Gearbox
February 1996
EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM JAMES McMURTRY,
GYPSY GUITARISTS PAST AND PRESENT, AND BEN
HARPER.
NEW GEAR
gets a burst of energy when asked about his gear. His main guitar is a purple Guild GF-30, a mini-jumbo acoustic that was only manufactured for a couple of years. It has an arched, laminated back and a laminated maple neck, which doesn't move much when McMurtry uses dropped tunings. He also owns a blond Guild GF-30. "I like them a lot, partly because they hang well in a strap," McMurtry says. He notes that his GF-30s have aged well. "I bought the purple one strictly for looks because I had never seen a purple guitar before. It didn't sound very alive at first, but after I beat on it for awhile, the top loosened up, and now it sounds great."
McMurtry uses GHS white bronze strings on his Guilds. He likes how well they work with his Sunrise magnetic pickups. "I run the pickup into a solid-state Sunrise preamp," he says. "I haven't got up the nerve to spend the money on their tube preamp, but I will eventually." He splits the signal at the preamp, sending one signal directly to the house and one back to a 200-watt Lab L-11 amp. He runs that into a Music Man speaker cabinet, which has four 12-inch speakers. "I recently acquired that rig. Until a couple months ago I was using a 100-watt Lab with two 12-inch speakers. I like the 4-12 because it gives a full, warm sound."
McMurtry also owns a Fender Telecaster, whose signal he runs through a Fender spring reverb unit. For strings, he uses a medium-gauge GHS burnished nickel set. On the song "Levelland," McMurtry plays a Jerry Jones baritone guitar, a six-string instrument that's tuned to a low A. "It's halfway down the scale between a guitar and a bass," explains McMurtry. "You hear it in the intro to 'Levelland' before the band kicks in. It's the heart of the song." He uses the strings that Jones makes for his baritone guitar. "The baritone is also really helpful for tracking. Because it sits in the range between a bass and guitar, you don't need anything else besides a drum machine."
McMurtry uses Fender heavy picks and Shubb capos. "I like the Shubbs because they're small, and you can cut the tip off one to do the offset tuning I use on the song 'Melinda' on the new album." He generally uses whatever mikes are available at gigs and has given up miking his guitar. "Too much noise," he says. Instead, he mikes the amp. If he's traveling with his own sound engineer, he sets up an old Passac effects box. "It was intended to have a Strat plugged into it," McMurtry says. "I like to run it into the soundboard and blend effects loops into the direct signal."
--Dan Ouellette
played Selmer guitars throughout his recording career. Although he used very light silk-and-steel strings (probably .010 to .046), the thin, slightly arched tops on these guitars made them surprisingly loud and responsive. In the earliest days of the Quintet, Reinhardt played a 12-fret Modèle Jazz with a large D-shaped soundhole, sometimes called a grande bouche or big mouth. In 1934 Selmer redesigned the guitar, lengthening the neck to 14 frets, changing the soundhole to a smaller oval, and making some interior modifications. This is the style of guitar that Reinhardt made famous, and in 1939 Selmer renamed the Modèle Jazz the Modèle Django Reinhardt (see Great Acoustics, page XX). In 1940 he took delivery of a guitar with the serial number 503. This is the guitar he was to play until his death in 1953. This guitar is currently in the Musée Instrumental de Paris. Selmer stopped making guitars in 1952.
Many of the other guitarists, past and present, who play in this style have followed Reinhardt's example in their choice of instruments. Matelo, Sarane, and Baro Ferret played Selmers in the '30s and '40s. After Selmer stopped making guitars, a number of luthiers stepped in to fill the demand. Of these builders the most famous is Jacques Favino. In later years Matelo played one of his guitars, and today Favinos are almost as sought after as the original Selmers. Jacques Favino retired a number of years ago. Stochelo Rosenberg and Boulou and Elios Ferré all play Favinos, although Boulou also sometimes records with a Selmer.
These days, Babik Reinhardt almost always plays an electric archtop, favoring a Gibson ES-175. But when he plays acoustically, he plays an Ovation Adamas.
Bireli Lagrene plays an electric archtop or sometimes a Fender Stratocaster. When he plays acoustically, he currently uses a guitar by a young luthier from Cognac named Maurice Dupont. Dupont's guitars (available in the U.S. through Paul Hostetter, 2550 Smith Grade, Santa Cruz, CA 95060) are regarded by many players of jazz Manouche to be the most accurate replicas of the old Selmers.
John Jorgenson recorded his album After You've Gone using a 1941 Selmer. He currently plays a custom-made Dupont with a large D soundhole and a 14-fret neck. Paul Mehling of the Hot Club of San Francisco also plays a Dupont and has the distinction of being the first American to order one.
--Michael Simmons
Ben Harper
"fiends" over vintage Weissenborn koa hollow-neck Hawaiian guitars. In ascending order of use, his working instruments include a Style 2, a teardrop (like a Style 1, but without upper body bouts), a Style 4, and a Kona Style 4 (Weissenborn-made, but with a short, solid neck and a deeper, narrower body). In addition to these touring instruments, he brings into the studio his prewar Regal-made Dobro and square-neck Brazilian rosewood Bronson Honolulu Master (probably also made by Regal in the '30s).
In round-neck guitars, Harper's preferences run to smaller-body instruments, like a '40s Gibson LG-2 (originally his mother's and the one he kicked prenatally) and a 1958 Martin 00-18. For his next studio recording, he plans to include his 12-fret, 0-size koa Weissenborn Style B.
On stage Harper uses Sunrise pickups ("the best acoustic tone for recording and the stage," he says, "just unsurpassable") in all these instruments, with Sunrise passive direct boxes and tube interfaces (Sunrise Pickup Systems, 8101 Orion Ave. #19, Van Nuys, CA 91406-1438). Occasionally, he uses various new Gibson acoustics with under-saddle pickups when the overtones from the bass and drums cause his strings to contact the magnetic pickups during a performance. (Creative EQ and repositioning the bass speaker cabinet are his favorite solutions.)
Harper has two wires on stage: One feeds the guitar pickup sound through a direct box to the house. The second (used sometimes for the Weissenborns, never on the round-necks) connects to a Boss compressor, Auto-Wah, and a volume pedal feeding a vintage 1969 Marshall 100-watt amp head and (recent) cabinet with four 12-inch speakers. Thus, the Weissenborn sound can be blended through the mixing board to achieve varying proportions of Sunrise or Marshall signal. For recording acoustic instruments in the studio, Harper augments the Sunrise pickups with vintage tube mikes like Neumann C-12s or U-67s.
Harper uses (and changes, since he does all his own guitar tech work) D'Addario J-16 light-gauge phosphor bronze strings, sometimes stepping up to medium-gauge J-17s for a steel guitar with its sixth string tuned to C or lower. He picks with his bare fingers, occasionally using a flatpick in place of his thumb. On his Hawaiians, he uses steel bars made by Tim Scheerhorn (1454 52nd St., Kentwood, MI 49508).
Harper's guitars travel in white Jan-Al flight cases (3339 Union Pacific Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90023; [213] 260-7212), with velvet rather than foam lining to protect the finish. The white color helps protect from the heat, he says. Two years on the road have included several bumps and jolts--but no damage to instruments.
--Ben Elder