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Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, February 2000, No. 86. JOHN JACKSON | LUCY KAPLANSKY | JIM LAUDERDALE | JOHN McLAUGHLIN John Jackson has been playing the same mid-'50s Gibson J-45 for over 40 years. It has a natural blond finish and a punchy sound. He uses his bare fingers and very powerful thumb to spin out his bluesy lines. One of the unique qualities of his picking is the fact that he doesn't restrict his thumb to playing only downstrokes. He will play upstrokes with it on the bass strings and alternate his index finger and thumb to play single-note leads. He gets a great tone from extra-light D'Angelico 80/20 brass wound strings. "You can't bend those heavy strings like you can these," Jackson says. "Maybe people with big hands can use the heavy strings, but these are plenty thick for me." He also likes the longevity of the brass windings. For amplification, he uses a Bill Lawrence soundhole pickup or just a microphone when possible. Jackson owns a few other guitars as well. "I have others," he says, "but I don't take them on the road much. I have a very nice Taylor [small-body cutaway] that we take sometimes and a metal guitar." The cutaway metal guitar, dubbed Lady, was made for Trish Byerly, Jackson's manager and executive producer of his new Alligator Records CD, by Ron Phillips ([925] 335-0582; metalgitar@aol.com). It's featured in the photo above. Jackson also owns two Sears and Roebuck banjos and an S.S. Stewart parlor banjo. For many years he played slide guitar with a knife blade, but he recently acquired a custom-made slide. "A fella in West Virginia, Bill Dailey, said, 'I'm gonna make you a slide,'" says Jackson. "He's a silversmith, so he melted down three silver dollars and got a piece of red brass and made me one and put my initials on it." —Orville Johnson In contrast to the subtle emotional shadings of her songwriting, Lucy Kaplansky's approach to the guitar is a model of stripped-down simplicity. Twenty years down the road, she remains faithful to a trusty 1928 Martin 00-18 she bought in the late '70s. The vintage, small-bodied Martin, played almost exclusively in standard tuning, is outfitted with a Fishman Blender system, which she describes as "incredibly warm and natural sounding." —Mike Thomas Whether he's at home or on the road, Jim Lauderdale plays a 1994 Collings D-2H with Brazilian rosewood back and sides that he uses so often that "it feels like an appendage" (Collings Guitars, 11025 Signal Hill Dr., Austin TX 78737; [512] 288-7776; www.collingsguitars.com). If he has room for a second guitar, he'll grab his 1994 sunburst Collings D-2HA. He also owns a 1954 Gibson J-45, a 1977 Martin HD-28, a 1970 Martin D-41, and a 1996 mahogany Collings CJ that was originally built for Steve Forbert. Lauderdale strings all his guitars with D'Addario phosphor-bronze medium-gauge strings, strums them with Dava flatpicks, and records his song ideas into a Sony TCS-580V stereo cassette recorder. He uses a Fishman Matrix pickup on each of his Collings D-2H guitars, sending the sound though a Demeter VTDB-2B tube direct box and an SWR California Blonde amp. —Kenny Berkowitz John McLaughlin's most memorable and unusual acoustic guitar is the 13-string instrument built for him in 1975 by Abe Wechter (Wechter Guitars, PO Box 91, Paw Paw, MI 47079-0091; [616] 657-3479; www.wechterguitars.com). McLaughlin commissioned the guitar when playing with Shakti, his pioneering East-meets-West band. To aid McLaughlin in his search for vina-like articulation, the Shakti guitar features a scalloped fretboard: the wood is carved out in between the frets so that the fingertips touch only the strings, not the fretboard, and the strings can be pushed down or pulled across the frets. In addition to its regular, standard-tuned six strings, the guitar has seven sympathetic drone strings that cross the soundhole at a dramatic angle. Wechter went on to build two more Shakti guitars for McLaughlin, with significant variations on the original design (see Great Acoustics, page 106). Unfortunately the original Shakti guitar was out of commission when McLaughlin needed it again last year for the band's reunion, and he opted not to use one of the later Shakti instruments. "It's like destiny in a way," he says, "because quite a while ago I loaned my [first] Shakti guitar out to somebody, because I believe that instruments should be played. It's not good to leave them lying around. But it came back terribly beat up. It was a mess. I took it to a luthier right away, but too much damage had been done and to have a new one built would have taken about nine months. So that guitar is now hanging on the wall, virtually useless. "In the end I had to make a decision," he continues. "I had to go with the nylon-string [Wechter] guitar that I played with Paco and Al in the Trio and also in the trio with Trilok Gurtu and Dominique Di Piazza, or go with the acoustic-electric that I've been playing with my Free Spirits and the Heart of Things bands—the Gibson Johnny Smith guitar. I settled on the Johnny Smith guitar because I felt the spirit was closer to the original Shakti guitar. I don't have the sound of the sympathetic strings, but other than that, I was very happy about the sound." McLaughlin played that hollow-body Johnny Smith guitar for the series of four special concerts throughout the U.K. and then switched to his Gibson ES-345 semi-hollow body guitar for the rest of the tour. Equipped with a scalloped fingerboard, the ES-345 seemed to free him up considerably. In performances I witnessed in both New York and Montreal, his playing was positively incandescent, a notch or two above the recent Verve recording. In the faster passages, whether echoing a searing Srinivas solo or trading fours with tabla master and longtime friend Zakir Hussain, McLaughlin was flying up and down the neck of his instrument with heroic conviction. The combination of the scalloped fingerboard and Bigsby tremolo bar gave him the ability to deal in microtonal nuances for heightened expressiveness, and the smaller frets allowed him to explore some rather extreme uses of glissandos. "I particularly like the sound of this electric guitar," he enthused after the New York performance of Remember Shakti. "The sustain is much better, and particularly in these long movements I can hit a chord and it'll just hang there. When I do that on nylon-string guitar—unless it's got tons of reverb, which is not good—it dies quickly. I also like the combination of this sound with the electric mandolin. They're sort of made for each other. It's like modern-day Shakti in a way. There's more vitality in the music." When playing as part of the Trio with Paco de Lucía and Al Di Meola, McLaughlin used a Wechter single cutaway acoustic equipped with a custom-made Fishman hexaphonic transducer capable of providing a separate output signal for each of the guitar's six strings. Those signals were sent to his Photon guitar synthesizer (made by PhiTech) via a built-in PhiTech MIDI interface and forwarded to two half-rack size Yamaha TX-7 synthesizer modules. Another signal from a Fishman SBT soundboard transducer, used to pick up the guitar's acoustic sound, was sent through a T.C. Electronic digital 31-band equalizer and BSS DPR 901 dynamic equalizer. "On a given note on the fretboard it will call up a [particular] MIDI configuration," McLaughlin explained. "Everything's done from the fingerboard. You don't have to touch the machine. It's very smart. Plus, I get to play in unison, so the melody definitely can carry more weight. From the guitar, I can build up polychords in a way that's normally only possible on a keyboard, and I can bring an element in at a moment's notice, which is great for this trio." —Bill Milkowski |
