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| From
Acoustic Guitar Magazine, April 1999, No. 76
EDDY LAWRENCE - RICHARD BUCKNER - GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS - TAJ MAHAL
Eddy Lawrence relied on three guitars to make Guitars, Guns, and Groceries: a Santa Cruz Tony Rice model (his main live ax), a Fender Telecaster, and a Martin D-18, all of fairly recent vintage. Mandolin parts were duly tremoloed, chonked, and the like on an Epiphone MM-50. After that, things get a little more esoteric. Bass parts were cut using the Telecaster and D-18 ("tuned wicked low"), and Lawrence’s "faux drums" included "wooden spoons, maple kindling, closet wall," as well as tambourine, egg shaker, and "guitar snare." Electric guitars were run through either of two amplifiers: a Fender Super Reverb or a Gallien- Krueger 220 MV. The whole project was recorded to a Tascam 244 Porta-Studio, and power was provided by solar panels, a wind generator, and a small stack of Trojan golf-cart batteries. —David Hamburger Richard Buckner’s hard-rockin’ urban-billy songs originate on one of two acoustic guitars and one of two electrics that he carries with him at all times. For starters, he’s got a rosewood Guild D-50 with an L.R. Baggs pickup and parametric EQ. "I also have a ’50s Gibson nylon-string with an L.R. Baggs pickup," he says. "It sounds very good; it’s a beautiful little guitar. I don’t use that as much because I’m kind of into the electric thing now. I picked up a couple of those new $250 Danelectros, and they’re amazing. I’m a big fan of the lipstick pickup, and the action’s great. It kind of makes me a better player." For amps, Buckner is particularly fond of Fender reissues, like the Deluxe Hotrod and the Blues Junior. "I’m using two amps a lot of the time," he explains, "with a stereo tremolo pedal and a couple of Boss overdrive pedals. I haven’t found a muting tuner that I’m completely happy with, but I just picked up a Danelectric muting chromatic tuner. I wish L.R. Baggs would put a mute button on their DIs. A lot of clubs you play, the sound guys aren’t really on top of it and you have to mute the guitars or they start feeding back [when they’re not being played]. So I was thinking about calling Baggs or writing a letter because I like his product." The rootless troubadour used medium-gauge strings until recently. "I was breaking them too much," he says. "I switched to light-gauge because they break less. It’s some weird physics thing. I don’t know how it works, but it’s true. I switch around; I was using Martins for awhile, but recently I’ve been using generic strings because I change them every night and they’re a third the price. On the classical guitar, I just use normal-tension nylon strings. On the Danelectros, I use D’Addario flat-wound jazz strings. They’re smooth and they tend to give the guitar a lot more body. For picks, I use a Dunlop .73." —Roger Len Smith GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS Gillian Welch’s main guitar is a ca. 1956 Gibson J-50 with a factory-installed adjustable bridge. "It’s pretty much just like a J-45," she says. "It’s blond, and it’s got a big ugly pickguard on it." A couple of years ago, she picked up a five-string Vega Senator banjo, which she’s specially modified "with a little bit of bubble wrap shoved under the head." David Rawlings gets his signature, midrangey guitar sound from a 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop with a carved top and plywood mahogany back and sides. He likens its sound to that of a resophonic guitar. "I bought it without a bridge," he says, "and had a one-piece mahogany bridge made for it. I think with a top this small it really behooves you to get as much stuff touching the top as you can, because the top doesn’t have that much flex to it." He says his guitar is unique in that every note on every string plays at the same volume. "It doesn’t have any dead spots or any high spots—which is very, very strange," he says. "It makes it fun to play lead, because you don’t have to worry where you’re at. It’s not much of a solo instrument, but I can’t really play by myself worth a darn, so it doesn’t make much of a difference." Welch and Rawlings switched their stage amplification rig in 1996 from pickups and DIs to external microphones. Rawlings explains that the change has made setting up for shows easier, although they do need to be a bit more hands-on during setup than they used to be. "We carry Shure SM-58s and SM-57s," Welch says. "Fancy microphones can be very difficult. The one thing that’s nice about the Shures is that their quality control is low enough that they are all different. They’re like snowflakes. If we carry a complement of eight microphones, we can go into a hall and find the right one for the room and the system. We play the microphone game; we swap them out." "And it’s easy to control volume by changing the proximity to the mics," Rawlings adds. —Simone Solondz
Taj Mahal has always loved guitars. "Any book that had a bunch of guitars in it, I could just look at them for days," he says. His first instrument was a Silvertone: "One of those Sears models with the round hole." In high school he made enough money to buy himself an Epiphone Texan. "That was the first guitar that I had around for a long, long, long time," he recalls. Mahal got into resonator instruments early on with their "ringly, tingly sound." The brown National Duolian he used on his first records was a long-term loaner from a friend who was sent to prison. "He said that I deserved this instrument more than he did." Today he confesses, "I don’t know how many guitars I have. It’s probably about time for me to count. I’d probably say about 25 or something like that. I’ve got a ’50s Gretsch Eldorado, a couple of Dobros (a signature Dobro that Dobro made for me), a really nice Guild 12-string that I love." He also owns three black McPhersons (McPherson Guitars, PO Box 537, Sparta, WI 54656; [608] 269-2728; fax [608] 269-3120) that have three soundholes: a small-body model "built like a 00-18," and a six-string and 12-string, both "built almost on the J-200 size." These instruments feature spruce tops and mahogany backs and sides. As for string gauges, Mahal says, "Generally I use an .011 to a .047 or .012 to .052 on the bigger guitars, the necks and bodies that can hold it." —Dale Miller
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