 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
|
|
|
|
Check out these equipment picks from artists featured in the March 2002, No.111 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
JOSH
GRAVES |
|
|
Josh Graves has had many Dobros over the years and currently favors the Josh Graves Signature Model made by Gibson. It is a re-creation of his famous 1928 Model 37 with a sunburst maple body, solid headstock, and 25-inch scale (a half-inch longer than standard). The original is the guitar he calls "Cliff" after its former owner, Cliff Carlisle. "An old boy up in Kentucky bought it off him, and then a few years later he called me and said he thought I should have it," says Graves. "People think Cliff gave it to me, but it was that fellow in Kentucky. It’s got a real balanced sound." He used Cliff and another 1928 model Dobro that he named Julie during his Flatt and Scruggs years. Later on, he played custom models by R.Q. Jones and Paul Beard ([301] 733-8271, www.beardguitars.com). Graves plays a set of John Pearse nickel-wound strings (www.jpstrings.com) named after him with gauges of .018, .018, .026, .038, .049, .059. His third string is a hefty unwound wire that contributes an extra twang factor to his picking. He slides with a Stevens Steel bar and uses Dunlop fingerpicks and a thick plastic thumbpick. He never uses a capo and says, "I’d rather try it in A or B without the roll. I don’t care for the capo. You end up just going for the open sound. You find more different sounds when you play the natural key." —Orville Johnson On the road, Lúnasa’s Donogh Hennessy plays a small-bodied 1995 S32C Lowden guitar with a cedar top and rosewood back and sides, strumming it so hard that he’s dug two holes into the body. At home, he plays a pair of large-bodied Lowdens (O32C and O25C) and a 1998 Martin 00-1. "The Martin is the guitar I love most," says Hennessy. "I just play it and play it when I go home, sitting there watching the telly." All of his guitars are strung with Elixir medium-gauge strings. In the pubs, when he’d rather play an instrument he can carry in his pocket, he uses Mike Grinter whistles. —Kenny Berkowitz Wyatt Rice’s main instrument these days is a 1988 Santa Cruz Tony Rice model dreadnought with an Indian rosewood body and a Sitka spruce top. Like his older brother, Rice prefers natural tortoiseshell picks and uses medium-gauge GHS phosphor-bronze strings. "My action is a step under what most people would call medium," he says. "It’s low enough that if I try to play too loud, it’ll definitely rattle. But I don’t play too hard; I let the mic do the work." On stage, he has been using a new Neumann KM 184 plugged straight into the mixing board with no signal processing. "I really like it a lot," Rice says. "It tells the truth." —David McCarty For 20 years, Lucy Kaplansky was faithful to a Martin 00-18. "It was starting to fall apart," she says, "and I decided, ‘You know what? I’m a professional. Maybe I should have two guitars.’ Richard Shindell had bought this [Martin] SP000-16. I don’t know anything about guitars and I didn’t know what to look for, but I played it and I thought, ‘I love this.’ And I called up Martin and got one." The 000 is a tad bigger than her old guitar but still a comfortable fit for her small frame, and she says it delivers a much warmer sound. On stage, Kaplansky uses a Fishman amplification rig, with a Crown internal mic and an under-saddle pickup run through a Blender. "I love that system," she says. "It’s so easy to use, and it always sounds good." The Blender has separate mic and pickup channels, so she can use only the pickup output in the monitors to rein in feedback problems while using the mic as the dominant sound in the house. Kaplansky’s long-suffering strings are Elixirs. "I, for some reason, can kill strings in one show," she says. "I can use [the coated Elixirs] for two or three shows and they sound equally good." She uses a medium set because lights break too easily under the heavy pounding of her pick. "I don’t seem to be able to play lighter. I lose some kind of emotion in the process, so I just have to break strings." The other key item in Kaplansky’s travel bag is a Shure Beta 87 mic for her vocals, which she says is a big step up from what’s typically available at gigs. —Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Roland Dyens’ guitar was built in 1992 by French luthier Olivier Fanton D’Andon (48 rue Jean Moulin, 28200 Chateaudun, France; [33] 2-37-45-14-58; fax [33] 2-37-45-14-12). He strings his guitars with Savarez strings, a combination of the Cristal trebles and the Corum basses. He likes the trebles for their clarity and the basses for their tone and responsiveness. Dyens uses either the nail or the flesh of his right thumb, and the Corums work well with both. He tends not to use any amplification except when it is absolutely necessary, and then only a little to fill out the sound in a room. He prefers to use Shure microphones for this purpose. —Stephen Dick |
||
