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- gear This is the equipment I use to make my music. This is not an exhaustive list of all the musical equipment I own, but it's what I'm currently using to record what will (eventually) become a CD of my original material. Yamaha custom SGV My main all-round guitar. A custom-made one-of-a-kind Yamaha SGV built to the specifications of Mr. Vinny Burns of Manchester (ex-Dare, Asia and Ultravox) and sold to me. The Seymour Duncan pickups ('59 in neck, Distortion in bridge) sound great, and it's so easy to play it's ridiculous. Squier Jagmaster Cheap (but well-made) main 'sound effects' axe. The trem is the most reliable non-Floyd Rose type I've ever seen, the stock pickups have plenty of power and feed-back in a musical way. The only modification I've made is to wire the two humbuckers so that each one has it's own volume control - this way when the neck pickup is turned off the toggle switch can be flicked on and off like Tom Morello's (Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave) 'Arm The Homeless' guitar. And, of course, it looks great. Squier Jagmaster As above, but this guitar is currently having a Sustainiac and a fretless neck fitted. More on this when it's finished. The Simpsoncaster Made by me at 15 years of age out of a wooden goalpost for a GCSE woodwork project. A microphonic pile of cack, but great for tortured noise and feedback, and it does things like this. Oh, and you can shout through the pickups too. Vintage Jazz-copy Bass Cheap. Sunburst finish. 4 strings. Surprisingly playable. Goes 'thud thud thud' like a good bass should. Line6 Flextone Amp A rather nice 'amp-modelling' amplifier. I plug my guitar into it, it makes it louder. It has footswitches to select different sounds, and wah and volume pedals. It has an output socket so you can record it without the hassle of mic-ing it up. That's about it, really. Pedalboard My collection of effects pedals, housed in a purpose-built case from Flightcase Warehouse. The signal chain from guitar to amp is: Digitech WH4 Whammy, Boss OC2 Octave, Digitech Synth Wah and Line6 DL4 Delay modeller (with expression pedal) . This is the latest incarnation of my pedalboard. Although there are only 4 pedals on here, using them I can manipulate the pitch, tone and time of what I play - for live use and for the type of music I make I reckon the above layout is the minimum I can get away with. Using different combinations of sounds and using the rocker pedals gives some very unusual sounds. Roland VS-880EX Digital Multitracker ... And this is where all the sounds that I make with all the above are stored. When I first got a PC I was impressed by what could be achieved with recording software when compared to my old tape machine: as many tracks of audio as your CPU will allow! No more 'bouncing' tracks down when you run out of room! CD-like sound quality that won't get worse as the tape wears out! Make your own CDs! Over time, though, the drawbacks of PC recording became clear to me: - PCs crash. Usually when you are in the middle of that mythical 'perfect take'. - Driver conflicts, setting sample rates, problems with Windows - all these things were distracting me from what I should really be spending music-making time on, which is psyching myself up for a take and hitting 'record'. - When you can edit sound as easily as you can edit a Word document, you take shortcuts. Choruses and verses get copied and pasted, tracks get fiddled with endlessly until all the life has been processed out of them and your eyes take over from your ears as you judge your music by how well it's edited in a Cubase window as opposed to how good it actually sounds. - When you have unlimited tracks to play with you never get that feeling of 'oh crap, I really have to make this take count' - things can be endlessly redone, pondered over and multitracked until you have a mediocre, watered down version of what you really wanted. - I like to mix sound and adjust effects units in real-time to give a 'vibe' to a performance or mix - this can be programmed into Cubase's automation features, but it's laborious and I don't like the results as much. So, bearing all this in mind, the device above was my solution. It records 8 tracks of CD quality audio (more if you bounce, which I don't), is easy to work and sounds great. Effects can be plugged into it and fiddled with and all control surfaces are real knobs and faders, not software equivalents that are adjusted with a mouse. Great stuff. I still arrange drums in Cubase and import them into the Roland, then record all the other tracks live, mix back into my PC via the soundcard and master in Cooledit. Just like my old tape-based 4-track days, but much more flexible and with better quality results.