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Check out these equipment picks from artists featured in the May 2002, No.113 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
DAN
CRARY AND BEPPE GAMBETTA |
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Dan Crary performs on a variety of Taylor guitars including his own DCSM signature model (now discontinued). On Synérgia, he used a specially modified version of that guitar with an extended neck two frets longer than standard and tuned to D. He uses an on-board pickup and preamp system by Trance Audio (www.tranceaudio.com); medium-gauge, phosphor-bronze strings; and Fender medium picks. Beppe Gambetta used a Taylor K-14-C guitar with koa back and sides and a spruce top; medium-gauge, phosphor bronze strings; and a Fishman Matrix under-saddle pickup and Crown internal mic combination, mixed with a Fishman Blender. On several tunes, Gambetta also played a 14-string harp guitar made by Antonello Saccu. —David McCarty Marc Ribot plays a vintage Gibson acoustic that bears the company's ornate script logo. "It's a 1930s Gibson flattop roundhole that I picked up six years ago," he says. "But it doesn't say anything inside it at all, so I'm not sure what model it is or exactly what year it's from." His electric is an early '70s Audition. "It's a very thin hollow-body and it feeds back at a very low volume so its live applications are limited to solo playing," he says. "With a drummer, you would not be able to hear it at all. The pickup is microphonic as well, so you can talk or scream into it and it really projects. The neck wobbles a bit and there are tuning problems. It's not simply that it sounds like shit; in fact, it has a kind of lovely intonational problem. But if I tune it a major third flat—so the high and low strings are tuned to C—it has a really nice sound. It also has an interesting sound acoustically, so when I record it I have my electric setup, but I also mic it acoustically with a Sennheiser MKH 44. By splitting the signal through the volume pedal, I can alternate one or the other. Sometimes I lift the volume pedal so that for a note or a phrase you only hear the sound acoustically. And I can alter the blend while I'm playing as well as while I'm mixing. On the new album, I do that a bit on 'Book of Heads, No. 13' and 'Somewhere.'" —Bill Milkowski Kris Delmhorst's main guitars are a 1968 Gibson J-50 with a Fishman Rare Earth Blend pickup and a mahogany/spruce Taylor 510 with a Fishman Matrix under-saddle pickup. "The Taylor is brighter and really beautiful for fingerpicking," says Delmhorst, "but for strumming, the Gibson is warmer and meatier sounding and feels a lot more substantive when I'm playing with a pick." Delmhorst also plays a Shanti SF32 Cambodian rosewood/Sitka spruce guitar that she won at the 2001 Telluride Bluegrass Festival Troubadour songwriting contest. She uses an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI; Boss stomp tuner and EQ pedal; D'Addario phosphor-bronze, medium-gauge strings; and medium-gauge or Dunlop Tortex .73 mm. picks. When playing fingerstyle, she goes au naturel. "When it's fingers, it's just fingers," she says. "No fingernails even." —Julie Bergman On the sepia-toned cover of The Legend of Tommy Johnson, Chris Thomas King holds a wood-body Regal resonator guitar that is one of his regular acoustic axes. His rack also includes a new steel-body Dobro, a Martin dreadnought, and––in an intriguing twist for a blues player––a cutaway Fender nylon-string. "When you play solo with a nylon-string acoustic, it has such a full sound and the notes sound so pure," he says. "It's a great solo instrument." The nylon strings obviously don't work for slide, but he says, "When I play a little Jimmy Reed groove or a slow-blues, minor-key ballad, it's beautiful." King's mainstay electric is a white reissue Stratocaster, which he supplements with a recently acquired Gibson Explorer for cleaner tones. All his guitars, acoustic and electric (except the Dobro, which he mics on stage and only uses solo), plug into a T.C. Electronic G-Force multi-effects processor and run in stereo through two Fender tweed amps. He calls the versatile G-Force, which has replaced all his pedals on stage, a "fantastic piece of guitar gear." King does all his recording in Pro Tools at his home studio in New Orleans. Doing acoustic tracks, he finds, is a time-consuming process. "It's a lot easier recording electric guitar––you know the settings on your amp, you turn it on and you mic it, and you do what you've got to do," he says. "But acoustic recording is real delicate. It takes time to learn the room and get what I want out of it." —Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Bill Frisell has become a bit of a guitar nut in the last few years, but his two favorite road guitars at the moment are a Collings D-1 dreadnought and a Gibson 446 semi–hollow-body electric. "I just love that Collings," he says. "I've had some archtop guitars, but I started getting interested in flattops in the last five or six years. Then I started itching for a dreadnought, and I met Danny Barnes, and he had this Collings—a rosewood one that's one of the nicest ones I've ever played. I got the Collings so I could try to be a bluegrass guy. For a while I was worried about taking it on the road. But now I'm just taking it and checking it." Frisell also records often with a Steve Klein M-43 and is fond of a newer Martin mahogany 12-fret 000-15S. "I like that guitar," he says. "And I really noticed the difference between the 14-fret and the 12-fret, which has a lot more bass and midrange." On record, and when he plays gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area, he often plays a 1961 Gibson J-45 owned by his manager and producer Lee Townsend. "He's produced a lot of my records and I'll have him bring it," says Frisell. "It's almost like my guitar, because I've used it on so many things." Frisell's favorite electric at the moment, a recent-vintage Gibson 446, is a thin-bodied archtop with a spruce top. "It's completely hollow inside—it doesn't have a block," he says. "The bracing is actually part of the top itself. Where they carve it out, they leave the strips for the bracing. I really like that guitar, but I've had to change everything—frets, tuners, nut, pickups, pots, bridge pieces, tailpiece. The only thing left on the guitar is the wood!" To amplify his acoustics in concert, Frisell uses an external mic, but the Martin has a Seymour Duncan Mag Mic pickup, which combines a magnetic pickup with an internal mic. "I did a weird five-hour concert, a tribute to Harry Smith, in L.A.," he says, "where I had to play with all these people. I had to go from one extreme to the other—guys that were super loud and people that were completely acoustic. And I just had that Martin with the pickup going direct. It worked for that." Frisell uses medium-gauge D'Addario strings and medium-thickness, small teardrop-shaped flatpicks (along with his fingers). "Gibsons are the ones I can usually find that are the right shape," he says. —Scott Nygaard There are three guitars in Jim Hall's life: a classic '50s-era Gibson ES-175 and two handmade beauties—an acoustic and an electric—by late guitar maker Jimmy D'Aquisto. Hall bought the Gibson used in 1956 from jazz and studio guitarist Howard Roberts. "I love that guitar, even though sometimes I don't touch it for months," says Hall. "It's easy to tune, and after having been schlepped around and played for so many years, it's as if it knows just what to do." Hall's D'Aquisto acoustic is the Avant Garde model. It has adjustable screws at the bottom of the tailpiece for changing the tension of the strings, and wooden slides that raise and lower the bridge (which Hall only occasionally uses). "Jimmy was trying to get as much metal out of the sound picture as possible," he says. "He was experimenting right up to the end. That's one of the things I loved about him." The electric D'Aquisto is the Jim Hall model, built specifically for him. D'Aquisto used to service Hall's Gibson ES-175, so he used that instrument as a starting point for the original he designed. Hall used to get D'Aquisto strings all the time (as well as the guitar maker's special brand of picks), but the last set of strings he bought were by D'Addario. "I use a light-gauge setup on all my guitars," he explains. "The strings are flat-wound. The top string is .011 and the bottom is .050 or perhaps a little heavier. I usually use a .022 for the third string, but I also use an unwound .019 so that I can bend it a bit to sound like a horn." For several years Hall had a Gibson GA50 tube amp that eventually became too fragile to take on the road. "I've been trying to get something as close to that sound as possible," he says. He owns a couple of Polytone Mini-Brute amps, which he takes to local gigs, but uses whatever the promoter supplies on the road. "One night in Montreal they gave me a Fender amp that went up to 12," he recalls. "It was a joke. I think I kept it down to 1 for the whole show." On his latest album, Jim Hall and Basses, he used a Taylor 12-string in addition to his two D'Aquistos, as well as a Walter Woods amplifier (Walter Woods, PO Box 7534, Van Nuys, CA 91409; [619] 347-7099) and a Harry Kolbe GP-1 preamp and speaker cabinet ([212] 627-2740; www.soundsmith.com). —Dan Ouellette Manuel Barrueco plays his 1995 Matthias Dammann guitar in concert (Matthias Dammann, Neuhaus, Germany; phone/fax [49] 850-7760), but all of his recordings were made with his 1972 Robert Ruck (Poulsbo, WA; [360] 297-4024; www.maui.net/~rtadaki/ruck.html). He travels with a Neumann KM 84 microphone and laughs about his first joint appearance with Steve Morse, where he showed up with a microphone in his pocket and Morse arrived with a van full of equipment. —Scott Cmiel David Tanenbaum and Peppino D'Agostion David Tanenbaum uses a Daniel Friederich nylon-string when playing unamplified (Daniel Friederich, Paris, France; [33] 14228-4755), but for amplified projects he plays a 1994 Gary Southwell (Nottingham, England; [44] 115-947-3633; www.garysguitars.cwc.net), which features a piezo, under-saddle Fishman Matrix pickup and a Crown GLM-200E mic that clips inside the soundhole. He runs the signal through an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI and then either into the house PA or what he calls "the best acoustic amp on the planet," the AER Acousticube IIa (www.aer-amps.de). Peppino D'Agostino plays his own signature-model Seagull guitar with Elixir custom light-gauge strings. He uses an L.R. Baggs Duet II pickup system and Para Acoustic DI, and either the house system or an AER Acousticube IIa, to which he sometimes adds an AER extension speaker. —Scott Cmiel William Coulter and Ben Verdery Benjamin Verdery and William Coulter use minimal amplification in performance but do feel that some amplification is critical in order for the textures to be clear. Verdery usually plays a Greg Smallman guitar (Greg Smallman, Glen Innes, Australia), but he used a Chris Carrington electric classical guitar on this project (Chris Carrington, Dallas, TX; phone/fax [214] 320-0050; www.chriscarrington.com/luthier.htm). "Chris is an accomplished guitarist who worked with Al Di Meola for years," says Verdery, "and through that experience he became an expert on amplifying the nylon-string guitar." Coulter plays a Jeff Traugott guitar (Traugott Guitars, Santa Cruz, CA; [831] 426-2313; www.traugottguitars.com) that is equipped with a Highlander pickup, and he places an external AKG mic near the soundhole on a small gooseneck. He blends the signals through a Raven Labs PMB-1 preamp (www.raven-labs.com). Verdery and Coulter both use D'Addario strings. —Scott Cmiel |
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