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What gear did you use on your final tour?
For quite a few years I’ve been using the modular head that Randall designed with me. The company’s warehouse is only an hour from where I live, and it gave me the opportunity to be hands-on with it. So when we were making [2005’s] 10,000 Fists, a couple of their technicians came to the studio along with [producer] Johnny K and we really developed the amp there in the studio. We were taking what they had already built and expanding upon it, so it was really a combination between a Mesa/Boogie and a Bogner Ecstasy head. Those were two of my favorite heads I was using in the studio a lot. And we tried to get the best of both worlds, combining both tones. It was a great opportunity because we had a lot of smart, talented guys to help develop this and I got a great head out of it.
You switched to Schecter guitars for Asylum.
I use my Schecter guitars; I’ve been with them for about 18 months now. I have an isolation box that I use. I don’t put any microphones on the cabinets out front, I put them in the isolation box. So it’s basically a flight case with a 4-by-12 cabinet in it, and it’s got four microphones on it and you close the lid of the box so you don’t get any bleed through or stage noise and it gives our sound guy the cleanest signal possible.
Do you use effects?
My rhythm tone is straight into the Randall. And then I have a Digitech GSP rack. I might use a little delay in a solo and there are a couple spots where I use a flanger in a subtle way. I have a Digitech Weapon pedal they built for me some years ago that was modeled after some of the tones I had on The Sickness album. Digitech came to me and said, “Let’s recreate some of those tones so you can pull ‘em off live.” There’s a sitar sound I use in “Stupefy” and a few other songs. And I have a rack Cry Baby Wah. That’s about it.
What tunings do you use in Disturbed?
I use three different tunings. On some songs everything’s tuned down a half step to E flat. And then a couple of them are Drop C sharp so the low E is tuned down to E sharp. And then I have a Drop C tuning. It’s the same thing, just everything’s dropped another half step from that.