Noe Venable

Noe Venable plays two acoustic guitars onstage: a 2001 Bourgeois Luthier Series OM and a 1957 Martin 00-18. Both guitars are strung with D'Addario lights and fitted with undersaddle Fishman pickups, and her preamp/DI of choice is an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI. In concert, she and bandmates Alan Lin and Todd Sickafoose experiment with Line 6 delay pedals for looping effects. "It's fun," Venable says. "A little dangerous, though. The gear can take over everything if you're not careful. When we get to the point where there are more pedals onstage than people in the audience, we have maybe gone too far." Venable keeps a few other guitars at home, including a small-body 1916 Gibson archtop with a round soundhole and a 1969 Fender Telecaster with Gibson PAF pickups and a Bigsby whammy bar—"kind of a rockabilly guitar," she says.

—Drew Pearce

Return to top

Elliott Sharp

Elliott Sharp's acoustic guitar of choice for The Velocity of Hue was a Godin Multiac Steel Duet, modified with a Dobro-style trapeze tailpiece. "I use this tailpiece to give me the harp strings behind the bridge for koto-like bending and extra sounds," says Sharp. The guitar's custom L.R. Baggs electronics include an internal condenser mic and an undersaddle Ribbon Transducer, which can be blended onboard or used separately via a stereo output. It was recorded through a Sytek mic preamp and Summit DCL-200 tube compressor/limiter into a Yamaha 02R console. "Sometimes I'll also add a small condenser mic to the front for some extra ‘air,'" Sharp says. On the road, he plugs into a small Soundcraft mixer through a Boss SE-70 multi-effects unit set up as a preamp/compressor/EQ and from there into the PA for live processing. Sharp owns several other guitars–a 1946 Martin 00-18, a '70s Martin D12-18, a 1956 Gibson CF-100, a National Tricone roundneck, and a Turner Renaissance Baritone. When it comes to strings, he says, "the brands vary, as do the gauges."

—Dan Ouellette

Return to top

Shelby Lynne

Shelby Lynne does most of her songwriting on a 1954 Martin 00-18 and an old, nameless nylon-string that she picked up at a pawnshop. She also owns a 1965 Gibson Southern Jumbo and a Gretsch electric that she plays onstage and in the studio. "I am not sure of the model of the Gretsch," she says, "except it is old and orange and has a Bigsby on it." She also plays a Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion guitar, equipped with a Bigsby tremolo bar, that she uses "for that Les Paul sound." Lynne uses D'Addario strings on all her guitars—.010's on her acoustics and .011's on her electrics—and Shubb capos. On Identity Crisis, she says, "The only effects I used were a Crybaby [wah-wah] pedal and a distortion pedal. The rest was clean through a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp." She used an old Neumann KM56 to record all her vocals and guitars for the album. "I like it 'cause it's rich," she says. "Old, like fine wine. And I used it for guitar, too—amps with acoustics don't work."

—Paul Zollo

Return to top

John Mayer

John Mayer took a very hands-on approach to the development of his Martin signature model, a modified OM-28 with a low-profile neck with a nut width of 1 11/16 inches and 2 1/8-inch spacing between the first and sixth strings at the saddle that feels comfortable to a player raised on electrics, and a Martin Gold+ Natural I undersaddle pickup. In addition to long phone conversations with Martin Guitars' Dick Boak, Mayer mocked up the look he wanted (including Macintosh Titanium—inspired aluminum inlay on the bridge and peghead) by editing a photo of an OM-28 he downloaded from the Martin website, and then he headed to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to see it all come together at the factory. "Isn't it a boyhood dream to have a guitar named after you?" Mayer says. "You'd better be there to watch it happen. The worst thing in the world would be for somebody to hand you a guitar that's got your name on it and it's not the one you want to play or look at."

Mayer begs to differ with those who say all that matters about a guitar is how it sounds. "I believe that guitar players and creators, we're all too scared of sounding superficial, but the bottom line is that when something looks good, it brings things out of you. And so I'd say half of the guitar's qualities are sonic or physical and the other half are cosmetic. All those things factor into the level of inspiration when you pick something up."

Onstage, Mayer runs his Martin through a tuner and an Avalon U5 DI/preamp (www.avalondesign.com) and then straight to the PA with no effects. Mayer raves about the sound of the U5, which he calls a huge improvement over basic direct boxes and well worth the investment.

On the electric side, Mayer pays homage to his original guitar hero and cranks up a Stevie Ray Vaughan model Fender Stratocaster. He's been obsessing over amps lately, playing through hard-to-find Dumbles as well as Victoria's replicas of old Fender tweed amps (www.victoriaamp.com). In concert a MIDI-based Bradshaw switching system controls his delay, distortion, and tremolo pedals, keeping them out of line until they are actually switched on.

"This year has been all about learning the subtle sonics of things—the way that a top wood can change a guitar, the way a three-piece back will change a guitar," Mayer says. "I even learned how you can get a different sound out of an electric guitar by switching the direction of the cable, which I would never have bought into. Jack Joseph Puig takes me out into the control room and says, ‘Listen to this: play, unplug, switch this . . .' And they are totally different! So I've become a bit more of an audiophile."

—Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Return to top

Martin Simpson

"I've been using a Sobell Model 1 for about 18 years," says Martin Simpson. "The one I have now has been on the road for 11 years, but Stefan Sobell (www.sobellguitars.com) just built me a new model. It's basically a very rarified version of the guitar I've been playing for the last 18 years, with Brazilian rosewood, a Cuban mahogany neck, and an ebony bridge and fingerboard. We developed this guitar together, and we will be selling a very limited edition of them, probably 14 instruments altogether."

Simpson describes his other road guitar, a Traugott model BK (www.traugottguitars.com), as "a complete thoroughbred, modern American fingerstyle guitar." Both guitars are equipped with Highlander pickups (www.highlanderpickups.com), which Simpson runs through Highlander's Pro Acoustic Mix DI (PAMDI). "It's got four bands of tunable EQ on each channel, and it's just totally hi-fi," says Simpson. "It sounds fabulous; it's completely silent." From there, his guitars go straight into the board.

The Sobell, which is Simpson's guitar for D A D G A D and C-modal tunings, is strung with medium-gauge D'Addarios. He replaces the high string with a .015 "to support the slide across the rest of the strings," resulting in the gauges .056, .045, .035, .026, .017, .015 (low to high). He keeps the Traugott in standard tuning or dropped D and strings it with "a bit of a mongrel set," lights with a .056 on the bottom and an .013 on top, or .056, .042, .032, .026, .016, .013.

On Righteousness and Humidity, Simpson also played a ukulele and a banjo (both made by Ron Saul of San Luis Obispo, California), a Roger Sadowsky Telecaster-style guitar (www.sadowsky.com), a Rick Turner Model T (www.renaissanceguitars.com), a 1956 Fender Telecaster, a Silvertone "amp in the case" electric, and a National lap steel. Additionally, Tippin Guitars (www.tippinguitar.com) has recently introduced a Martin Simpson signature model, which is a variation on a cutaway 000-size 12-fret guitar.

Simpson wears a discontinued D'Andrea celluloid thumbpick and uses silk wraps on the first three fingers of his right hand, which he describes as "much closer to the bulk and tone of real nails than acrylics." He uses his own signature model slide made by Planet Waves.

—David Hamburger

Return to top