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Rig Rundown: Nine Inch Nails

Video

Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini create the perfect drug for NIN fans with a bevy of heavy-hitting custom guitars and basses and a high-tech hybrid setup that marries digital with analog.

Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini (above) of Nine Inch Nails detail their high-tech rigs that include a formidable army of custom axes, sophisticated wireless MIDI and digital presets paired with analog effects, all streamlined to help them create intricate, scorching industrial rock soundscapes.

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Open Tunings and Their Songwriting Magic

Kevin Gordon and his beloved ES-125, in earlier days.

Photo by David Wilds

Looking for new fuel for your sound and songs? Nashville’s Kevin Gordon found both in exploring traditional blues tunings and their variations.

I first heard open guitar tunings while in college, from older players who’d become friends or mentors, and from various artists playing at the Delta Blues Festival in the early mid-’80s, which was held in a fallow field in Freedom Village, Mississippi—whose topographical limits likely did not extend beyond said field.

When Building Guitars—or Pursuing Anything—Go Down All the Rabbit Holes

Paul Reed Smith shows John Bohlinger how to detect the grain in a guitar-body blank, in a scene from PG’s PRS Factory Tour video.

Paul Reed Smith says being a guitar builder requires code-cracking, historical perspective, and an eclectic knowledge base. Mostly, it asks that we remain perpetual students and remain willing to become teachers.

I love to learn, and I don’t enjoy history kicking my ass. In other words, if my instrument-making predecessors—Ted McCarty, Leo Fender, Christian Martin, John Heiss, Antonio de Torres, G.B. Guadagnini, and Antonio Stradivari, to name a few—made an instrument that took my breath away when I played it, and it sounded better than what I had made, I wanted to know not just what they had done, but what they understood that I didn’t understand yet. And because it was clear to me that these masters understood some things that I didn’t, I would go down rabbit holes.

Rig Rundown: Nine Inch Nails

Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini create the perfect drug for NIN fans with a bevy of heavy-hitting custom guitars and basses and a high-tech hybrid setup that marries digital with analog.

Looking for new fuel for your sound and songs? Nashville’s Kevin Gordon found both in exploring traditional blues tunings and their variations.

Need more firepower? Here’s a collection of high-powered stomps that pack plenty of torque.

Paul Reed Smith says being a guitar builder requires code-cracking, historical perspective, and an eclectic knowledge base. Mostly, it asks that we remain perpetual students and remain willing to become teachers.