Q & A WITH BEN HARPER

Guitar Player Magazine: The Musical diversity of your youth still seems to drive you creatively...For instance, your feedback-laced, Weissenborn-through-Marshall riffs have given way to an even heavier distortion.

Ben Harper: You're hearing my Asher guitar. On the previous record, Will to Live, I think I pushed an acoustic lap guitar as loud as it could go with the crunch stuff on "Faded" and "Will to Live." Those old Weissenborns are only held together with hide glue, and I could feel them vibrating in a dangerous way..... So I went to [luthier] Billy Asher and said, "How can we translate acoustic lap guitar into something that's a cross between a Weissenborn and a Les Paul? He came up with the instrument I played on Burn to Shine. It's built of Honduras mahogany--like and old Les Paul--but it's a neck-through-body design. The wings are honeycombed with nine hollow chambers and covered with a koa top. Billy also hollows out the neck and fills it with graphite. He built several prototypes--with and without the graphite--but somehow the graphite connects the resonance to the rest of the body, so we settled on that. The Asher also has a brass saddle, which seems to enhance sustain.

I was excited when Billy built this guitar--it gets such a mad tone. Finally I could get solid body volume and sustain, control feedback, and still have some hollow resonance that filters up through the pickups instead of through the open hole.

GP: The Asher sounds very different from a traditional lap steel, and it obviously led you down a new sonic road.

BH: One reason the Asher sounds different is because it has a full, 25" scale length--like the Weissenborn. Typical lap steels have a 22.75" scale.

GP: What other guitars and amps did you use on Burn to Shine?

BH: All the crunch slide is the Asher.....

-- Guitar Player Magazine Dec. '99