| Riptide Home Page | Nigel's Gear
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My main two guitars are; A 1991 USA Gibson Explorer in tobacco sunburst/black scratchplate. This thing is a beast and I love it! I’d always loved the shape since I was a nipper, and when I saw it in John Boots Music, Hythe... I drooled! It was second-hand, the previous owner couldn’t get on with it; I was amazed when the shop guy agreed to knock £60.00 off the listed £490.00... bargain! Whoo-hoo! This was handy as £430.00 was all the cash I had in the world at the time... he then went out to the rear of the shop and came back with a pink fur lined case the size of a small bungalow, all in the price... Cool! Another guitar that I'm using on a regular basis is my Jackson Dinky in satin black, which is fitted with Seymour Duncan pick-ups in a h-s-s (bridge to neck) typical super-strat configuration. |
It's a great guitar and with the humbuckers and single coils quite versatile, I can play a whole set of quite varied material with the one guitar and of course its got the Floyd-Rose whammy on it which I'm quite fond of fannying around with! A further foray on Ebay lead to the purchase of a Fender Telecaster, a '72 Custom model, all black with a maple neck and a wide ranging humbucker at the neck position. |
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As you would expect it's a pretty twangy sounding guitar, really nice though, the single coil bridge pick-up has got a lot of bite, while the neck humbucker has a kind of jazzy honk! It's instant Keef if you set the amp right! I changed the humbucker pots to 500k which really opened up the sound. It also has a very solid feel to it, quite different to the Strat... as Swiss Tony would have said, playing a Strat is like making love to a beautiful woman, playing the Tele is like driving a small tank! |
I also have a 1996 USA Fender 'Highway' Stratocaster, in translucent blue with a maple neck. It plays really well and all the usual Strat tones and sounds are in there. I have changed the bridge pick-up to a Seymour Duncan ssl -3 which is slightly hotter than the standard one, but still balances okay with the remaining two pick-ups. My main ‘spare’ is the ’91 Washburn N2, which is a good all rounder without being outstanding at any one thing. Very good recording guitar though, and it has the Floyd Rose trem for those episodes of crazy whammy madness. My last electric is a Vox Standard 25 of mid/late seventies vintage, which originally was a Japanese ‘strat’ type copy. I say originally as I took mine for a trip to see Mr Bandsaw and changed the shape (I never liked its big fat arse, so I cut it off!), ditched the crappy trem and fitted a hardtail bridge, and then sprayed it in black Hammerite! |
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With its alloy scratchplate it actually looks quite cool and original. I used it almost exclusively in Lemonwedge, and quite a bit in Tash, but with the acquisition of the Strat it’s now taken a bit of a back seat. I also have a nice Takamine electro-acoustic that I used an awful lot in Lemonwedge, but which has barely seen the light of day with Riptide... what does that tell you about the setlist! Lastly I have an Aria IGB60 bass, which I use solely for noodling and recording. During summer 2009 I changed amps, I'd been using a Marshall VS265 2 x 12 combo for the previous 12 years (through the Lemonwedge days and RIPTIDE) and while it was a good workhorse of an amp and reasonably versatile, I'd kinda got to the stage where it was time for a change the footswitch going on the blink was the final straw that made me decide to look for something else. |
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On the floor I’ve got a bunch of stomp boxes... l to r Marshall VibraTrem VT-1 tremolo, Boss PH3 Phaser, Boss DD3 Digital Delay, Ibanez TS10 Tubescreamer, Boss CS3 Compressor/sustainer and a Carl Martin ‘Hydra-Boost’.
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I also have a Dunlop Cry-Baby but tend to leave the wahing stuff to Pete. Finally I sing into a Shure SM58 microphone. And that’s it!!! Nigel Leppard AKA ‘The Cosmic Lawnmower’ |