Kaki King

Kaki King plays an Ovation Adamas acoustic through a SansAmp preamp and into the house PA. She prefers light-gauge Elixir Polyweb strings, replacing the high E with a .013 and the B with a .017. "I play a lot and I play hard," she says, "but the Elixirs still sound and perform really well after a month. Also, an Ovation Adamas is a very bright-sounding guitar, and strings with coating tend to warm things up." King uses acrylic on her nails to get a thicker acoustic fingerpicking sound. She also has a Gretsch Roundup solid-body electric guitar that she uses primarily for writing. "I write a lot on electric, because I live in an apartment," she explains. "And at night people can hear my acoustic, so I just play my electric not plugged in."

—Bill Milkowski

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Jesse DeNatale

Jesse DeNatale's first guitar was a Harmony Monterey archtop that a friend of his mother's stashed in the DeNatale home for safekeeping. "He was an alcoholic and afraid he would wreck it," DeNatale says. "I was so pleased, because it wasn't a toy." DeNatale's nine-year-old hands weren't big enough or strong enough to grip the neck and hold down the strings, so he open-tuned the guitar, balanced it on his lap, and tapped on the strings with his fingers or pencils. Today he relies solely on the Guild D-40 that he's had since the 1970s. "I'm not much of a gear head at all and I kind of wish I was," he says, "because what do I do if my guitar busts? I don't have a backup and I should." He uses medium-gauge D'Addario phosphor-bronze strings, and his flatpicks are "three-pointed, triangular, medium-thick, made by Fender or Gibson. They're a little bigger than your regular pick, almost as big as a half-dollar, and I like that because there's a better chance it won't fly out of my fingers in the middle of a song and make me look foolish."

—Derk Richardson

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Chuck Prophet

Whether he's working on original material or one of his frequent session dates, Chuck Prophet remains faithful to a pair of trusty six-string companions. His acoustic of choice is a 1989 Martin D-28 outfitted with a Fishman under-saddle pickup. He strings the dreadnought with Ernie Ball phosphor-bronze mediums and recently switched to orange (.60 mm.) Dunlop Tortex picks to get a more "feathery" acoustic sound. Prophet's electric is a 1984 Japanese-made Fender Squier Telecaster strung with Ernie Ball Light Top/Heavy Bottom Slinkys and plucked with green (.88 mm.) Dunlop Tortex picks. Prophet plugs into a pair of customized Fender Blackface Deluxe Reverb amps. His pedal board includes a Ratt fuzz unit, a DOD envelope filter, a Boss delay, and a Sex Driver midrange booster (originally designed by Austin techie Alan Durham for Dylan sideman Charlie Sexton). When a down-home-and-dirty mood strikes, Prophet also plays a 1970s Dobro.

—Mike Thomas

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Bruce Cockburn

On solo tours, Bruce Cockburn's main guitars are two Manzer six-strings, a Guild 12-string, and a metal-body Dobro. Cockburn has been playing acoustics built by Linda Manzer (www.manzer.com) since the late '80s. His current Manzers are basically identical, with European spruce tops, Indian rosewood "wedge" bodies (thinner where the right arm goes over the body and wider below), and combo amplification rigs of an internal mic and Fishman under-saddle pickup. The pickup signal runs through a series of pedals; the exact signal chain varies but at the time of the interview looked like this: Boss tuner, Carl Martin Hot Drive'n Boost, Boss DD-5 digital delay, Boss tremolo, Line 6 delay, and Lexicon reverb. The signal, Cockburn says, is in stereo from the DD-5 onward, and in a live mix, the mic is generally in the center while the pickup signal is panned to either side. Cockburn's electric guitars (which include a Strat, National ResoLectric, Charvel Surfcaster, and Jerry Jones) go through the same chain but also plug into Fender Bassman amps. Sometimes he uses the amps with his acoustics, too, for onstage monitoring.

Cockburn played much of the acoustic guitar work on You've Never Seen Everything with a Collings D-2H, recorded with a mic only. "Messenger Wind" features a Manzer recorded with a mic as well as the direct pickup signal, which was colored with reverb. He played his Dobro on "Wait No More," Guild 12-string on "Put It in Your Heart" and "All Our Dark Tomorrows" (both with effects on the L.R. Baggs pickup signal in addition to the mic sound), and an old S.S. Stewart acoustic-electric archtop on "Trickle Down." Cockburn relies on John Laroque at Ring Music in Toronto to keep his instruments in shape.

The Manzers are set up with 80/20 bronze strings—a light-gauge set with an .011 first string and .014 second string replacing the usual .012 and .016. Cockburn is particular about the alloy and the gauges but not the brand. He uses Kyser capos and strikes the strings with his bare fingers, anchored by his pinky on the top.

—Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

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