WHAT THEY PLAY: THOM BRESH, MERLE TRAVIS, CHRIS STILLS, TONY McMANUS, STEPHEN FEARING, SCOTT TENNANT
THOM BRESH
One of Thom Bresh's most treasured guitars is the Martin D-28 with Bigsby neck that Merle Travis played in the movie From Here to Eternity and on all his acoustic recordings since 1946. Three years ago Harvey Leach (PO Box 1315, Cedar Ridge, CA 95924; [530] 477-2938; www.netshel.net/~leagit/home.htm) built Bresh a fine replica of the irreplaceable original called the Spirit. "Harvey's guitars have the mellow sound of that Martin," Bresh says. "The only difference between Travis' guitar and the Spirit is 40 years of wear on the neck." Leach currently builds two versions of the guitar: the Bresh Legacy, which features a spruce top, rosewood back and sides, bird's-eye maple neck, and rosewood fingerboard and bridge; and the Bresh Spirit, which features additional abalone trim ("the way I thought Travis would order one if he were alive today," says Bresh). Both models feature a scroll peghead with burled walnut veneer, the characteristic Bigsby pickguard, and playing-card fingerboard inlays (diamond, heart, club, spade). Both guitars are available with RMC low-impedance output pickups like the ones Bresh uses (RMC Pickup Co., 1739 Addison St. #15, Berkeley, CA 94703-1580; [510] 845-9130; www. rmcpickup.com). Leach also does all the inlay work on Bresh's other guitars.
Another stunning replica in Bresh's stage arsenal is the Unity Special built by Aaron Cowles of Unity Guitars (113 S. Main St., Vicksburg, MI 49097). Cowles carved archtop guitars for Gibson at the company's former plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and he worked on the original custom Super 400 guitars Gibson built for Travis in the 1950s. Cowles' replica of the Travis Super 400 is an 18-inch archtop with an ebony fingerboard with Bresh's name flanked by two stars inlaid in abalone. It features two Gibson P-90 pickups, a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece with the same type of long arm Travis used, and a headstock with an elaborate abalone overlay similar to the original one. "The headstock is bigger than a D'Angelico's," Bresh says. "It just fits into a regular case." Bresh plays the Unity Special through a solid-state Crate amplifier designed for keyboards. The most important thing in getting the Travis sound is a 15-inch speaker, Bresh says. "I love a tube amp, but I don't own one. I've been playing the Crate, which weighs about 2,000 pounds. But it really sounds good and has a lot of power."
On stage Bresh also plays a red steel-string Godin Multiac. Affectionately dubbed Hannah, Bresh's Godin is outfitted with an RMC synth pickup that drives all Roland GR synthesizers as well as the Roland VG system. Aside from being synth-friendly, Bresh says the Godin sounds good plugged into anything, from a boom box to a PA system to a studio mixing board. "It's the best-feeling off-the-rack guitar you can get," Bresh says.
The most unusual guitar Bresh uses in concert is the Bresh Dualette built by Del Langejans (23 East Eighth St., Holland, MI 49423; [616] 396-1776; fax (616) 396-3105). Essentially a dreadnought-size guitar with no back, the Dualette features a steel-string setup on one side and a nylon-string setup on the other. The two necks are slightly angled away from each other, and both fronts have single cutaways. Both sides were originally equipped with L.R. Baggs pickups, which were later modified with independent power supplies. Bresh later installed Ovation pickups on the Dualette. "I play pretty loud," he explains, "and the Ovation pickups gave me more of the in-your-face sound I like, because they deliver more fundamental and less harmonics."
Bresh prefers Fred Kelly's Speed Pick thumbpick for playing electric and a heavy John Pearse thumbpick for his acoustic work. On tunes such as "Whatever Blows Your Dress Up," he augments his sound with the Porch Board, a touch-sensitive foot percussion device from En Route Music (PO Box 8223, Janesville, WI 53547-8223; [608] 752-2229). Bresh also uses a Nady UHF wireless system with the Dualette guitar. "It works much better than the VHF version," he says. "It has a wider bandwidth, with less compression and less interference."
-Jim Ohlschmidt
Merle Travis inherited his first guitar-a used instrument of unknown origin-from his brother Taylor around 1930. In 1935 he saved $30 from a six-month stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps to buy a new Gretsch Model 30, the company's lowest-priced acoustic archtop, which he put to good use with Clayton McMichen and other early groups. Several years after he began performing on WLW in Cincinnati, Travis acquired a handsome Gibson L-10 archtop, which he later outfitted with a DeArmond pickup and a Vibrola tailpiece.
Travis played the L-10 throughout his remaining years at WLW and during his early years of dance-band and session work in Los Angeles. In 1948 Travis met Paul Bigsby, a machinist from Downey, California, who shared Travis' interest in motorcycles and musical instruments. Bigsby replaced the old Vibrola device on Travis' Gibson L-10 with the first vibrato tailpiece that didn't detune the guitar. Bigsby tailpieces have remained virtually unchanged ever since.
Bigsby had built steel guitars for Joaquin Murphy and Speedy West, and it occurred to Travis that a regular guitar made of solid wood might sustain in the same manner. He also didn't like having to reach over the headstock to change the treble strings, so he sketched a guitar that had all the tuners in a row with position dots on the neck shaped like a heart, spade, club, and diamond. He drew it with a thin body that had a fancy cutaway, an arm rest, and a violin-style tailpiece. Bigsby took Travis' sketch and built a remarkable replica out of flamed maple with one pickup near the bridge.
Travis was playing the solid Bigsby at a dance club in Placentia, California, when Leo Fender, who had recently begun building steel guitars and amplifiers nearby in Fullerton, asked to see the radical new instrument. Travis loaned him the guitar for a week, and Fender built his own version. When the Fender Broadcaster hit the streets in 1950 (priced at $75), it was by no means a copy of Bigsby's guitar, but the influence was undeniable. The original Bigsby solid-body is on permanent display at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
The slim Bigsby neck was particularly well-suited to Travis' unusual chord fingerings-he often used his left-hand thumb to fret several bass strings at once. Travis once likened his grip on the neck to grabbing a hoe handle. He had Bigsby install the same style neck and a custom pickguard emblazoned with his name on the Martin herringbone D-28 he had acquired in 1946. Travis made virtually all of his acoustic recordings with this guitar, which he played until his death in 1983. Travis also owned a stock Martin 5-18 that he called the baby Martin and used mostly as a travel guitar.
In 1952 the Gibson company built the first of several custom Super 400 electric archtop guitars for Travis. Valued at $1,070, it was the most expensive guitar the company had produced to date. Its decorative features included an intricate headstock overlay designed by Travis, his name inlaid in western-style mother-of-pearl letters on the fingerboard, and a gold-plated Bigsby vibrato tailpiece with an unusually long arm. Gibson's Custom Shop recently unveiled a Merle Travis Super 400 Special with all of the original custom features combined with hand- painted images of Travis and special additional inlays created by Bruce Kunkel and D.R. Auten.
In 1967 Guild's Carlo Greco built the most ornate custom guitar ever designed by Travis (see Great Acoustics, page 130). An unusual feature of the guitar's construction was a solid top that was carved on the outside but left flat inside to give the guitar more mass and reduce feedback. Travis also bought the first Standel amplifier when they were introduced in 1953, and it was apparently the only guitar amp he endorsed during his career. He also used a Music Man electric guitar amp built for him by Leo Fender in later years.
-Jim Ohlschmidt
Of his healthy collection of acoustic guitars, Chris Stills favors his glistening, sea foamÐgreen Gibson J-200-a gift from his father. "It's out of the pro custom shop in Bozeman, Montana," says Stills. "They only made a few of them. There's a little mother-of-pearl inlay on the neck-it's the same pattern as the normal J-200." He also frequently plays a pair of Alvarez-Yairis, one of which has a lever for quick access to dropped-D tuning (Hipshot, 8248 State Route 96, Interlaken, NY 14847; [607] 532-9404; www.hipshotproducts.com). "The Alvarez electronics are amazing," says Stills. "Usually, I just take two guitars out on the road. Otherwise, I have a '65 [Gibson] Hummingbird that I bought off of Ethan [Johns] that was all over the record. I have a 1949 Martin tenor guitar. It's a four-string guitar. It looks like a baritone uke, but they called it a tenor. Also, I just got a sweet 12-string Guild."
Stills uses Highlander pickups (Highlander Musical Audio, 870 Capitolio Way, Unit 3, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401; [805] 547-1410; www.highlanderpickups. com), which he says are "fat and stay true to the guitar." On his acoustics, he uses medium-gauge Martin Marquis strings. "The heavier the better," Stills says, "because I knock the shit out of my guitars. I have to change my strings every second gig, otherwise I will break a string." He uses Dunlop .88-mm nylon flatpicks.
-Roger Len Smith
For solo playing and accompaniment, Tony McManus' main guitar is a 12-fret 000 built by Bill Kelday of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. The guitar has a European spruce top and cocobolo back and sides. The headstock features a thistle, Scotland's national flower, inlaid in mother-of-pearl and copper. McManus amplifies it with a Mimesis blend system-a combination magnetic pickup and internal microphone (available in the U.S. in a similar form as the Fishman Rare Earth Blend). "I tend to err more on the side of the microphone, which is a soundman's nightmare," says McManus. In addition, McManus plays a baritone guitar, also built by Kelday, with Brazilian rosewood back and sides and a Sitka spruce top. McManus also owns guitars by LarrivŽe (780 E. Cordova, Vancouver, BC V64 IM3, Canada; [604] 253-7111; www.larrivee. com) and Lowden (137 Doggett Dr. N., Forest City, NC 28043; [704] 245-8906). He strings his standard guitars with medium-gauge D'Addario strings (.013Ð.056) and his baritone with strings gauged .018Ð.080.
-Dylan Schorer
Toronto luthier Linda Manzer built Stephen Fearing's main guitar, the Manzer Cowpoke (Manzer Guitars, PO Box 924, Station P, Toronto, ON M5S 2Z2, Canada; www.scsi.org/manzer). It is a fairly large, deep-bodied model with a cutaway and a German spruce top inlaid with abalone and boxwood. Fearing uses John Pearse phosphor-bronze medium-gauge strings. The pickup system is a hodgepodge of over- the-counter and customized electronics that he says is "ever changing as boredom or new products dictate." Currently, Fearing uses a dual pickup/ internal microphone setup: a Takamine piezo bridge pickup and an Audio Technica mic, which is internally mounted against the back of the guitar under and facing away from the soundhole.
Fearing uses a custom Countryman 85 direct box module mounted with Velcro to the neck of his guitar. Both the DI and the mic take phantom power. The mic/pickup signals are fed into a Mackie 1202 mixer and a Rane ME15 dual 15-band equalizer. The Takamine pickup signal is sent to an Ernie Ball volume pedal and then back to an Alesis Quadraverb, where chorus, reverb, delay, etc. are added to the signal. He uses a Boss MIDI pedal for shifting between effects presets on the fly, and a Boss TU12 tuner.
In lieu of flatpicks, Fearing plays with plastic fingernails. He has tried this in a number of different ways, from gluing Ping-Pong balls to his fingers to artificial nails (which tend to fly off), to his current choice-liquid powder acrylic nails that he brushes on to create a "big, thick plastic coat on the top of the nails."
-Steve Givens
Scott Tennant's main guitar is a 1995 Daniel Friedrich, which he bought new from the maker in Paris. This is his second Friedrich instrument. "He's maybe the best of the old school," Tennant says, "and this guitar is a great solo instrument and unbelievable for recording."
Tennant has been using a Dake Traphagen instrument (916 Harris Ave., Bellingham, WA 98227-0724; [360] 671-1017) with the L.A. Guitar Quartet because he wanted something with a strong high end to cut through those other three guitars. He recently got a guitar by Australian luthier Simon Marti (fax [61] 2-9569-2002; simonm@ cia.com.au) for the same reason.
The L.A. Guitar Quartet uses Neumann KM184 microphones on stage, placed about two hand-widths away from the area around the bridge. The Quartet used to use Trace acoustic amps for performance, but Tennant says they've gotten too old and grumpy to lug that equipment around and generally go with the house sound systems these days.
-Kenny Hill
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