My Guitar Gear and Sound.

This bit can be really easy. It depends on how much you want to know…are you a guitar- playing geek or a non-musical punter who doesn’t know a Strat from a Les Paul?

• The bare facts….

For our gigs I pretty much stick to one guitar.

It’s called a PRS Custom 22.

I bought for one reason.. It looks so good. What do you expect? …I am a man, my brain is hardwired that way. Luckily, it also sounds good and it plays nicely.

My amp is a Mesa Boogie DC5.

I bought this from Musical Exchanges in Birmingham. It’s a 50 watt all-valve jobbie. Single 12- inch Celestion speaker. Twin channel. It is very loud for a 50 watt combo, and I’ve had it for about 10 years.

It has been 100% reliable. A very good amp, versatile, easy to set up, and also sounds good when played quietly at home.

Sometimes if we do a big gig, I also plug in an old Marshall 2x12 cab which is loaded with 1963 Celestion greenbacks..nice. It sounds better with an extra cab but I can’t get it in the back of the car (mainly because we’re also bringing the PA and Barb has got a massive bass cab)

Some more detail.

I bought my Custom 22 in Chicago from Flynn Guitars.

I was over there with a little spare time, so I snuck around the numerous music shops looking for something special.

I had an idea that I wanted a PRS, but I wasn’t sure how much they would cost and I had never actually played one.They appeal because they are a little exclusive, they look good, and on the 3 or 4 times that I had heard one, they sound really good.

Those Flynn Bros are no fools…the guitar was hung on the wall with some carefully positioned downlights illuminating the quilt amber top. It looked stunning. Handling it…they had set it up perfectly, new strings, and a very low action. It zinged acoustically and was nice and light.

They left me in peace in the far corner of the shop while I did the widdling thing through a DRZ amp… ( tip to all guitar shop owners….it’s a good idea to always plug the customer into a top quality amp….you won’t believe the number of times you get a crappy old thing with a dodgy lead and nowhere to sit..)

To be honest, I could hardly play anything, and I felt like a muppet. I loved it immediately.The rest was easy… gentle highly skillful English style haggling reduced the price by precisely nothing and it was mine.

Other guitars

Oh yes..of course I’ve got some others. We all have to have more than one. It’s called GAS. Barb has got more guitars than I have.

Fender Stratocaster
This is a very clean-sounding Strat. It has a big old neck, battered ash body with the paint wearing off and generally looks a bit knackered.

It is a great guitar but I don’t really gig it much cos I’m too lazy to bring more than one guitar to a gig.

It doesn’t really rock-out, so I couldn’t really do the gig with this guitar alone. If we were doing more mellow material this would be the one..it’s a clean machine.

Eggle Berlin

I’ve also got a 1992 Eggle, Berlin model. I bought it off Ian in Strings, Ryde. It has a 24 fret neck which is very thin, with an ebony fingerboard. The frets are exquisite, and it plays very nicely. I love the neck, and the way the dirt builds up on the ebony, and your fingers polish it. Sad I know. I swapped the original Kent Armstrong pickups for DiMarzio Alnico Pro 11’s, added an on-off switch and coil taps. Or rather I should say Nigel Hayles did that work for me.Nigel was the singer from Gas Mark 4 who also had a sideline in electrical repairs and half owned Strings music shop in Ryde. Sadly, he is no longer with us.Nigel, if you’re reading this up there….thanks mate, and we all miss you.

Effects

I’m not into stomp boxes. I used to use a Zoom 2020 multieffects unit which was OK. One night, we were gigging in the Anchor and I leaned forward to read the set list and my guitar fell off the front strap button and the headstock smashed onto the Zoom unit and punched a nice clean hole in it.(It also knocked a chunk off the headstock of my precious PRS.

I was secretly miffed but because I’m in the middle of a gig, I pretended I didn’t care. Ha Ha! Secretly I wanted to weep, and get on my knees and hunt around the stage until I found the little chunk of wood so I could glue it back on. Daft. Now I don’t care about scraping it up and down the mic stand or on the hunks of huge scaffolding around Jason’s drum kit.

The rule of gigging is that you are inevitably going to knock chunks off your guitar gradually and slowly. I view each scratch and mark as an honourable battle scar to be celebrated. After all, guitars to the gigging musician are simply the tools of our trade, and I feel strangely proud that I am not just a bedroom guitarist.)

So, all I use is a Boss TU2 tuning pedal which goes into a Morley Bad Horsie Wah, and then I’m straight into the Boogie.

The TU2 is a great bit of kit. When you stomp on it, it mutes the output so you can tune silently. The circuitry is very quick and accurate and the led’s are bright enough to be seen under bright lights or outdoors. The other great feature of these pedals is that you can use it to daisy chain your power feed to other effects units.

The Morley wah is also highly recommended. I used to have the old Jim Dunlop Crybaby, but it was always cutting out, and the on-off switch was rubbish. The Morley has an optical switch. I believe, no moving pots, and ..get this..a little red led to tell you when it’s working. Essential.

I don’t use any distortion effects, but rely on the amp.The Boogie has enough gain for the sort of material that we do.

Sometimes less is more. There is a small eq section on the lead channel which makes a tremendous difference to the sound, so I’ve gradually learnt to tweak the eq to get a variety of lead sounds during the gig. Hence we can do from Metallica to Scissor Sisters.