TALK BOXES & MODDED MARSHALLS
NO ONE KNOWS PETER FR AMPTON’S gear better than his longtime Nashville-based guitar tech, Darren Hurst. We’ll leave it to him to give us the rundown on Peter’s expansive setup from 2019’s Finale: The Farewell Tour.
“Peter’s rig seems really complex at first glance, but it is deceptively simple in terms of signal flow,” Darren says. “It’s built on the idea of the shortest and cleanest signal path at all times, and is basically a center dry/left-and-right wet system, designed and built by Mark Snyder.
“Peter’s main tone is very simple: It’s a Klon Centaur into a John Suhr clone of a 1970s Marshall JMP [] into a single 4x12 cabinet loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s. There is a second Suhr Marshall clone that serves as a backup to the main head, and the proper ‘José’ Marshall that serves as the Talk Box amp. The main Marshall is electronically split so that the preamp section and power amp are separated electronically and can be used individually. In addition to the Marshall preamp, there’s a Fender Bassman and an Egnater preamp that can be chosen, but they all hit the power section of the Marshall, and this gives the various preamp sounds a very nice common characteristic. The clean intro to ‘Lines on My Face,’ which uses the Bassman preamp, is
