Hamell on Trial

Ed Hamell, the man behind Hamell on Trial, plays one main guitar, a 1937 Gibson L-00 with D'Addario medium-gauge, phosphor-bronze strings tuned to standard tuning down one whole step. Playing in one tuning is a function of his songwriting, but it also lets Hamell get through a gig without having to change guitars or replace strings during a show. "I'm in D always," he says. "People say, 'How come you don't break your strings?' It's because there's not that much tension in them." He sometimes fingerpicks Travis style, sometimes uses a pick with his index and middle fingers ("a la James Burton," he says, "although nowhere near as good"), and relies on Dunlop Tortex .60 picks. Hamell use an L.R. Baggs LB-6 ceramic bridge pickup and L.R. Baggs preamp, and for amps, he says, "it's either a Peavey PA for clean or a '58 Fender Bassman head with a 4x12 HiWatt bottom for the 'distorto.' I got a new Ampeg—a gift from Ani—and I have an old '70s Marshall I'm messing with too."

—Nick A. Zaino III

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Lyle Lovett

Lyle Lovett plays Collings guitars. He has "at least ten" but onstage primarily plays a custom D-45-style dreadnought with Brazilian rosewood back and sides and an Adirondack spruce top, made in 2000, and a sunburst CJ41 slope-shouldered jumbo made of the same woods and built in 1992. Occasionally, he also uses an 18-inch Collings archtop onstage. The D-45-style guitar was originally built for Lovett with his name inlaid in the fretboard, but he is so modest he asked Bill Collings to remove it. "He surprised me with it and put my whole name in the fingerboard," he recalls. "I said 'Bill, I can't do that.' It was beautiful but . . . I think he still has the fingerboard. I don't know, he probably chopped it up in little pieces."

Lovett still has his first Collings, a dreadnought that Bill Collings built for him personally in 1978 with Indian rosewood back and sides, an abalone rosette, and maple body binding. "When I met Bill he was living in Houston," Lovett recalls. "He had a two-bedroom apartment in Spring Branch and one bedroom was his shop. I went to him because someone recommended him for a fret job for my D-35. I went over there at one in the afternoon and didn't leave until ten that night. We talked guitars that whole time. He made me a guitar about a year later. Bill builds a really great instrument. And he keeps looking for ways to make his guitars better. I have a great admiration for his craftsmanship."

Lovett has used Sunrise pickups for 15 years. "Leo Kottke turned me on to Sunrise pickups back in '89," Lovett says, "and I run that through a Demeter Tube DI," which he says, is the secret to the warm, clear sound he achieves in acoustic shows. When he's recording, he usually mics his guitars with AKG C-12 mics. Lovett plays with a National medium thumbpick and three National fingerpicks and strings his guitars with D'Addario medium-gauge strings.

—Melanie Haiken

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John McLaughlin

For the recording of Thieves and Poets, John McLaughlin played the nylon-string Our Lady guitar built for him by Abe Wechter, who completed his work in 1993. According to Wechter's website (www.wechterguitars.com), the design was inspired by Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The back and sides are made from 15 strips of highly flamed quartersawn curly maple with thin strips of abalone inlaid at the seams; the top is curly bearclaw-figured spruce; and Wechter designed one-of-a-kind soundhole and peghead embellishments that he had a jeweler cast in 14-carat gold using a lost wax process. "She's really something," McLaughlin says. "It's not cutaway, but there are 14 frets to the body, so that really gives me a chance to get up there, which is difficult for me, or anyone, on a regular classical guitar. He'd already built me a number of guitars [including the storied Shakti guitar with a scalloped fingerboard and sitar-like sympathetic strings], and this guitar comes from a conversation we had in the '80s. I said, 'Abraham, why don't you just build me a guitar that you want to build without me asking for such and such criteria. He'd call me up every six or nine months and say, 'You know, John, I'm fresh out of ideas.' I'd say, 'Well, did you think of this or did you think of that?' And he'd say, 'Oh, yeah, great idea, OK, talk to you later,' and boom, he was gone. The guitar cost a fortune in the end. But it was seven years' work and it was worth it. It's a magnificent instrument. I had some input. I asked him to put ebony flamenco tuning pegs in—not tuning machines, just the pegs, which makes it harder to tune, but there's something very Zen about it, very direct and simple. Also, I didn't want really low action. You have to work very physically with the left hand when you have high action, but you get better tone.

"There's only one thing he did that I had a problem with. He said, 'I'd like to put some gold filigree on it.' I said, 'Abraham, I don't want any gold on the guitar. You can use stone, wood, ivory, bone, I don't care, but gold? No.' Then he went and put gold on right in the middle of the pegboard. Terrible. I told him, 'Don't put any gold there!' And he went and, well . . . you know, human beings, what can you say? So I took a washable black felt pen and blacked it out. It looks much better. He wanted gold so he put gold on it. It was his guitar. But it's mine now, so I blacked it out."

McLaughlin strings Our Lady with D'Addario Pro Arté strings, and uses heavy Dunlop 3 jazz picks rather than his fingers, because, he says, "I like to be able to really dig in. But you have to take care with acoustic instruments or else you choke the string or the note."

When McLaughlin performs with Shakti, he plays either his 1972 Gibson ES-345 semi-hollow-body electric with a scalloped fingerboard and Bigsby tremolo bar or his Godin LGXT with built-in MIDI pickup. He strings both with D'Addario strings. He runs the Godin into a Mac G4 laptop computer (with Emagic Logic Audio Version 6 for Audio and MIDI) that he keeps nearby onstage, running audio out to the PA. With the Gibson, he uses a Sony M7 signal processor before running it into the PA.

—Derk Richardson

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David Tanenbaum

Although David Tanenbaum's main guitar is a cedar and East Indian rosewood instrument built by French luthier Daniel Friederich in 1996, he used a 1991 Gregory Stuart Byers (www.byersguitars.com, [707] 459-4068 ) made of spruce and East Indian rosewood on his recording of "Serenado por Gitaro." For Lou Harrison's last guitar piece, "Scenes from Nek Chand," Tanenbaum used a metal-bodied National Reso-Phonic Tricone (www.nationalguitars.com) with a just intonation fingerboard (using nonstandard fret spacings), made from a template designed by Bill Slye.

—David Tanenbaum

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