 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
|
|
|
Alison Brown
picks a Mastertone.
|
Check out these equipment picks from artists featured in the December 2000 No. 96 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
|
|
|
Alison Brown has a strictly "mahogamous" relationship with the guitar used to record this tune, her treasured 1939 Martin D-18. "It’s as light as a potato chip," she says of the vintage mahogany dreadnought. The guitar was strung with Elixir strings—light-gauge on top and medium on bottom. Brown prefers her action "very light and easy to play," and she uses a natural tortoiseshell pick she got from Stuart Duncan a decade ago. She also just acquired a small-bodied Washburn that’s at least 100 years old. Brown’s main banjo is a very rare 1938 Gibson Mastertone RB3 flathead with the original tone ring and five-string neck (nearly all banjos from this era were four-string tenor instruments). She keeps a reproduction neck on the Gibson to protect the original from breaking when she tours. Her electric banjo is a solid-body instrument made by Tom Nechville, [Nechville Musical Products, (612) 888-9710, www.nechville.com], that incorporates a Fishman Matrix guitar pickup and an on-board EMG preamp. "Our goal was to make the banjo sound the way we wanted naturally without a lot of processing," she explains. It is strung with specially modified D’Addario nylon guitar strings with ball ends added. —David McCarty John Hiatt is a self-described "Gibson guy." On the road, his main acoustic guitars are a 1988 Gibson J-45 reissue and a J-200 he got about six years ago. On Crossing Muddy Waters he played a Gibson Nick Lucas reissue whose construction was carefully supervised by plant manager Ren Ferguson. "He’s a very sweet man," says Hiatt. "His son Matt was a roadie for us at one point, and he’s become a Gibson acoustic guitar artist rep. And Ren oversees all the acoustic guitar making for Gibson. I’ve got one of the first guitars that rolled out of that Bozeman, Montana, factory when Ren started working for the company again. He makes great guitars!" Hiatt also plays an "old" J-45 and a 1947 LG-2, which used to be his main acoustic guitar for songwriting. "But it’s kind of delicate," Hiatt says, "and it’s gotten fickle in its old age. So I can’t beat and bang on it as much as I usually do." He’s been playing a Taylor 855 12-string for the past seven years and says that "it just gets better every year." All his acoustic guitars are fitted with Fishman pickups except the J-200, which has its own stock pickup and preamp built in. He uses D’Addario phosphor-bronze strings (gauges .013–.056) on stage and in the studio, and he prefers Dunlop .73 tortex flatpicks. He occasionally plays a National wood-body resonator using metal Dunlop fingerpicks and a plastic Dunlop thumbpick. For most of the tracks on Crossing Muddy Waters, Dave Immerglück played a vintage Gibson mandolin, but he played a Kent electric mandolin on "Every Stone." Davey Faragher played a Hofner Beatle Bass. —Simone Solondz Although the Jayhawks’ densely produced recent recordings stand in contrast to the unadorned Americana of their earlier work, guitarists Gary Louris and Kraig Johnson employ more acoustic sounds on stage than ever before. Both perform on brand-new Gibson J-45 slope-shouldered dreadnoughts equipped with Fishman Matrix under-saddle pickups, which they run through Pendulum SPS-1 stereo preamps. A Gibson man to the core, Louris also owns an old J-200, an LG-1 he used extensively on Smile, and a Southern Jumbo. Johnson’s stable of instruments includes a host of low-budget beauties and a Baby Taylor that quickly became the envy of everyone aboard the band’s tour bus. —Mike Thomas Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, December 2000, No. 96. |
||
