Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
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(Created page with ''''circa 1999''' '''From ''Acoustic Guitar'' Magazine, April 1999, No. 76:''' "Gillian Welch’s main guitar is a ca. 1956 Gibson J-50 with a factory-installed adjustable bridge…')
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Revision as of 19:52, 9 June 2011
circa 1999
From Acoustic Guitar Magazine, April 1999, No. 76: "Gillian Welch’s main guitar is a ca. 1956 Gibson J-50 with a factory-installed adjustable bridge. "It’s pretty much just like a J-45," she says. "It’s blond, and it’s got a big ugly pickguard on it." A couple of years ago, she picked up a five-string Vega Senator banjo, which she’s specially modified "with a little bit of bubble wrap shoved under the head."
David Rawlings gets his signature, midrangey guitar sound from a 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop with a carved top and plywood mahogany back and sides. He likens its sound to that of a resophonic guitar. "I bought it without a bridge," he says, "and had a one-piece mahogany bridge made for it. I think with a top this small it really behooves you to get as much stuff touching the top as you can, because the top doesn’t have that much flex to it." He says his guitar is unique in that every note on every string plays at the same volume. "It doesn’t have any dead spots or any high spots—which is very, very strange," he says. "It makes it fun to play lead, because you don’t have to worry where you’re at. It’s not much of a solo instrument, but I can’t really play by myself worth a darn, so it doesn’t make much of a difference."
Welch and Rawlings switched their stage amplification rig in 1996 from pickups and DIs to external microphones. Rawlings explains that the change has made setting up for shows easier, although they do need to be a bit more hands-on during setup than they used to be. "We carry Shure SM-58s and SM-57s," Welch says. "Fancy microphones can be very difficult. The one thing that’s nice about the Shures is that their quality control is low enough that they are all different. They’re like snowflakes. If we carry a complement of eight microphones, we can go into a hall and find the right one for the room and the system. We play the microphone game; we swap them out." "And it’s easy to control volume by changing the proximity to the mics," Rawlings adds."
