NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE
this month Nev Marten pontificates on his ideal rig of essentials – one guitar, an amp and a few select pedals…
This month’s missive is yet again the result of office chat. Having silently been ruminating, Jamie piped up with, “So, what’s your perfect rig?” He meant real amps and pedals, and generously offered the luxury of one electric guitar (my red Custom Shop Strat, obviously). If you’ve followed these columns you’ll know I use a modeller but keep an amp and small ’board for pub gigs. Since that’s what I’ve arrived at, it probably does represent my ‘perfect rig’.
But I’ve gone through the gamut. The first amp I played live was a mate’s 1963 Vox AC30. My ES-335 flat out through the ‘normal’ channel was sonic nirvana. Why, then, when I’d saved up for my own amp, did I buy a Fender Dual Showman with a 2x15-inch JBL cabinet? I probably could have got three secondhand AC30s for what I paid for it in 1972. It was a monster, but useless for my purposes – it wouldn’t distort, even if you could get it full up.
Next was an early Peavey – a 50-watt, 4x10 Classic in tweed. I loved it because it had a master volume, so I could overdrive it. We did hundreds of gigs before I ‘upgraded’ to the company’s 100-watt Deuce. Sadly, it just didn’t do it for me.
Every guitarist I liked used Marshalls so finally I bought one – a 100-watt master volume half-stack. It was brilliant, but I didn’t drive and mates weren’t always willing to cart it around. So I got a 50-watt combo – the same one Aynsley Lister used for years. That was great, but then Clapton switched to Music Man so I did, too. Again, I didn’t bond with it, but when a friend told me one of these new-fangled Mesa/Boogies was on offer (the amazing guitarist Phil Palmer was selling it), I hocked everything I owned. £700 in 1980 was a fortune, but I forked out. A Mark II in mahogany with a wicker front, it sounded amazing, but it had no reverb so I wrote to the States asking if one could be retrofitted. A few weeks later I received a letter addressed to ‘Rezille Mooten’ saying it couldn’t. Mick Taylor calls me Rezille to this day!
AmpEvolution
For 14 years that was my only amp and it was fabulous with a Boss DM-2 delay and CE-2 chorus. Then one day I called into Mansons in Exeter. They sold Matchless and in Guitar Player mag a DC30 had blitzed their 10-amp shootout. I had my own Les Paul with me, plugged in and that was it – the old AC30 sound but on steroids. It powered every gig for nearly 20 years until soundcrew complaints about volume and my own struggles to lift its 83lbs saw me selling it, regretting it, buying it back and selling it again. Today, I’m still using Matchless but a King Cobra. It’s a DC30 but with EL34s not EL84s, and one 12-inch speaker not two. Long story, but that’s my current dream amp.
Pedal-wise, I’m no aficionado so I use a few that suit me. Currently, I have two overdrives: a Fulltone OCD and an Analog Man King Of Tone; two great individual drives but all on together is wondrous. For echo, I like it simple so use two – a generic soloing delay (Keeleymodded Boss DD-3) and a slapback (TC Flashback, but might change it for a Waza Craft DM-2W). Both on together does a reasonable ‘Hank’.
Chorus has come right back into my affections. Mine’s a Providence Anadime and it’s simple, transparent and musical. I rarely use wah-wah, but Vox sent me its classic Hand-Wired one and it’s perfect for my needs. I took the Voodoo Lab’s tremolo and Mr Black SuperMoon reverb off since the Matchless has great versions built in.
And there you have it: after almost 50 years of gigging, my dream rig turns out to be a modern take on the tones I loved on day one. But that’s GAS for you, and speaking of which…