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Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, June 2000, No. 90. WILLY PORTER | DAVID LINDLEY | DON PERIS | KURT ROSENWINKEL | STEPHEN BENNETT Willy Porter tours with one guitar for solo performances: a six-string cutaway dreadnought (named "Junior") built by luthier Gordon Bischoff (5150 Deerfield Rd., Eau Claire, WI 54701; www.bischoffguitars.com). "Junior has a very warm and balanced low-frequency response, which makes it a great guitar for playing solo because it can move the bottom end in any room," says Porter. "Those same qualities make it a difficult guitar to record, though; it tends to get swallowed by the kick drum and bass guitar. So most of the new album was recorded with a Martin OM-28VR six-string." Junior is equipped with a Fishman Natural Thinline pickup and an AKG microphone mounted on a Miniflex-style gooseneck inside the guitar. "I’m still searching for the tone in my head, but this is the closest I’ve gotten," says Porter. He uses a Pendulum SPS-1 preamp system for the guitar on stage. "The Pendulum combined with frequency-specific compression is the key for me. You can compensate for the resonant frequencies of the guitar and the house with the Pendulum and then compress specific frequencies without squishing the entire tone, as with a conventional compressor. I use the Brook Sirens DSP-1 to accomplish this. The two units complement each other very well and minimize the role of the house soundperson." Porter also takes a short-scale 12-string Bischoff on the road "when there’s room in the van." When performing with his band, Porter plays another Bischoff, the Acoustelectric. It has two separate outputs: one Thinline acoustic and one electric. The acoustic side goes through a Fishman Dual Parametric D.I., and the electric goes through floor pedals and into a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. "The feel of the acoustic with all the tonal variations and combinations the guitar allows is really liberating," says Porter. "I like medium- to heavy-gauge acoustic strings. And I’ve got a claw of a left hand, so the Acoustelectric guitar is perfect for me." Porter endorses D’Addario strings (medium-gauge J-17 and J-38), uses both Kyser and Shubb capos (whole and modified in various ways), and sings through a Shure Beta 58 microphone. —Lissy Abraham David Lindley has no idea how many instruments he owns, or even how many different instruments he knows how to play. His collection of vintage gems, exotic pearls, and oddball treasures shows a distinct fondness for the fringe artifacts of lutherie, particularly among the electrics (he’s got Danelectros, Ekos, Kays, solid-body Nationals, a variety of Teisco Del Reys. . . ). Lindley’s penchant for pawnshop specials has fostered a kind of inverse chic, and some of these former cheapo dust collectors are now highly desirable axes. One of the most distinctive timbres in the Lindley oeuvre comes from a curious hybrid: a Bill Wyman Vox bass from the ’60s with a bouzouki neck. Lindley strings it with a custom set of strings in mandocello tuning, with the lowest two string pairs—C and G—split into octaves: CC GG DD AA. It has an immense sound when plugged in, and Lindley plans to produce similar instruments so that others can share in the fun. "You’ve got to have your low C," he says. His acoustic collection includes the familiar Martins and Gibsons, plus a Vega archtop; a Vega Fairbanks banjo; Hawaiian slide guitars by Weissenborn, Kona, Manzanita, Silber, and Canopus; a 1960 José Ramírez nylon-string; assorted mandolins, including a Gibson three-point F-4 (see Great Acoustics); an oud; a family of Turkish sazes; a bunch of Greek bouzoukis in traditional, acoustic-electric, and fully electric versions; a Norwegian Hardanger fiddle; Irish-style flatback bouzoukis by Trinity and others; a cümbus; tambours of all sorts; a tamburitza; a Portuguese guitarra; a lute; various Latin and Caribbean instruments; and scores of sundry stringed things from Autoharps to zithers. Lindley likes bouzoukis because "they are really universal when they’re tuned in fifths. And with the longer necks you can capo them and go anywhere with them. You hear all these cool voicings—it’s all Baroque and Renaissance. People wrote serious music on these things—I’m absolutely sure of it. They’re portable, small. I just really get lost in the sound of them." On the road for his nearly acoustic shows with Wally Ingram, Lindley pares down the collection to a manageable nine or ten instruments. He usually goes out with three or four Weissenborn copies, one made by Manzanita in Germany (Manzanita Guitars, Sellenfried 3, 37124 Rosdorf, Germany; [49] 551-782417; www.manzanita.de), which he says is "the best of all Weissenborns"; one made in Mexico under the direction of Marc Silber (930 Dwight Way #9, Berkeley, CA 94710; [510] 644-1958; www.marcsilbermusic.com); and a seven-string and a six-string Canopus (made in Japan by luthier Yas Kamiya and imported by Scotty’s Music, [314] 427-7794, www.scottysmusic.com). "I keep the Weissenborns in different tunings," says Lindley, "usually C, D, and Eb." He also travels with his Vox bouzouki, a Goodall 12-string, two Trinity College flatback bouzoukis (one tuned in fourths, one tuned in fifths), and a saz or two. "The sazes are tuned tonic, fifth, tonic," says Lindley. "The nice thing about playing in the duo is that I can use natural or tempered tunings or put it in between the notes of the Western scales." Lindley outfits his instruments with myriad pickups, including Sunrise, Barcus-Berry, and a variety of generic electronic elements. "If it has a soundhole and you can get in there," he says, "you can use cheap little piezos—made to be earthquake sensors, actually. And if you get it in the right place, then you get this huge sound. I have a divan saz that sounds like God." Lindley believes musicians need to be comfortable tinkering with their instruments in order to get the best sounds. His hands-on approach includes using a special winding machine to make custom string sets, and he has also built necks, bridges, and other parts for some of his more unusual instruments. As he says, "When you mess with an instrument, you get more torque out of it, but you figure out a way to do it without making the hole bigger. You never do anything that causes structural or permanent damage. None of that ruining thing!" Lindley can fill a huge hall with the sound of a single acoustic instrument, and he’s refined his stage setup to a very reliable rig. "I run the basic line from the instruments through a splitter box that a friend of mine made for me," he explains. "I run half of the signal through a reworked Ashly preamp that has a Klark Teknik graphic EQ loop in it so it’s ultimately controllable for frequencies. The other half goes into an old Roland Jazz Chorus 120 amp, which has a mic on each of the two speakers. It’s mixed to the house with the direct signal in the center and the JC 120 speaker mics split left and right. The signals don’t get to the audience’s ears at the same time, and it makes a huge sound. "My friend Max says, ‘Why do you change instruments so often when they all go through the same amp with the same chorus and they come out the same?’ I was about to say, ‘Screw you, Max,’ when I realized, ‘Damn, they do all sound the same.’ It’s not really true, but in a way it is, so I’ve been trying other variations. But basically I like the way it sounds. "When you have a piezoelectric instrument plugged directly into the board it sounds like a dentist drill. Nnnnnrrrrrrrr! Have mercy with that! It’s effective on some things, but it gets real abrasive, so you have to soften it up. Sometimes it’s not as pure a sound as you’d like, but to get a really pure amplified sound is almost impossible. Ultimately it boils down to speakers and amps, and it’s very difficult to get the real thing through that, so you settle for the next best thing: the bigger-than-life Leo Kottke sound. First time I saw Kottke play, he had a magnetic pickup going into an amp and a piezoelectric signal too. I was blown away and I asked him, ‘What do you call that?’ He said, ‘Bigger than life.’" —Paul Kotapish Don Peris of the Innocence Mission plays a 1974 Guild D-44M, a 1929 Gibson L-37 archtop (his grandfather’s guitar), and a 1997 Guild JF30-12 12-string. Karen Peris plays a 1963 Gibson C-0 classical guitar and a Gibson L-37 archtop from the early ’30s. For the past five years, Karen has been tuning her guitars down a step or a step and a half. "I just love hearing the guitar in that lower register," she says. "When Karen tunes down to C#, I often capo up," Don adds. "The open chords resonate so beautifully in this C# tuning, and the capo accompaniment allows for light harmony on the top." They both use light-gauge D’Angelico 100L 80/20 brass round-wound strings (D’Addario Pro-Artés for the classical) and Fender medium flatpicks. For live performances, Don’s D-44M is outfitted with a Martin Thinline pickup, which he runs through an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic D.I., and Karen uses a 1990 Gibson J-100 and a Fishman Pro-EQ equalizer. —Tim Morse Kurt Rosenwinkel’s acoustic guitar is a four-string Stella he acquired from a friend in 1990. He also has two electric guitars—a Gibson ES-325, which he keeps in standard tuning, and a brand-new Epiphone Dot, which he radically detunes. "This Epiphone is an incredible guitar," he says. "And the most amazing thing is, it’s bottom-of-the-line. I got it for $600! It’s like a beginner’s model, but for some reason they happened to make this one perfect. I got it at Rudy’s on 48th Street [Music Row in Manhattan]. I was playing it there for an hour, and Rudy was sitting there with his jaw open, just staring at this guitar. At one point he said to me, ‘That sounds like a $30,000 1957 Gibson.’ I bought it on the spot." —Bill Milkowski In addition to his grandfather’s original Dyer harp guitar and another Dyer separated by only 31 serial numbers, Stephen Bennett plays modern harp guitars constructed for him by Ron Spillers (8342 Greenock Dr., Richmond, VA 23235; [804] 327-3864; clamandtroll@earthlink.net) and the newly formed Merrill Guitar Co. (140-B Tewning Rd., Williamsburg, VA 23318; [757] 229-1892; merrillfam@integrityonline18.com; www.merrillguitar.com), which has also constructed a custom six-string Bennett uses extensively. He also plays a 1930 National. He strings all his guitars with D’Addario J-16 phosphor-bronze strings; for the bass strings of the harp guitars, he uses ball-ends in gauges .042, .053, .056, .062, .066, and .070. Bennett’s stage amplification rig includes Pendulum Audio’s HZ10-FE preamp, which he uses for the Highlander pickups he’s installed in the harp guitars. He also uses two Barcus-Berry Insider pickups on his grandfather’s Dyer and an AKG C-411, a small contact mic that attaches directly to the body of the instrument, on his Merrill harp guitar. "A mic seems to be too much inside the harp guitar," he explains. In the studio, he frequently blends the signal from the Pendulum with paired Neumann microphones in stereo in front of the guitar and another Neumann over his shoulder to pick up the harp guitar extension. —David McCarty
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