Equipment Picks from Sara K., Slaid Cleaves, Kelly Joe Phelps, and Mike Marshall
plays a four-string, classical cutaway guitar custom-made by Pimentel and Sons (3316 Lafayette N.E., Albuquerque, NM 87107; [505] 884-1669). The top and bottom strings are La Bella basses, and the middle ones are Savarez high-tension nylon- wound strings. She uses a Fishman saddle pickup and sometimes a Fishman preamp, as well as a Shure SM-58 vocal mic. She doesn't use flatpicks or fingerpicks, she says, just "the ends of my feengers."
--Steve Givens
plays a 1965 Gibson J-50 that is on permanent loan from his father. "My dad bought it new for $140," Cleaves says. "He still has the receipt. I kind of stole it from him about eight years ago."
Cleaves uses an Audio-Technica 831--a lavalier-type acoustic instrument mic--in combination with a Thinline-style pickup in the bridge. "They sound great together," he says, "but it's a pain having two cords hanging out of the back of my guitar."
He describes the Gibson's "custom" intonation adjustment. "After taking it to three luthiers for intonation work, with no improvement, I started hacking at it myself." The result was "this Frankenstein nut that's ugly but gets the job done."
Free sets of Elixir strings have kept Cleaves wired most of the year. His most recent purchases are D'Addarios. "Currently I'm trying D'Addario Bluegrass, which I like," he says. He uses no effects and has no preference in vocal mics other than that "the one at the gig doesn't smell too bad."
--David W. Johnson
slide guitar is an early '60s Gibson FJN (Folk Jumbo Natural). "It's got a wider-than-normal fingerboard, and it's turned out to be a great lap-style guitar," says Phelps. "I ran across an old George Gruhn column about this guitar, and, evidently, Gibson was looking for a guitar that you could use nylon or steel strings on and this is what they came up with," he says. The guitar has been modified with a raised saddle and a raised nut that is level across the top.
Most of Phelps' regular guitar playing is done on a new Gibson J-60. "I'm not using picks or fingernails, so it helps to have a guitar with some volume and projection, which this seems to have," he says. On "That's Alright" from Roll Away the Stone, he used a little Yamaha FG-170 that he purchased at a pawnshop for $125. He also used a 12-string Takamine G-335 set up for lap-style slide.
Phelps had another 12-string that met with a sad end some time ago. "Somebody I respected mentioned that he felt like my stuff all sounded the same and that I should get a 12-string to mix things up a bit. So I took his word and started working with one. It really messed me up because it somehow consumed me and all of a sudden my focus was going in two different directions. It didn't feel right, but I just couldn't get it out of my mind. It tripped me up so bad that I thought that the damn guitar was possessed. I thought, 'I can't even give it away, 'cause it's going to screw somebody else up,' so I laid it on the floor in the basement and just jumped up and down on it. It was a totally crazy thing to do, but it was good as a reminder for me to stay focused. And now here I am playing 12-string again, but it's different now, 'cause I wasn't ready for it then," he says.
Phelps strings his regular and slide guitars with Martin medium-gauge strings with the first and second strings replaced with a .017 and a .020, respectively. "It seemed that I had to go that heavy to get the melody to balance with the bass notes," he explains.
"For a capo [on the lap guitar], I use a piece of ebony radiused for the fingerboard with a groove for the fret and a groove on the top for a quarter-inch drill rod that the strings rest on. I then put a $2 strap capo over the top to hold the strings tightly against it. Some of the regular square-neck Dobro capos that I've tried require a flat fingerboard, which my guitar doesn't have," he says.
His guitars are amplified with Fishman Matrix pickups, and he prefers to use a mic as well. His main slide is a standard Stevens bar, but he's been experimenting with a Shubb SP3. His CD Roll Away the Stone was recorded direct to ADAT in his apartment living room using a Neumann KM-184 microphone on the guitar and an AKG 414 for his voice.
--Dylan Schorer
Mike Marshall|
embarked on his Christmas album project with the idea of using a different guitar for each track for sonic variety. But, he says, after auditioning ax after ax with growing disappointment, "Anytime I'd pick up my Martin--any Martin--I would just feel like it was going to be a musical experience." So he wound up recording the whole album with his trusty 1966 D-28, which Tony Rice picked out for him back in their David Grisman band days. "He went down the line of all these Martins and played the D and G strings on each one, without even taking them off the rack," Marshall recalls. "He just pulled that one off and said, 'This is a great guitar.' And boy, was he right. I've just gotten so much mileage out of it in so many different settings. As a straight-up bluegrass guitar, it's really great, but I've used it in all these poppy-sounding rhythm sections with bass and drums and piano where they want a brighter sound, and it's just blended so great. And then to walk it through all this solo guitar stuff, with all these low bass notes. . . ."
Marshall himself reshaped the neck on that guitar. "In the '60s they had those big, clubby necks. I just took a block of wood and attached sandpaper to it, and took it down to something closer to the '30s-style V. And I like not having finish on it. I got some of the original Martin color from a guitar repairman, so it is colored the same, but it is really nice not to have the stickiness of the glossy finish." He strings his Martin with D'Addario EJ16 lights.
His current amplification rig combines a Baggs saddle pickup with a Crown microphone capsule that attaches to the top and sits inside the soundhole, pointing down. The pickup and mic signals go to a stereo jack and then into a Pendulum preamp, which has three bands of parametric, fully sweepable EQ on both pickup and mic. "I think the key is that the electronics inside this unit are really Class A," he says. "It's like buying two channels of a really good mixer." For a little extra sound-shaping flexibility, he adds an Alesis unit with a 31-band EQ on each channel. Depending on the situation, he gives the sound engineer separate pickup and mic signals or blends them.
Marshall recorded Midnight Clear in his ADAT studio (see his home-recording feature "Bringing It All Back Home," March '96) using a pair of tube microphones handmade in Sweden by Didrik de Greer.
--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
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