Gear Head

I love guitar gear. My lovely wife does not love guitar gear. The solution to this has been for most of my gear to migrate to the rehearsal space and to live there. One day the band will break up and I’ll have to haul it all home and she’ll have a cow; she may have an entire herd.

My guitars still live at home. I own nine of them that run from Gibson to Fender, humbucker to single coil, bass to acoustic. Plus three amps. I have a Fender Princeton Chorus, a 50-watt amp that I bought a dozen years ago that still sounds great, plus I have two Crate Powerblocks (150 watts apiece!) that I run through two different cabinets. I built the cabinets in my shop and loaded them with Eminence Texas Heat speakers. One of the cabs is open-backed and one is sealed and ported. The difference in the sound is slight – the sealed cab seems to be a little brighter.

My main go-to axe is a 1979 Les Paul that once belonged to Steamin’ Steve Clark from Def Leppard. I also have a Hamer Slammer that came with el-cheapo Korean Seymour Duncan knockoffs. I replaced them with a Seymour Duncan Alnico II in the neck position and a Pearly Gates in the bridge, trying to get more of a Les Paul sound without laying out the cash for the real McCoy. Sometimes I’ll play the Fender Lead II or one of the others, but in the end I always go back to the Les Paul. I like the sound, the shape of the neck and the huge resonance that comes from a thick slab of mahogany.

My original pedal board started with a ProCo Rat (a stalwart that I’ve had in my arsenal since the 80s), a Mesa Boogie V-Twin for that authentic tube sound, an old Ibanez analog delay and an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phaser (probably 30 years old). Plus I put a Zoom multi-effects box in the loop, which I use mostly for looping. Obviously I’m a fan of used gear. Very little of what I own was purchased new.

That said, for several years now I’ve watched some of my guitar friends noodle with the Line 6 POD, first with the desktop POD (the red, kidney-shaped one), and later with the various floor models.

I’d been kicking around the idea of getting a PODxt Live for several months when Crate announced that they had come out with a 150-watt solid-state amp that was the size of a wah-wah pedal (since discontinued – bummer). I was immediately sold. The clouds parted, the sun shone down, the angels sang – I saw the light. So I angled for the amp for Christmas, scraped my nickels and dimes together for the PODxt Live but still needed a cabinet. It was a no-brainer to build the cabinet. After all, I am TOOL MAN, able to fix nearly anything in a single afternoon. Plus I had a sheet of ¾ inch plywood in my shop already, just waiting for a project.

I have to say that the whole thing turned out really well. So well, in fact, that I decided to build a second cab and buy a second Powerblock because if one is good, then two is better, right? The cool thing is, if I want to sound like Brian May from Queen, all I have to do is step on the pedalboard and it’s dialed in. That classic Marshall Stack sound? No problem, another patch (which I call “Slash‿). George Harrison circa 1967? You got it. I call that one “Day Tripper.‿

But pedals and extraneous gear go only so far. At the end of the day, you have to be happy with the sound of your guitar plugged straight into the amp. If you’re not happy with the cake, no amount of icing will fix it. You and I can pick up the same guitar plugged into the same amp and it’ll sound vastly different, mostly because you are a guitar god and I am a hack. The magic is in the fingers and the soul, not in the gear. So go and buy gear ‘til your heart’s content but remember that the quest for tone is a journey, not a destination. My journey’s been a lot of fun so far.

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