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Check out these equipment picks from artists featured in the August 2002, No.116 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
PRECIOUS
BRYANT |
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Precious Bryant likes to play both acoustic and electric guitars ("I like my music loud!"). When her instruments were destroyed in a house fire recently, she was given an Epiphone Howard Roberts electric guitar and a Fender amp by longtime fan Taj Mahal and the Musicmaker Relief Foundation. Bryant uses plastic picks on her thumb and index finger ("That's the dog finger") and occasionally plays slide guitar with the spine of a pocketknife. —Steve James Phil Keaggy's two favorite acoustic guitars are a 1984 James Olson SJ cutaway with a cedar top and a Del Langejans Grand Concert model. He also uses a McPherson flattop in the studio. Among his favorite electric guitars are a 1971 Les Paul Deluxe, a 1964 Fender Stratocaster, a 1986 Zion, and a recent Gibson ES-336. "It's a beautiful guitar," Keaggy says of the Gibson. "It's bluesy, it plays like a dream, and it has a huge sound. It's one of my favorite guitars." The Olson and Langejans are both equipped with L.R. Baggs Duet systems, using a combination of LB6 pickups and internal mics. The signal path from the onboard preamps in the guitars goes through a series of signal processors and effects, including a compressor, octave divider, volume pedal, Line 6 delay modeler, tuner, digital reverb, Peavey chorus, and Lexicon Jam Man, before it reaches the PA. Keaggy uses a MIDI Wizard to control the Jam Man, which is particularly useful for recreating some of the layered pieces on his records. "It allows the Jam Man to do more than most people realize," Keaggy says. "You can create the whole loop and all the layers, then stop it, mute it, and when you open it again, it starts right at beat one. You can also fade out loops. It's just fantastic, and it all fits into a two-space rack." —Jim Ohlschmidt Gurf Morlix's acoustic studio workhorse is a 1959 Gibson J-45. "It's really beat up and I love it," says Morlix. "I always liked that Beatles strum sound." Equally important, though less versatile, is his asymmetrical 1930s Kay Kraft acoustic, which features an arched top and a bolt-on neck that can be raised and lowered. "It's got this really amazing midrange bark to it," says Morlix. "It records really well." Other acoustic instruments include a 1959 Gibson A-50 mandolin, a '30s Regal Octofone octave mandolin, and a 1916 Gibson mandocello. For his fiery electric slide work, Morlix uses an early-'70s, double-neck, ten-string Evans pedal steel and a '60s double-neck, eight-string Bruno lap steel. His acoustic slide guitar of choice is a 1920s Weissenborn. —Bill Meyer Lisa Loeb plays a Taylor 512-C equipped with a Crown GLM-200 microphone and a piezo pickup running through a Fishman Blender system. She recently acquired a custom Albert Lee electric guitar made by Music Man. "It has piezo pickups and also P90s," she says, "so it has an acoustic possibility as well as an electric, and you can blend the two. It's easier to play things that sustain, and you don't have to hit the guitar so hard." In live performance, she switches between the acoustic guitar and the electric. "When there's a really intricate picking pattern in a loud rock song, I like to go ahead and play the Albert Lee guitar," she says. Loeb uses Ernie Ball strings and picks by Ernie Ball and Fender, and she prefers Shubb capos. "There are some capos that are so hard to clamp on," she says. "I hate that. Shubbs hold the tunings the best, and I use capos a lot, so it's very important to me." When performing, she uses an Audio-Technica AE3300 microphone. "The [standard model] is cordless," she explains, "but they made a special version with a cord for me. It's very similar to the 4050." She's always playing when she sings, so she doesn't need a mobile microphone. And she finds them to be a bit of a pain: "The battery runs out and there's too much interference." For monitoring her live sets, she uses Sennheiser Evolution 300-IEM in-ear monitors. —Andrew DuBrock Chris Isaak collects acoustic and electric instruments of all sorts, but his treasure trove of pawnshop specials will inspire envy in only the most adventurous fans of vintage lutherie. "I probably have 40 or 50 guitars," he says, "and they are a real oddball collection. Some guys are into vintage Stratocasters and Les Pauls, and I'm like, 'Look! I've got a Hagstrom!' But I've used them on records, and they sound great." For Always Got Tonight, producer John Shank—a self-professed guitar freak—augmented Isaak's collection with dozens of his own vintage acoustic and electric instruments, plenty of effects and processing gear, and a kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm for all of the sounds guitars can make. On "Let Me Down Easy," for example, he created the rich tapestry of tones by carefully layering discrete tracks played on a '63 Gibson Hummingbird, a '61 Martin D-18, a '60s Martin 12-string, a Rickenbacker 12-string, and a '79 Stratocaster. On the road, Isaak eschews the exotics and sticks with Gibsons. "In the studio you can get by using a lot of weird stuff because you have time to fiddle with the tuning and the intonation and keep it together," he says. "Whereas when you go out onstage, you don't want to have junk. The audience doesn't have time to have you up there tuning between each song. Playing live, I've got a couple of Gibsons, and I string them both with really heavy strings, running from .056 on the bottom to .014 on the top, and they don't go out of tune. If it's acoustic, it's a J-200. For my electric, I've got a one-off Gibson version of a Gretsch 6120, a sort of Chet Atkins thing. They made one of these things and gave it to me to see if I liked it, and I liked it so much I've been playing it ever since. People told me they thought it was a White Falcon, but it's not. It's just a white Gibson. I don't think they ever manufactured any of the things. They strung up this one prototype, scratched their heads, and said, 'Huh. Give it to Isaak.'" Amplification is simple, too. "My stage setup is about the most fundamental you ever saw," says Isaak. "I've got my guitar and a cord. The acoustic goes straight to the board, and the electric goes directly into a Fender Twin Reverb blackface, and that's it. Man, there never was an amp like a Fender Twin on stage. You travel around with those things and it's just like traveling in a Chevy. Everybody knows how to fix a Chevy, everybody's got parts for it. I see guys traveling around on tour with some fancy-schmancy setup, and it always sounds like a bag of glass." Isaak plays with a medium flatpick with a hole in the center. "You can always tell the picks I've been playing 'cause they've got that hole in them," he explains. "I take a regular pick and an office hole punch and I pop a hole right in the middle. It feels great. You can feel your skin right through it. It's got to be a Tortex or some sort of plastic like that or it will disintegrate in one song." —Paul Kotapish Vicente Amigo has a very special relationship with his Manuel Reyes guitar (Calle Armas, 4, E-140 Córdoba, 957, Spain). "I am very comfortable with her," he says. "I have been with her for years. Once I left her on the sofa, the phone rang and I picked it up and then sat on her and broke her. I took her to be repaired like one would take a sick child to the hospital. I got this guitar in C—rdoba. It is a fantastic guitar for flamenco. These guitars have a wonderful range of sound. And they are slender. It's not a big fat guitar; it's very sharp-sounding with a very quick response. It's made of cypress, which is the best wood. There are other flamenco guitars made of palo santo [the Spanish term for Indian rosewood, translated literally as "blessed wood"], but I like cypress much better. The ones that are made of palo santo are 'flamenca negras,' and the ones made of cypress are 'flamenca blancas.' I have an American flamenca negra guitar as well, made by Lester Devoe (Devoe Guitars, 680 Camino Roble, Nipomo, CA 93444; (805) 931-0313; ; www.maui.net/~rtadki/devoe.html), but I don't play it much because I am so used to the other one. Lester Devoe makes lots of palo santo guitars." Amigo strings his guitars with D'Addario strings. "They give me the best tension and the best control," he says. "I have tried other strings, but these are the best. For me, they are fantastic." —Bill Milkowski His recorded music, and the remembrances of people who played with him such as Johnny Shines and Robert Lockwood, suggest that Robert Johnson used more than one guitar during his career. H.C. Speir said his customers in the '30s almost unanimously preferred a model of Stella guitar that sold for $12. They couldn't afford the $32.50 price of a National. In his famous "cigarette" photo, Johnson is holding a 14-fret-to-the-body flattop by Kalamazoo (a budget Gibson brand) with a capo plainly visible at the second fret. These ladder-braced guitars, introduced in the mid-'30s, have a loud, bright sound and are especially good for slide guitar. In another commonly seen photo, Johnson, wearing a three-piece suit (and a white plastic thumbpick!) is posed with a circa 1930 Gibson L-1. Although various makers have offered reproductions of this "Robert Johnson model" guitar, it's obviously not the instrument he used to record pieces like "Terraplane Blues," which require unobstructed slide access to the 14th fret. —Steve James
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