EQUIPMENT

MY FAVOURITE EQUIPMENT

Get good gear even if you have to borrow money to buy it. Good gear will last you forever if you look after it. Don't modify it or screw with it. Don't get gear lust. Just learn to play quality gear properly. If you buy the best gear once you will never have to trade in to trade up and will in fact save money in the long run. At the risk of pissing off people with passion for their gear I want to mention my favourites:

Look at the type of equipment most professionals playing your type of music use and buy that. But be warned a star might be paid to play Brand X guitars and amps. (Before he was big he might have played a Strat and Marshall and now he plays Brand X and is heavily featured in Brand X advertising - you work it out.)

BASS GUITAR

Being a Bass player I will start with the bass. Avoid effects boxes, a bass player should have one sound, a good one. The more crap there is between your strings and the speakers the less impact it will have.

BASS GUITAR: Fender Jazz or Music Man Stirling bass guitar - The necks are faster and much more playable than the Precision style bass guitars. If you have some serious money the custom basses using neck thru body construction are gorgeous. Check out the work of Jeff Mallia. A Fender Jazz Bass is not just for playing jazz, you can play anything from metal to rock to funk on it.

BASS AMP: Mesa/Boogie, Trace Elliot, SWR, Eden or Ampeg are all good with JBL or EV speakers. I love the Mesa/Boogie product! I like the 4 x 10" quad box sitting on a single 15" cabinet or 2 quad boxes and driving that with heaps of power.

I like D'Addario XL round wound strings and put a little boost on my graphic equaliser at 1.2kHz.

GUITAR

I have done mixing on a P.A. systems over the years and have seen lots of guitarists with lots of gear. The best sound I have heard is: a Fender Stratocaster through a Mesa/Boogie. To my ears that combination is just so much better than anything else. (There are some boutique and custom made Strats that leave factory models for dead.)

GUITAR

Fender Stratocaster, perhaps with Seymour Duncan pickups. One of the original electric guitars and still one of the best. For your first guitar buy a Squire Strat or mid priced Ibanez and keep it as a second guitar when you buy your Fender USA Stratocaster in case you break a string at a gig.

EFFECTS

So many people ruin their sound with too many effects. The best effects come out of your fingers. A Jim Dunlop Wah Wah, chorus and an overdrive pedal will be all you need 95% of the time. Too much crap just muddies the sound. If you have one of those nasty little digital boxes throw it out or sell it to a bedroom player.

GUITAR AMP

I LOVE the sound of a Mesa Boogie F100 head through a Marshall Vintage quad box (The one with the Celestion speakers.) Unfortunately it is too big and loud for many gigs. But it just sounds SO GOOD, check it out! The Mesa Boogie F50 or Nomad combo sounds good too and might be a better choice for many venues. Anyway, if you mic it up and put it through the PA you can play the world's biggest stadiums with it.

The Mesa Boogie Triaxis preamp and one of their stereo power amps is a mind blowing combination. Put it through a quad box with Celestion Vintage 30 speakers. Sparingly add effects using the effects send loop out the back.

DRUMS

Buy a quality electronic kit! Roland V-Drums are the best. You can practice them with head phones in the middle of the night without getting killed by your family or neighbours. They sound shit loads better than acoustic kits through a PA and in most recording situations. There are many problems with putting microphones on an acoustic drum kit at a gig. You get spillage from other instruments, the PA usually does not have the compression and gates to make the kit sound good and the microphones are usually old, bashed up and rather average.

YOU WILL SOUND BETTER AT GIGS WITH AN ELECTRONIC KIT.

I was at a gig and the drum sounds were really big and punchy. They only had SM57 microphones on the kick and snare so I went and had a talk to the PA operator about how he got such a great sound. He told me he was just using the microphones on the kick and snare to trigger samples in an Alesis DM5 drum machine. The drummer didn't know but thought it sounded great...

I also know someone who works in a studio with a lot of young bands. He just uses microphones around the drum kit to trigger samples in an Alesis DM5 drum machine too. He records the drums as a MIDI file from the DM5 and quantizes the drumming in Cubase SX3 as soon as the drummer has played it. He has had so many comments about "how great my drums sound in this studio". He has never been caught with this slight of hand.

Get with the times and buy an electronic kit. You will also need some used PA speakers and an amp for practices etc.

KEYBOARDS

The main things you need is a good 76 or 88 key, weighted keyboard with piano, rhodes, organ, strings and synth sounds. Something like a Roland RD-500 fills the basic needs and has a MIDI output to control as many synthisers and samplers as you want. Just don't make it too complex at gigs - you have to be able to get on and off stage quickly. You also have to be able to set up in a dark venue - just keep it simple for gigs.

You will also need an amplifier and keyboard stand. Just make sure the amplifier is big enough to be heard over your guitarist at practices. At gigs you might trust the PA guy to give you adequate volume through the fold back speakers but I would have my own stage amp.

DON'T GET GEAR LUST

Gear means nothing if you can't play it well. Get it? If you are not taking lessons from a qualified teacher and doing real practice for at least an hour each night then you will always be an amateur.

Don't go through Fenders, Gibsons, PRS and lot of different gear chasing the golden sound. 90% of the sound comes from your fingers not the gear. Just check out what most of the pros playing your kind of music use and buy that. But keep it simple, you are not playing stadiums with 50 roadies to make sure everything is perfect.

Get professional gear and keep it forever. Get a loan and pay it off if you have to because buying quality once is cheaper than buying and trading and buying and trading etc. Get insurance and engrave everything with your name and licence number as too much stuff gets stolen. A professional quality guitar and amp can cost $8,000. Buy right, buy once. Go cheap or unconventional and you will be buying replacements. (I still have a Ibanez guitar I bought in 1976 and a MusicMan amp I bought in 1977.)

It will also be useful to have a B grade guitar and small practice amp. Something like a Squire guitar and a small Peavy amp. Or whatever your instrument is.

Fancy effects stuff up sounds more often than making a really cool sound and take your mind of the real playing. The best effects come from your own hands and playing ability. Conditions are very different between your bedroom and the gig. Effects that sound cool in the bedroom are rarely the same at the gig and often just takes definition and punch from your sound. So many guitarists you hear in venues just sound like "too many effects." Forget the effects spend the money on lessons and learn to play better. - Obviously this is directed at younger players.

DON'T FORGET TO TAKE SPARE STRINGS TO GIGS - YOU ALWAYS SEEM TO BREAK THEM AT THE WORST TIMES. The one and only time I broke a bass string was in front of 11,000 people. Fortunately I had a spare bass.