The Extreme virtuoso weighs in on why, when it comes to tone, your personality always comes first
How much does the gear you use inform the music you make?
I’ll be backstage playing through this small Blackstar amp in the dressing room. And it sounds so good the sound guy will walk in and say, ‘Can we just mic that fucking thing up?!’ And then Steve Vai might come in and it will instantly turn into his sound. We know amps and guitars are important, but your own DNA is bigger than that. You end up realising that amps and pedals aren’t there to elevate our playing, they’re there to get out of the way of our playing. We all know what we sound like in our heads. That’s what you want to come out of the speakers.
So gear can be a hindrance, in certain situations?
Yeah! Sometimes your tone can get in the way of what you’re trying to say. You hear Eddie Van Halen on the first four or five albums and then you hear inklings of other effects and stereo splits on the later records, and it became something different. For me, it was all about raw Eddie, because he was just plugged in, with nothing else getting in the way. When you start processing things it can get lost a bit. If I use a delay or phaser, it has to colour what I’m doing rather than change what I’m doing. It’s got to be a nuance effect.
But you use certain amps for a reason, right?
The amp you play through matters a bit but not hugely. For me right now, I happen to have a Marshall DSL in the studio that I like. But in a way, I’m not using DSLs, I’m just using one I like… there are a lot that I didn’t like. It was the same with [third Extreme album] III Sides To Every Story – when I found the right Soldano head to interpret what my fingers were doing in 1993. Whenever I’m making music, I want something that doesn’t get in the way of my DNA. I like hearing my personality come through. Even Zakk Wylde, when he’s putting on the craziest effects and that crazy vibrato that sounds like two fretboard’s worth, he still cuts through. It’s all about making the gear work for you!
You’ve always loved your Rat pedal, which is quite untypical for more technically ambitious shredder-type guitarists…
Yeah, I always love going straight in except for that Rat pedal I have. It’s supposed to be a distortion pedal but the distortion is all the way off. I find it just tightens my bottom end. I don’t know one amp, from Marshall to Mesa/Boogie and everybody else, that has the enough chunkiness to it without this pedal. Sure you
