Hughes & Kettner amps
The Man Who Changed Guitar Forever (Guitar Player 2008)
Can you imagine yourself ever playing through a laptop, using software to get your tones, at least when touring?
I thought about it for convenience sake, especially nowadays, because the traveling and customs hassles at airports are a nightmare. It’s nothing like what it used to be. So, from that point of view, it’s crossed my mind, but then I’m not sure that I’d want to give up … but maybe I wouldn’t be giving up anything at all … but I never did move in the computer direction. I don’t even have a computer recording setup at all. Pretty much everything I’ve got is analog, except for two Alesis high-resolution hard disc recorders, which I really like the sound of. It’s like the same as it was 20 years ago, except instead of having a Studer 24-track, I’ve just got two 24-track digital recorders. And every time I’ve tried to do things with a computer, it’s like something doesn’t happen, so I’ve never been really enthused about that. And I know that there are lots of things that you can do in terms of editing, and I’m afraid that if I did that, the next record I’d do would take me … they’d be shoving me in a pine box while I was still working on it. I don’t have that, and I’m okay with it. And H&K have been really gracious in helping us out with gear when we travel, so I don’t have to carry that stuff with me, unless we’re doing a local tour, when I take my own gear. But usually I just take a couple cases of accessories and cables, and they provide us with the backline wherever we go. And I don’t know that I’d trust a computer that much with everything that I had. You get all these great sounds and stuff and then something happens to your computer. I have mixed feelings about it. But one of the funniest things is that Bill Hine (?) who was my head guy Enigma, he always used to see me as a guy who was always pushing the techno thing using the old Atari computers back in the ’80s and the SynthAxe. He was amazed that I didn’t go any further than that. It just kind of stopped. Because at that time, most of the guitar players would pick up the SA and try to play guitar on it. They’d pick it up and start trying to play blues licks on it, and I’d say, “Oh, that’s not what this is for. You can go out and buy a $500 Strat, why do you want to spend $10,000 on a machine and then try to make it sound like a Strat?” Because I used to do clinics and guys would come up and ask if it could that.
