Martin M-38 guitars are Arlo Guthrie's favorites. He was one of the first artists to regularly use an M-38 in performance, and he now travels with three of them: two six-strings-one rosewood and the other mahogany-and a custom 12-string. "It's not boomy," Guthrie observes. "It has the best overall balanced string sound, and yet it's not as quiet as the older, antique models. The M-38 has close-to-dreadnought volume and feel, with a real picker's neck, as opposed to the older, wider, classical necks." Guthrie continues, "I look for a guitar that sings to me. Personally, I'm not concerned with the company of origin, although I have played Martins all my life. I do have a couple of Gibsons, including a J-180 that I often record with, and I have a few electrics."
C.F. Martin and Co. recently issued a limited-edition Alice's Restaurant 30th Anniversary model, with design input from Guthrie. The 0000-sized guitar has herringbone binding and a mother-of-pearl headstock inlay of the famous church. It features circles and arrows on the fretboard and the words "Alice's Restaurant, 30th Anniversary, Arlo Guthrie" on the back. Only 30 six-strings and 30 12-strings were built, and Guthrie signed the label of each one.
Guthrie also owns a Velazquez flamenco guitar made in 1961, which he takes with him on the tour bus. He says he loves playing its wide neck because "it stops you from getting lazy. Your fingers really have to stretch." Last year, Guthrie was given a Pegasus ukulele (Pegasus Guitars and Ukuleles, 45 Pohaku St., Hilo, HI 96720; [808] 935-7301) with a Fishman transducer, and he recently had the electronics in all of his guitars overhauled by the people at Fishman. He says his axes sound better on stage than they have in years. He uses Fishman Matrix under-saddle transducers in all his performance guitars. Two are mated to Crown directional mics, and the third is paired with a Joe Mills omnidirectional mic. He also uses a Pendulum rack so he can adjust his own EQ from the stage.
Guthrie usually uses medium-gauge phosphor-bronze D'Addario strings. He has a stash of National metal fingerpicks he purchased decades ago and is always on the lookout for strong plastic thumbpicks.
-Roger Deitz
A ten-year-old Alvarez-Yairi cutaway with a stock pickup has spent its entire life as Monte Montgomery's main performing guitar. "It's got a full sound, with deep lows and a nice punchy midrange," Montgomery says. The guitar has taken a tremendous beating, the result of his frenetic playing; it shows bare wood on both sides of the strings and large chips at the edge of the soundhole but remains "a really good stage guitar." On stage, Montgomery runs the guitar's signal through an ART preamp, an old Boss CS2 compressor, and an Ibanez Tube Screamer before plugging into a pair of 100-watt Trace Elliot amps. He recently purchased a "beautiful" concert-sized Breedlove cutaway, which he is slowly trying to incorporate into his live performances (Breedlove Guitar Co., 19885 8th St., Tumalo, OR 97701; [541] 385-8339; www.breedloveguitars.com). "It's an extremely live guitar-almost too live," he says. "I'm still trying to figure out how to play it on stage."
-David Gold
"I have two Ovations at home," said Cameroonian singer-songwriter Henri Dikongue, "but I'm traveling with this Canadian La Patrie" (La Si Do, 4240 Sere St., St. Laurent, PQ H4T 1A6, Canada; (514) 343-5560; www.lasido. com). He also used the La Patrie to record C'est la vie. "When I first got it, the wood was too raw, too savage, so I soaked it in the bathtub for a while, and now it behaves. I set it up with an internal pickup under the saddle, because without it I couldn't be heard over my band." He favors lightly built classical or flamenco-style acoustics and plans to hunt for new guitars on his next trip to the States. "I'm hoping to find some more guitars that will respond like this one to my style of playing," he said.
-Danny Carnahan
All of Bill Cooley's acoustic guitars, including his Taylor 812, his ten- year-old Guild GF50, and his new Taylor grand auditorium, are outfitted with L.R. Baggs Duet systems (L.R. Baggs Co., 483 N. Frontage Rd., Nipomo, CA 93444; [805] 929-3545; fax [805] 929-2043). "We play at a pretty healthy stage volume," says Cooley of his gigs with Kathy Mattea, "and with the Duet I can run about half mic, half pickup and it doesn't feed back. That's amazing. To hear the air and the wood is such a treat." The Duet system combines an LB6 piezo pickup and a microphone embedded in foam inside the back of the guitar with a built-in preamp. Cooley uses no outboard signal processing. "I just go into a DI, which goes into the PA," he says. "I don't like reverb on the guitar on stage; I like hearing it dry in the monitors, because with a drum kit, bass, and keyboards it's a pretty full mix of instruments and you've got to be able to hear your part. When you start adding reverb, your fundamental signal starts to dissipate."
-Jim Ohlschmidt
At home, Guy Davis keeps a harem of guitars. On the road, he travels with the guitar he calls Grandma, an early '60s Gibson J-45, as well as Baby O, a Harmony Stella 12-string he recently acquired for $100. Baby O was originally sold through the Sears catalogue during the late '50s or early '60s, and, according to Davis, it "sings like a bird." He usually keeps it tuned to open E (E B E G# B E) for slide playing. Baby O has stolen some of Davis' attention away from Black Betty, a Gibson 12-string he still uses in the studio. Ida Brown, a Hagstrom concert model, is another studio guest. Its measurements especially intrigue Davis. "It's a shallow guitar," he says. "The shoulders are deeper than the hips. But that shallowness forces the sound out of the hole."
That wailing rack harp you hear on Davis' CDs is a Lee Oskar "because they come broken in already. The reeds are cut very thin. They're easy to bend." Davis uses metal fingerpicks on his thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers. He has no brand loyalty regarding strings. He favors bronze round-wound acoustics, sometimes brass. He likes a light gauge, from .012 through .054. He uses a Dunlop capo, "the kind that takes two hands to put on. I'm not so interested in being able to slip it on with one hand."
-Steve Boisson
On his solo tour following the release of Dirt Floor, Chris Whitley played five of the instruments used on that record:
a '31 National Style O, a '31 National Triolian, a '56 National Reso-Phonic with an old Danelectro pickup (used on the song "Indian Summer"), a '58 Gibson ES-125 (also used a lot on Terra Incognita), and a '95 Bart Reiter five-string banjo. On the album version of "Loco Girl," he played a '36 Gibson L-0. As you might gather from this list, Whitley prefers old instruments-"old stuff that's been played a lot," he says.
Whitley uses D'Addario strings on all his instruments-nickel-wound electric strings on everything but the Gibson L-0, which has a bronze-wound acoustic set. The gauges vary: the Triolian has stock extra-lights (.011 first string), the Style O and the L-0 have .013 first strings and .022 wound third strings, and the ES-125 has a .012 first string and a .021 third.
The Nationals are outfitted with Barcus-Berry magnetic Dobro pickups, which Whitley runs through a tube DI called the Juice Box (Retrospec, PO Box 466, Phoenicia, NY 12464; [914] 688-7329; www.retrospec.com) and into a Fender Pro Junior amp. "This is different than playing totally acoustic," Whitley says. "I can be more dynamic. I can be quieter and louder. I use a DI and a mic on the amp so I can push it and it'll distort, and also be clean enough to articulate."
Whitley plies this arsenal of instruments with a purple Dunlop flatpick and metal fingerpicks on his ring and middle fingers. On his pinky he wears a slide he made from a piece of bicycle handlebar, which is cut so that he can rotate it out of the way for fretting.
Last but not least, in his solo show Whitley stomps out the beat on a boot board that's amplified with a Fishman upright bass transducer.
-Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
A new Tim Scheerhorn and his faithful old R.Q. Jones are Jerry Douglas' main resophonic guitars. The R.Q. Jones has a body made out of mahogany; the Scheerhorn (1454 52nd St., Kentwood, MI 49508; [616] 281-3927) has a full- size all-maple body. Both guitars are equipped with McIntyre pickups and Shure SM-98 microphones. Douglas runs them both through stereo preamps, either a Rane unit or Richard Battaglia's Chard Stuff (Chard Stuff, PO Box 210383, Nashville, TN 37209; chardstuff@aol.com), unless the rest of the band is unplugged, in which case he'll just use mics as well.
Although he owns some old Rickenbacker and National lap steels, Douglas prefers either a Stratocaster- style lap steel built by Joe Glaser (Glaser Instruments, 434 E. Iris Dr., Nashville, TN 37204; [615] 298-1139; fax [615] 791-8824) or the new Telecaster- style instrument he used on Restless on the Farm built by Fred Stewart of the Fender Custom Shop. He found his 1920s Weissenborn "hanging on a wall, with plastic flowers coming out of it," he says. He also has a new Weissenborn-style instrument made by Tim Scheerhorn. D'Addario strings, a Dunlop thumbpick, ProPik fingerpicks, and a couple of decades of experience round out Douglas' setup.
Finally, Gibson's Dobro division now makes a Jerry Douglas model, a mahogany square-neck with a 25-inch scale.
-David Hamburger
"Rosalie" was recorded by Mike Dowling on a Martin M-36, though he regularly performs it on a wooden-bodied 1932 National El Trovador, one of his main working guitars. "It's a nice guitar because it's got a 12-fret neck joint," he says, "which gives the body a deeper, richer tone." His other touring guitars are a 1936 National Style O metal- bodied guitar, a reissue Gibson J-185 flattop, and a 1949 Gibson ES-150 electric archtop. "For my acoustic guitars, I look for volume and tone that require a minimum of EQ," Dowling says. "My National Style O is ideal in that I can get different tones by manipulating the placement of the microphone from the f-holes to the coverplate or anywhere in between."
Dowling prefers to use microphones to amplify his guitars, but he has rigged his guitars with some interesting pickups for those moments when more volume is necessary. He uses a Bill Lawrence pickup in the J-185 (Bill Lawrence, 950 Jennings St., Bethlehem, PA 18017; [610] 974-9544; fax [610] 974-9548; www.billlawrence.com). "It had a Fishman under the saddle," he says. "I took that off, but it had a couple control knobs on the rim, and I just wired the Bill Lawrence into that. If I'm playing something completely acoustic, I can take the Lawrence and tuck it inside the guitar-the little spring flange allows me to stand it up inside and out of the way." His National setup is even more unusual. "I've rigged the National with a pickup that I found," he says, "an inexpensive single-coil pickup that had come off something like a Kay guitar. I took the pickup cover off, and now it's got such a low profile I can slide it under the strings, and I have that kind of hot-wired. I just have a little cord on it. It looks pretty bluesy, but it sounds really nice." As for effects and preamps, Dowling says, "I try to keep as little between me and the PA as possible. I've got a Fishman preamp, and I just use that to cut the low-mids around 150 because the flattop guitar is a little too boomy for me."
Dowling uses phosphor-bronze strings, and his slide, which he wears on his ring finger, is cut from a Mateus wine bottle. "It's got enough mass to it that I can play the bar slides on the National guitar and still have it hold the strings down without it being so heavy that it's out of control," he says. "If I'm playing something on the flattop guitar or on the wood-body National, I'll use a generic store-bought Pyrex slide." For his electric swing gigs, he often uses the 1956 Fender Pro amplifier that he used on his first gig in 1965.
-Scott Nygaard
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