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My current main instrument is an Avalon L32 model, from the Legacy range, made in Nothern Ireland,by a small team of talented luthiers. It's a jumbo model, with rosewood back and sides, spruce top and I believe pear tree bindings. The neck is fairly shouldered, just the right side of chunky, and laminated from sycamore,mahogany and an ebony fretboard. I wanted an Irish jumbo for a long time, for a few reasons really.
They fingerpick well, despite the size of the body,the attack transient is quick, making them responsive.....yet they can handle heavy strumming/flatpicking and slap/pop percussive styles very well too. To me they are the only guitars I've yet tried that convincingly handle all the dynamic elements of solo (and I mean one man, not lead guitar) performance, particularly when you use multiple tunings and techniques, such as I do.
Mine has the ideal frequency spread for me, plenty of "fatness" in the trebles, they really sing.....and a big round bottom end that underpins the top perfectly, and mids that don't dominate the sound, which my last guitar did, and proved to fatigue my ears after a while of playing.
Now amplification can be a pain in the proverbial ass when a guitar is truly resonant,as it will resonate at the same frequency as the air around it...(and I like being loud) and the common approach is to damp the top and close the soundhole with a heavy rubber "bung"....it works,and in a way it's a good way to get a huge sound, as you can crank the bass on the amplifier and get unnatural big bottom end.
The thing is, I like the sound to be a little bit runaway, I use the feedback and air resonace to get sustain and warmth in my sound, and I also find the touch response less stiff this way. I have two output jacks in the endblock of my guitar, one is wired with a K+K pickup, which is a three headed contact pickup that sits under the bridge plate, and is very responsive to every tap,rub, movement and even some crowd noise! This is my "air and wood" sound, i.e. the sound you hear of a guitar unplugged is not just the strings, and this pickup gets all that in there. I have a mic, wired into the same jack, which I can add to the sound by plugging in a stereo lead, but rarely use it, as the K+K does all the mic like sounds I need.
The second output jack is wired to my MiSi duo, which is a rechargeable soundhole magnetic that weighs next to nothing and doesn't affect the unplugged sound,due to the aforementioned top damping, like the (awesome sounding) Sunrises I was using previously in all my gigging guitars. It also doesn't really need a D.I. impeadence matcher, as it is active,low impeadance,and pretty high output....yet carries no batteries due to it's rechargeable,capacitor based onboard preamp. This pickup purely picks up the strings, and has a warm,soft and dark sound, with less attack, that fattens out the overall sound no
end, as the K&K adds the snappy attack and icy trebles as well as the body sounds.
As of May 2011 I have started using a custom voiced Mi-Si preamp for the K&K.
Mikhail at Mi-Si made me a "simple jack" preamp, see their site for details of the simple jack, but voiced and matched to the K&K I use.....the result is a close coupled, great sounding buffer for my K&K, an active signal and still no batteries in my guitar!! This system is great, sounds fantastic and allows me to do away with any external preamp/blenders and just plug both my outputs into anything with no worries about impedance or cable length.
I set this one up with keeping the unplugged sound in mind, as I had done a radio show using my Cole Clark FL3 (see "other guitars" below) and had to play unplugged. This guitar had been set up with a heavy sunrise pickup in the soundhole, and was designed to be less resonant to start with, as this makes less feedback problems at volume. When I heard the radio show back my tone was awful.....I got the Avalon so I will never have that problem again.
I use a Dunlop trigger capo, as it is simple, and simple is a breath of fresh air after all the pickup jargon I just went through!
I string with Daddarios, uncoated,as I snap my G and D on any guitar in every show. Just my bad technique! I use the 13-56 gauge "mediums" and change them so often I do it in my sleep. I hate old strings.
Other guitars
My other guitars you see in the pics are a Cole Clark Fat Lady 3, which replaces my Takamine TNV360sc, both guitars are cutaway dreadnaughts with factory "palathetic" type undersaddle pickups, that are part of the guitar from design up,part of the bridge, and sound way superior to the usual undersaddles that are added as an afterthought to some guitars.
The Takamine was my main guitar for a long time, until it got broken as was a total loss beyond repair(a story for another time...), and it did everything I needed in a guitar. The unplugged sound was more than passable, if not up to the Avalon I now have, and plugged in the factory pickup and cooltube preamp did a fine job,although I still ran a Sunrise on another output, because I was sending that to a Fender twin-amp to get that huge electric sound. Build and finish on the Japanese made Takamines are exceptional, and they were fairly well priced when I bought mine.
When it got broken, I tried to get another one the same model and spec, but Fender had taken over the European distribution of Takamine, and the price had gone up so much that it wasn't a good deal, I couldn't afford one anymore.
So I researched a bit, and bought the Fat Lady, Cole Clark had a cool pickup system, that was getting rave reviews, and the guitars looked different from anything I'd ever seen, and they seemed tough as my buddy Derrin Nauendorf was gigging a twelve string version with his usual merciless abandon! So I bought one straight from Australia where they are made. It's OK.....not the unplugged sound of the Takamine.....the build is dodgy on mine, there are sanding marks under the laquer....lots of glue smudges inside, the inlays have alot of filler around them, and the jacksocket was loose when I got it, brand new from the factory. But it sounds very good plugged in, there is a dual input "face brace" pickup that takes sound from the back and top of the guitar, as well as an undersaddle unit that is similar to the Takmaine Palathetic I linked to further up. This has a cool crossover that takes all the bass from the undersaddle,and lets you bring in the treble from the face sensor with a slide control on the preamp on top of the guitar. I like the guitar despite it's flaws, and I use it for gigs where I won't have chance to soundcheck, as between the built in system and the Sunrise, I can pretty much know it will sound reat through a PA system.
I also have a Gibson J-185....which shamefully for the Gibson guitar co, is awful sounding, and an amazing (discontinued) Yamaha handbuilt CJX32, that is an amazing guitar, but has a neck profile too thin for my silly fat hands!
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