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| From
Acoustic Guitar Magazine, June 1999, No. 78
GEOFF MULDAUR - TIN HAT TRIO - CHUCK PYLE - BETH ORTON - DEL McCOURY - RONNIE McCOURY - STEVE EARLE - THE McGARRIGLES
"I play a 1935 00-40H Martin," says Geoff Muldaur. "They had an overstock of Hawaiian guitars in the '20s, and they ended up with these guitars that were more heavily braced, and they cut down the necks and made them into gorgeous-looking instruments. As the ornamentation of Martins goes, 45 is the most outrageous, 42 is the next, and 40 would be the third most ornate, so it's got a lot of mother-of-pearl and it's rosewood." Muldaur relies on luthiers Eric Schoenberg and T.J. Thompson to keep this beauty in working trim and strings the Martin with Schoenberg Light Minus strings: .011, .014, .023, .030, .040, and .052. While he opts to play with fingerpicks at parties, the guitarist is otherwise an avowed "bare-fingered boy" live and in the studio. Muldaur also plays a Great Lakes open-backed banjo made by Roger Kasle in the 1970s. --David Hamburger Mark Orton, guitarist and composer for the Tin Hat Trio, primarily plays a recently purchased 1893 Martin 1-21. He also uses a 1937 Dobro square-neck as his slide guitar and an early 1900s Bacon tenor banjo, which he prepares by putting paper, thumbtacks, and strips of tape on the strings. He uses a Fishman Rare Earth magnetic pickup on the Martin and a Barcus-Berry Dobro pickup, mounted between the neck and the cone, on the Dobro. He runs the signal from the pickups through an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI and into a Trace Elliot Acoustic Concert 100 amplifier. In addition, all his instruments are miked with a Schoeps MK IV microphone. He strings the 1-21 with Martin SP phosphor-bronze or silk-and-steel strings, gauges .010–.046. He forgoes fingerpicks and attacks the strings with either his bare fingers or a Jim Dunlop Jazz III flatpick, which is the only pick that will fit in his preferred hiding place: between the first and second joint of his middle finger. --Scott Nygaard Chuck Pyle has a whole herd of beautiful guitars, including three Martins: a 1983 D-35, a 1995 HD-35, and a 1990 000-28. He also owns a 1996 Breedlove RD-20 mahogany dreadnought with a spruce top (Breedlove Guitar Co., 19885 Eighth St., Bend, OR 97701-9042; [541] 385-8339; www.breedloveguitars.com). "That guitar is very responsive dynamically," Pyle says, "with a sweet tone and a loud resonance that never fails to turn heads." He also owns a beautiful 1996 Goodall KJ-1086, a noncutaway koa jumbo with a Sitka spruce top (Goodall Guitars, PO Box 3542, Kailua-Kona, HI 96745-3542; [808] 329-8237; www.goodallguitars.com). "The guitar sounds huge," he says. "Every other jumbo-style guitar I've ever played has had a muffled sound. James Goodall seems to have figured out how to do it right!" For performing, Pyle prefers the Breedlove or the Goodall, and he used the Breedlove to make his latest recording, Keepin' Time by the River. Pyle endorses Elixir Strings and uses a Fishman Pocket Blender preamp for all of his guitars except his Goodall. "I have two different types of dual-signal guitar setups," he explains. "My older and much-loved guitars [Martin and Breedlove] each use a saddle transducer combined with a Fishman soundboard transducer. They require some manipulating of the EQ but ultimately give a good acoustic signal. My new Goodall has the EMF Acoustics B-Band pickup combined with the EMF internal microphone [www.b-band.com]. I can run the B-Band flat and just tweak the mic a bit, and this gives really great sound--better than anything I've ever heard." --Brad Smithe Beth Orton raves about her Breedlove C20, a recent acquisition that she uses for both stage and studio (Breedlove Guitar Co., 19885 Eighth St., Bend, OR 97701-9042; [541] 385-8339; www.breedloveguitars.com ). Her C20 is a noncutaway, deep-bodied concert model with rosewood back and sides and a redwood top. On Trailer Park she played a Gibson J-200, which is also heard on Central Reservation on the song "Feel to Believe." Atop her guitar wish list is a small-bodied Martin, and Ben Harper--whose grandparents run the Folk Music Center in Claremont, California--is helping her on that quest. "I'm looking for more of a dry, bluesy sort of sound, which isn't quite so pretty," she says. "Sort of a bit more brittle." Orton's Breedlove is strung with Martin mediums and amplified with either an L.R. Baggs pickup or a Sennheiser 421 mic. Her guitar tech, John McCormack, says the Sennheiser delivers a "beautiful sound" and points out that Dennis Cahill, the guitar wiz who plays with Celtic fiddler Martin Hayes, uses the same setup. Orton's sideman Ted Barnes used to perform with one of his own guitars (he was in business as a luthier for three years before joining forces with Orton), but these days he favors one by U.K. builder Simon Birkett. He also plays a bouzouki he built, which used to be his primary instrument when he was playing Celtic music. Barnes' self-made guitar has a Headway pickup, the Birkett has a Baggs, and the bouzouki has an EMG. On stage he plugs into a Trace Acoustic TA-50 amp, with no effects. --Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Del McCoury's main guitar is a 1936 Martin D-18. "That's about all I've played in the last three, four years," he says. "I have a couple D-28s but they need some work. This D-18 is in better shape than any of them right now. It records really well." He strings the vintage Martin with D'Addario medium-gauge Flat Tops: phosphor-bronze semi-flattened strings. "They won't get your pick rough," he says. "They stay smooth so your pick will slide off the string easy." "They're really cool," says Steve Earle. "I've thought about switching at least one of my guitars over to them myself, because I've used Del's guitar a lot when I just show up at the Station Inn without a guitar. They're round-wound strings that have been polished off flat. And they just go on the guitar bluegrass-friendly." McCoury uses heavy David Grisman picks that have been worn in by his son, Ronnie. "Dad'll use them till they're round, just completely round," says Ronnie. "I'll use them till I can't hardly use them and then I give them to him." --Scott Nygaard "I have a 1981 Gilchrist mandolin [F-model, X-braced] I got in about 1989," says Ronnie McCoury. "My dad went out to play the Great American Music Hall [in San Francisco] with David Grisman and he came back with a Gilchrist that David had for me. The neck had been pulled out of it. The glue wasn't holding, so I had it fixed. About a year or two later David said, "I want you to have that mandolin--you just have that." He adds, "I was using a Grisman pick but I went to a big three-corner Fender extra-heavy. But I've got to take the corners off of it." He uses D'Addario J-75 phosphor-bronze mandolin strings, gauges .0115, .016, .026, .041. "You can really dig in with them," he says. --Scott Nygaard Lining the walls of Steve Earle's studio, Room and Board, are countless vintage and new acoustic and electric guitars. "I tend to favor Gibsons when I'm playing rhythm stuff on rock tracks," he says. But the guitar he plays when he's doing the one-mic dance with the McCoury band is a new Santa Cruz Tony Rice model. "The Tony Rice is a really good guitar. I've also got a Santa Cruz D slot-head. I avoided Martin-type 14-fret dreadnoughts for a while," he says. "All the Martins I've had have been slot-heads. I've got a D-18S. I've even got a slot-head 12-string. Both the Santa Cruzes have the oversized soundhole, and I've kind of gotten used to that. The oversized soundhole really works. It sort of opens them up. They're real well-balanced. When I'm recording I like that woofy thing from a standard-sized soundhole, especially for rock stuff and hillbilly stuff. But for [bluegrass], especially working one mic, it works really well." Earle's collection also includes a Taylor Leo Kottke model 12-string. "That thing's a monster," he says. "That's the best 12-string I own. I use it on records all the time. And I like the Taylor Babys. That's what I'm playing on 'Christmas in Washington' [from El Coraz--n]. I've got a killer gut-string made by Paul McGill, who makes those weird-ass resonator guitars [808 Kendall Dr., Nashville, TN 37209; (615) 354-0070; Konecaster@aol.com ]. I have one of those too. It's amazing. I've also got a slot-head guitar that John Dillon made" (RR #4, Box 115A, Bloomsburg, PA 17815-9124; [717] 784-7552). Earle's mandolin collection is smaller but no less complete. "I've got a lot of mandolins," he says. "I've got an old A model and an H-2 mandola [both Gibsons]." His favorite mandolin is a Gilchrist F-style tone-bar model that he just got from Ronnie McCoury. "I'm going to have him build me another," Earle says. "I want one of the X-braced ones. I paid him a certain amount of money for this one and the deal was that I could give him this one back and pay the difference. But I'm gonna have him start it and I'll save up the money. When he finishes the mandolin I'll buy it too, 'cause I've gotten attached to this one. It's a tone-bar mandolin, but it really sounds great. It makes me play all the time." He strings the Gilchrist with D'Addario J-75 mandolin strings. Earle's electric mandolins are made by Jimmy Moon from Glasgow, Scotland. "They're acoustic instruments; they're Telecaster-shaped but X-braced with a pin-type bridge," says Earle. "They're great. They have a lot of space between the strings and a slightly longer scale. Through one of those Trace amps we're the loudest fuckin' hillbilly band in the world." In a band situation Earle uses green Tortex flatpicks. When he plays solo acoustic guitar, he primarily uses his bare fingers, amplifying the guitar with a Fishman Matrix Natural pickup that he runs through a Fishman Blender. --Scott Nygaard Anna McGarrigle owns a 1955 Brazilian rosewood Martin D-28 with light-gauge strings and a custom case. "But the case is too heavy for me to carry," she said, "so I don't bring it on the road anymore. The case cost as much as the guitar did when I bought it back in the '60s. I have an old pickup for the guitar--just this thing that was lying around the house. Everybody says that I should get an [internal] pickup, but I don't know." She also plays a Gibson electric guitar with medium-gauge strings. She and Kate own three accordions. "My favorite beautiful little accordion is a Castaneri diatonic Tommy-style accordion," Anna said, "which has a double reed." The sisters also share two Hohner accordions "that are really beat up," according to Anna. Each Hohner plays in only two keys; they have one that plays in C and F and one that plays in A and D. Kate McGarrigle's on-stage guitar of choice is a nylon-string Takamine cutaway acoustic-electric with heavy-gauge strings. "I play harder than Anna does," Kate said, "and I don't want the strings to move. I used to have an expensive Martin, but it got stolen, so I refuse to tour with expensive guitars anymore. This one is so cheap. Somebody once broke into our tour bus, stole the guitars of the guys playing with us, opened up my case, took out the pickup, and stole the battery! They didn't even want the guitar." --Paul Zollo |
