GEAR

I like to keep my gear to a minimum. More of a jazz guitarist’s approach, I guess. I don’t know why some guitarists take the whole of NASA with them to gigs and to record with – it’s simply not needed, IMO. Your sound is in your fingers, not in a box of electronics. And with that in mind, you’ll see that I don’t use/own a lot of equipment…

The guitar I’m currently using is an Ibanez S520 in Blackberry Sunburst. Mahogany body, Wizard 3 neck with 24 frets and Rosewood fretboard… a real workhorse guitar. It has a really low action which I love, great for my ‘legato’ style of playing, but, more importantly, it has rock solid tuning and is terrific for recording as it’s very lightweight. My one was made in 2013 at the famous Cort guitar factory (Cor-Tek) in Indonesia.

For recording the John Irvine Band albums I have always used the Yamaha DG Stomp and it’s sibling pedal the UD Stomp. Both were developed by Yamaha in collaboration with Allan Holdsworth, and Frank Gambale also had a hand in the DG Stomp presets, I gather. A couple pieces of gear that are not very well known, because… well, people tend to go for the usual suspects, don’t they?

I used the UD Stomp a lot on the early JIB albums, but not so much on the last few, as the music changed in character somewhat, and I longer needed the long delays provided by the UD. Great pedals, though. They do everything you need and record beautifully, too.

I use an 2017 iMac running Mark Of The Unicorn’s Digital Performer (11) for music production. I’ve been a MOTU user for about 30 years now. A lot of my PhD work was done using DP as my DAW.