Martin guitars seemed to be Josh White's favorites. He played a 00-21 with herringbone trim and a 1940 00-42 with a belly bridge, a slotted headstock, and pearl trim. The 00-42, which he played right up until his death in 1969, is now in the possession of his wife, Carol. During the '40s, the guitar was fitted with double black pickguards that covered both upper bouts.
In a photo of White recording in New York in December 1934, he is pictured with what looks like a Gibson archtop. He also played a custom-made Guild, which looked like a modified F-50 with a two-inchÐwide (classical width, perhaps slightly slimmer) neck, a slotted headstock, and custom fingerboard inlay. This guitar gave way to a Josh White model guitar made by the Ovation company with a spruce top and molded fiberglass body. The Josh White model featured the wider fingerboard he preferred and a slotted headstock with White's name on it. I also saw him play what looked like a straight classical guitar strung with steel strings.
White used medium-gauge phosphor-bronze Black Diamond strings and played without fingerpicks. Due to psoriasis of the fingernails, a condition White suffered from that attacks the beds of the nails and gradually causes them to crumble, his fingerboard was sometimes bloody after a show. At one point he was using fiberglass fingernails epoxied to what remained of his natural nails.
--Don McLean
A Takamine acoustic guitar with a built-in equalizer is Mary Lou Lord's performing partner. "I don't know what the model is," she says, "but it's a total workhorse. I know that I can depend on it." She also owns a 1953 Martin D-18. "It's gorgeous, but it's like a grumpy grandpa now, and I wouldn't take it on the road." She amplifies the Takamine with a Martin Thinline pickup and a Fishman preamp, and she strings both the Martin and the Takamine with Martin mediums.
On the street and subway, Lord used to use a Maxi Mouse amp (Lectrosonics, 581 Laser Rd. N.E., Rio Rancho, NM 87124; [800] 821-1121), "which I loved," she says, but "the schematic in it is so over-the-top insane that when it breaks no one knows how to fix it." Now she uses a Trace Elliot combo that she calls "the rockin' system" (Trace Elliot USA, 2601 75th St., Darien, IL 60561; [630] 972-1981; fax [630] 972-1988; www. trace-elliot.com). "It's got at least three inputs, it's 100 watts, and I hook it up to a little wheelchair battery."
--Lisa Theo
Sons of the Never Wrong (page 15)
Bruce Roper, Nancy Walker, and Sue Demel--aka Sons of the Never Wrong--all play and write songs with acoustic guitars, although Roper is the primary (and often the only) guitarist on stage. He plays a Martin M-36, Walker plays a LarrivŽe L-05, Demel a "big, black, shiny jumbo" Gibson Everly Brothers model. All their guitars are equipped with Fishman Matrix pickups, which Roper says provide reliable, no-fuss sound at the gig--just "plug 'em in and go." He and Walker play mainly in standard tuning, while Demel favors
D A D G A D and D A E G A D.
Walker also picks a Washburn F-style mandolin, and Demel gets funky on a 12-inch Remo djembe--a versatile and increasingly popular adaptation of the Senegalese drum.
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
The latest addition to J.P. Cormier's arsenal is a highly ornamented custom Santa Cruz guitar. "It's a special order that Richard Hoover built for me," he says. "It has a slotted headstock, an abnormally wide neck, a cutaway, koa, Engelmann spruce, and an OM shape. It's a beautiful guitar. Richard Hoover and I designed it together over the phone and fax, sending pictures and sketches and scribbles back and forth. He started working on it in September ['97], and I got it on New Year's Eve."
Before acquiring his custom guitar, Cormier primarily played a Santa Cruz Tony Rice model, which he still uses on some occasions. "If I have to play acoustically, I take the Rice, because it's loud, super loud," he says. He also owns a Gibson CL-20 and two Fender acoustics, a 12-string and a gut-string. He uses L.R. Baggs, Martin Thinline, and TrueTone amplification systems in his instruments. "I started with a Baggs ribbon system in the new guitar, and it got a bit unbalanced on me," he says. "So I switched to a Martin Thinline pickup and kept the Baggs electronics. My Rice model has a TrueTone M7 in it, which is a pair of mics and a transducer that attaches to the bridge plate, and the Gibson has all Baggs. Every guitar is different."
Cormier uses a Boss equalizer pedal for the Tony Rice and a Trace Elliot eight-band graphic EQ for the custom Santa Cruz. He runs all the guitars through a Baggs Para-Acoustic DI. His fiddle is a "$200 Sears and Roebuck made of plywood," which he amplifies with a Baggs pickup. "I love the way it sounds," he says. "It's deeper than a regular fiddle. It just sounds like a big bear."
--Scott Nygaard
Equipment hasn't been Dan Bern's top priority while he's been cranking out songs at such a prodigious pace. His main ax since 1992 has been a Fender acoustic. "I don't even know the model," he says. "I guess I could look inside some day and find out. It's certainly not a high-end guitar, but for some reason this particular guitar has the bite that I really need for the way I play, and it has become my primary guitar." He strings it with Martin Marquis medium-gauge strings and makes them ring with Jim Dunlop nylon picks--.060 and .073.
Bern's friendship with Ani DiFranco has yielded a bonus above and beyond their touring together and DiFranco's production work on 50 Eggs. "Now I also have an Alvarez that Ani gave me," he says proudly, "and it's one of my prize possessions. So I sort of go back and forth between the Fender and it as my main guitar." Recently, Bern added a Fender Telecaster to his concert arsenal, and he uses it to beef up the sound during a third to a quarter of his set.
When he's on stage, Bern amplifies his acoustic with a Lloyd Baggs pickup run through a Westwood buffer preamp, made by Westwood Music in Los Angeles. When playing acoustic, he runs that signal into the board, and when he plugs in his electric guitar, he uses a Fender Pro 210 amplifier.
--Derk Richardson
Although he endorses Fender and Guild guitars, the acoustic guitars Tommy Emmanuel likes best are made by Maton, the oldest guitar manufacturer in Australia (Maton Guitars, 9/1 Kelvin Rd., N. Bayswater, Victoria 3153, Australia; [03] 9720-7259; fax [03] 9720-7273; www.maton.com.au). "My first guitar was a Maton," Emmanuel says. "I got it when I was a kid, and it still plays like the day I bought it. I've played some that are better than others, and that applies to every brand out there. But pound for pound, if you went into a shop and you took off the wall a Takamine, a Yamaha, a Fender, and a Maton, the Maton is always going to win hands-down because of the incredible tone these things have. It's a sweet sound that I love. I like a guitar to be evenly balanced, with a rich bottom end and good midrange, so that when you dig in, it fights back. Some guitars are really sweet, but when you hit them hard, nothing happens, it sort of flattens out. A really good guitar, when you hit it, the sound should just project out."
Maton makes a Tommy Emmanuel signature model steel-string based on a prototype they made for Emmanuel a few years back. "If you look inside, you'll see all these wires and junk hanging down, because it's a prototype, but I won't give it back," Emmanuel says. "I told them, 'You've got it. Now let's just leave it alone.' When I'm on TV and they do a close-up of my right hand, you can see all the stuff hanging about inside, and they tell me it's embarrassing, can't they just make it look better? But I won't let them touch it."
Although much of the acoustic sound Emmanuel gets in concert is produced by Maton's built-in transducer, he says the natural acoustic sound of the guitar is vitally important to how the pickup works. "It's almost everything, because if you have a great acoustic tone going on, and you put a great pickup in it, that tone is going to be ten times as big," he says. "Because I play really lightly and really hard, loud and soft and all that, I need a pickup with a lot of headroom. A whole lot. The Maton system has so much headroom, you could never use it all. It's so sensitive that I can play very quietly and all the nuances are there."
Emmanuel usually plays steel-string acoustic guitars, but he also owns some nylon-string instruments. His personal guitar collection includes a Martin and a Buscarino (9075 130th Ave., Unit B, Largo, FL 33773; [813] 586-4992), which he says also has a great pickup system that he uses on stage. And like all collections, there's always room for one more. "I would love a Kirk Sand," Emmanuel says.
--Jim Ohlschmidt
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