David Morgan
Thousand Oaks CA
Sound Mixer
Question:
You’ve written about working with James Taylor and his team to perfect his iconic guitar sound in concert. You drill deep on capturing the nuances of his playing style so that it is heard clearly by thousands in a venue. It seems as though you’ve moved past the “get a good DI box and plug it in” mentality that often is associated with acoustic instruments in the sound reinforcement world and headed more upstream – working with the pickups, the preamps, other electronics, and of course, his beautiful Olson guitars. How did that come about?
Answer:
In my world, the two most difficult instruments to accurately reproduce in live performance are the acoustic piano and the acoustic guitar. Throughout the 21 years I mixed FOH for Paul Simon and the 20 years I have now been with James Taylor, I have labored to liberate piezo-electronic acoustic guitar bridge pickups from the block of wood and the saddle that lock them in place. I have used custom tube DIs, tube compressors, several different equalizers, reverbs, delays and a Sennheiser MKE 2 inside the guitar. Our current acoustic guitar rig for James is pretty simple: Baggs LB6 pickup into a Radial PZ Pre into a Fishman Aura. Using the newest Fishman image system plus several reverb, delay and harmonic enhancement algorithms, we have created “space” around the pickup output that mimics the sound of a string resonating in a wooden box. James is thrilled that we have nearly eliminated that “rubber band” sound that characterizes the raw output from a piezo acoustic guitar pickup. Many hours of trail and error went into the guitars sound as though there are no transducers involved. Many thanks to Digico, Waves, TC Electronic, Fishman, Radial, and LR Boggs for creating the exceptional tools we employ on tour with JT.
