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Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar Magazine, November 1999, No. 83. Peter Mulvey Peter Mulvey is still mourning the February theft of his Lowden L-25 in Middlebury, Vermont—the guitar had served him for five records and an estimated 700 gigs. Built during the period when the Irish maker's instruments were manufactured in Japan, the guitar has a cedar top, rosewood back and sides, ebony tuning pegs, and a flower inlay (which came from Mulvey's great-grandfather's fiddle) on the headstock where the logo would usually go. Other distinguishing features include a blank fingerboard, heavy top-wear down where a pickguard used to be, and a Sunrise pickup and Crown internal mic running out of two jacks. Mulvey would be mighty happy if anyone could reunite him with this old friend; for more details and a photo, visit www.petermulvey.com, and pass along leads to his management office at yh@shore.net, (781) 643-2773. In the meantime, he's playing a cedar-topped Seagull S6, formerly his official subway guitar. He strings it with medium-gauge Gore Elixir strings, which he endorses. "They're great for me, because I have those cheese-ball hands that zap guitar strings till they're old in like ten minutes," he says. He also raves about his Boss TU-2 stomp-box-style tuner, which shows the note's letter name in lights and is the only tuner he's found that can accurately read the signals from his wicked-low tunings. For amplification, the Seagull is wired with a Fishman Rare Earth Blender, which combines a magnetic pickup and an internal mic on a little gooseneck and, Mulvey says, delivers reliably good sound with minimal fuss. "I had a sort of awakening about gear," he says. "I went to do some shows with Kelly Joe [Phelps], and I hauled my gear out of my little suitcase—I had a little ART tube preamp and I ran one side of that into a Fishman Blender, I ran the other [side] through a different thing, and then a tuner. . . . I'm setting up all these things, and he was saying, 'I thought we came here to play guitar.' He was just funning me, but he had a great point. I've learned now, I'd rather have pretty good electronic sound and just not ever think about it, and think about the playing, than spend a lot of time sort of getting tremendous acoustic electronic sound and then having less time left to actually think about the playing. It was a good moment for me; thank you, Kelly Joe." Mulvey's accomplice David Goodrich plays three electric instruments in their duo gigs: a Chandler Rickenbacker-style guitar with three Seymour Duncan mini-humbuckers, a Gibson Nighthawk for open-G slide, and a Fender Mandocaster from 1962. He calls the electric mandolin "probably the best thing I ever started playing. The voicing of the mandolin, for playing with guitar players, is perfect. It puts you right out of the guitar range, and it opens up your mind to different scales." He plugs all these instruments into a Boss GT-5 multi-effects unit, on which he programs all his settings for Mulvey's songs, and then into a Full Drive pedal for fuzz tones and a silver-face Fender Princeton amp. Goodrich also travels with a Rigel acoustic mandolin for writing sessions and hotel-room jams. Made in Vermont (Rigel Mandolins, PO Box 288, Hyde Park, VT 05655; [802] 253-4422), the Rigel is, he says, "the best new acoustic mandolin that I've heard." Goodrich says he'd love to carry more instruments, but "we have a rule: we can only take to the show what we can carry in one trip." |
