Electric Guitars

Fender Stratocaster

My main electric guitar is a 1998 American Standard Fender Stratocaster with a swamp ash body and a natural finish and a white pick guard.

I replaced the neck and middle pickups with Seymour Duncan Antiquity Texas Hot Pickups. These pickups are aged through some mysterious process which changes the characteristics of the magnets in order to make them sound like vintage pickups and they sound incredible. They don't distort the sound like other 'hot' pickups I've tried, but instead produce a warm thick tone. I replaced the bridge pickup with a Seymour Duncan Hot Stack Strat Pickup. I chose this single coil humbucking pickup for the bridge, because because it sounds much fatter than a standard strat bridge pickup.

I added a switch in place of the second tone control on my strat so that I could switch this bridge pickup to between single coil, (normal) serial humbucker and (higher output) parallel humbucker. I also changed the volume and tone pots to push-pull pots, so I could get series and parallel combinations of the three pickups. It also allows me to have all three pickups going at once, so I can get a wide variety of tones out of the guitar before the signal even gets to the amp and since all of these modifications are passive so I don't have to worry about batteries running out. If you're interested in doing modifications like this to your own guitar look here.

Guild Acoustic Six String

My other six-string electric guitar is a Gibson ES–340 with a natural finish which looks alot like this one except that it's missing the pickup covers. This guitar is not too dissimilar to an ES335 (B.B. King's guitar) but it has a thinner neck, which I prefer, having played strats for so long. I bought it used in NYC. The tone is really sweet and playing around with a mix of the bridge and neck pickups, you can really get it to growl. I added a switch so I could split the neck humbucking pickup so I could use just one of the coils which gives a beautiful woody strat kind of tone.

I also have a 12-string Rickenbacker (360/12) with a Fireglow finish and an R tailpiece that looks pretty much like this one. I bought it used in Boston in the mid-eighties for about $600. Plays great and has that wonderful classic 12-string rickenbacker sound.

I have a Candy Apple Red Fender Squire P-Bass that I use for bass. I replaced the pickups that came with it with a set of Seymour Duncan Vintage P-Bass pickups

Acoustic Guitars

My main acoustic guitar is a Guild D52 NT Dreadnaught. It has a great low end and plays like a dream. When I'm recording, I like to mic it with two Shure SM57s near the point where the neck meets the body and arranged in an X pattern with one pointing towards the top string and the other towards the bottom string. I run this to my recording equipment to two tracks in stereo. In addition, I like to use a third mic, a Neumann TLM 103, about six inches away from the strings and panned to the middle for a little extra air. I keep the tracks separated going into my recording equipment, so that I can line up the wave forms by hand in Protools later to avoid phase cancellation issues between the three tracks.

My other acoustic guitar is a Baby Taylor Koa which I use when I travel. I've taken it backpacking in California and canoeing in Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada. It definately has the best sound of any of the small travel guitars I've tried. Of course, the low end can't compare with my Guild, but the tone blows away the Martin Backpacker which I used to own. The shape of the body also makes it easier to hold - my old backpacker kept spinning on me when I tried to bend a string.