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Stacey Earle picks a Papoose. |
Check out these equipment picks from artists featured in the November 2000 No. 95 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
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Stacy Earle plays a Tacoma Papoose and a 1990 Gibson J-45 with D’Addario light-gauge strings. Mark Stuart plays a 1990 Gibson J-200 and a late ’70s Gibson J-50, also with D’Addario light-gauge strings. When Stuart isn’t fingerpicking, he opts for a medium flatpick. Of Earle, he says, "Stacey never uses a pick. It’s all flesh." Both use L.R. Baggs Para DI preamps and pickups. "It’s a DI and preamp all in one," says Stuart, "a self-contained unit that takes an XLR or quarter-inch, phantom or non-phantom output. It allows us to deal with almost any sound situation." —Rani Arbo Jethro Tull’s frontman Ian Anderson has always favored small-bodied acoustic guitars. "Most people think I’m 6’6" and weigh 200 pounds," he says, "because the guitar looks so small on me. But in fact I’m a little guy with an even smaller guitar. Using a big box, you’ve got a very full sound, but it tends to be lacking definition in the midrange. I like to pick some notes as well as play chordal things, so I prefer more weight in the midrange and find that the smaller-bodied guitars work better for me. And because they don’t have as much natural bass, they’re less likely to feed back." He uses a Fishman AG-125 pickup, which he runs through a Zoom 504 acoustic effects pedal. Anderson didn’t indulge in expensive instruments on the early albums. He played a bottom-of-the-line Yamaha around the time of Stand Up and an Aria on Aqualung. During the early ’70s he played Martin New Yorkers, most often an 0-16NY. "But Martin was reluctant to go into any modifications," he says. "Martin didn’t want to do any of the things that I felt might make [parlor guitars] more playable and more reliable." In the ’80s he began using instruments built by luthier Andrew Manson of Devon, England, who built guitars to Anderson’s specifications based on early Martin parlor guitars. He currently tours with a ¾-size parlor guitar, the smallest he’s ever played, which Manson created from a 150-year-old French design (A.B. Manson and Co., Easterbrook, Hittisliegh, Exeter, Devon EX6 6LR, England. [44] 1647-24139; fax [44] 1647-24140). Anderson also owns about 20 vintage Martins, dating from 1834 to the late 1930s, which decorate his walls rather than his studio tracks (although some were used on 1976’s Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.) Anderson changes strings every night because he sweats a lot on stage. For the past ten years he’s been using La Bella light-gauge strings on his guitars and mandolins, but he recently switched to D’Addario EJ-16 phosphor-bronze lights for his small acoustic guitars. "The winding versus the core thickness is quite different," he explains. "They’re more supple than the La Bellas, which work fine on my regular-scale guitars." His arsenal of instruments also includes Sankyo and Powell concert flutes; bamboo flutes by Patrick Olwell; Schecter electric guitars; Ozark, Ibanez, and Fylde mandolins; Ozark and Manson mandolas; Generation tin whistles; a piccolo by Phillip Hammig; Hohner harmonicas; and Paul Hathaway bouzoukis. An extensive list of Jethro Tull equipment can be found on the band’s Web site at www.J-Tull.com. —Steve Boisson Peter Mayer plays a 1985 Lowden L25C cutaway with a cedar top, rosewood back and sides, and all-wood decorations and bindings. He replaced the original pinless bridge with a pin bridge that includes a Fishman AG125 pickup. He runs the pickup, along with an AKG C406B instrument mic mounted inside the guitar, into a Pendulum HZ-10SE preamp. A separately EQed piezo contact pickup on the soundboard captures percussive effects. Mayer uses Martin phosphor-bronze strings, and when he uses a flatpick (about half the time), he prefers .60 or .73 mm. Dunlop 44R nylon picks. —Kenneth M. Sheldon Del Rey calls the custom Ron Phillips instrument she plays on X-Rey Guitar "the most fabulous metal resonator guitar in the world. I have never played a metal-bodied instrument that had more delicacy of tone." The cutaway body, a little bigger than a 00, uses different alloys for the top and back, and the cone, which is smaller than those of standard-size resophonics, was spun by Phillips out of his proprietary alloy. "His cones are so superior that they make any metal guitar sound better," says Rey. "For a while, when I was still playing a National 1938 Style O, I was using one of his cones, and it definitely helped a lot" (Ron Phillips, [925] 335-0582; metalgitar@aol.com). Rey uses D’Addario heavy-gauge strings (.014–.059). "A lot of tone comes from that heavy-gauge string," she says. "And your action being up helps—the easier it is to play, the worse you’ll sound." Rey has used a cone-mounted pickup but now uses a mic for amplification. Resonator guitars, she says, are "more like horns than guitars in terms of how you mic them. The sound is coming off the front of the instrument, not from a vibrating top. It’s happening about four inches in front of the instrument. It’s a big problem to mic them. It tends to be much better with something like a Shure SM57 or 58. Put a condenser mic on a resonator guitar and it sounds terrible." —Russell Letson Jess Klein plays a 1996 Martin 000-16T, a Guild acoustic cutaway with an arched back, and a Guild F45CE acoustic-electric with a cutaway. Of the Martin she says, "It has a nice balance and is not too tight-sounding." She uses D’Addario medium-gauge phosphor-bronze strings on the Martin and DR strings on the Guild. When she’s strumming her guitars, she uses yellow .73 mm. Dunlop Tortex picks. With the Martin, she uses a Fishman Pocket Blender to mix the signals from a Fishman Acoustic Matrix Natural I under-saddle pickup and a Crown GLM-200 mini-microphone inside the guitar. —Karen Iris Tucker Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, November 2000, No. 95. |
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