 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
|
|
|
Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar Magazine, December 1999, No. 84. ANA EGGE | JEFF AUTRY | CLIVE CARROLL | JESSE WINCHESTER Ana Egge built her own guitar while working for luthier Don Musser (3077 Bird Point Dr. #16, Cotopaxi, CO 81223) for a year and a half after she graduated from high school. Under his tutelage, she built the mahogany-bodied, spruce-topped acoustic guitar she has used exclusively since 1993. "Working for Don was the best day job I ever had," she recalls. "I did inlay production and hand filing and ran the diamond saw. I patterned it after a Gibson B-25, except it's slightly smaller-bodied because I slipped a couple of times, so I had to round everything off. I haven't played another guitar that I like as much." She was given a National Estralita wood-bodied resonator guitar for her 21st birthday. "I'm playing a lot of slide now," she says, "and I've done a few shows with the National. I'm easing it in there." She mostly plays the National in open-G or open-D tuning but sticks to standard tuning or dropped-D on her own guitar. Her Egge/Musser guitar sports an L.R. Baggs under-saddle pickup, minus the volume control, and she usually plugs into the mixing board via whatever direct box the venue supplies. "I like to carry just my guitar and plug in," she says. She uses D'Addario phosphor-bronze, medium-gauge strings. —Julie Bergman Jeff Autry's main guitar for years was a 1979 Martin HD-28, but the instrument he plays most often these days is a 1986 HD-28 Martin Signature Series model. Setup expert Dan Lashbrook installed a small, maple bridge plate to replace the larger original maple bridge plate and outfitted the guitar with fossil ivory nut, saddle, and bridge pins. Autry strings his guitar with D'Addario medium-gauge phosphor bronzes, and his flatpick of choice is a 1.2 mm. Clayton gold synthetic tortoiseshell pick. On stage, he prefers playing into a Shure SM-57 mic, but he chooses either the Neumann KM 84 or AKG 451 for studio work. —David McCarty Clive Carroll plays a Martin-Levin, a guitar manufactured between 1975 and 1979, when Swedish guitar maker Herman Carlsson Levin established a link with the Martin Guitar Co. He also plays a guitar made by Philip Woodfield-Moore, a Cornish luthier who lives on a boat near Redruth, and he recently acquired a custom-made Russ Wootton steel-string guitar with Martin-style X-bracing but with the neck and body joined in the Spanish classical tradition. For Sixth Sense Carroll occasionally borrowed Chris Newman's 1930 Martin OM-18. —Chris Mosey In concert, Jesse Winchester plays a Takamine Hirade H-5 nylon-string guitar with high-tension Savarez strings. In his studio, he uses a high-strung Gibson steel-string (which he strings with "plain old Martins") and a Telecaster (which is strung with a set of medium/light-gauge Fender strings at the moment). "I'm not picky about what kind of strings I use," Winchester says. "I don't pay much attention to [gear] almost as a matter of principle. I feel if you can't make a song sound good on an oatmeal box, you can't make it sound good." He uses a Shubb capo and doesn't require a pick unless he's playing rhythm on his Telecaster. Then he uses a hard pick of any brand for strumming. In concert, Winchester uses a clip-on lavalier condenser mic--the same kind that's often used for television interviews--clipped onto the soundhole of his acoustic guitar. "The sound is beautiful," he says. "With the lavalier, you don't get the clanginess you get from pickups that are attached to the bridge. But you have to warn the soundman to back off a little on the lows because the mic is attached to the soundhole." While Winchester doesn't tote an amp with him on the road, he does use a Music Man in his studio. In his backyard studio where he writes his songs and records his demos, Winchester uses a Roland VS-880 hard-disk recorder, which he says has been a godsend as far as songwriting goes. Other studio gear includes an Allen and Heath mixing board, an E-mu sampler (for such demo instrumental sounds as the upright bass and clavinet), a Cakewalk MIDI sequencer, and an Audio-Technica 4050 microphone. —Dan Ouellette Leo Kottke currently travels and records with a pair of Kottke signature-model Taylors, a 12-string and a six-string. He uses light-gauge strings on the six-string and gauges .012–.053 on the 12-string (even for his low tunings). On stage he uses either a Sunrise or a Fishman Rare Earth magnetic pickup, usually run through a Fishman Dual Parametric DI. "That's it," he says. "I don't add a mic to the guitar. I've spent a lifetime trying to decide whether I want that in or out of the mix, and literally every soundman will want the mic in. Sometimes they're right, but usually not." In the studio he uses an RMC pickup and a Roland VG-8 digital processor. Of sound reinforcement in general, Kottke says, "There are real problems with getting guitar sound live. It's an art in itself getting it to work. I don't carry a lot of gear or a rack or anything, because it won't do you any good if the system isn't set up right, and if the system is set up right, you don't really need the rack. So I like to sound check from in front of the stacks. I'll walk the cable out into the first few rows and check from there." His choice of pickup on any given night, he says, "kind of depends on the system I'm playing through. Usually it's the Sunrise, and sometimes the system is just so dead in the water that the Sunrise sounds like a turtle that's upended somewhere. In that case the Rare Earth can save your ass. It has a wider bandwidth and a different kind of high end. And it's an active pickup. It has a different quality on the transients and the bottom end compared to the Sunrise. It can solve problems, and I kind of treat the sound as a problem--every sound check--and try to solve it." —Russell Letson |
