Tom Morello: “I don’t think gear matters at all – it literally matters zero percent”
Tom Morello‘s got a hot take when it comes to gear – he doesn’t care about it at all.
While plenty of guitarists consider themselves gear geeks, especially since those choices can be a vital part of honing your sound, the Rage Against the Machine guitarist is not one of them – and knows his opinion is unpopular.
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In a new interview with The Metal Voice, Morello explains why gear matters “zero percent”, even pointing to the fact he’s been playing the same amp for over 35 years just because it was what he stumbled across in a shop one day.
“Guitar players always hate what I have to say about this, because I don’t think gear matters at all. I don’t give a shit,” he says. “It really, literally, matters zero percent. The guitars I have are often like the Island of Misfit Toys. I use an amp that I bought one afternoon in 1988 just because that’s the one they had. And I played that on every Rage record, every Audioslave record.
“It’s like, I think there’s musicians and there’s artists. If there are artists, you’ll take whatever you’ve got, and find a way to make art. Musicians can practice a lot to sound really good, and that’s also admirable, but, I don’t do any endorsements or anything like that, because I honestly think that it doesn’t matter.”
The interview took place at The Bowl for Ronnie benefit for the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund, at the Pinz Bowling Center in Studio City, Los Angeles. Morello then recalls the advice Dio, who died in 2010, gave to his Audioslave bandmate Chris Cornell.
“Audioslave and Dio rehearsed next to each other for a while in the 2000s. I used to press my ear to the door to try to hear Mob Rules or something,” says Morello. “There was an interesting conversation between Ronnie and Chris Cornell, where Ronnie gave two bits of advice to Chris. One was to never take shit from anybody, and the other was: ‘The size of your pencil doesn’t matter. It’s how big you write your name.’ You got a lot of laughs out of that one.”
Last week, PRS head honcho Paul Reed Smith also offered his opinion on gear, specifically whether the location in which guitars are made matters. He asserted that “the country a guitar is made in does not matter much”, adding that “the skill and care of the instrument makers” is the thing that matters.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
