EQUIPMENT PICKS FROM ANN RABSON,
THE BAD LIVERS, BADI
ASSAD, ANI DIFRANCO, AND UTAH
PHILLIPS
main guitar is still her beloved and trusty Gibson LG-1, her first guitar, given to her by her father when she began playing. "He had it in the attic," Rabson recalls. "It had been my stepmother's guitar in college in the '40s. When I told him I wanted to play, he said, 'Well, here, use this one, and if you learn to play it I'll get you a good one.' He didn't know it's a great guitar!" She also has another old Gibson "somebody must have kept in the attic" and a Gibson ES-124 from either the late '50s or early '60s.
Her main guitar is equipped with a Seymour Duncan pickup and strung with light-gauge strings. "My luthier, Tom Schiff, said that he felt it would be bad for the guitar to have too much tension on the neck," Rabson says, "but I do like the heavier strings."
--George Hansen
Danny Barnes brings a dream team of instruments to his work with the band. His first love is the banjo, and he plays a 1959 Gibson RB-250, a mahogany archtop that he likes because of its snappy tone. He also plays a 1930s May Bell tenor banjo that's good for swing rhythms played over the tuba, he says. His guitar is a custom-designed Collings D-2H dreadnought with spruce top, rosewood back and sides, mahogany neck, and ebony bridge and fingerboard with inlays of skulls and baseballs by Tom Ellis. "This is such an inspiring guitar to play," Barnes says. "I think Collings makes the best guitars anywhere."
The Collings is equipped with a Fishman pickup under the saddle, which Barnes combines with a mic. He strings the Collings with phosphor-bronze strings in the heavy-to-medium range; he's not particular about brands. In addition to his bare fingers, he uses flatpicks, thick for lead and medium for rhythm.
Barnes also plays a 1929 National Triolian with metal body and Bakelite neck, and he recently bought a brand-new National Radiotone for use on the road. "I prefer Nationals to Dobros because they have a more strident tone, more banjo-like," he says. He normally tunes the Nationals using low-bass open G: D G D G B D.
On the band's new album, Barnes also played a 1918 Gibson A-model mandolin that belongs to bass player Mark Rubin. "That's my favorite type of mandolin," he says. "I like the warmer sound."
Bob Grant plays a late '70s Gibson J-45. "It's a good guitar," he says, "not a loud guitar, but it sounds good. It's been hot-rodded up--just about everything that can be done has been done to it." He uses a Baggs bridge pickup and medium-gauge Martin Marquis strings. His mandolin is a '93 Flatiron F-style that he says is "a real hog. It's real solid and it barks real well." It's strung with D'Addario J-74 medium-gauge strings and mounted with a Fishman bridge pickup. For both guitar and mandolin, Grant uses tortoiseshell picks. "Tortoise is real thin but super-stiff," he says. "You have to have something hard if you want to play loud."
Mark Rubin plays a plywood bass that was "most likely made in Germany in 1972." For his percussive, slap-bass style, Rubin says a plywood bass is actually better than a solid-wood bass, which would cost thousands of dollars more. Rubin also has a collection of pawnshop tubas, including a Yamaha YBB-103, "one of the smallest tubas made," which he uses for touring. "Among Dixieland players, this model is well known," he says. "It's a decent little instrument."
--John Herndon
has relied until recently on one of two guitars, depending on the situation. For recording and venues where a strictly acoustic sound was required, she played a hand-built Fisher classical, originally loaned to her by her brother Odair, which she now considers her own. "I love this instrument," she said. "It was only my second guitar." The guitar she has most often used in performance is a Takamine Hirade model. To amplify it, she mixes the signal from the Takamine's pickup with the signal from an internal microphone made by Joe Mills (Music City Audio, PO Box 160371, Nashville, TN 37216; [615] 227-3542) and one from an external mic placed near the bridge.
The Joe Mills mic is mounted on the soundhole of the guitar, right in the center between the D string and the G string. Jeff Scott Young, Assad's manager and sound man, says of the Mills mic, "I haven't found any other mic that sounds this good. It's so warm and rich, you can really hear the wood and all the organic stuff going on inside the guitar that usually gets lost." The mic also adds presence and body to Assad's percussive guitar sounds.
For her next recording, Assad will be able to choose among the Fisher, Takamine, and two recently acquired instruments: a 1997 Thomas Humphrey Millennium (Humphrey Guitars, 124 W. 72nd St., New York, NY 10023; [212] 799-0713), owned by Young, and a 1997 Pimentel Badi Custom, designed and given to Assad by Pimentel and Sons (3316 Lafayette Dr. N.E., Albuquerque, NM 87107; [505] 884-1669).
Assad strings her instruments with D'Addario Pro Arté EJ46 Classical strings. She also endorses Taos drums.
--Scott Nygaard
main guitar is an Alvarez-Yairi Bob Weir model with a built-in pickup and preamp. In the studio, she says, "I usually record it with two mics and a direct signal and go to an amp too--split the direct to an amp of some kind, so I can really manipulate the sound of an acoustic guitar. I've got a few crazy old amps. Oftentimes on, say, my album Dilate, people think it's an electric guitar, and the sound can change over the course of a song."
On her album with Utah Phillips, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, drums and electric bass (a Fender Precision) steal the spotlight from guitar, but she did use a wide variety of instruments and sounds on the project. "I'm an old beater-instrument slut," she says in reference to the funky tenor guitar that appears on "Half a Ghost Town," accompanied by a background track of her Alvarez run through a Silvertone amp "with the tremolo turned up to ten." Other instruments she played on the album include a '30 National, a Hammond B-3 organ, and a Wurlitzer piano.
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
has played Guild jumbos for most of his performing life. He says he owned the first Guild F-50 ever made; when it was stolen in the mid-'60s, he asked Guild to make another (at that time it was a special-order guitar), and that instrument remained his traveling companion for 30 years. In 1996, though, when Phillips retired from the road due to heart problems, his cardiologist told him that he needed a lighter guitar and case if he was going to do any traveling at all. So a friend located a Gibson L-00 (now known as the Robert Johnson guitar) from 1935--the year of Phillips' birth--which he now carries in a gig bag.
Physical problems have forced Phillips to make other musical adaptations as well. In the past he was a fingerpicker--he learned the style from Etta Baker herself--but focal dystonia and other hand problems have forced him to develop a new style of playing, using the nail of his index finger in a sort of frailing style.
He strings his Gibson with a light-gauge set and uses some tricks to make them last. Boiling old strings in water with "a little carbon tetrachloride" or vinegar takes the finger oil off of them, he says. Another technique came from Doc Watson, whom Phillips met when he was hitch-hiking through North Carolina in the days before Watson was traveling. "He showed me how he put the [old] wrapped strings with one end--the peghead end--in a vice, and then took a pair of pliers to the ball end and twisted it until he got the wraps on the strings tighter. And then the string would go right up again. So I tend to do that." Boil up some old strings and give 'em the vice treatment, he says, "and you've got a new set of strings."
On stage, Phillips uses microphones for his guitar and voice. Pickup systems, he feels, are "the great levelers," making cheap guitars and great guitars sound the same. "And as for the effects box," he says, "how that fits into acoustic music sort of eludes me. To me, acoustic music is [something] you could play on a flat rock overlooking a river." He also finds that stage monitors intrude on his work as a performer. "I'm a storyteller, and I have to know how the audience is responding," he says. "This is why I have the house lights up. If I have a monitor, it's like having a radio sitting in front of me, and I lose track of what the audience is doing."
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
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