Guitars | Amps | FX
Guitars
Fender
Below you see the three guitars I play most:
- A Fender '99 standard USA Stratocaster, totaly stock.
- A Fender'91 USA telecaster with a noiseless Dimarzio Area T pickup in the neck and an Seymour Duncan Lil '59 in the bridge.
- A Fender '97 Lonestar Stratocaster with a Dimarzio Area 61 in the neck position, an Area 67 in the middle and a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates humbucker in the bridge.
For those who are interested in pick-ups. I did a youtube movie comparing several of them. It has around 25.000 viewers, so it must be interesting for some...
For 'classic rock' sounds I also use a Fenix Les Paul copy with a Dimarzio DP103 PAF in the neck and a Super Distortion in the bridge position. Fenix guitars were made in the end of the 80ties and nineties by the famous Korean Instrument builder Young Chang. This factory was well-known for the Squier copies they made for Fender. Besides that they also produced their own high quality copies of Fender, Gibson and PRS. This is a very fine guitar!
Furthermore, for the real Fender twang I use an original 2006 Telecaster (60th Anniversary edition). Finally, my bass is an old Yamaha 1000S. A bass that I own since the 80ties. See the pictures below.
Amps
I have done my share lugging around heavy (tube) amps. Furthermore tube amps can be sensitive things, and mine (maybe because of me) suffered from all kinds of reliability issues from time to time. So regular maintenance was needed. Corroded tube feet, for example, if an amplifier was left in the rehearsal room for some time. I understand that maintenance is occasionally necessary, but a whole rehearsal with a creaking amplifier behind you is very annoying and spoils the fun! I know, there are tube amplifiers that do not have these kinds of issues, it is my personal experience with a limited number of amps.
Nowadays I keep it simple. My main amp is an Award Session Blues baby 22 transistor amp, loaded with an Eminence Lil Texas speaker with a Neodymium magnet. It sounds amazing and is very loud and lightweight. The whole package is below 10 kg!
... and of course there is the famous indestructable 'Red stripe' Peavey Bandit! A great workhorse amp. I have several of them in rehearsal rooms and around the house. The only thing I have done to make them even better is change the speaker for a Eminence Texas Heat or Red White and Blues speaker.
And, almost forgot, this Yamaha THR5 is hidden somewhere in the living room. A very nice little amp with a lot of sounds. Particularly well suited for low volume practise.
Pedals
I don't use any guitar effects during recording, but add them at a subsequent stage with plug-ins, so they are not imprinted and I can change them later on without having to redo a track.
But I'm a guitar player and guitar players have pedal boards. I have loads of stompboxes, but at the moment I'm using this simple board with a tuner, a Chicago Stompworks pedal with on the right a TS808 clone and on the left a Proco Rat clone (great pedal!), a TC electronic mini Shaker and TC electronic Flashback mini delay.
