Why the guitar gear status quo is there to be challenged

Some pieces of gear are timeless, but players shouldn’t limit themselves to tried and tested formulas

During a recent interview with Reverb, Jack White explained why his early playing days were defined by oddball guitar gear picks, saying that swimming upstream was fundamental to his growth as an artist.

He had the peculiar 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas, a guitar with a fibreglass body, his own in the White Stripes, while it was a 1950s Kay hollow-body that he used to record one of the world’s most iconic – and Googled – guitar riffs: Seven Nation Army.

Before that, he was playing Silvertone Strat copies – budget guitars from the 1950s and ‘60s that most derided as cheap and charmless. Never once did he look towards the guitars and amps that most players do.

When it comes to gear, there are plenty of commonplace picks. Be it a Gibson Les Paul paired with a Marshall stack, or, in modern metal circles, an extended-range Strandberg through a Quad Cortex, lots of gear is synonymous with genres and players.

White, however, avoided guitars with pre-existing connotations, partly out of a feeling of inferiority, and partly through a desire to do things differently: to carve out his own path.

“In my late teens, I decidedly hated anything to do with Stratocasters and Les Pauls, and any of the common instruments that you see everybody use,” he says. “I thought they were so overused and so indicative of white boy blues. So I was attracted to Silvertones and Airlines and other things you just didn’t see on TV or in videos. When I was using [those guitars], it felt very unique.”

The same can be said for players like Josh Homme, who veered away from classic amp choices in favour of an Ampeg VT 40 bass amp, and playing exclusively on the neck pickup. It made it easier for him to forge his identity because he was playing with gear that hadn’t been used in this way before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DP9LkMzzBM

Fast forward to the present day, and, because of bands like Loathe, baritone guitars are incredibly in vogue, especially ones with P-90 pickups. Just as Tosin Abasi almost single-handedly created an eight-string boom, which Ibanez is now cashing in on with the Alpha, Loathe have seen baritone sales rise exponentially.

I get it. We all get inspired by our heroes, but sometimes it’s better to think like White or Homme, or bebop guitarist Cecil Alexander, who regularly raises eyebrows by playing jazz on a Jackson Soloist.

Once you place gear in an atypical situation, there can be a shock factor, but there can also be a magical sense of originality.

Now everyone is playing baritones and fucking about with pitch shifting, so it can be harder to stand out. But if you found a way to make thall work on a piece of shit jazz big box from the 1970s, plugged into a set of desktop monitors instead of an amp, you could suddenly stand out.

The point is, while the gear picks of our biggest heroes will always inspire us, always excite us, and make us want to raid our piggy banks so we too can achieve that sound that got you so excited in the first place, it’s important not to lose yourself along the way. 

Don’t blindly follow the mentality of ‘Well, if they use X, I should too,’ because you’re completel y neglecting the best part of the journey: the trials, tribulations, fuck ups, and fucked up combinations of gear and styles that, once you’ve seperated the idiotic from the inspired, becomes a true reflection of you, the musician, over you, the super fan of [insert name here]. 

Use gear in fucked up ways. Don’t be afraid to try things that, on paper, seem complete and utterly ridiculous. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll end up in the same place you started. The best thing that can happen? Well, that’s near limitless. 

Fortune favours the brave; you can’t innovate if you solely tread the beaten path.

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