Inside the band’s East Nashville studio, we zoom in on the multi-instrumentalist’s string-driven things.
Mike Harris says he “Forrest Gump-ed” his way into the Grammy-winning Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show when he was drafted to join in January 2021. But rather than picking his spot in the group from life’s box of chocolates, Harris’ initial connection was his friendship with drummer Jerry Pentecost. He quickly proved himself an important member of the Nashville-based outfit of “Wagon Wheel” fame, thanks to his flexible guitar, mandolin, banjo, resonator, and vocal abilities.
Harris invited PG to Old Crow Medicine Show’s East Nashville studio, where they recorded their latest album, Paint This Town, for some show-and-tell about his favorite traveling and recording instruments.
Brought to you by D’Addario XS Strings.
Tale-Telling Tele
Mike Harris’ main electric instrument in Old Crow Medicine Show is his well-loved 1968 Fender Telecaster with a maple-cap fretboard. The guitar has had a few changes over the past 54 years—the biggest is its Lollar neck pickup—but is mostly stock.
From Fessler’s Lane
Famed Fender luthier Greg Fessler, who’s made guitars for Robben Ford and many others, created this Custom Shop ’62 Tele in 2017. The speed dials and saddles are by notable vintage-style parts maker (and builder) Glendale Guitars of Arlington, Texas.
Gift Jag
This stripped 1964 Fender Jaguar was a gift from Chris Stapleton. The tuners and bridge have been upgraded, which is common for pro-player Jags.
Harris’ Martin
For a guitarist in Old Crow Medicine show, a classic Martin seems like a requirement. Harris’ 1960 D-28 features a Brazilian rosewood back and sides. The headstock has been repaired and a bridge plate saver installed.
Mondo Mando
This Collings MF Mandolin features an Adirondack spruce top and an Eastern flamed maple back and sides. It has a V-shaped neck and wide string spacing, for easy finger placement. Harris has a Fishman pickup installed.
Barking Banjo
Amplifying a banjo can be tricky, so Harris has a microphone installed behind the head of this Deering Sierra model.
A “Handy” Les Paul
This 2012 Gibson R7 Les Paul has a mahogany top, Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates pickups, and a Bigsby BP-15 palm-pedal tailpiece installed with a Vibramate V5 bridge plate. The R, by the way, stands for reissue, and the 7 designates 1957 as the year of origin for the guitar that inspired this goldtop.
Here’s Pearly!
The Rev. William F. Gibbons’ very own monster ’59, dubbed Pearly Gates, is the inspiration for this Gibson reissue. Of course, it also sports a pair of Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates Pickups. Only 350 of these came out of the Gibson Custom Shop in 2009.
Meteor Shower
This mid-1960s Harmony Meteor actually belongs to Harris’ great uncle, Howard. True to its birth-era, the guitar stays strung with flatwounds. It also possesses its original D’Armond-made gold-foil pickups, which were introduced with this model back in the day.
I’ll Have a PBR
This Gold Tone PBR Paul Beard Signature-Series Roundneck Resonator with a cutaway gets carried to the PA via a Fishman Nashville Series spider-style resonator pickup. Harris always plays the guitar through a Fishman Jerry Douglas Signature Aura Acoustic Imaging pedal.
Reso-Whammy
And now for something unusual: Harris has his PBR resonator tricked out with a Bigsby BP-12 palm pedal tailpiece.
Stompin’ Rompin’
Harris’ pedalboard starts with a XTS custom pedalboard interface and routes to a Fancy Boy Klon clone, an Origin Effects Cali76 Compact compressor, a Walrus Audio 385 overdrive, a Demonfx King of Drive, a Shnobel Tone-modded Ernie Ball VP Jr. with a built-in TC Electronic PolyTune, a EHX Micro POG, an MXR Phase 95, a Moog MF Delay, and a Strymon Flint Tremolo & Reverb. All are powered by a Truetone 1Spot CS 12 and wired with Mogami cable with SP500 plugs. The board also houses a Magnatone reverb/tremolo controller.
Other elements of Harris’ gear include D’Addario American Stage Cables, BlueChip thumb picks, ProPik fingerpicks, Fender medium triangle plectrums, Dunlop .88 mm Flow picks, and Clayton thin triangles. He uses Dunlop slides: a 224 Heavy Wall Brass for resonator and a Derek Trucks signature for electric.
Sonic Vista
In the studio, Harris uses a lot of amps. On tour, however, he carries two, including this Magnatone Panoramic Stereo 2x10 combo. These come with Jensens, but Harris replaced those with a pair of Eminence Legends.
No. 2 for the Road
His other touring amp is a Fender Chris Stapleton Signature ’62 Princeton with an Eminence George Alessandro GA-64 12" speaker.
Wall of Sound
Here’s a look at the studio amps he keeps on tap—mostly classic-style Fenders with a little assist from a Silvertone and that Magnatone.
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AI, which generated this image in seconds, can obviously do amazing things. But can it actually replace human creativity?
Technology has always disrupted the music biz, but we’ve never seen anything like this.
AI has me deeply thinking: Is guitar (or any instrument) still valid? Are musicians still valid? I don’t think the answer is as obvious as I’d like it to be.
As a professional musician, I’ve spent the vast majority of my days immersed in the tones of tube amps, the resistance of steel strings under my fingers, and the endless pursuit of musical expression. Each day, I strive to tap into the Source, channel something new into the world (however small), and share it. Yet, lately, a new presence has entered the room—artificial intelligence. It is an interloper unlike any I’ve ever encountered. If you’re thinking that AI is something off in the “not-too-distant future,” you’re exponentially wrong. So, this month I’m going to ask that we sit and meditate on this technology, and hopefully gain some insight into how we are just beginning to use it.
AI: Friend or Foe?
In the last 12 months, I’ve heard quite a bit of AI-generated music. Algorithms can now “compose,” “perform” (with vocals of your choosing), and “produce” entire songs in minutes, with prompts as flippant as, “Write a song about__in the style of__.” AI never misses a note and can mimic the finer details of almost any genre with unnerving precision. For those who are merely curious about music, or those easily distracted by novelty, this might seem exciting … a shortcut to creating “professional” sounding music without years of practice. But for those of us who are deeply passionate about music, it raises some profound existential questions.
When you play an instrument, you engage in something deeply human. Each musician carries their life experiences into their playing. The pain of heartbreak, the joy of new beginnings, or the struggle to find a voice in an increasingly noisy and artificial online world dominated by algorithms. Sweat, tears, and callouses develop from your efforts and repetition. Your mistakes can lead to new creative vistas and shape the evolution of your style.
Emotions shape the music we create. While an algorithm can only infer and assign a “value” to the vast variety of our experience, it is ruthlessly proficient at analyzing and recording the entire corpus of human existence, and further, cataloging every known human behavioral action and response in mere fractions of a second.
Pardon the Disruption
Technology has always disrupted the music industry. The invention of musical notation provided unprecedented access to compositions. The advent of records allowed performances of music to be captured and shared. When radio brought music into every home, there was fear that no one would buy records. Television added visual spectacle, sparking fears that it would kill live performance. MIDI revolutionized music production but raised concerns about replacing human players. The internet, paired with the MP3 format, democratized music distribution, shattered traditional revenue models, and shifted power from labels to artists. Each of these innovations was met with resistance and uncertainty, but ultimately, they expanded the ways music could be created, shared, and experienced.
Every revolution in art and technology forces us to rediscover what is uniquely human about creativity. To me, though, this is different. AI isn’t a tool that requires a significant amount of human input in order to work. It’s already analyzed the minutia of all of humanity’s greatest creations—from the most esoteric to the ubiquitous, and it is wholly capable of creating entire works of art that are as commercially competitive as anything you’ve ever heard. This will force us to recalibrate our definition of art and push us to dig deeper into our personal truths.
“In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener can’t tell the difference?”
Advantage: Humans
What if we don’t want to, though? In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener can’t tell the difference?
Of course, the answer is still emphatically “Yes!” But caveat emptor. I believe that the value of the tool depends entirely on the way in which it is used—and this one in particular is a very, very powerful tool. We all need to read the manual and handle with care.
AI cannot replicate the experience of creating music in the moment. It cannot capture the energy of a living room jam session with friends or the adrenaline of playing a less-than-perfect set in front of a crowd who cheers because they feel your passion. It cannot replace the personal journey you take each time you push through frustration to master a riff that once seemed impossible. So, my fellow musicians, I say this: Your music is valid. Your guitar is valid. What you create with your hands and heart will always stand apart from what an algorithm can generate.
Our audience, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. And that’s the subject for next month’s Dojo. Until then, namaste.
Joni Mitchell’s rich, colorful altered-tuning chord voicings have set her work apart in its own musical universe, where the rest of us guitarists either scratch our heads in wonder or have to do dissertation-level research to unpack just how she gets her sound.
Joni Mitchell’s rich, colorful altered-tuning chord voicings have set her work apart in its own musical universe, where the rest of us guitarists either scratch our heads in wonder or have to do dissertation-level research to unpack just how she gets her sound. Dawes guitarist and songwriter Taylor Goldsmith gained firsthand experience with Mitchell’s songs when he joined her on stage—just check out 2022’s “Joni Jam” from the Newport Folk Festival, which also included Brandi Carlile, Blake Mills, Jon Batiste, and others.
Goldsmith joins us on this episode of the 100 Guitarists podcast. Together, we talk about Mitchell’s chord voicings and progressions, her tunings, what it’s like to share a stage with her, and Goldsmith wonders: Was Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” a nod to the songwriter’s 1971 album?
When we wrap up our conversation, we cover a new release of energetic, forward-leaning guitar cumbia by Los Pirañas and an album of Bach Partitas for Telecaster by guitarist Noel Johnston.
This episode is sponsored by L.R. Baggs.
The Mick Ronson Cry Baby Wah, meticulously recreated from his own pedal, offers fixed-wah tones with a custom inductor for a unique sound.
The Mick Ronson Cry Baby Wah taps into the vibrant, melodic character of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most gifted songwriters. Few guitar players have been able to combine a keen musical instinct with a profound grasp of how to bring a composition together like Mick Ronson. Laden with expressive resonance, his arrangements layered deliberately chosen tones and textures to build exquisite melodies and powerful riffs. The Cry Baby Wah, set in a fixed position to serve as a filter, was key to the tone-shaping vision that Ronson used to transform the face of popular music through his work with David Bowie and many others as both an artist and a producer.
We wanted to make that incredible Cry Baby Wah sound available to all players, and legendary producer Bob Rock—a friend and collaborator of Ronson’s—was there to help. He generously loaned us Ronson’s own Cry Baby Wah pedal, an early Italian-made model whose vintage components imbue it with a truly singular sound. Ronson recorded many tracks with this pedal, and Rock would go on to use it when recording numerous other artists. With matched specs, tightened tolerances, and a custom inductor, our engineers have recreated this truly special sound.
“You place the wah, and leave it there, and that's the tone,” Rock says. “It's all over every record he ever made, and I’ve used it on every record since I got it. Dunlop’s engineers spent the time and sent me the prototypes, and we nailed that sound.”
Mick Ronson Cry Baby Wah highlights:
- Tailor-made for Ronson’s signature fixed-wah tones• Carefully spec’d from his own wah pedal
- Custom inductor replicates higher frequency response and subtler peak
- Fast initial sweep with Instant reactivity
- Distinctive EQ curve from period-accurate components
- Special finish inspired by Ronson’s monumental work
The Mick Ronson Cry Baby Wah is available now at $249.99 street from your favorite retailer.
For more information, please visit jimdunlop.com.