Michael Gulezian

Michael Gulezian has two guitars: a scuffed and scratched 23-year-old six-string built by Tom Beeston, a luthier from Oracle, Arizona, who died a couple of years ago, and a Guild F-212XL jumbo-body 12-string he's had since the mid-1970s.

For amplification, Gulezian uses a Sunrise magnetic soundhole pickup, which he runs through a Sunrise tube interface preamp; an under-saddle Highlander pickup; and a pair of Trance Audio Acoustic Lens transducers run through an Amulet preamp. Gulezian doesn't use any mixers or blenders onstage, opting to send three separate signals to the PA. He runs the signal of the Sunrise through a T.C. Electronics SCF pedal, which he keeps in pitch-modulation mode. "Depending on the song, I may also run this signal through a Lexicon LXP-1 reverb unit," he says, "but I will almost always keep the other guitar channels free from any signal processing."

—John Diliberto

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Wake the Dead

Wake the Dead revives the Grateful Dead Celtic-style with a suitably diverse array of recent and vintage instruments. Danny Carnahan's main ax is a custom-made 1986 Stefan Sobell archtop guitar equipped with medium-gauge, phosphor-bronze strings and a Trance Audio (www.tranceaudio.com) Amulet pickup system. Carnahan's octave mandolin, made in Dublin in 1978 by Andrew Manson, is also set up with phosphor-bronze strings (.011—.046) and a Trance Audio unit. Guitarist-vocalist Sylvia Herold plays a 1934 Gibson L-5 archtop strung with medium-gauge D'Addarios and she plucks with Fender extra-heavies. Utility man Paul Kotapish strings his custom Steve Gilchrist Model 5 mandolin with D'Addario J-75s (.0115—.041) and employs a medium-gauge Clayton rounded triangle pick. His guitar of choice is a Lowden F-35 with amazaque back and sides and a spruce top, which he strings with D'Addario phosphor-bronze lights.

—Mike Thomas

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Erin McKeown

Onstage, Erin McKeown uses three electric guitars, a Gretsch Synchromatic archtop with a single pickup, a Gretsch Anniversary archtop with a double humbucker, and a Gibson Chet Atkins SST. She also plays a Danelectro baritone. She strings all of her guitars, including the early '70s Gibson Hummingbird she keeps at home for songwriting, with D'Addario medium-gauge flatwound electric strings. She uses a pedal board—with an Ibanez Tube Screamer and Boss tuner, delay, tremolo, and reverb pedals—and runs two lines from it, one that goes directly to the PA and one to a Fender Blues Junior amp that sits onstage. "I can take the signal from any of my guitars and run it anyplace I want," McKeown explains, "to the PA or the amp. And I mix them up."

—Simone Solondz

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Chris Smither

Chris Smither is indelibly associated with his blue guitar, a thin-body Alvarez acoustic-electric DY-88BL he's played on countless stages around the world. He loves its plug-and-play simplicity compared to high-end acoustics that require a lot of fuss to amplify well. "My feeling is that the audience came to hear the song," he says. "They didn't come to hear your prewar D-45 sounding exactly the way it would sound if they were parked right in front of you."

At home, though, Smither rarely plays the blue Alvarezes (he has two), and the entire CD Train Home was recorded on a 12-fret Collings (custom built for someone else) with a solid peghead and a cutaway. Producer David Goodrich (longtime duo partner with Peter Mulvey, with whom Smither has toured extensively) wanted to capture the new songs the way he first heard them—live in the living room. So Goodrich and engineer Mark Thayer recorded Smither solo right in his house, using a Tascam 24-bit 24-track machine. The Collings was recorded with a Royer stereo ribbon mic ("one amazing mic," says Goodrich, who also used it for overdubs of drums, electric guitar, piano, mandolin, and more). They miked Smither's feet and built a small enclosure around them to control bleed into the other mics. Once the basic tracks were complete, overdubs were done in the studio. Goodrich played many instruments, including a 1937 Martin 00-17, 1938 Kalamazoo (Gibson) L-00 for slide, 1964 Gibson SG, Rigel A-style mandolin, and one-string diddley-bow—a fretless pine-wood instrument with a small resonating chamber. Goodrich's diddley-bow was made by Washtub Robbie Phillips, a Boston folk icon who has played with Howard Armstrong, G. Love, and many others.

Smither strings his guitars with Elixirs and plays with a Golden Gate plastic thumbpick and Dunlop steel fingerpicks; he capoes up with a Shubb. For foot percussion, he employs a half-inch piece of particle board held in place on the floor with Velcro. Many people have tried to talk Smither into using fancy solid wood underfoot, but he prefers pure percussion with no tonality. The boot board is miked onstage, and he occasionally uses a reverse gate on his right foot to create a snare sound.

Smither's guitars generally remain either in standard tuning or open D (D A D F# A D). On the new CD, "Kind Woman" is in open D and "Desolation Row" is in open G (D G D G B D).

—Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

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