EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM JILL SOBULE,
GRAY AND PEARL, JOHN
MILLER, MARTIN SEXTON, INDIGO
GIRLS, BILL FRISELL, AND PAT
KIRTLEY
NEW GEAR
two main acoustic guitars are a Baby Collings (Collings Guitars, 11025 Signal Hill Dr., Austin TX 78737; [512] 288-7776) and a Vagabond travel guitar (Vagabond, PO Box 845, Albany, NY 12201; [518] 436-9942). She began playing the Vagabond, a full-scale-length instrument with a diminutive soundbox, when she was recovering from back surgery and couldn't handle a heavy guitar. Her friend Richard Barone (who played with the Bongos) lent her his featherlight Vagabond, which she quickly fell in love with. She still uses it as her stage guitar, getting a really good amplified tone using a Fishman pickup and a Demeter tube preamp. She says, "I'll be doing these songwriters' shows where you've got a guy with a Martin from the '40s and all these other nice guitars, and here I am with my little $400 Vagabond guitar through the Demeter, and people are going, 'How do you get that sound?' It's really worked well for me. Plus, I like it not looking like a guitar. It looks like some kind of lute."
Sobule played many guitars on her latest album, Happy Town, including the Vagabond, an old Gibson belonging to her producer, and a borrowed Takamine classical. Her first guitar was a nylon-string, and she still is very attracted to the softer sound of a classical and finds it a nice break from steel-string jangle. Plus, she says, "I play with my knuckles, so there's something very percussive, and with a classical or a flamenco you can get very percussive." On the electric side, she's a devotee of Gretsch guitars.
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
maintain that they bought matching guitars by accident. They both play artist series models with Engelmann spruce tops from the same tree by luthier Richard Bruné (800 Greenwood St., Evanston, IL 60201; [847] 864-7730). Julian Gray's was built in 1985 and Ronald Pearl's in 1988. "When we started playing together in 1982," recalls Gray, "we had guitars by different builders. At one point, Ron had a cedar-top and I had a spruce. We hadn't planned on getting guitars from the same builder; it was just that Richard's were the best instruments we saw. My instrument has great projection and sound quality. It is very responsive and really lets me sing. The tone is very malleable, and I can get really beautiful vibrato from it."
"Julian's guitar has a French-polish finish and is a little louder and brighter than mine," says Pearl. "Mine has a catalyzed finish. They were never meant to be paired or matched. It just sort of happened. When we played them together, it was a good combination, but there was no planning on Bruné's part or ours."
Pearl uses Hannabach medium-gauge strings, recommended by Bruné, and Gray's string sets are a bit more complex. "I use hard-tension strings because it powers up my guitar," says Gray. "They make it louder and give it a fuller tone. For the first two strings, I use Hannabach hard-tension blue strings. The third string is an Augustine Regal, which is a little thinner than the Hannabach third. I've used either Hannabach or Augustines for the basses, but I may switch to the new D'Addario ProArté basses. I tried a set, and they are really good."
In their concerts as a duo, they never use amplification, but when Gray performs with the Diaz Trio (with violist Roberto Diaz, violinist David Kim, and cellist Andres Diaz), he uses amplification. "I use an AKG 451 mic with a 12-inch VRI extension tube and a CK1 capsule plugged into a small Trace Elliott amplifier," he says. "But I don't crank it up. I just want to create a slightly bigger sound, so the small Trace Elliott is fine and very portable. I am looking into a wireless system, but I haven't found a wireless mic that sounds really good. For now, an external mic seems to work best."
--Mark L. Small
isn't much of a gearhead, and his preferences are simple. He plays a 1985 Brazilian rosewood custom Martin OM-28 herringbone with bar frets. He feels the bar frets help create sustain, and he got to like the feel of them playing his old guitar, a 1930 OM-18. His strings are GHS light-gauge Bright Bronze, and he lets them get pretty dead. He plays fingerstyle with no picks and uses no special amplification.
--Del Rey
went looking for a Martin "'cause everyone seemed to use Martins," but he took home a 1964 Gibson J-50 instead. "This guitar had a ballsiness to it," he explains. "It wasn't sweet. It was more bottom-endy and bluesy." He doesn't think a lot about equipment. "I'm the lowest-tech guy I know on the circuit," he says. No picks, no pedals, rarely a capo, he runs a Martin Thinline pickup into the house PA and dampens it with a little reverb. On Black Sheep, he recorded certain songs with his Fender Stratocaster amplified by his pre-CBS Fender Super Reverb Amp. He uses D'Addario phosphor-bronze medium strings.
--Steve Boisson
Emily Saliers and Amy Ray play a battery of Martin guitars. Ray's main ones are an 0-18, a black J-40M, a D-35, and a J-40 12-string. "I've never found anything that sounded better," says Ray. "I've played everything. I'll hear Bruce Springsteen play a Takamine, and I'll go, 'Oh my God, I want to sound like that,' and then I'll play it and it doesn't sound as good. I play so hard. Martins are great 'cause they're bluegrass instruments and you can bang on them." Like most bluegrass players, she uses medium-gauge strings--a Martin set. Ray also has several guitars made by Kent Everett (2338 Johnson Ferry, Atlanta, GA 30341; [770] 451-2485), including a 12-string and two six-strings, one of which she uses on stage as a high-strung guitar for the song "Mystery." "His guitars sound the best of the guitars that I've heard high-strung." she says. "I love the sound of a high-strung guitar, but it's the kind of thing that you don't want to overuse."
Saliers' main acoustics are a Brazilian rosewood D-35, a rare koa D-45, and a J-40, all strung with D'Addario lights. She also plays an Alvarez-Yairi classical and a wood-bodied Dobro (which she used on "This Train Revised" from Swamp Ophelia). For electrics, she plays a mid-'60s Stratocaster and an "old, cheesy" National through either a Vox AC-30 reissue or a Peavey 50 Classic with two 12-inch speakers.
Both Saliers and Ray use Shubb capos and Dunlop Tortex picks. Saliers also sometimes uses a thumbpick along with her bare fingers. "I've never gotten quite used to [fingerpicks]," she says. "They make your fingers feel disconnected from what's going on." Using bare fingers also allows her to switch easily from fingerpicking to strumming, as she often does in midsong.
Ray and Saliers use L.R. Baggs pickups and TC Electronics preamps for the amplification of all their acoustics except Saliers' Dobro, which has a Highlander pickup. "We're picky, picky," says Ray. "I mean, I can hear a string imbalance in the middle of a crowded bar. It's important to me. The guitar has to be an extension of you in order to perform with it, so it's got to sound great. It can sound great in a crappy bar or a big room. It's not [about having] the most expensive equipment; it's just that your guitar has to feel like you." They use no other effects on their acoustics, except for when Saliers switches to an amp sound for an occasional slide break.
Clearly Ray and Saliers are tone fanatics, although they don't consider themselves true guitarheads. "We're not equipment goobers," Ray says, "but there's nothing wrong with equipment goobers. Some of my best friends are."
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
has several electric guitars, including a reissue of a 1957 Fender Strat and a spruce-body instrument built by Steve Klein (Klein Custom Guitars, 2560 Knob Hill Rd., Sonoma, CA 95476; [707] 938-4189). "I still haven't found anything comparable to my Klein," he says. "It wipes out every other electric guitar I've ever tried. It's unbelievably comfortable to play."
Frisell also owns three guitars built by Seattle guitar maker Steven Andersen (7811 Greenwood Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103; [206] 782-8630). His first Andersen was a flattop concert model, which was given to him by The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, who himself owns several Andersen guitars, in appreciation of Frisell's soundtrack work on the first Tales from the Far Side television special. Frisell was so impressed with the guitar that he asked Andersen to build a Model 17 archtop. "I played a lot of Steven's guitars in his shop, so I knew that I would be happy with what he built," Frisell says. He adds, "And I wasn't disappointed."
In fact, Frisell approached Andersen to build him a smaller model that he could take on the road. Andersen says, "Bill and I talked about it, and I came up with a prototype built of spare parts in my shop. It was an eight-hour guitar. From that, I built a small archtop for Bill. It was the first one of its kind. I wasn't sure how much demand there would be for a guitar like that, but I'm building my sixth one already. It fills a niche. That's certainly the case for Bill, who was used to touring with his little Klein, which is easy to store on an airplane." Officially, the miniature Andersen archtop is called Model 14; unofficially, it's called Little Archie, the nickname Frisell gave his guitar.
Both of Frisell's Andersen archtops are equipped with Bartolini 5J floating pickups (Bartolini Pickups and Electronics, 2133 Research Dr. #16, Livermore, CA 94550; [510] 443-1037). Frisell strings his Klein and acoustics with D'Addarios of various gauges depending on the guitar. When he plugs in, he uses the following pedals: Rat distortion, Boss DD1 (digital delay), Digitech eight-second delay, and Lexicon LXP-1 for reverb. In addition to a Fender Princeton Reverb amp, Frisell uses an old Gibson amp. Both have ten-inch speakers.
--Dan Ouellette
recorded the version of "Daisy Goes a Dancing" that appears on Kentucky Guitar on a cutaway Martin MC-28, an auditorium-size guitar that's "thinner than a dreadnought. It's the guitar on the cover of Kentucky Guitar," says Kirtley. The "Daisy" on the Narada Guitar/Fingerstyle collection is played on a Taylor 514-C, which is also the guitar Kirtley travels with. "It's very woody sounding," he says, "but it's also very balanced." On Kentucky Guitar, he also played a Kirk Sand shallow-bodied acoustic-electric (Sand Guitars, 1027 N. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, CA 92651; [714] 497-2110), and he sometimes experiments with a Godin Multiac MIDI guitar and a Roland GR-9 synthesizer.
Although he is constantly experimenting with different pickups, Kirtley is currently using a DiMarzio magnetic soundhole pickup on his Taylor. For live performance, he likes to blend the pickup with the sound from a high-quality condenser microphone. Kirtley's clutch of essential road equipment also includes an Alesis Nanoverb and a Baggs ParaAcoustic DI box with a five-band parametric equalizer. He particularly likes the phase switch on the Baggs, which helps establish an in-phase relationship between the external mic and the guitar's internal electronics.
D'Addario Flat Top phosphor-bronze strings (gauged from .012 to .054) are Kirtley's favorites. He regards Flat Tops as a worthwhile innovation, noting that "string squeak is drastically reduced, and they don't have that super-bright tone when they are first put on." He recommends using a thin thumbpick to get the percussive sound that drives "Daisy" (he carries a sharpened yellow Ernie Ball thumbpick in his pocket just for this tune). He always plays with a thumbpick and his plastic-reinforced fingernails. "My fingernails don't last an hour of playing," he explains, "and I don't like to just get that sound of the flesh of the fingers. I like the round tone that a nicely shaped nail can get."
--Todd Ellison