BRIAN BECKEN: I'm Brain Becken from the South Austin Jug Band

DENNIS LUDIKER: I'm Dennis Ludiker from the same band. I play mandolin and fiddle and a little bit of acoustic guitar.

BRIAN BECKEN: I play the same and a little bit of electric guitar as well.

DENNIS LUDIKER: If I wrote like a particular part on the fiddle that I like then maybe I'll do it, or if something Brian wrote and he knows how to do really well, he'll do it.

BRIAN BECKEN: I don't really know much about the fiddle, the actual fiddle that I play on. It came actually from Dennis's mom. She found it in like North Carolina.

DENNIS LUDIKER: Yeah. That's right.

BRIAN BECKEN: Yeah, and where'd she buy it from?

DENNIS LUDIKER: She brought it from -- She found this guy online and she was coming to see one of our shows and she went out to this shop and got this fiddle from this guy, just seeing it on the internet, she saw it in person and she fixed it up, and it ended up being a really, really nice sounding fiddle. It's about 120 years old, something like that, and no not even --

BRIAN BECKEN: I have no idea.

DENNIS LUDIKER: Yeah. It's about 120 years old. It's an old German fiddle, a Stradivarius kind of deal, and it's a really, really nice sounding fiddle. We both use the LR Baggs pickups for our fiddles, which come attached to the bridge. You just have to get your bridge cut, and those seem to work really nice.

PATRICK OGLE: Now, when you use those with the fiddle, I mean you usually use the guitar, it sounds logical that you actually you put them out through an EQ, do you do the same thing with the fiddle or not, or you just go straight?

DENNIS LUDIKER: The fiddle is pretty, you know, pretty easy to control. There's not a lot of feedback issues and not a lot of, you know, not a lot of -- [OVERLAPPING]

BRIAN BECKEN: Yeah. I mean I run mine through a -- I go through like a pedalboard that's got like a loop and a tuner and like a reverb unit, and it's also got like a Boss EQ that I just use like just to take some of the low end out when I run like fill in over like a verse, like somebody singing over, but from there I go to an ART or ART

DENNIS LUDIKER: Yeah the ART.

BRIAN BECKEN: Preamp, and that's what I run like my fiddle pre and so.

DENNIS LUDIKER: And so we run both the acoustic guitars through also.

BRIAN BECKEN: James uses a Collings. I use a Martin that he used to play in the band until he got his guitar but it's just that I don't even know the model on it. No it is.

DENNIS LUDIKER: Nah. Nah.

PATRICK OGLE: What does it look like? Is it a little one or a big one?

DENNIS LUDIKER: It's a big one with a cutaway, but it's an acoustic and it -- I don't know. It's a nice little guitar.

PATRICK OGLE: It's not a D16, is it?

DENNIS LUDIKER: No. It's a newer one. I'm not positive what it is though.

PATRICK OGLE: You know, if you look inside you just [LAUGHS]

DENNIS LUDIKER: Yeah I know. [LAUGHS]

PATRICK OGLE: [LAUGHS]

DENNIS LUDIKER: You just spend too much time playing those things.

PATRICK OGLE: Right, right. Well the Collings, you know, I'm going to go up and talk to them tomorrow, and I remember I saw one of their guitars where I usually go to place -- Curiously, the place I worked years ago there was like a music place, and they had Collings guitars. That was the first time I had seen them and I thought they were fantastic.

BRIAN BECKEN: Yeah. They're great.

DENNIS LUDIKER: They're amazing sounding guitars.

BRIAN BECKEN: They're actually like let us use a couple of other guitars on the record and they turned out really nice.

PATRICK OGLE: What is it? I mean they do -- just the aesthetic and they look great, but what is it you really like about them?

BRIAN BECKEN: They're just put together so well, and the quality of the wood is unbelievable, and whenever you go there and like just hang out with them, they always hand you these guitars to play all the time, and each one is just like -- I mean the smell alone is so good because it's brand new like I don't know. There's just something about the way they put them together, and they take such good care of them there and they shine them up real nice.

DENNIS LUDIKER: For some reason, those guitars seem to sound better brand new than any other guitar that's brand new. You know what I mean?

BRIAN BECKEN: MT1.

DENNIS LUDIKER: ...MT1, but this is my Collings with newer wood on the front then everywhere else.

BRIAN BECKEN: [LAUGHS] Funny story about that.

DENNIS LUDIKER: Funny story about that. We were heading to a gig and we're loading stuff in the back of Brian's car and I forgot to put my semi-brand-new mandolin inside the car and we rolled over it, and it just smashed. It didn't break any of this off but it just smashed the whole top, and I took in there and they fixed it for free. They were very nice and just.

PATRICK OGLE: I guess one of the things that guitar makers that are going to be the ones that produce like 100,000 or 200,000 guitars a year, you're never going to get that kind of...

DENNIS LUDIKER: No.

PATRICK OGLE: ...response. I broke my guitar but like...

BRIAN BECKEN: Oh yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah. Get a little bit [LAUGHS].

DENNIS LUDIKER: [INDISCERNIBLE]

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah right. We had a whole bunch of new....