David Ross MacDonald

David Ross MacDonald plays a small-bodied cutaway David Churchill guitar with Indian rosewood back and sides and a cedar top (www.churchillguitars.com). His no-name parlor guitar is in storage, but he plans to use it for rhythm chores on his next CD. He uses light-gauge D'Addario strings, primarily, he says, because of the "groovy tins they come in."

—Ron Forbes-Roberts

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The Waybacks

James Nash's primary guitar is a 1990 Santa Cruz OM with a Sitka spruce top and Indian rosewood back and sides. He amplifies it with a Baggs LB6 saddle pickup and a Pick-up the World #27 transducer, running the pickups' signals out of his guitar with a passive stereo jack and into a Raven Labs PMB-1 preamp/blender and then to a Roland VG-88 virtual guitar system (analog input only). He likes the Roland's clean digital signal processing (he mostly adds a bit of reverb and delay) as well as its ability to program custom patches to be controlled by his Ernie Ball volume pedal. He uses Elixir Polyweb medium-gauge strings (.013—.056) and 1.14 mm. Dunlop 500 teardrop-shaped flatpicks.

Stevie Coyle plays a three-year-old Thompson T1C with a cutaway, Sitka spruce top, and rosewood back and sides. "It has this tremendous clarity, the neck is extremely comfortable, and it's a really simple, elegant guitar, with wood binding everywhere," Coyle says. He amplifies it with a Fishman Active Matrix Natural under-saddle pickup and a Joe Mills mic, blends them in a Raven Labs PMB-1, and sends the signal to the PA via a Boss tuner pedal and a Goodrich L10K pedal steel volume pedal. When he can afford to take a second guitar, he brings along a ten-year-old cedar-and-rosewood Lowden O-25, which he keeps tuned to D A D G A D. He uses D'Addario EXP strings and Golden Gate medium thumbpicks.

—Scott Nygaard

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Kelly Willis

Kelly Willis owns just three guitars: a dark red Takamine EF325SRC with Graph-EX electronics, which is her favorite to play onstage because "it sounds really clean"; a late '80s Gibson J-180 that has sentimental value but "gets a little boomy sometimes"; and a Tacoma EM19C with Fishman electronics. She prefers GHS medium-light acoustic strings and .73 mm. gray vinyl picks. As for electronics, Willis plays through a Countryman DI and uses a Shure PSM in-ear monitoring system.

—Melanie Haiken

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Nickel Creek

Nickel Creek's Sean Watkins travels with two Bourgeois guitars: a cedar-top JOMC and his signature model, a Brazilian rosewood OMC (www.bourgeoisguitars.com). His amplified tone comes primarily from an L.R. Baggs iBeam pickup run through a Baggs Para Acoustic DI box (www.lrbaggs.com); for soloing, he steps up to a Shure KSM44 mic and occasionally uses a volume pedal. "We recently got serious about trying to get good sound with pickups," he says. "We're playing in a lot of situations where you can't use a mic, and a pickup makes things a whole lot easier."

Watkins' guitars are strung with Elixir mediums, and he uses 1.14-mm. purple Clayton flatpicks, a Kyser capo, and a Boss TU-2 tuner pedal. He sometimes uses his fingers with the pick for extra texture.

Chris Thile's main mandolin is made by Lynn Dudenbostel (www.dudenbostel.com). "The mandolin looks like it's 50 years old, just because of how hard I am on it, but it's from 2000," Thile says. "Everybody always asks me if it's an old [Lloyd] Loar [Gibson], which of course it's not. It's definitely been loved and played." Onstage, Thile's second mando is either a Gibson F-5 or a Davis.

Thile amplifies his mandolin with a Schertler pickup (www.schertlerusa.com). The signal runs through a Schertler Pre-Amp II, a Boss TU-2 pedal tuner, and a BSS direct box. Like Sean, he uses 1.14-mm. Clayton picks and a Shure KSM44 mic for solos. "In the studio," he adds, "we use stereo [Neumann] KM 54s, which in my opinion are the most ingenious mics ever made." His strings are D'Addario J74s (lights) or J75s (mediums), "depending on if I'm in a thin mood or a thick one."

For songwriting and recording, Thile also plays a Bourgeois guitar similar to Sean's signature model but not Brazilian, a 1967 Martin D-35, and two bouzoukis, a Sound to Earth (www.soundtoearth.com) and a Flatiron. Both bouzoukis are set up with GHS octave mandolin strings.

Sara Watkins plays a German-made fiddle dating from the early 1900s. Martin Brunkalla (www.brunkalla.com) recently built her a five-string fiddle that adds a low C. Onstage she's recently begun experimenting with a Baggs bridge pickup. With one-third pickup and two-thirds mic sound, she says, "I can play with full pressure and hopefully get a nice steady bow and tone without having to play really lightly for the quiet stuff."

—Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

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Mance Lipscomb

Mance Lipscomb began his recording career playing a borrowed Harmony Sovereign guitar. Eventually he had his own custom model, which featured his initials inlaid in the upper bout of the soundboard. In the '70s he switched to a Gibson J-200, which he sometimes referred to as an electric guitar due to its soundhole pickup. Lipscomb picked his signature monotonic bass lines with a black plastic thumbpick.

—Steve Boisson

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Marc Atkinson

On his new CD, Marc Atkinson used a guitar built in 1991 by former luthier Mike Berg, which is modeled on the Selmer-Maccaferri guitars preferred by Django Reinhardt and other Gypsy jazz guitarists. The guitar has cocobolo back and sides and a top carved from a 100-year-old piece of European spruce that Atkinson found and gave to Berg for the purpose. In concert he uses a Shelley D. Park guitar (www.parkguitars.com), another Selmer-style instrument with a cedar top and koa sides. Atkinson strings his guitars with medium-gauge, silk-and-steel GHS strings and uses Big Tone pickups (distributed in the U.S. by Dell'Arte Instruments, www.dellarteinstruments.com) in both of his guitars. These days, he picks with a highly polished 3-mm. chunk of coconut shell.

—Ron Forbes-Roberts