NASH’S CACHE

Graham’s tech, John Gonzales, shows us his quiver of touring guitars

“We’re travelling light on this, just the four acoustics here,” explains tech John Gonzales as he guides us to the rack of instruments he tends for the CSN legend. “We’ve got Graham’s Martin signature edition 000, which is the main guitar. It sees most of the work, generally in standard tuning. The Gibson J-50 here, this is from circa 2000 or something like that; it’s relatively new. It’s a little more beefy, little more lower-end, so we use it on some of the more driving rock tunes and things like that. Then we’ve got the O25 Jumbo Lowden here, which we use for some fingerpicking things. It’s got a cedar top and stuff like that. So, that’s set up for fingerpicking and lighter stuff. Then there’s the S-35, which is the Lowden parlour guitar, and that is generally going to open tuning, right now: it is all Es except for the B and E, modal. We use that just for some open tuning stuff, and it gets aired on three or four songs, I guess.

“Pickup wise, we’ve got Fishman Matrixes in both the Martin and the Gibson. Those two guitars also run through a Grace preamp. So, these each have a channel on the Grace, and we tweak them and boost the low-end on the Gibson a little bit with that. Both of the Lowdens have the LR Baggs pickups that were installed in the factory and it suits those guitars really well. They sound great. Then everything runs through Shure Wireless stuff – the two Lowden guitars also run through a Jim Demeter tube preamp. It warms them up a little bit. We’ve been using those for years.”