Gear Notes

I use and abuse equipment by PRS, Music Man, Fender, Ibanez, Marshall and Engl. Guitars are things of sensual beauty that yearn to be touched, caressed, played, displayed and loved. This is my current collection of beauties.

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MusicMan Luke

This is now my main guitar for live work. This guitar plays wonderfully with the active EMG pickups, silky smooth MusicMan rosewood neck and a great tremolo system.

PRS Custom 24, 20th Aniversary

This is such a beautiful piece of work; vintage natural maple flame top with a mahogany one-piece body. It plays like a dream - a masterpiece.

Ibanez RG320FM

This is also a great rock guitar with a far more solid feel than the Fender. The Floyd Rose delivers rock solid tuning stability - unlike the diabolical Fender tremolo.

USA Fender Stratocaster

This is a dependable workhorse for recording, with a silky smooth neck and punchy single-coil sound when compressed. I have replaced the bridge pick-up with a Seymour Duncan humbucker to give a little thickness to the bridge sound.

Taylor 414CE Electro-Acoustic

This guitar is truely a thing of beauty with a lovely ringing sustain and pure tone. Sounds great through a PA system and even better through a recording console. This is probably my Desert Island Discs luxury item - unless I can rig up a solar powered amp.

Stagg BC-302 Bass

A clunky old piece of Korean junk that will do me until the royalty cheques start coming in.

Studio

For backline, I use a Marshall TSL60 valve amp with 3 switchable channels through a 4 x 12 cabinet. The Marshall has an excellent speaker-emulated output from the preamp that can be used directly for recordings. For recording I mainly use an Alesis MultiMix16 16-channel firewire mixer patched into a MacPro running Logic 7. For monitoring and playback I have a pair of Mackie HR7 monitors. I also use a MIDI-controller keyboard controlling a variety of software synthesizers.