/builder in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ackerman unexpectedly found himself getting major radio play and concert bookings, and his side hustle as a label owner grew fast, especially in the realm of acoustic instrumental music.

While not solely a guitar label, Windham Hill ushered in a new era for the steel-string guitar, thanks especially to seminal albums by Ackerman, his cousin Alex de Grassi, and Michael Hedges. Building on the work of guitarists like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and John Renbourn, Ackerman and Windham Hill opened up a creative and commercial space for sophisticated, eclectic guitar music, often powered by alternate tunings and unconventional technique, that countless players continue to explore today.

Ackerman sold Windham Hill in 1992, and the windfall from that deal helped furnish Imaginary Road with an extraordinary collection of vintage Neumann microphones, a Steinway B grand piano, and more. In this studio, Ackerman and engineer Tom Eaton have recorded scores of albums, specializing in the guitar- and piano-based instrumental music associated with Windham Hill. Ackerman’s own Grammy for Best New Age Album, for the 2004 guitar collection Returning, sits on the windowsill in the control room.

As a producer, Ackerman uses a unique system for assessing takes and making quick editing decisions. Basically, he maps out a song in very short sections/phrases that might be just five or ten seconds long and creates a table in which the rows list the sections (A1, A2, B1, C1, etc.) and each column is a numbered take. While the performance is happening, he marks plus signs in the grid to indicate the best sections. Meanwhile, Tom Eaton writes down time stamps on his own sheet, for easy access afterward.

From these notes, Ackerman creates a master map for Eaton indicating which sections of which takes to edit together. “This is a system for a guy who doesn’t read music, which is me, but it’s a hell of a system, because you can know in real time when you’re done,” says Ackerman. “It’s damned efficient, because you don’t record and then sit around and waste time and money listening to the tracks. You have the faith to make your decisions in real time.” —JPR

Though more prolific as a producer, with more than 25 gold and platinum albums in his credits, Ackerman has kept up his own creative output as well. In recent years he’s done a spate of collaborations, including the Grammy-nominated Brothers album with trumpet/flugelhorn player Jeff Oster and Tom Eaton on keyboards; the quartet Flow with Oster, pianist Fiona Joy, and guitarist Lawrence Blatt; and Four Guitars with Todd Mosby, Vin Downes, and Trevor Gordon Hall.

And after a long break from solo work, Ackerman last year released Positano Songs, featuring guitar pieces composed in his longtime favorite getaway on Italy’s Amalfi coast. Like all of Ackerman’s guitar music, Positano Songs is based on his unending exploration of alternate tunings, with gentle melodies over lush open string arpeggios. Ackerman is so devoted to discovering tunings, and not looking back, that he is unable to recreate the music even from his latest album without referring to video documentation.

During an extended conversation in the studio, flanked by vintage photos of Fahey and Basho, Ackerman reflects on creating Positano Songs, shows his favorite guitars, and shares insights into his process as a producer.

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