Gearbox
June 1996
EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM BILL MORRISSEY,
THE PRETENDERS, DAVID
STAROBIN, AND DAN CRARY
Bill Morrissey
has always been "a sucker for Epiphones." On stage he plays a 1968 Texan sunburst model. "I like how small the neck is," he says. "It's just easy for me to play." A couple of years ago, while on tour with his friend Greg Brown, Morrissey came across a 1963 Texan, factory sealed. It stays at his home, with his Guild 35, his first "real" guitar. He bought that one when he was 17 years old and still occasionally records with it.
Morrissey uses D'Addario light-gauge phosphor-bronze strings, Shubb capos, and Dunlop thumbpicks for strumming and playing fingerstyle. He doesn't use fingerpicks, relying instead on his hardened right-hand nails. A Sunrise pickup stretches across the soundhole of his Epiphone. "You can adjust each string," Morrissey explains. "So I got it, adjusted it, and I haven't had to adjust it since." He doesn't carry around his own amplification system but plugs into the house PA. "I keep it real simple," he says. "The more things you have, the more things can go wrong."--
Steve Boisson
front woman Chrissie Hynde played two acoustic guitars on The Isle of View: a Martin D 28* that she has owned for many years, and a Gibson J-100 Xtra 12-string that she played on "Back on the Chain Gang" and a handful of other songs. She has been traveling recently with a small-body Guild acoustic--a "beautiful little guitar," she says--which she plays in her hotel rooms. Hynde often writes songs on unamplified electric guitars, such as the red Fender Bronco that her friend Jimmy Ellison from the band Material Issue gave her. "It's a gorgeous guitar," she says. "I don't know what it sounds like plugged in."
"That's my relationship to my guitars anyway," Hynde adds. "I have to be able to play it propped up on some pillows, stretched out on the bed. That rules out Ovations, as anyone will know who's tried to play one like that. Electric guitars are fine like that. That's why I haven't gotten into acoustics before, because they're so bloody big."
On the live recording of The Isle of View, Hynde's Martin was amplified with a soundhole pickup made by Bill Puplett (1 Brookshill Cottages, Brookshill Drive, Harrow Weald HA2 6SB, United Kingdom) and an AKG condenser mic mounted on a very thin wire that bent around and aimed at the strings. Separate feeds were used for the pickup and the mic, and only the pickup signal was in the stage monitors. The 12-string was also set up with a Puplett pickup.
Andy Hobson played an Epiphone El Capitan bass in the acoustic concerts, and guitarist Adam Seymour primarily used a Gibson Blues King, plus a Gibson Starburst for high-string work on "Brass in Pocket" and a few other songs. Both guitars have Gibson's AccuVoice pickup system, which includes low and high controls, a "jazz" and "pop" knob (it mainly rolls off highs toward the jazz side), a bright switch, and a notch filter. "Once you start using an acoustic guitar electrically, it changes," Seymour says. "No matter how good a sound you can get, it's never like an acoustic guitar. It really is between an electric and an acoustic; you've got the worst of both worlds, really. But with the Gibson [pickup system], you've got a lot more there to squeeze out of it." Seymour's guitar also had a Dean Markley soundhole pickup installed in case of problems with the AccuVoice.
For effects, Seymour used a Roger Mayer VooDoo-Vibe box, and in the "I Hurt You" guitar solo, he shifted into acoustic overdrive with a Rat fuzz pedal.
Seymour uses different gauges of strings on every guitar, but generally his taste runs toward heavier sets. "I like plenty of weight behind it; I don't like light strings," he says. "Heavier strings stay in tune more, they sound better, they react a lot better, and if you've got to bend them . . . then you've got to bend them! They're like train wires, but it makes you want to try."
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
plays a circa 1835 C.F. Martin, an 1844 René-François Lacôte, a Stauffer/Legnani copy built by British luthier Gary Southwell in 1988, and a 1995 Southwell amplified classical. The Martin and the Stauffer copy are both based on the Stauffer/Legnani design, which was developed in Vienna during the late 1820s. They feature adjustable action and fingerboards raised well above their soundboards, enabling easier access to frets 13 and higher. The three 19th-century instruments have scale lengths of 63 centimeters or less, making them ideally suited to the left-hand demands of works by composers such as Giuliani, Sor, and Regondi.
Starobin describes Southwell's amplified classical as "an inspired hybrid of 19th- and 20th-century design." Its 19th-century features include its body, which is slightly larger than that in a typical Stauffer design and is shaped more like guitars built by Scherzer, giving it a larger bass response and better projection than smaller 19th-century instruments; materials typical of mid–19th-century builders (European spruce and bird's-eye maple); a string length of 63 centimeters; and adjustable action. On the more modern side, the instrument employs fan bracing and is equipped with a Crown microphone and piezo bridge transducer, whose stereo output can be mixed, equalized, and amplified separately.
For low-level amplification, Starobin uses a Fishman Acoustic Performer Pro amplifier. If he is playing through a house system, he uses a Rane AP-13 preamp. He plays on Augustine Blue bass strings and Augustine Regal trebles.--
Simone Solondz
is a Taylor Guitars endorser, and he plays three Dan Crary Signature Model dreadnoughts designed with heavier bracing on a thin top, compared to the traditional Martin-style scalloped braced top. "The thinner top and heavier braces," Crary says, "makes it louder, but it also puts treble overtones throughout. So you have a loud bass, but it's a crisp-sounding bass since you have treble overtones. It makes the guitar more microphone-friendly, because a heavy bass output [characteristic of scalloped-braced guitars] is hell on a dynamic microphone, which is what most people use."
One of Crary's Taylors is the prototype, which has a slightly thinner top than production models. He picked up the second Taylor, a production model, to take on the road "because the neck had been on and off [the prototype] eight or nine times." His third guitar features a long neck in the fashion of a Pete Seeger banjo, with two extra frets. "It's kind of an experimental guitar I've been playing at solo gigs," he explains. "Take the capo off, and it's standard at D [D G C F A D] instead of E. I do that because I sing low."
Crary also plays a Taylor A-55 jumbo cutaway 12-string with extra abalone trim, which he strings with Guild lights. His original A-55 was damaged in a shipping accident, so he had Taylor make him his current 12-string, which has a Florentine cutaway, natural finish, a spruce top, and maple back and sides. Crary uses D'Addario J19 "Bluegrass Gauge" phosphor bronze strings on his six-strings, "a set that is standard medium but with .001 inches off the first and second strings." He plays with the rounded corner of a Fender medium pick.
Crary says that on Jammed if I Do his guitar was recorded in stereo through two AKG condenser mics in a V configuration, pointing at about the 15th to 17th fret.
For live performance, Crary (who's also a Fishman endorser) uses a Fishman pickup and internal mic (substituting an AKG horn mic for the Crown that comes as part of the Fishman package) with a Fishman Blender. "The Blender has effects loops on all three possibilities: the pickup, the mic, and the blended combination of the two," Crary explains. "I use a Zoom multiple effects box because it's small and it's battery operated and I do a lot of traveling where size is a big issue. I consider it to be a wonderful little tool. I wish it were a little hotter in terms of the quality of the reverb and the lack of noise, but the rest of it is brilliant because it's about the size of two cigarette packs and it runs off AA cells." Crary opts for battery-powered devices, as he finds house power, with its converters and often faulty plugs, to be unreliable.
"In addition to that," Crary adds, "there's a little [Fishman] Pro EQ to suck some of the midrange out of the microphone, because the Fishman tends to emphasize midrange, which is great for a scalloped braced guitar but not great for mine, which is EQed a little differently. That's a really good little piece of equipment, and it also runs off batteries." --
Ben Elder