If you are already this deep into my site, then you probably know that although I am mostly an electronic artist, I also write music on guitar and create lyrics for a few songs. That being said, I always see artists who are talking about the gear they use to get their signature sound. Granted, a large portion of this stuff is just an endorsement for whoever sponsors the artist’s equipment needs but sometimes they are actually telling you what they like to use. Although I am not what you would call a ‘gear head’, I do have a few pieces of equipmet that I am quite partial to.
Guitar Gear
My primary guitar is an Ibanez GI0 guitar with humbuckers that I purchased about 3 years ago. Throughout my life, I have owned several guitars including the old Teisco Del Rey that I mentioned in my influences section but I usually stick with Ibanez. I have actually owned a beautiful 12-string Fender acoustic at one time that I thought was an amazing instrument but I could rarely devote enough time to playing it back in those days. If I am just trying to pick out a guitar riff or structure a song, I find that I enjoy the mellow sound of a blue Johnson acoustic guitar that my sister gave me many years ago when she no longer needed it for school. I love the guitar and have used it for writing and practicing for well over a decade.
Once you get past the guitar, I use a Crate amp with built in Overdrive. This amp is only about 150W but it is MEAN and LOUD. I played on several amps in my life time but if I ever bought an amp, I would go with Crate every time. Sure, a large part of that is beacuse they are relatively cheap but they aren’t shoddy.
I also am a huge fan of pedals. It always seemed like I could do more things when I had lots of interesting pedals to test and play with. I can’t count the number of pedals I have used in my time but I have owned several various distortion pedals, a wah pedal, and various others. My current collection is exclusively BOSS pedals that I purchased about 8 years ago. I have a BOSS overdrive pedal that I usually use for my distorted works. I use a BOSS Super Chorus to give my songs that extra fullness when the mood suits me. And my favorite pedal for experimentation is my BOSS Phase Shifter – that pedal is really customizable and gives me deep rolling sounds on some stuff and heavy psychadelic tremolo when I want that and of course, everything in between. I have owned and experimented with several different pedals including the fancy multi-tap pedals with millions of banks of sounds but none of them really seemed useful outside of the distortion, chorus, and shifter. I may eventually buy more pedals but GarageBand/Logic now provides me with a host of pedals that I could never afford seperately.
Last but not least, I purchased a Lexicon Alpha that was created by HarmonKardon as a way for me to record on to my computer and found it to be an amazingly useful device. It is basically a USB audio device that I can route my guitar sound into as it comes from the amp (pedals or not) and it will quickly convert the sound into digital audio that I can drop right in to my studio software. It has the capability to hook up at least two instruments or one instrument and a mic and I usually will route both myself and my friends that I jam with into it.
Studio Gear
As I outlined in the section about my studio, I do have a small home studio that I have created on a second desk in my home office. It is nothing too fancy but it does the job.
The main workhorse of the studio is my MacBook Pro 17″ that I purchased used from a college student at UCO. The laptop had received a few after market upgrades and is pretty much able to stand on its own as a powerful machine. Sure, I would like to have a more powerful machine or at least something that could use more than one video output but this one does the work. I installed Logic Express 9 as well as GarageBand ’11 on this laptop and although I spend almost all of my time in Logic, I often sample instruments from the GarageBand libraries. I do intend to purchase a more extensive loop library as I have found that loops are a great way to get me started when I am creating something but I have not had the funds to spend on it yet.
The next important piece to my studio is my Casio WK200 keyboard. This is a full 76-key keyboard that my dear wife got me as a present for my 29th birthday party. It features an extensive list of prebuilt drumbeats and tones and can be hooked up via USB to my MacBook (as it usually is). I also really like the fact that it comes with a large bank of pre-programmed songs with everything from Pachabel’s Canon to Frosty the Snowman. Sometimes, I will just turn on a song that I have never heard or haven’t listed to lately and listen to it. My keyboard also allows me to manually control any instrument that Logic has to offer and that is a feature I have often used to play sections of a song. I have a Korg NanoKey that I bought for myself before the keyboard was given as a present and although I rarely need it, I do take it with me when I go traveling in case I get inspired.
That about covers all the gear that I use. Not a really extensive list but at least I listed them.
