Before I got into production music, this was kind of an academic question. I have actually only bought two guitars since starting the business. One is an acoustic resonator, the other a lap steel. I didn’t own any kind of either of these. Neither was very expensive, either-both were well under $500. But I had plenty of guitars before then; I just had no idea that I actually needed them all until I started sync music work.
So here is a list of all the distinct guitars that I have found useful and that I own.
- Acoustic guitar with wide neck (I generally record with microphone, so it doesn’t need to have a pickup/jack)
- Second acoustic guitar for Nashville tuning
- Telecaster w/Single coil pickups
- Telecaster w/Humbuckers
- Electric guitar with a wide neck (i.e., more than 11/32 at the nut) for doing complex fingerstyle stuff. I use a hollow body to pick up that ES-335 sound. This one has a tremolo bar on it, which is also super helpful, because I need that available for some effects. Note that there are different kinds of tremolos, so this creates a potential point for combinatorial expansion (Bigsby versus Fender Strat spring tremolo versus locking Floyd Rose, and so forth).
- Second electric guitar for Nashville tuning
- Lap steel
- Resonator
- Archtop with jazz strings (fantastic for tracking intense acoustic fingerstyle work without shredding your fingertips on the strings)
And this is before we get to things like alternate tunings. I would love to have two lap steel guitars. Then I could keep one in C6 tuning and one in open G or E. They have very different sounds, and there are plenty of songs where I’d love to do both, but I don’t want to have to retune it or, worse, restring it. That’s the problem with alternate tunings – some of them require different string gauges, which means you can’t just switch tunings back and forth on the same instrument.
Could I get away without the lap steel? Maybe. But playing slide on a regular electric is very different. It’s much noisier because the strings are close to the neck and the slide tends to bang on the frets and fretboard. When you are going for a production recording, that kind of noise is wicked bad, so having a cheap lap steel is a really simple way to a much faster, quieter track.
I would also like to have a Les Paul or some other shorter-scale guitar with humbuckers to get that 80s arena ballad sound. But I can duplicate that on a Fender with TV Jones pickups; it just takes more finger strength to get those bends so wide.
The larger point here is that I’m not playing in a band. I don’t have to record music that I could then play live. So I use all the tricks I can think of to get the right sound, even if it’s not something that’s conventionally playable. For example, I’ll record the verse in standard tuning on guitar and the bridge in drop D. Or take the Nashville guitar, for example.
If you haven’t heard of this technique, it’s pretty awesome. Restring a guitar with the second set of strings on a 12-string. A twelve-string has the six normal strings on, and then it has a second string that is either an octave up or in unison. When you string a normal guitar up with that second set of strings, it sounds pretty weird, trebly, and thin. But if you track the same part on that guitar and a regular guitar and then put the two on top of each other – boom! You have essentially a 12-string sound with one major difference: with a 12-string, it’s almost impossible to articulate every note because your fingers are operating on two strings at once. With two guitar tracks (regular + Nashville) articulate away, you’ll get a sound you literally can’t make on a conventional 12-string.
So what’s next? To be honest, I have enough guitars at this point, although I’ve pressed more of them into service than I ever expected. I need more studio gear than guitar gear at this point. I’d love to get a pedal steel guitar, but I don’t have the time to learn it properly. Honestly, the next thing I’m buying is either FabFilter Pro-Q 4 or a Steam Deck for making video production easier.
But don’t tell anyone I said I have enough guitars.