EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM JEWEL, KURT RODARMER, DONOVAN, HOWARD ALDEN, MARTIN SIMPSON, MARTIN TAYLOR, AND GILLIAN WELCH
plays two Taylor guitars, a 912-C (rosewood, grand concert-sized cutaway) and an 814-C (rosewood, grand auditorium-sized cutaway), and a unique guitar made by veteran luthier Danny Ferrington (PO Box 923, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272; [310] 454-0692). For Ferrington, who has crafted beautiful instruments for everyone from Elvis Costello to Kurt Cobain to Ry Cooder, collaborating with Jewel was a labor of love. "She's very inspiring and fun to work with," he said from his shop in Santa Monica, California. "At first she didn't know what she wanted, so we started talking and she paged through my book [Ferrington Guitars, HarperCollins] for ideas. She had been playing a Taylor that she got cheap because it was damaged, and she wanted something a little bigger for more sound. So we decided on a dreadnought size, though not at all a traditional dreadnought shape. I measured the width of the neck on the Taylor so that it would match, allowing her to easily switch from one to the other in concert. She knew she wanted something that would be unique to her, so right away we knew this wasn't going to be a conventional guitar.
"Since she is on the road so much and away from her home, she wanted to include icons on the guitar that would symbolize sentimental parts of her past and serve almost as a talisman to represent physical and spiritual things that she loves. We discussed using many different kinds of icons, such as flying birds, before settling on what we wanted. We realized as it got simpler it became more beautiful.
"It was her idea for the color: a field of rich, dark blue like a night sky, filled with stars. It fades in gradation from one end to the other as opposed to the typical sunburst pattern that fades from the center out. It's an idea I would never have considered without her. The icons we eventually used were inlaid in mother-of-pearl and abalone: a mountain range, a cowboy hat to represent her father, a girl on a horse that is Jewel, angels, and on the back a map of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands with a blue star designating Homer, her hometown. It's a guitar that is very outdoors and environmental without being crunchy-granola, and it has a calming, peaceful quality that she loves and needs while traveling around the world."
The guitar also has a banner on the headstock that reads, "Lass deine Liebe dein Leben sein," German for "Let your love your life be." There is a delicate curl built into the headstock and into the cutaway, a mahogany bolt-on neck, an Engelmann spruce top, East Indian rosewood for the back and sides, and an ebony fretboard. It has a Highlander piezo-style pickup built into the saddle and is usually run directly through the board.
Ferrington has also made another guitar for Jewel--a small-bodied instrument hued with bright purple fading into yellow, like an iris flower, that she plays in the video for "You Were Meant for Me." "I knocked that one out for her quickly," he said. "On planes she likes to travel light with a gig bag, and it's small enough for that, like an electric guitar. It's also a good songwriting guitar for her on the bus."
Ferrington's newest collaboration with Jewel is a little electric guitar still in the works, which he says will probably end up being a kind of orange-red Japanese design.
--Paul Zollo
needed a special instrument for his Goldberg Variations recording, and Richard Schneider (who passed away in February; see Jump Street, May) was the ideal guitar maker for the project. "I became convinced early on," Rodarmer states, "that unless there was a real bottom end on the recording, Bach's music would suffer. Seven-string classical guitars with a low A string sound nasal and thin in the low register. I needed a guitar with a true bottom end to play the low parts. We made what we had to guitar-wise to keep from modifying the music."
Instead of giving his guitars serial numbers, Schneider always gave them names. Blanca, Rodarmer's low guitar, is tuned a fourth below standard. From high to low, the notes are B F# D A E B. For the recording, Rodarmer tuned the sixth string down another step to A.
Schneider and Florida State University professor Michael Kasha designed a new guitar with a soundhole in the lower, front right corner of the instrument to produce the rich low end Rodarmer refers to. "Schneider figured he needed more surface area on the guitar's top plate to give the low A a real fundamental," says Rodarmer. "He wanted to get rid of the hole altogether. That doesn't work, so he put it as far out of the way as he could." Schneider also incorporated new approaches to bracing and bridge design. He employed a new alloy for the frets and placed a steel shaft in the neck to enhance treble response.
When he finished Blanca, Schneider didn't have the low strings Rodarmer had had custom made for it, so he strung it up with regular strings. It still sounded great, which led him to conclude that the increased plate area would be good for a conventionally tuned guitar. That spurred Schneider on to employ the same design in building Cassandra, Rodarmer's other guitar, which is tuned to standard pitch. Cassandra closely matches Blanca's sound quality, which further enhanced the recording. Many are calling the Kasha-Schneider innovations the most significant developments in classical guitar design since 1840.
--Mark L. Small
usually brings a couple of D-model Martin guitars along with him on tour, but he favors his custom-built Danny Ferrington guitar, which he nicknamed Kelly. "The look, the coloring, the motifs, and the symbolism on that Ferrington are based on the Book of Kells, an eighth-century manuscript from Ireland, where I live now," he says. On stage Donovan jokes that when the guitar was initially built, "It only played Irish tunes."
Inside the Ferrington is a Sabine Stealth tuner, which has six convenient LEDs that help keep Donovan in tune (Sabine, 13301 Highway 441, Alachua, FL 32615; [904] 418-2000). He also uses a Fishman pickup that runs on three cell batteries (Fishman Transducers, 340-D Fordham Rd., Wilmington, MA 01887; [508] 988-9199). "Acoustic guitar players are at the state of the art now," he says, "because you don't have to see anything, but inside is all this high-tech simplicity."
Donovan's entire new album, Sutras, was recorded using another custom guitar, designed by Tony Zemaitis, that Donovan refers to as the Blue Moon. It's pictured on the cover of his
1973 Cosmic Wheels album. "The Blue Moon was essentially a cosmic event," Donovan says, "very much to do with the stars and astrology."
--Janet Butler
plays three seven-string acoustic archtop guitars built by Robert Benedetto (Benedetto Guitars, RR 1, Box 1347, East Stroudsburg, PA 18301-9738; [717] 223-0883). The first one is a 16-inch archtop with an oval soundhole. The second is similar but with a unique fan bracing pattern. Both of these instruments are fitted with custom Benedetto suspended pickups. On Alden's third and newest La Venezia seven-string (with f-holes and no pickup), Benedetto used the standard X-bracing. "Howard wanted a pure acoustic archtop for certain playing situations, such as recording," Benedetto explained.
Alden has an endorsement with Evans Custom Amplifiers and uses the FET-500 model, which was designed specifically for the acoustic jazz player. Says Alden, "The Evans amp has a beautiful clean tone throughout the entire range of my guitar--from single notes to the most complex chords, at any volume, in any room--and it records beautifully." He also uses and endorses GHS strings. For his 16-inch, oval-soundhole guitars he uses gauges .013, .017, .024, .036, .046, .056, and .080. The only difference on the La Venezia is that the gauge of the sixth string is .058. Since 1979 Alden has been using Manny's small, heavy, oval picks.
--Charles Chapman
swears by his Sobell Style 1 guitar, built by English maker Stefan Sobell, though he's made room in his life for others. "I used to be guitaristically monogamous," he says, smiling. "I tried to make the one Sobell work for everything. But now I play a lot of different guitars. Still, if it comes down to only one, it's the Sobell." Simpson is more than casually supportive of Sobell's guitars. He's set up his Santa Cruz mail-order business, Watershed Enterprises, in part to act as U.S. distributor for Sobell (Watershed Enterprises, PO Box 8332, Santa Cruz, CA 95061; [408] 457-9301; fax [408] 459-7956; Email DREMGPJ@aol.com).
On tour, Simpson carries two or three guitars, often alternating between the Sobell Style 1 and the prototype for Bourgeois Guitars' Martin Simpson Model (Dana Bourgeois Guitars, 235 Goddard Rd., Lewiston, ME 04240; [207] 786-9320; fax [207] 786-4018). The Bourgeois is a 12-fret large-body cutaway, with a feel and bass response not unlike that of a Gibson J-45 and very wide string spacing under the right hand.
Simpson favors D'Addario medium-gauge strings but switches out the top E for a .015. "I have the E string tuned down to D all the time, and I take it down to C quite a lot," he says. "I want to be able to hit it hard and know it's not going to crap out. A .013 will sound terrible, and who can blame the poor thing? A .015 tuned down to C behaves like a .013 tuned to E. It has a huge amount of tone. And when I'm in D, even without high action, it supports the slide right across the strings."
For amplification, Simpson uses Highlander under-the-saddle coaxial transducers in all his guitars, running them through a Fishman Blender. He's also experimenting with adding a strip contact mic on or around the bridge plate. When playing solo, he points a Shure SM-57 at the junction of the neck and body or just below the soundhole and mixes it in with the Highlander. With or without the help of the SM-57, the Highlander picks up Simpson's signature aggressive picking and back-snaps beautifully.
--Danny Carnahan
played David Grisman's 1924 Lloyd Loar L-5 and his own 1935 Epiphone Deluxe on a recent tour with Grisman. Both guitars were acoustically miked, with no pickups.
One of Taylor's most treasured instruments is a 1929 000-45 Martin, given to him by collector Scott Chinery. For solo shows and most other appearances, however, Taylor plays a production model AEX-59 Martin Taylor Yamaha archtop, the guitar he developed in the 1980s with Yamaha in England.
The cutaway Yamaha archtop features a floating magnetic pickup and a piezo pickup in the bridge that can be blended for different sounds. Taylor recorded the original stereo prototype of this guitar on his Artistry disc, which was produced by former Yes guitarist Steve Howe. Last year Howe and Taylor collaborated again on an as-yet-unreleased recording that showcases more than 60 instruments from Scott Chinery's collection.
Taylor plugs into a DI wherever he plays, which allows him to travel without carrying a rack or an amp.
--Jim Ohlschmidt
plays a Guild D-25M from the mid-'80s on the road and in the studio. "I had one from the '70s that got stolen, so I bought another one, same model," she says. She strings it with D'Addario phosphor-bronze lights. At home she often writes on a '40s Gibson LG-2.
Dave Rawlings' unique sound emanates from a 1935 Epiphone Olympic, a small-body archtop. "When I found the Epiphone I was really happy. It had an aggressive acoustic sound that I liked," he says. The acoustic guitars he'd owned previously had "a sweet sound that bugged [him]." He uses the rounded edge of Fender extra-heavy picks and, he says, "the cheapest strings I can get, in bulk--regular bronze, light gauge."
Welch and Rawlings both use Kyser capos because, as Rawlings says, "They put the guitars out of tune the same amount." Bucking the current trend, they rely on microphones to amplify their guitars on stage.
--Scott Nygaard
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