He plays music. He has a lot of guitars. He is one of the most underrated guitarists of our time, but he doesn't care. He knows tone, and tone is the thing for him, not having his picture in People magazine. So he has this guy Bobby that works for him. Bobby has a friend that works on guitars and designs stuff. Bobby talked to Brad about his buddy, and Brad and Bobby decided that their buddy could help Brad.
Sooooo.....
Oh, I don't have the patience to keep this up!
I met up with Bobby Saturday night after leaving the KIX show(another thread), and crashed at the Westin on Aerosmith's dime. They know what they are doing, those Aerosmith boys. Sunday morning bus call was 11 am, and off to the Nissan Pavilian we went. Local crew had rolled all the boxes by the time that we got there, so we set up the backline and guitar world and got down to business. I had Will at WB Custom Pickups wind me up some pickups to my exact specs (GregWinds) and I brought a set for Brad, since he's been a big influence on my playing. Brad has a Hamer Korina Standard that he hasn't used a lot recently(the stock Duncans sounded kind of flat to him), and Bobby had told him that I was going to mod it a bit.
Before...
I leved a couple of high frets, cleaned up the board and dropped the GregWinds (zebras instead of those boring gold covers) in where the Duncans had been...
So, Bobby and I spent a few hours playing with this......
Brad's rig consists of a Greg Howard head on a 4x12 in the center and two Divided By 13 heads on 4x12s for the stereo signals. A TC Electronics G System controls the rig, with a Klon and a few modded TS9s are in there for a little hair. Since the G System is new, Bobby and I played around with tones...
I wish I had asked Bobby to grab a shot of me playing Brad's rig. The rest of the crew went to catering and we had the whole place(stage and venue) all to ourselves. There is a very special magic standing on Aerosmith's full stage playing Brad's rig at HUGE volumes to an empty ampitheater the size of an airport. I was 15 again, and it was BAD ASS. Soon enough, Joan Jett's crew started setting up her backline so Bobby and I had to be quiet. Bobby started grabbing guitars out of these....
...and had me restring a set up the main ones. Pics later.
When Brad arrived, we took him through the changes to the rig and gave him the hotrodded Hamer for him to wring out the rig. He liked it so much, he opened the show with it and played it for several songs!
A couple songs into, he turned and mouthed the word "COOL!", and looked down at the Hamer.
I'm still grinning.