Maverick City Music you ' re playing an Olsen acoustic guitar . Are you the proud owner of an Olsen now ?
[ Crowder ] Here it goes … my wife is getting props . That was actually a birthday gift from her fifteen years ago .
[ WM ] Wow .
[ Crowder ] So I ' ve had that guitar for a really long time . When I started playing acoustic , I was super into alternate tuning . Wilcox and Michael Hedges . Just like really folky … I didn ' t know what standard tuning was for at least a year .
[ WM ] Jeepers , I ' m impressed .
[ Crowder ] You just tune it to whatever you want and play along ! Olson was a very popular guitar for the singer-songwriter types and I ' ve loved it . It ' s like a grand piano . It ' s very a clear , pristine , finger-picking type guitar . It ' s beautiful .
[ WM ] Now , you ' ve got James Taylor , Phil Keaggy , Brian Doerksen , Doyle Dykes … all kinds of people that are playing James Olson guitars .
[ Crowder ] Totally . Well , when I got that one , I was also using the Pendulum for a preamp ( they had the mic inside ). I had a rocking folk guitar set up . It was really wonderful .
[ WM ] I was excited to see you on the cover of Mix Magazine . You had a chance to talk about your home studio . First question . Tell us about the role your wife played in this ? Boy , she ' s been all over this interview .
[ Crowder ] I think you ' re talking to the wrong person , right ? You should have done the interview with Toni . ( laughing ) So one of us is really great at their job .
She does design like interior architectural interior design . The best way I can describe it is she doesn ' t want to pick out your pillows .
She wants to tell you where the walls go , the environmental space , what it is and how it functions .
This house was an old Shotgun style and in 1989 , a guy who was the leading rusher of the Atlanta Falcons at the time , Gerald Riggs owned this house . The way I describe it is it looks like if Scarface and Miami Vice had a house baby .
It has a perfectly late 80 ’ s vibe and a lot of glass block , a lot of pink marble . Back when we were about to make an offer on this fixer-upper she ' s like , “ It ’ s got great bones ”. You know that phrase “ need to replace the surfaces ?” I didn ' t understand that she meant literally all of the surfaces . So , it went down to just the studs man . And the last room to get worked on was the studio space . I ' m good buds with Jacob Morris who goes by Biz , he ' s an engineer over at Reach Studios . Biz runs all the Reach Studios stuff and is a great mix engineer . And so I hollered at him , “ Hey man , want to do