Jim Nunally

In his duo with Dix Bruce, Jim Nunally plays a 1978 Martin HD-28, which he bought new. With his three other bluegrass bands, he plays a 1946 Martin D-18. "It's a stock guitar except I had the braces scalloped to make it more full sounding [the guitar was built during a period when Martin didn't scallop braces]. It really opened it up a lot," he says. He wired together a battery-powered Radio Shack lavalier mic (which he says has a Panasonic element) and a transducer pickup that is mounted inside the guitar's top (behind the bridge plate) with double-sided tape. "I really had to fiddle around with the placement of the mic and pickup to find the right sounding spots," he says. He takes a stereo output from the guitar and uses a Mackie 1202 mixer as a preamp, equalizer, and blender for the two sources. From the mixer, he sends a balanced signal to the house system. For recording guitar in the studio, Nunally uses a Neumann KM 184. Onstage, John Reischman and the Jaybirds use only two AKG 451 condenser mics. "It takes about 15 minutes to do a sound check and it sounds great," Nunally says. "I found angle adapters for the mics that help me get a wider pickup pattern." He uses picks by Clayton and D'Andrea and D'Addario EJ-17 medium-gauge phosphor-bronze strings.

—Lissy Abraham

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Paul Brill

Paul Brill's main guitar is a 1967 sunburst Gibson Dove. "This is a real gem that a collector friend found and sold to me at cost, which was really a song, so to speak," Brill says. "I play it live with a Fishman Rare Earth single-coil pickup." His second guitar is an early-'60s Gibson B-25 that's equipped with a Fishman Rare Earth humbucker pickup. Brill also plays a 1971 Martin D-35 and an old Aria AC50 nylon-string guitar, both with under-saddle pickups.

To amplify his acoustics onstage, Brill uses "an old Blackface Fender Princeton from around 1966 or '67." For the Sisters EP, he borrowed a 1937 Gibson HG-00 from Artichoke Music in Portland, Oregon. "On the Sisters LP," he adds, "we used some interesting old guitars, most memorably a 12-string electric Rickenbacker and a balalaika."

—Drew Pearce

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Lindsey Buckingham

Lindsey Buckingham's main guitar is a 1979 Model 1 solid-body made by Rick Turner (Turner Guitars, 815 Almar St., Santa Cruz, CA 95060; [831] 460-9144; www.renaissanceguitars.com). It was custom-built to fit Buckingham's distinctive guitar style, which blends an acoustic fingerpicking approach with electric lead playing. According to Buckingham's guitar technician of many years, Ray Lindsey, it was designed to be a "cross between a Les Paul and an acoustic." Its smallish body was based on an early-19th-century Johann Stauffer (who taught C.F. Martin how to build guitars), and its single humbucking pickup is designed to provide a tone somewhere between that of an acoustic and an electric. It's his main stage guitar because it covers so much ground; it has a broader frequency range than a typical electric guitar, especially on the bottom end where Buckingham needs a greater boost since he uses his thumb rather than a pick. The pickup is on a revolving disc so that it can be rotated at different angles to the strings. "The aim," says Ray Lindsey, "is a sound that is very loud and very clean." The guitar is strung with D'Addario strings, gauges .010—.046. Buckingham uses two Boss pedals: a Super OD-1 for overdrive on his leads and a digital delay for depth. The signal is sent through two Boogie Dual Rectifiers with EV 12L speakers.

Buckingham also has two Turner Renaissance cedar-topped steel-string acoustic semi-hollow-bodies with flatwound, light-gauge strings as well as a Renaissance baritone six-string. They're fitted with Roland GK guitar synth pickups. Each string has its own output and can send either a straight signal or trigger a Roland GR-50 guitar synth, enriching the tone with a steel-string guitar patch and other sounds.

Turner also modified a Gibson Chet Atkins CE solid-body nylon-string for Buckingham by replacing its stock pickups with a set of custom-made hexaphonic units and an elaborate custom preamp. Buckingham uses it with a Roland VG-8 guitar processor and sends the signal through Trace Elliot acoustic guitar amps. Buckingham's onstage acoustic, used on such songs as "Landslide," is a Taylor 814ce with Fishman electronics, sent through SWR California Blonde acoustic amps. He strings the Taylor with D'Addario bronze-wound lights. He also plays a Baby Taylor that Turner set up with nylon strings and a D-TAR Timberline pickup. In the studio, Buckingham plays a variety of guitars, including a 1965 Martin D-18, an early '60s Fender Stratocaster, a Dobro, a Takamine nylon-string, a National resonator, a Baby Taylor, and an Alvarez dreadnought. His capos are made by Shubb.

—Paul Zollo

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Kevin Breit

Kevin Breit still plays the 1931 National Style O he got when he was 13, along with a 1960s fiberglass National and a single-cone, round-neck, wood-body resonator guitar made by Toronto luthier Joseph Yanuziello (ysi@inter.net.ca) that Breit describes as "a combination of a National and Maccaferri." On Jubilee he also played his three Martins: a 1932 0-28, 1946 00-18, and 1948 000-28. "At least, that's what I remember carrying up the stairs," he says. His electric slide stash includes an old Harmony Stratotone, an early Danelectro, and "a kind of Strat-style Frankenstein guitar" made up of various parts that sounds "really dark, like a pedal steel." He also plays two 1950s Gibson RB-250 banjos (one of which is tuned down an octave from standard banjo tuning), a Vega Little Wonder banjolin, a Flatiron mandolin, a 1908 Gibson mandola, and a 1917 Gibson mandocello.

For live performance, Breit's Martin 0-28 and 00-18 are equipped with EMG transducers, the signal of which he runs straight into the board, combining the pickup signal with a Neumann condenser mic. His Yanuziello has a McIntyre pickup in the cone and a Lindsey Fralin pickup in the neck, the fiberglass National has a McIntyre and a Gibson PAF pickup, and he runs both into a 1961 Fender Vibrolux amp in addition to miking them. The Flatiron mandolin gets miked in conjunction with a Fishman transducer, and the electrics all go through the Vibrolux.

All of Breit's acoustic guitars are strung with either medium- or bluegrass-gauge D'Addario strings, and his low-tuned banjo is strung with mandocello strings. Breit plays with a metal slide. "It's steel. I don't even know where I got it," he says. "I've had it since I was 13."

—David Hamburger

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Steve Dawson

Steve Dawson plays a Weissenborn-style lap-slide guitar made by Neil Russell of Celtic Cross Instruments (1441 Jamaica Rd., Victoria, BC V8N 2C9, Canada; [250] 721-0712; neilscelticcross@shaw.ca). For regular slide, he uses a recent National tricone and a Harmony Roy Smeck, which he describes as an "ultracheap black guitar with '60s countertop aluminum siding." He strings the National and the Harmony with John Pearse strings gauged .014, .017, .026, .036, .046, .059, and the Celtic Cross with John Pearse strings gauged .016, .018, .026, .039, .049, .062. He plays slide with a Golden Gate medium thumbpick and lap style with a thumbpick and Propik fingerpicks ("the ones with the open fingertips") on three fingers.

Dawson has Sunrise pickups on his Celtic Cross and Harmony, both of which he runs through a Boss tuner, Danelectro delay, and tremolo pedal and then into a Fender Blues Junior amp. His National has a Highlander tricone pickup and a Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck pickup installed in the cover plate. "The Highlander goes to an EQ pedal and then straight to the board," he says, "which gives it the real tricone sound," while the Jeff Beck pickup, running through his pedal/amp setup, provides more volume. Dawson uses a Dunlop slide for lap-style playing and a handmade bottleneck for slide.

—David Hamburger

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Don Rooke

Don Rooke's main instrument for recording and performing is a Kona Style 3 made by Weissenborn in the 1920s. "Unlike a usual Weissenborn, the Kona has a solid neck and a deeper body," he notes. He tunes the Kona to his Gadd9 tuning, A B D G B D (low to high, the A is pitched between the second and third strings) and strings it with "the expensive version of a D'Addario light-gauge set. I buy a wound .022 and an .018 and toss the top and bottom strings of the set," he says. "The second string (.016) becomes my first string." So his whole set is .016, .018, .024, .032, .042, .022w, high to low.

In the studio, Rooke mics the Kona, but onstage he runs a Sunrise pickup into a Sunrise buffer, a T.C. Electronics parametric EQ, and various distortion, ring modulation, and delay pedals before plugging into a Fender Deluxe amp with a JBL speaker.

—David Hamburger

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