Q – What are those guitars that you play in your acoustic show? They sound great, is there some trick to this?

A – I played Taylor guitars exclusively for many years, but recently I’ve been trying some others – a Collings, a Santa Cruz, and most recently a new Guild. All my guitars are orchestrla model (OM) size.

The ‘secret’ of making an acoustic sound good, I think, is to keep the system as simple as possible. Microphones always sound better than DI boxes, but sometimes the stage is too loud, and feedback can be a problem. So I travel with Neumann condenser microphones for vocal and guitar and L.R. Baggs DI boxes for the guitars. The guitars themselves have simple Fishman piezo pick-ups under the bridge and no volume or tone controls (I hate plastic bits on a guitar). That’s about it. You need good cables, too.. see Gear links for more info.

Publication date: 27/04/2007