Welcome to my new section on musical equipment. Now I'm really not a techhead as far as gear goes but I do know what I like and why I like it. In this article I will discuss the instruments, amps and other miscellaneous gear that I own and hopefully give you some advice for the next time you buy some gear. In future articles I am going to really go into detail about the equipment I own but for today I thought I would start off with a run down of my rig and maybe a brief discussion about my guitars and distortion sounds.

Currently my main guitar is my cream Fender Eric Clapton signature guitar which you can see a picture of above. It is a great guitar with a really beautiful maple neck that just seems to suit every guitarist that picks it up. Every single guitar player I know that picks it up is immediately impressed and just loves the feel of it.

The EC Strat comes equipped with 3 gold sensor lace pickups and I'm very pleased with their sound. Whilst not exactly authentic strat at heart, they can get a great clean sound, especially in the out of phase positions. Most of the settings are great for lead as well. I've never been a big fan of the sound of a distorted bridge single-coil but in this case it is smoother than normal.

The middle tone control is a TBX circuit which can add a lot of brightness to the overall sound. It affects all three pickups. The other 'tone' control is in fact the notorious 'Clapton circuit.' This is an active mid-boost which adds up to about 25DB of gain! When playing clean this gives you a really fat punchy sound and with distortion you have pretty much infinite gain. As one of my friends said when he played it, you get to take your tone with you!

This is a teal Roadhouse Strat. I bought one of the last ones in Chandlers before the new American series came in. Now Fender have renamed it and notched the price up a little. Basically I'm very fond of the guitar and it plays well. Its maple neck is far shallower than the EC's famous V profile and it has slightly larger frets. It comes equipped with texas special pickups which give a fairly convincing impression of the classic strat pickups but are slightly brighter. Basically I love the sound but I couldn't really get away with the bridge pickup and recently replaced it with a Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck Junior which is a 'squeezed' humbucker that fits into a single coil slot. It has a punchy sound with just a bit of squeal and a slightly higher output. So far it has sounded great and I'm really happy with it.

I don't really play my last guitar very much. Essentially it is one of the older Fender Strat Plus Deluxe models with a sunburst finish and a rosewood neck. Originally it came with a Wilkinson trem and lace sensor pickups (red, blue and silver) but I've had the trem locked down and replaced the pickups with the EMG Dave Gilmour DG20 System. It has active single coils and replaces the tone controls with both mid boost and mid cut circuitry. Athough I have not played it much recently, it does have a great range of tones.

Obviously this article was designed to give you a taster of some of the gear I'm going to review in the future. Although I wasn't a big fan of strats initially, they are really the only guitars I play nowadays. I hope to do full articles on each of these guitars individually and go into far greater depth than this brief teaser. I plan to try and get some sound clips of me playing through various settings onto the site to accompany future articles as well.

Although it would be boring to list out all of my gear, I thought people may have preferences for which came up first. I am going to be reviewing my 100 Watt Marshall JCM900 DSL head, my THD Electronics Hotplate, my SKB pedalboard and my Ibanez Tubescreamer over the coming months. I will probably look at other items as they come up but I hope to write the next article about my rig as a whole before going into each specific element.

Well that's it for the first of these gear articles. Hope you come back for more.