 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
|
|
 |
FAREED
HAQUE |
|
|
Fareed Haque and his Schwartz
sitar-guitar. Custom-made by Kim Schwartz (675 Vancouver Rd., S.E., Rio Rancho, NM 87124; [505] 896-3441), Fareed Haque's acoustic sitar-guitar has a standard six-string neck with an additional 13 sympathetic strings and a sitar bridge to help him achieve the kind of nontempered phrasing associated with the north Indian instrument. "The point was just to be able to get a sitar sound but with a chromatic neck so that I could comp and play bebop on it," Haque says. "The neck is quite a bit wider than a conventional neck, so you can bend and get a little more Indian-sounding articulation." Haque's classical guitars include a new Herman Perez Barranco from Granada, a 1987 Ignacio Fléta, and a 1986 Miguel Rodriguez with spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides. For his acoustic-electric instruments, Haque endorses Godin guitars, and makes extensive use of the company's Multiac Nylon. —Bill Milkowski Several years ago, Bryan Sutton was looking for the ultimate multipurpose guitar, something with a warm high end that would work for recording country music as well as enough volume and tone for bluegrass. He found it in a guitar he calls the Banjo Killer, a quilted mahogany, round-shouldered dreadnought by Dana Bourgeois (Pine State Music, 2 Cedar St., Lewiston, ME 04240; [207] 786-0385; www.bourgeoisguitars.com). Later, Sutton added to his collection a Bourgeois D-150 Brazilian rosewood D-28–style instrument for bluegrass recording and a Bourgeois OM for more delicate material. For Gypsy jazz, he has a Dupont MD-50 (Dupont Guitars, 2550 Smith Grade, Santa Cruz, CA 95060; [831] 427-0343) strung with "an oddball string from Europe." On the Bourgeois guitars, he usually uses medium-gauge Elixir strings, though he's apt to experiment, and a 1.14 mm. flatpick. —Craig Havighurst Ian Carr plays a Martin D-35 guitar with D'Addario medium-gauge strings in both standard and dropped-D tunings. For amplification, he uses a British-made LBG or LBGX Bug pickup. He especially likes the simplicity of his L.R. Baggs Pre-EQ preamp with its three-band EQ. —Sue Thompson "I've always been a Martin guy," says Ray Wylie Hubbard. His current arsenal ("I keep 'em in different rooms so my wife doesn't start asking how many I have") includes a well-worn 1955 D-18, his primary stage guitar; a treasured 1954 D-28, on which he recorded his last three albums; and a 1961 00-21, which is strictly a house guitar. Hubbard's D-18 is equipped with a Fishman Matrix pickup and a condenser mic, whose signals he runs through a Rane AP13 preamp. He has played through a number of different amps. "I keep trading them in," he says. "It's like searching for the Grail." Hubbard has recently acquired an exquisite black CFox Napa dreadnought, which he plans to begin using on stage as soon as he installs a pickup in it. "I really like it. They seem to be turning up everywhere. I ran into Dave Carter out in California and he played one, and then Patty Griffin started playing one. I called [CFox] up and said, 'What have you got?' They said, 'A black one with blue trim.' I said, 'I'll take it.'" Of all Hubbard's guitars, the D-28 holds a special place in his heart. During his "lost years," he sold it to the Hard Rock Café. For years the guitar served as a painful reminder of the near-derailing of his career. Finally, he got the courage to call the Hard Rock and ask if he could check it out for a recording session. When the time came to return it, he asked if he could somehow get it back for good. "I was afraid you were going to say that," said their rep. Hubbard strings all his guitars with Gore Elixirs, which he endorses. "I love 'em to death," he says. "I'd use them even if I had to buy them." —David Gold Beverly Smith plays a 1949 Gibson J-45 with medium-gauge strings. She strives for a rich, warm, dead sound, without a lot of string noise or brightness, so she uses Fender heavy or extra-heavy picks. She often uses multicolored picks so she can find them when they are dropped in the grass at festivals. When she is not performing acoustically, Smith uses an Audio-Technica lapel microphone placed inside the guitar and a McIntyre transducer attached to the bridge plate. —Leah Weiss with Paul Brown and Gary Wright Jeff Claus plays a 1936 Gibson Roy Smeck Stage Deluxe—a converted Hawaiian 12-fret guitar with a fat neck and short scale. "It's kind of like playing with a baseball bat in your left hand," he says. It is set up with almost no angle as the strings go over the saddle, so the saddle is almost flush with the bridge. This makes the string tension lower and the strings bouncier. The action is low in first position but higher in other positions. Claus primarily uses light-gauge Martin strings with medium gauges on the D and G strings. He likes the warm, woody sound he gets with medium-heavy nylon picks, which also have a bouncy feel and don't break. When performing on stage, Claus uses a Shure SM57 microphone angled near the end of the fretboard above the soundhole. On larger festival stages, he uses a vibration-sensitive pickup mounted inside the guitar. —Leah Weiss with Paul Brown and Gary Wright Paul Sutphin plays a Martin D-28, circa 1950. He has installed three pickguards above and below the soundhole for added protection when the going gets frantic. He uses heavy-gauge Martin strings to get his heavy bass sound, and he tunes the strings down when he's not playing to minimize strain on the guitar. To keep the bridge in place with such heavy strings and his powerful playing style, Sutphin has devised a unique solution—he's bolted the bridge in place, using wing nuts and washers inside the guitar and abalone dots to cover the bolts on top. "That's exactly what holds her down there," he declares. "If it wasn't that, it would fly off!" Sutphin uses a heavy plastic thumbpick and a heavy plastic pick on his index finger. He uses any microphone that's put in front of him on stage, and he's not shy about getting close to the mic. —Leah Weiss with Paul Brown and Gary Wright Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, October 2000, No. 94. |
||
