Gearbox
August 1996
EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM ALVIN YOUNGBLOOD
HART, MARK EITZEL, JONI
MITCHELL, AND BUCKY AND JOHN PIZZARELLI
Alvin Youngblood Hart
is using two guitars on stage these days. One is a new National polychrome tricone with two pickups: a McIntyre under-saddle and an old DeArmond magnetic pickup, whose signals he blends. and blending the two signals.* The other is a late 1960s Mosrite 12-string dobro with a stock magnetic pickup. He tunes the Mosrite down to C, using extremely heavy strings (.064 bass).
Hart controls his own EQ on stage with a Mackie mixer. "I have a real problem with sound people," he explains. "The sound guys come from a big rock 'n' roll thing and have no idea what acoustic guitars should sound like."
--Dale Miller
is a Gibson man. He's the proud owner of a 1962 Gibson J-50. He says, "It's so quiet, and the low end is so strong. I love playing it because it sounds so soft and beautiful. It's my dream guitar." He rarely travels with it, though, unless he can carry it on a plane with him. On a recent trip, when told he would have to leave his guitar at the counter to be stowed, he told a stewardess, "This guitar is older than you, and I'm not checking it." Eitzel adds, "Yeah, I made friends that day." Eitzel tours with two Gibson Chet Atkins guitars. "They're great live because they have great EQ. I put them direct into the board, and the sound is always good." In addition, he owns a Gibson Les Paul, an "indestructible" Takamine guitar he takes on the road, and a Harmony 12-string.
Eitzel's not choosy about strings but prefers GHS. He likes bronze strings, usually with first-string gauges of .011 or .013. He has several Shubb capos. He uses a Peavey Classic 50 amp and a Boss tuner. He has a Lawrence pickup for his J-50, and he loves using Audio Technica 41-HE mics for his vocals. "The EQ for my voice is perfect. It's a powerful mic that pushes right through any monitor system. Plus, it has a smoothness that always comes through the monitors."
For working out arrangements of his songs, Eitzel uses Vision 2.0 sequencing software on his Macintosh Quadra 610 computer.
--Dan Ouellette
Joni Mitchell
has never quite gotten over the first guitar she loved and lost: a '56 Martin D-28 she got circa 1966 from a Marine captain stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The guitar had accompanied him to Vietnam and was in his tent when it was hit with shrapnel. "There were two instruments and all this captain's stuff in there," Mitchell says. "When they cleared the wreckage, all that survived was this guitar. I don't know whether the explosion did something to the modules in the wood, but that guitar was a trooper, man." Mitchell played that D-28 on all her early albums. Before she recorded Court and Spark, it was damaged on an airline, and soon after it was stolen off a luggage carousel in Maui. Wistfully, she adds, "I've never found an acoustic that could compare with it."
As Mitchell explored jazzier sounds in the late '70s, she turned to electric guitars. From 1979 until the mid-'80s, she performed with five George Benson model Ibanez guitars, which were set up by Joel Bernstein and Larry Cragg with a range of string gauges to accommodate her tunings. At that time, the Roland Jazz Chorus amp--which was invented, Mitchell says, so she could replicate her Hejira sound in performance--was an important component of her live sound.
These days, Mitchell's main acoustics are a Martin D-45, a Martin D-28, and two Collings--a D2H dreadnought and the 3/4-size Baby seen in the cover photo--that she calls "the best acoustic guitars I've found since I lost my dear one." She says, "I need really good intonation, and one of the signs of really good intonation is how flashy the harmonics are with a light touch. You should be able to get them to bloom like jewels. Both those guitars have that capacity. Of the two, the big one [which was the primary guitar for Turbulent Indigo] records better, but the little one is so sweet to cradle. It's just the right size for sitting. I write a lot on it and I travel with it, which is kind of scary. I carry it on board with me, because I won't take a chance on it. I won't let it go into the hold and get mushed like my beloved." For performance, her acoustics are equipped with Highlander pickups, which she uses in combination with an external microphone.
In the last year, Mitchell has almost exclusively played an electric guitar made by Fred Walecki of Westwood Music in Los Angeles, which she uses with the Roland VG-8 processor to electronically create her alternate tunings. The guitar is made with a very lightweight German spruce body and a neck that's somewhere between that of a Martin and a Stratocaster.
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
both play seven-string archtop guitars, custom-made by Bob Benedetto (RR1, Box 1347, E. Stroudsburg, PA 18301; [717] 223-0883). Each of these guitars has a floating pickup that was designed for Benedetto by Ken Armstrong. The Pizzarellis use the pickup in addition to--not instead of--putting a microphone in front of an f-hole.
"Years ago," says Bucky, "old guitar pickups like the DeArmond had a button that switched between two volume settings. It didn't mean much, even then, so I used to take it off. Nowadays, I use the pickup to distinguish between a rhythm sound and a solo sound."
John explains how the combination works. "We played on a classical music radio show, and the engineer said, 'We're going to mic the guitars.' But we said, 'No. We also need a hint of amplification from the pickup. It's something that doesn't come through with just a mic.' The host commented on that after the show. He said, 'I thought you were doing it to make it loud, but now I understand that it was to make it full.'"
John uses standard-sized hard picks, and Bucky uses smaller, teardrop-shaped ones. They both use flat-wound La Bella strings because, according to Bucky, "they're easy on the fingers and they have a nice punch to them." The seventh string, which is tuned to an A an octave below the fifth string, measures .100 inch, and comes with the La Bella seven-string set. The high E string is .014 and the B .016. "You get a lot of attack out of them," says John. And Bucky adds, "The rest of the set will last forever. I just change the B and the E. The others stay on for about two years."
Bucky also has three D'Angelico archtops (one of which the maker refinished and one that's a copy of a Gibson L-5), an Epiphone Deluxe, and a prewar Gibson L-7. John has two Benedettos ("a good one and a traveling one") plus a Gretsch Synchromatic. "If I need something else," he says, "I can borrow one of Bucky's."
--Hal Glatzer