GET ON ’BOARD
A choice of Gary’s stompboxes, from box-fresh to road-worn units
MARSHALL BLUESBREAKER
“Gary was well known for using the
[Marshall] Guv’nor, which is the pedal on Still Got The Blues. The Bluesbreaker was one of the pedals in the batch that Marshall came up with after that – the Shred Master, the Drive Master and the Bluesbreaker. That was like the second wave, if you like, and they’re all interesting. I think the Bluesbreaker name piques peoples’ interest. They’re quite sought after now. Marshall stopped making them years ago and moved on to the more compact sized pedals, including the [BB-2] Bluesbreaker II.”
BOSS DSD-3 DIGITAL SAMPLER/DELAY
“Some collector might be
interested in this, but hopefully somebody’s going to get some use out of it. There are red and black markings on this pedal, so it’s got two different settings on it. Gary used a lot of Boss delay pedals, including the DM-2, DM-3 [analogue delays] and the DD [digital delay] pedals.”
BOSS HM-2 HEAVY METAL
“This is quite an early one. It certainly looks like it’s been kicking around in a box and bounced around in a flight case. People are always scratching around trying to find an early original one, or an alternative – which never quite satisfies!”
DOD OVERDRIVE PREAMP/250
“This is a reissue of the old pedal that harks back to Gary’s G-Force days. He said, ‘Oh, look! They’ve started making those DOD 250s again. I’ve got to get one of those!’ He got it, tried it and goes, ‘That’s great!’ Then he put it back in its box and didn’t use it [laughs]. It’s literally box-fresh!”
5 1991/’92 MARSHALL JCM900 4500
“Gary did an EPK film for the Ballads & Blues
[1982-1994] compilation that came out in ’94. It was filmed at SARM Studios and this amp is sitting on the rack behind Gary during the interview; you can see the clip on YouTube. He’s playing through it and demonstrating a few things with both the Les Pauls he had – the ex-Peter Green and the other ’59 [’Burst].”
6 1990 FENDER ’63 VIBROVERB
“This is one of Fender’s first
reissue amps. It was used on some of the stuff for Close As
You Get. We used this and those ‘Plexi’ combos that Dennis Cornell put out. For a lot of those sessions, Gary just used a guitar, a cable and an amp – he just plugged straight into the front-end. The break-up’s nice with these Vibroverbs; it’s a bit different when you push them. There are some red Sharpie marks on it, and you can see the volume is about 7, which is fairly cranked.”
7 1990s THE AUDIO BROTHERS HIWATT SA210
“We got this in 1998. I remember one of The Audio Brothers guys coming down from Northampton to the studio when we were recording the A Different Beat album. I think they did a 1x12 amp as well [the SA112 model]. It was a useful thing because it was different and it’s on some early demos. It’s quite a clean sounding amp.”
8 2004 ORANGE ROCKERVERB 100
“This was part of a batch of stuff Orange sent over for Gary to try out. It was an interesting amp because Gary had an old [Orange] OR-120 that saw some use on the Blues For Greeny album sessions. At the time, it was interesting that Orange were back in the amp game properly. Gary saw the ads in guitar magazines and wanted to try it out. He always had this thing about amps: Fender have great amp reverb, but why are there no great rock amps with it? So he jumped all over this. He was after that big sound, probably as a throwback to Peter Green – you always come back to your influences. He sometimes used an external reverb unit, although he played at such volume that the vibrations would always set the thing off!”
9 2008 MARSHALL MG10
“This little MG10 was quite useful and was probably one of the last amps Gary used. He had it at home for mucking about, sitting in front of the TV playing along, or playing with the kids. There was always something going on. I think Neville [Marten] turned him onto these originally. The next thing it was, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get one of those!’ It lived in the corner of his home studio for a while and got wheeled out for various things. When we did the Russian tour in 2010, we were very restricted on weight because we were flying the equipment around in our own aeroplane, so this was an ideal little amp to just have backstage or in a hotel room.”
10 1984 MARSHALL JCM800 1987
“Neil Carter used this one
back in the day. When I first started teching for Gary on the After The War tour, he had five amps on the go and at least another five as backups. There were a lot of heads. There was so much Marshall on stage in those early days it was quite frightening. Great for Marshall, though! There were racks and racks of it.”