The most famous guitar solo Amos Garrett ever played was on a borrowed guitar. His own instrument — an Epiphone Sheraton that had been on the road with him for weeks — was slightly out of tune and poorly set up from the touring grind when he arrived at the studio for the overdub session on Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis.” So he borrowed David Nichtern’s Gibson ES-330 and played through the studio’s house Fender Twin amplifier. “The solo was the first overdub,” he has since confirmed. It reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974. Jimmy Page cited it, and Garrett specifically, as one of his favorite American guitarists in a Rolling Stone interview the following year. Albert Lee has performed with Garrett and described him with obvious respect. The solo is, in the assessment of many musicians and critics, “as famous as the song itself” — a languid, jazz-inflected, blues-seasoned single-guitar statement that produced the specific multi-string bending effect that nobody had done manually before Garrett and very few have achieved since.
Amos Garrett was born on November 26, 1941, in Detroit, Michigan. He was moved to Toronto, Ontario at age five, where he studied piano and trombone at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto. At twelve he relocated to Montreal, Quebec, where he began playing guitar at fourteen — watching performers at the Esquire Club, including Ben E. King, absorbing what was possible from the closest available living sources. He moved to New York in 1967. Ian and Sylvia Tyson gave him his first break and his first ticket to America — he was brought to Nashville by the Tysons to record the country-folk-rock crossover album Great Speckled Bird (1970), produced by Todd Rundgren, which is one of the founding documents of Canadian country-rock. From there: Paul Butterfield’s Better Days (1973), Maria Muldaur’s debut album and the “Midnight at the Oasis” overdub, a decade as Maria Muldaur’s guitar player and bandleader, and then — in 1978 — the decision to pursue his own material, resulting in albums on the Edmonton-based Stony Plain Records label, a Juno Award (with Doug Sahm and Gene Taylor, for the inaugural Juno Best Roots/Traditional Album in 1989), a teaching career, and the quiet ongoing influence of a musician who changed what electric guitar was understood to be capable of and then moved on to the next thing.
Background: Royal Conservatory Trombone, Montreal Jazz, New York, Great Speckled Bird, Better Days
Garrett’s musical formation was unusually systematic for a guitarist who would become identified with the loose, improvisational feel of his playing. The Royal Conservatory training gave him the theoretical foundations that most self-taught guitarists lack: music theory, harmony, proper technique, the understanding of musical structure that allows improvisation to be genuinely creative rather than pattern-based. The trombone, specifically, is a relevant instrument for a guitarist who would develop the multi-string bending technique that gives his playing its pedal-steel-like quality: the trombone is a continuously variable pitch instrument, capable of any interval between notes, and a trombonist who absorbs music thinks in terms of continuous pitch manipulation rather than the fretted-note-to-fretted-note jumps that most guitarists default to. Garrett’s ear for pitch — for the notes between the frets, for the bending of multiple strings simultaneously to different target pitches — reflects the trombone’s continuous pitch vocabulary applied to the guitar’s discrete-pitch mechanism.
The Esquire Club in Montreal, where he watched Ben E. King and other American R&B and jazz performers as a teenager, was his practical school: the live performance venue as the real curriculum, supplementing the Royal Conservatory’s formal training with the specific vocabulary of American popular music at its most emotionally direct. He absorbed jazz harmony, blues vocabulary, and the specific American approach to guitar — bending, vibrato, the expressive manipulation of string pitch — from watching people who had grown up in that tradition. He was watching from outside, as a Canadian absorbing an American tradition, and this outside perspective gave him the analytical distance that allows conscious technique development: he was not raised in the tradition, so he had to understand it systematically rather than absorbing it intuitively.
The Great Speckled Bird connection — Ian and Sylvia Tyson’s country-rock band, produced by Todd Rundgren in 1970 — placed Garrett in one of the more creatively significant environments in North American roots music of the era. Ian and Sylvia were among the most important Canadian folk singers of the 1960s; Buddy Cage on pedal steel was among the most inventive steel guitarists in North America; Todd Rundgren was simultaneously building his own production and songwriting career. The Great Speckled Bird album is one of the founding documents of what would become the Americana genre — a genre Garrett helped create before it had a name, twenty-five years before it became a Grammy category.
Paul Butterfield’s Better Days (1973) — the band Butterfield formed after leaving the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — gave Garrett his next major context: a blues-rock band of exceptional quality, with Geoff Muldaur on slide guitar alongside Garrett’s lead work, and Butterfield’s harmonica providing the front-line statement. Garrett’s solo on the Percy Mayfield cover “Please Send Me Someone to Love” is documented alongside the “Midnight at the Oasis” solo as a career peak — the two solos, on the same year’s worth of recording, establishing him as one of the most distinctive session guitarists in American popular music.
The Rig: Amos Garrett’s Guitars, Amps, and Technique
Guitars
Epiphone Sheraton (Primary Guitar, Late 1960s–Early 1970s, “Midnight at the Oasis” Period): Amos Garrett’s primary electric guitar during his most important session period — the years of Great Speckled Bird, Better Days, and the Maria Muldaur album — was an Epiphone Sheraton. The Epiphone Sheraton is a semi-hollow thinline with dual full-sized humbucking pickups, produced by Gibson under the Epiphone brand in Gibson’s Kalamazoo factory during the 1960s. The Sheraton’s laminated maple body with center block, gold hardware, and multiple-layer binding made it one of the most elegant instruments in the Epiphone range — comparable in construction quality to the Gibson ES-345, which the Sheraton closely resembles. Its humbucking pickups provide warmth and output, and the semi-hollow construction gives a specific resonant quality that solid-body guitars lack. For a guitarist whose playing combines jazz warmth with blues expressiveness, the Sheraton’s specific tonal character — full, resonant, with the specific airy quality of a semi-hollow body — suited the approach precisely. The Guitar Steel Forum’s documentation of the “Midnight at the Oasis” session specifically confirms: “It wasn’t done dry into the board. Amos played an Epiphone Sheraton at the time but it was slightly out of tune/set-up from weeks on the road so he borrowed David Nichtern’s Gibson ES-330.”
Gibson ES-330 (Borrowed from David Nichtern, “Midnight at the Oasis” Actual Recording Guitar): The guitar on which Garrett played the most famous guitar solo of his career was not his own. When he arrived at the session with his out-of-tune Epiphone Sheraton, he borrowed David Nichtern’s Gibson ES-330 — Nichtern being the songwriter who wrote “Midnight at the Oasis.” The Gibson ES-330 is a fully hollow thinline (unlike the ES-335’s semi-hollow construction with center block) — it has no solid wood center block, making it more prone to feedback at high volumes but also more resonant and more “acoustic” in character than the center-blocked 335 family. The specific tonal quality of a fully hollow ES-330 through a Fender Twin at studio volume — warm, slightly compressed, with the bloom and sustain of a hollow body — contributed to the specific character of the solo. The borrowed guitar, the studio house amplifier, the first-overdub spontaneity: the most famous guitar moment of Garrett’s career was assembled from circumstances rather than from careful gear preparation.
Telecaster (Primary Live Guitar, Later Career and Current Instrument): Vintage Guitar magazine’s documentation of the 2013 Vancouver Island MusicFest summit meeting of Telecaster masters — Albert Lee, Amos Garrett, James Burton, and David Wilcox — places Garrett specifically as a Telecaster player: the article is headlined “Burton, Garrett, Lee, and Wilcox Join Forces” and described as “a true summit meeting of masters of the Telecaster (with an asterisk).” The Telecaster’s single-coil bridge pickup — bright, cutting, specifically suited to the string-bending and articulation that defines country and blues lead playing — is the instrument that Garrett uses for his multi-string bending technique in the live performance context. The asterisk of the Vintage Guitar headline presumably references the various non-standard Telecaster variants in the participants’ collections, but the Telecaster family is unambiguously Garrett’s current primary instrument.
Various Semi-Hollow Guitars (Session and Recording Work): Over the course of recording with more than 150 artists, Garrett used multiple instruments depending on the session’s requirements. The Canadian Encyclopedia documents him as working in “blues, country, and jazz,” genres whose different tonal requirements suit different instruments. His early Montreal blues absorption, his Royal Conservatory jazz training, and his specific multi-string bending technique that approximates a pedal steel are all applicable to different instrument types — and the breadth of his session resume suggests a guitarist who adapted his instrument choice to the specific tonal context required for each session.
The Multi-String Bending Innovation as Technical “Gear”: The most important single technical element of Amos Garrett’s playing — and the element that makes his sound identifiable regardless of which guitar he is playing — is the multi-string bending technique he pioneered. The Vintage Guitar magazine interview is the primary source on this: “Garrett is a pioneer of multi-string bending, raising two strings to different intervals, to evoke a pedal steel. ‘The only person I heard doing it before I started to was using a mechanical B-bender, and that was Clarence White,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know of anyone doing it manually before me — and very few since. It’s hard.'”
The technique involves fretting two strings simultaneously and bending them to different target pitches — one string raised to one interval, the other raised to a different interval, simultaneously. The pedal steel guitar achieves this mechanically: the foot pedals change the tuning of specific strings while others remain constant, allowing simultaneous multi-string pitch changes that would be physically impossible on a standard guitar. White’s B-bender achieved a mechanical approximation on Telecaster. Garrett achieves the same effect manually — with the strength and precision of his fretting hand, developed through years of deliberate practice. The result, to a listener who doesn’t know what they’re hearing, sounds like a pedal steel: a guitarist bending two strings to different pitches simultaneously, creating the harmonic bloom and the pitch movement that defines the pedal steel’s voice.
Thumbpick and Acrylic Nails (Right-Hand Setup): Garrett’s specific right-hand picking setup — documented in the Vintage Guitar article — is “a thumbpick and acrylic nails on my first, second, and third fingers.” This picking configuration is the classical guitarist’s fingernail approach applied to blues and country guitar playing: the thumb drives the bass strings with a thumbpick (for the specific attack and authority of a picked bass line), while the index, middle, and ring fingers use acrylic nail extensions to pluck and snap the treble strings. The acrylic nails’ specific tonal contribution — a brighter, more defined attack than bare fingertips, similar to the snappy quality of a flat pick but with the individual-string selectivity of fingerpicking — is essential to the specific crisp character of his lead articulation. This setup is also what makes the multi-string bending technique physically possible: the acrylic nails give him sufficient grip on the strings for the specific force required to bend multiple strings simultaneously.
Amps
Fender Twin Reverb (Studio House Amp, “Midnight at the Oasis”): The amplifier on which the “Midnight at the Oasis” solo was recorded was the studio’s house Fender Twin Reverb — not a personal amplifier but the standard professional studio clean amp of the era. The Twin Reverb’s 85 watts of clean headroom and its specific American tube character provided the transparent, natural amplification that the ES-330’s hollow-body warmth and the solo’s languid, jazz-inflected character required. At studio volume — where the Twin’s full clean power is never required — the amplifier’s character is purely amplification rather than tonal coloring.
Various Fender Amplifiers (Primary Live and Studio Preference): Garrett’s consistent use of Fender-family amplifiers reflects his jazz and blues background — both traditions favor clean, American-voiced tube amplification that allows the guitar’s natural character to be the primary tonal identity. The Fender Twin, Deluxe, and Super Reverb are the canonical amplifiers for the jazz-blues fusion that Garrett’s playing occupies, and his work with Maria Muldaur’s band and in his solo career consistently placed him in Fender-amplified contexts.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Amos Garrett’s playing style is the most jazz-inflected in the country-folk-blues tradition he inhabits — a guitarist whose formal training at the Royal Conservatory gave him a jazz harmonic vocabulary that most country and folk guitarists of the 1970s didn’t possess, deployed in musical contexts where that vocabulary was unexpected and revelatory. His innovation gave him the ability to sound like a pedal steel guitarist at times, while remaining rooted as a jazz musician.
The “Midnight at the Oasis” solo is the most documented expression of this vocabulary. Its specific character — the languid, semi-intoxicated quality of the melodic lines, the specific pitch inflections that seem to float between notes rather than landing precisely on them, the multi-string bend near the end that produces the pedal-steel bloom — results from the combination of jazz harmonic thinking, thumbpick-and-acrylic-nail articulation, and the multi-string bending technique applied to a fully hollow Gibson ES-330 through a clean Fender Twin. No single element produces the solo; all of them together produce it. Remove any one and the solo is different.
His tone philosophy is the session musician’s philosophy: the right sound for the song, achieved by whatever combination of instrument, amplifier, and technique the specific song requires. The borrowed guitar and the studio house amp for “Midnight at the Oasis” are the most extreme expression of this philosophy: he brought his own instrument (the Sheraton), it wasn’t suitable that day, he borrowed what was available (the ES-330), and the result was the most famous thing he ever played. The gear serves the music; when the specific gear isn’t available, you find what is available and make the music anyway.
His teaching activity — the Amos Garrett—Stringbending: A Master Class instructional book, the online teaching, the clinic performances — reflects his commitment to transmitting the specific multi-string bending technique rather than treating it as a proprietary secret. The technique is genuinely difficult: “The only person I heard doing it before I started to was using a mechanical B-bender, and that was Clarence White. I didn’t know of anyone doing it manually before me — and very few since. It’s hard.” Teaching it is the acknowledgment that it can be learned, even if it requires the sustained, deliberate practice that most guitarists don’t commit to.
How to Sound Like Amos Garrett
Guitar: A semi-hollow guitar with humbucking pickups — Epiphone Sheraton, Gibson ES-335 or ES-330, or comparable semi-hollow — is the authentic starting point. The semi-hollow body’s resonant, slightly airy quality is the foundation of the “Midnight at the Oasis” character. A Telecaster — his current primary live instrument — provides a different but equally appropriate starting point for the string-bending and country-jazz vocabulary of his later playing.
Amp: A clean Fender combo — Twin Reverb, Super Reverb, or Deluxe Reverb — is the authentic amplification. Clean, American-voiced, with natural spring reverb. No overdrive from the amplifier; all tonal coloring from the guitar and the hands.
Amp Settings (Fender Twin / Clean American Tube Amp):
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | 3–5 | Clean — Garrett’s jazz-blues tone is pristine |
| Bass | 4–5 | Natural — semi-hollow warmth needs no boosting |
| Mid | 5–6 | Present — jazz-inflected blues lives in the midrange |
| Treble | 5 | Natural — warm but not rolled off |
| Reverb | 3–4 | Natural spring ambience — the Fender reverb is part of the sound |
Technique: The multi-string bending is the non-negotiable core. Begin by developing independent string-bending ability on single strings — the specific pitch-target precision required for multi-string bends must first be mastered on one string before attempting simultaneous bends to different pitches. Garrett’s Stringbending Master Class instructional materials are the primary resource for the specific physical approach. A thumbpick and developed fingernail technique (natural or acrylic) is the right-hand foundation.
Influence & Legacy
Amos Garrett’s influence runs through two channels. The first is the direct influence of the “Midnight at the Oasis” solo — one of the most-heard guitar solos of the mid-1970s, heard by musicians of every genre and recognized by those equipped to recognize it as something technically and musically unprecedented. Jimmy Page’s citation of Garrett in Rolling Stone is the most famous specific acknowledgment, but the solo’s impact on the community of guitarists who were developing their own vocabularies in the early-to-mid 1970s was substantial and documented. Albert Lee — the British guitar virtuoso whose work in the same country-jazz-blues territory makes him Garrett’s closest stylistic parallel — has performed directly with him and expressed obvious admiration.
The second channel is the multi-string bending technique itself, which Garrett systematically documented and taught. His Stringbending Master Class, his online teaching, and his clinic performances have transmitted the technique to subsequent generations of guitarists who want to access the pedal-steel-like bend vocabulary without a mechanical B-bender or an actual pedal steel. The connection to Clarence White (Series 1) — whom Garrett cites as the only guitarist he heard doing multi-string bending before himself, using the mechanical B-bender — places him in direct lineage with the central figure in country-rock guitar. Garrett did manually what White did mechanically, and the manual version is more flexible and more widely applicable.
His connection to the Canadian music scene — he has lived in Turner Valley, Alberta since 1989, after years in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, San Francisco, and Nashville — is an important biographical fact in the Canadian musical tradition. The Juno Award (with Doug Sahm and Gene Taylor) for the inaugural Best Roots/Traditional Album category placed him in the founding generation of Canadian roots music recognition. Stefan Grossman (Series 2 #126), with whom he shares the acoustic blues and roots community, represents the parallel American figure; both built careers as session players absorbed by the tradition who eventually developed their own solo voices within it.
The specific story of the borrowed guitar and the house amp on “Midnight at the Oasis” is the gear narrative that most completely expresses Garrett’s philosophy: the musician’s job is to make the music, and the gear that is available is the gear you use. His Epiphone Sheraton was out of tune; he borrowed the ES-330; he played the solo; it was the first overdub; it is still, fifty years later, as famous as the song itself. The gear was secondary. The music was primary. The rest is history.
Internal Links:
- Clarence White, the only guitarist Garrett heard doing multi-string bending before himself (using a B-bender) (Series 1)
- Stefan Grossman, a parallel figure in the acoustic blues and roots community who also built a session and solo career at #126
- Jimmy Page, who cited Garrett as one of his favorite American guitarists in Rolling Stone 1975 (Series 1)
- Albert Lee, who performed alongside Garrett as a fellow Telecaster master at the 2013 Vancouver Island MusicFest (Series 1)
Frequently Asked Questions: Amos Garrett Guitars & Gear
What guitar did Amos Garrett play on “Midnight at the Oasis”?
The famous guitar solo on Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis” was played on a borrowed Gibson ES-330 — not Garrett’s own guitar. His primary instrument at the time was an Epiphone Sheraton, but it was slightly out of tune and poorly set up from weeks on the road when he arrived at the session. He borrowed David Nichtern’s (the song’s songwriter) Gibson ES-330 and played it through the studio’s house Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. “The solo was the first overdub,” as Garrett later confirmed. The ES-330 is a fully hollow thinline guitar, distinct from the semi-hollow ES-335 in its lack of a solid center block, giving it a warmer, more acoustic-sounding character.
What is multi-string bending and did Amos Garrett invent it?
Multi-string bending is the technique of simultaneously fretting two strings and bending them to different target pitches — one string raised to one interval, the other raised to a different interval, at the same time. This produces the harmonic bloom and pitch movement characteristic of a pedal steel guitar, where foot pedals change the tuning of specific strings while others remain constant. Garrett pioneered the manual (no mechanical device) version of this technique: “The only person I heard doing it before I started to was using a mechanical B-bender, and that was Clarence White. I didn’t know of anyone doing it manually before me — and very few since. It’s hard.” He documented the technique in his instructional book Amos Garrett—Stringbending: A Master Class.
What is Amos Garrett’s picking technique?
Garrett uses a thumbpick on his right-hand thumb (for bass string attack and authority) and acrylic nails on his first, second, and third fingers (for treble string plucking and snapping). This hybrid picking configuration — documented in Vintage Guitar magazine’s summit session coverage — gives him the specific bright, defined articulation of his lead playing and the specific grip required for multi-string bending. The acrylic nail extensions provide both the tonal brightness and the physical strength needed to bend two strings simultaneously to different pitches.
Who are Amos Garrett’s most notable collaborations?
Garrett has recorded with more than 150 artists. His most celebrated collaborations include: Maria Muldaur (her self-titled debut album and “Midnight at the Oasis” solo); Paul Butterfield’s Better Days (1973, “Please Send Me Someone to Love” solo); Ian and Sylvia Tyson’s Great Speckled Bird (1970, produced by Todd Rundgren); Emmylou Harris; Bonnie Raitt; Stevie Wonder; Todd Rundgren; Anne Murray (“Snowbird”); Martin Mull; Jerry Garcia; and many others. In Canada, his collaboration with Doug Sahm and Gene Taylor won the inaugural Juno Award for Best Roots/Traditional Album in 1989.
Why did Jimmy Page cite Amos Garrett?
In a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page cited Amos Garrett as one of his favorite American guitarists — the year after “Midnight at the Oasis” reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and introduced Garrett’s playing to a wide audience. Page’s specific admiration was for Garrett’s jazz-inflected technique and his “Les Paul-inspired” approach — the warmth and expressiveness of the semi-hollow guitar vocabulary that Garrett had developed and applied to the folk-blues context of the Maria Muldaur recording. The Page citation is the most high-profile external validation of Garrett’s specific significance in American guitar.
What is Amos Garrett’s connection to Canada?
Garrett holds dual American-Canadian citizenship and has spent most of his adult life in Canada. He was raised in Toronto and Montreal, received formal music training at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto, and moved to Turner Valley, Alberta in 1989, where he has resided since. His connection to Canadian music runs through the Ian and Sylvia Tyson relationship (Great Speckled Bird, 1970), the Stony Plain Records albums (1978–1988), the Juno Award (1989), and his integration into the Calgary and Alberta blues and roots community. He is considered one of the most significant guitarists in Canadian music history alongside Robbie Robertson, Lenny Breau, and Ed Bickert.
What albums should I listen to to understand Amos Garrett’s guitar playing?
The essential Garrett recordings are: Maria Muldaur (Reprise/Warner, 1973) — the “Midnight at the Oasis” solo; Paul Butterfield’s Better Days (Bearsville, 1973) — “Please Send Me Someone to Love” solo; Great Speckled Bird (Ampex, 1970) — his first major recording as lead guitarist; Go Cat Go (Stony Plain, 1980) and Amosbehavin’ (Stony Plain, 1985) — his solo Stony Plain albums; Get Way Back (2008) — his tribute to Percy Mayfield. The Burton-Garrett-Lee-Wilcox concert at Vancouver Island MusicFest (2013) is available on DVD as a documented summit of Telecaster mastery that captures his current playing alongside Albert Lee and James Burton.
