Guitars The Stars Play

If you think buying the guitar your favourite artist plays will mean you can play like them, you’re sorely mistaken. I’ve been at this long enough to know that the magic is in the fingers, not the wood. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get a little closer to greatness. Knowing what your heroes played, and why they played it, tells you something about tone, about feel, and about what certain guitars are built to do for fingerpicking and fingerstyle guitarists.

Nick Drake

As I mention elsewhere on the site, Nick Drake is the reason I started picking. His touch, his tone, his melody. He’s the only player I’ve ever truly wanted to play like.

The guitar on the cover of ‘Bryter Layter’ is a Guild M-20, small-bodied, all mahogany. It became the guitar everybody associated with Drake. It wasn’t his. It belonged to the photographer. What Drake actually played, for most of his recording career, was a Martin D-28, though his early recordings used a Guild F-20 and later a Martin 000-28, which he bought not long before he died and used on his final sessions, including ‘Black Eyed Dog’.

The 000-28 has rosewood back and sides and a spruce top. Medium-bodied, warm and even across the strings, which suits the kind of open-tuning, fingerpicked playing Drake specialised in.

What to buy: Martin 000-15M is an all-mahogany option at a more accessible price. For the rosewood and spruce combination, the Martin 000-28 is the real thing, though the price reflects it.

Bert Jansch

Jansch was Scottish, which gives me an extra reason to admire him. He came up in Edinburgh in the early sixties playing borrowed guitars in folk clubs, learning from whoever he could, absorbing blues and folk and jazz and turning it into something that sounded entirely like himself.

His 1965 debut was recorded on guitars he didn’t own. Martin Carthy lent him a Martin 000-28 for the sessions. Jimmy Page, who was listening carefully, once said it was so far ahead of what everyone else was doing that nobody in America could touch it.

Later in his career Jansch settled on a Yamaha LL11, a large-bodied jumbo with a big neck that he liked for the way it sat in his hands. Before that he played Fylde guitars, built by Roger Bucknall in Lancashire, and before that a John Bailey acoustic used on the Pentangle recordings, which was eventually stolen.

What to buy: The Yamaha LL series is still in production. The Yamaha LL6 is a solid-top jumbo at a fair price and a good place to start for anyone drawn to that big-bodied feel.

Joni Mitchell

Picking is not just for men. That should be obvious, but in the years I was coming up it wasn’t always treated that way. Joni Mitchell was playing circles around most of her contemporaries, male or female, and she was doing it on an acoustic guitar with her own tunings, her own chord shapes, and her own rules.

Her main guitar throughout her early career was a 1956 Martin D-28 she bought from a Marine captain who’d had it with him in Vietnam. His tent was hit by shrapnel. The guitar survived. She played it on ‘Blue’, on ‘Ladies of the Canyon’, on most of the records that established her.

It was stolen from a luggage carousel around 1970 and she spent the next twenty years saying she never found an acoustic that compared.

What to buy: The Martin D-28 is the real thing, priced accordingly. For a more accessible dreadnought with a similar spruce and rosewood specification, the Yamaha FG800 is a solid and honest workhorse.

Paul Simon

My dad was a Paul Simon man. Long car journeys in a Ford Cortina estate when I was a kid, cassettes playing, watching him tap the steering wheel. I came to Simon properly later, when I started picking, and understood then what my dad had been hearing.

Simon has played a variety of guitars across his career, but the one most associated with his sound is the Martin D-28. He used one through the Simon and Garfunkel years, and the fingerpicking on records like ‘The Sound of Silence’ and ‘The Boxer’ is as good a lesson in right-hand technique as you’ll find anywhere.

He later moved to a Martin 000-28EC, a model developed with his input. Smaller body, a bit more focused in tone. It suits the intricacy of his later solo work.

What to buy: For the Simon dreadnought sound, the Martin D-28 is the reference. For something closer to the 000-28EC feel, the Martin 000-15M gives you the smaller body and a warm, unfussy tone.

James Taylor

James Taylor gets some stick for being too polished, too comfortable, too Radio 2. I understand that reaction. I don’t agree with it.

His fingerpicking style, the alternating bass and the way he moves through chord changes, is technically demanding and rhythmically precise. He makes it sound effortless, which is probably the source of the problem. People assume if it doesn’t sound difficult, it isn’t.

The guitar he’s played almost exclusively since 1989 is an Olson SJ, built by Minnesota luthier Jim Olson. Cedar top, rosewood back and sides, ebony fingerboard. Olson builds around forty guitars a year and has a long waiting list. These are not mass-market instruments.

What to buy: An Olson is not a realistic recommendation. But the qualities Taylor values, cedar top, rosewood back and sides, warm midrange response, are available elsewhere. The Seagull S6 Cedar is a solid cedar-top dreadnought worth hearing.

Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith is possibly my favourite of all of these. He died in 2003 at thirty-four, and mental health took him from us before he was finished.

His acoustic playing was deceptively intricate. Multi-tracked vocals, open tunings, a technique built more around feel than flash. He played a Yamaha FG-180, a budget Japanese dreadnought from the 1970s, with a soundhole pickup fitted inside it. That’s what you hear on the early records. Later he played a Gibson J-45.

He had his own way about things. He tuned a step down, often used a capo, and layered tracks in a way that made a single acoustic feel like a whole room.

What to buy: The Gibson J-45 is the reference for that warm, slightly compressed acoustic tone. For a more accessible entry point, the Epiphone J-45 EC Studio is worth a look.

Let me finish with a story, possibly an urban myth, but the point stands. A recording studio spent weeks trying to make their piano sound like Elton John. They tried every combination of mic placement, room treatment, and tuning they could think of. Nothing worked. Then one day Elton visited. When he sat down and played, it sounded exactly like Elton John.

Only Elton can sound like Elton. Only you can sound like you. Find the guitar that helps you do that.