![Adrian Belew/BEAT Tour Rig Rundown [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=53638946&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Adrian Belew is one of the most inventive guitarists of the past half-century—an incandescent player and songwriter who has a vast menagerie of tones and sounds at his command. You’ve heard him with King Crimson, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and Frank Zappa, among others, and with his pop band the Bears and on his solo recordings and tours.
This fall, Adrian is following dates with the Talking Heads-fueled Remain in Light tour, which he co-led with Heads keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison, with the BEAT Tour—a run drawing on his recordings with King Crimson in the ’80s: the albums Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair. Of course, this is just a small—but extremely potent and influential—portion of his 30-year collaboration with Crimson founder Robert Fripp, who has given BEAT his blessing. But putting this repertoire in the hands of Belew, fellow Crimson alum and super-bassist Tony Levin, the incendiary Steve Vai (playing the guitar role of Fripp), and the Earth-shaking drummer Danny Carey from Tool promises magical performances. It’s also one of the year’s most-anticipated tours.
As I write this, Belew, Levin, Vai, and Carey are rehearsing on the West Coast, and by the time this video posts, they will have played their first BEAT dates. So, word is likely to have spread that Belew has brought some crucial pieces of gear he played with ’80s Crimson back into play. But here, you’ll get a close up look and listen as Premier Guitar joins Adrian—with tech Blair White of Nashville’s Eastside Music Supply—at his mid-Tennessee home for a pre-tour Rig Rundown. Dig in!Brought to you by D’Addario.
Fly Guy
The guitarist’s own Adrian Belew Signature Parker Fly is back on the music highway. The hard-to-find model sports exceptional—and some unconventional—appointments, like a 13-pin out for MIDI/synth capability. It has a DiMarzio humbucker, a Sustainiac humbucker, some Line 6 Variax components, Parker’s flat-spring vibrato system, Sperzel tuners, and a solid poplar body and basswood neck under its carbon/glass/epoxy exoskeleton.
Harmony, Man!
Adrian’s DigiTech Harmony Man is set at a fifth up during the opening of this Rig Rundown—one of his favorite settings with the pitch-shifting device.
Mind the Mastermind
Belew uses an RJM Mastermind MIDI controller as part of his rig’s cerebellum.
The Board, Part 1
A Boss GKC-AD converter lets Adrian use his Parker Fly with conventional stompboxes. Its neighbors include an Empress Compressor MkII, a Fractal Axe-Fx Ultra (Adrian has several hundred programs that he wrote into this Fractal that are not transferable to newer models), a Big Joe lithium battery power box, and volume and expression pedals. That’s all part of his self-proclaimed “modern rig.”
Sir Roland of Synth
Yes, Adrian has taken the Roland GR-300 Polyphonic Guitar Synthesizer that he acquired for King Crimson in 1981 out of mothballs, so he can recreate every sound fans for this much-anticipated tour want to hear. It was used for “Industry,” “The Sheltering Sky,” “Three of a Perfect Pair,” and other classics. “I could not do it right without this,” he says. The GR’s companions are a volume pedal, TC Electronic PolyTune, another Big Joe power box, and a custom glitching device.
Twang Me Back Home
Also on tour is Adrian’s famed Twang Bar King guitar (which debuted on the heels of his 1983 Twang Bar King album), which requires a 21-pin plug to make its sonic sorcery. In the video, Adrian shows how it functions as both a conventional guitar and the GR-300’s controller. This guitar had to be refreshed, since it was semi-retired, and is now back in full service. It started life as a Mustang, and now it’s a one-of-a-kind show pony, with a Kahler and Lace Sensor pickups. In this video, Adrian uses the Twang Bar King guitar to demonstrate some tunings for specific Crimson songs.
Racked Up
The signal to the rack gear flows from Adrian’s guitar to an always-on JAM Pedals Dinosaur Compressor, to a late-1970s V4 op-amp Big Muff, an MXR Ten Band EQ, a Strymon Deco V2, an Eventide H9, a Source Audio Artifakt lo-fi pedal (fuzz, reverb, modulation, rig mod, etc.), a Source Audio Nemesis Delay, and a Lichtlaerm Audio The Key and Gate noise gate. Adrian and Blair spent days running through various Big Muff pedals from different eras, and the ’70s V-4 is the only model that allowed Adrian to recreate his feedback acrobatics!
Echo, Echo, Echo ...
It’s not on the floor, because Adrian manipulates it with his hands, but also on this journey is his original Electro-Harmonix Echoflanger! He likes to use it set to between-setting spots, for maximum weirdness.
The Original JC-120
Yes, that’s right: Adrian is using the early-’70s Roland JC-120 amp he played with Bowie, King Crimson, and Talking Heads for the BEAT Tour. Despite its many road miles, the amp looks pristine.
While Annie Clark was named the 26th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023, she couldn’t care less about impressing an athletic stamp on either her sound or her image.
St. Vincent - Flea (Official Audio)
But the sincere curiosity I sense in her question is charming. It hasn’t been mentioned in our conversation yet that she was partly raised Unitarian Universalist (the other part, Catholic), and it’s as if she’s innocently excited that there might exist a friendly connection between her and I, the sunny, “nonchalant” journalist who’s doing my best to hide a fair level of enthusiastic fandom and admiration for her.
“I was raised Catholic, actually,” I reply.
“I love the saints,” says Clark. “Gimme a Caravaggio any day. And Mary as a figure; I’ve always….” she trails off, wistfully. “I’ll always love Mary.” (This adds up, as under her long black coat, she’s wearing an oversized t-shirt with an icon of the Virgin Mary on it, where the religious figure also happens to be depicted as a Black woman.)
Of course, St. Vincent—who took her stage moniker from a Nick Cave lyric—isn’t meeting me at Electric Lady to muse on spirituality. We’re there to talk about her latest release, All Born Screaming—her eighth studio full-length. It also happens to be her first entirely self-produced record, and with this new 10-track collection, Clark feels a sense of celebration about her growth as an artist over the course of her career.
All Born Screaming, which grew out of multiple hours-long solo jam sessions full of “bleeps and bloops,” is St. Vincent’s first entirely self-produced record.
“I’m very lucky to be in a position where more people care about what I do now than what I did on my first record,” she shares. “Like, thank god that I didn’t just have one that people liked, and then fell off the map. I got to grow as an artist and carve out whatever little lane I have in the world by getting to follow the muse and make music that lights me up, that I believe in.”
I would agree that All Born Screaming is a rather shiny jewel to be added to St. Vincent’s experimental, electroacoustic, art-rock crown. It’s ethereal and supernatural, which is to be expected from Clark, but this time, there’s something a little different in the air. The opening, “Hell Is Near,” conjures an illusion of billowing and enveloping fog, swallowing up the audience à la Stephen King. Her floating, sneakily adept vocal at times echoes that of her good friend Carrie Brownstein on Sleater-Kinney’s release from earlier this year, Little Rope, creaking and reaching with pangs of metaphysical desperation.
“Thank god that I didn’t just have one [album] that people liked, and then fell off the map. I got to grow as an artist and carve out whatever little lane I have in the world.”
The album’s first two singles, “Broken Man” and “Flea,” are framed by methodically chugging bass lines that nudge ominously at the edges of your shadowy mental recesses. (On “Flea,” Dave Grohl guested on drums.) “It was pouring, like a movie / Every stranger looked like they knew me,” she sings on “The Power’s Out,” calling David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the 6/8 opening track on Ziggy Stardust, to mind. Towards the close of the record, “Sweetest Fruit” and “So Many Planets” proudly, shamelessly, groove.
And guitar? It enters with an eerie George Harrison-esque jangle on the second verse of “Hell Is Near,” and, throughout the rest of the record, guides with punchy, distorted leads, accents, and welcome interjections. Clark, who was named the 26th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023, has rarely imprinted much of an athletic stamp on her music, in terms of shredding—which she’s shown she can do, but, almost as an aside to her more popular artistic definition. Instead, she moves the instrument in and out of her compositions in streaks of indigo, threading it like dendritic capillaries through a Junoesque, avant-psychedelic, gas-giant planet of sound.
Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to Dallas, Texas, with her family when she was 7. There, she developed a tight-knit group of friends with whom she’s still close with today.
Photo by Alex Da Corte
St. Vincent has an unshakeable confidence about her, in both her physical presence and creative exploits. She explains how, in her solo production pioneering for the making of All Born Screaming, she built out her home studio, got a Neve console, set up her modular synths and analog drum machines, and “finally figured out how to MIDI clock everything in time, which was its own hellscape.
“But then, [it was] playing with electricity,” Clark continues, “because electricity through analog circuitry.... I think it has a soul. Ultimately, you’re harnessing chaos. You’re like a god of lightning or something, you know?” she laughs.
“I would just jam for hours, making kind of post-industrial music, and then I would go back through and listen and go, ‘Ooh, well, this is a three-hour jam of bleeps and bloops. But, these four seconds are something so cool that I want to build a whole song around them,” she shares, then vocalizes some of the melodies in “Big Time Nothing,” “Broken Man,” and “Sweetest Fruit.”
Elaborating on her production approaches, she says, “Psychically, I’m obsessed with people like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry or J Dilla, where all of the effects are tactile. What I find exciting is making big decisions and then printing things, or the sound of something. ’Cause then it’s like you’re building a house on rock rather than sand,” she shares, referring to recording effects with the raw audio signal, as opposed to applying them after the signal is tracked, or in post-production. After further reflection, she concludes, “I think producing the album myself was like managing various egos, but all of the egos were in my own brain.”
We’ve been chatting for about half an hour, and St. Vincent mentions that she brought some snacks, if I want any. (I politely decline, as I’d rather not hear chewing on the recording of the interview when I listen back.) When I presume that she must have a strong sense of self-actualization at this point in her career, she gently counters, “But, I think, you don’t get the confidence without walking through some fire of self-doubt. As I grow more proficient, have more expertise, or get better at my instrument in various ways, music as a whole is more mysterious, mystical, and otherworldly than ever,” she adds. “So, understanding that feels more like it’s receding in a beautiful way, or opening in a beautiful way, while … ‘Okay, great, I know how to compress this better.’”
“What album of yours, excluding All Born Screaming, do you feel the most proud of?”
“Because I’m putting a set list together [for the All Born Screaming tour], I went back and listened to Strange Mercy. There are moments on that, tracks like ‘Surgeon,’ that I’m like, ‘Fuck yeah! That rips! I had no idea!’” she exclaims. “And that’s not always the case. You go back to certain songs, and you’re like, ‘Uh, I’m not sure I executed the vision here, or if this was … a good vision to have.’ But yeah, because I was so broken and bereft at that particular period of life.... I think you can hear it.”
St. Vincent's Gear
This shot was taken a year before the release of St. Vincent’s 2015 self-titled album, where she wore a hairstyle similar to this one on the cover. It was also four years before her signature Ernie Ball Music Man guitar debuted.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Guitars
- Ernie Ball St. Vincent signature models
Amps
- Marshall 1974X
- Roland JC-40
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010–.046)
- Ernie Ball Nylon Light
Effects
- Rig controlled by RJM Mastermind and Gizmo loop switchers
- Hologram Chroma Console
- Empress Echosystem
- Universal Audio Golden Reverberator
- Electro-Harmonix Small Clone
- Malekko Diabilik
- EarthQuaker Rainbow Machine
- Boss VB-2 Vibrato
- JHS Colour Box
- Fulltone Distortion Pro
- Ibanez Modulation Delay II
- Boss SY-200
- ZVEX Fat Fuzz Factory
- Chase Bliss Mood
- Chase Bliss Habit
“You told The Guardianrecently, ‘Artists and songwriters are in some way writing about the same thing over and over again: sex, death, love.’ Do you have any other thoughts on that?” I ask.
“Oh, did I say that? Sure!” she chimes, laughing. “Maybe I did!”
“My favorite art has always been stuff that channels the stream-of-consciousness mode of thinking. Do you know Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky?”
“No, I haven’t … read it?”
“Oh, it’s a film.”
“Seen it!” she amends, smiling. “But, understanding that sort of time-scape dreamscape multiverse…. I feel you.”
“I think Yes’s Close to the Edge is something like that; it’s one of my top 10 favorite albums.”
“I love Yes. Close to the Edge is one of my favorite records as well,” she says, and sings the melody to “II. Total Mass Retain” from the 18-minute-long title track. “And Chris Squire’s bass tone is perfect. It’s perfection on that record.”
“Absolutely! But I admit, I’m really just into early-’70s Yes.”
“Oh, 100 percent. ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ just reminds me of … being at the Texas state fair and my friend giving a hand job on a Ferris wheel to a carnie.”
On tour for 2018’s MASSEDUCTION, Clark plays a model of her EBMM signature with a leopard-print pickguard.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
While Clark shares that at certain points in her life, she has delved into practices like transcendental meditation, she says that today, the non-musical habits that best cultivate her creativity come down to activities as simple as working out, “so I don’t feel crazy,” and doing chores. “Oh, that’s so depressing,” she laughs.
And, while she doesn’t subscribe to any kind of organized religion, St. Vincent is entranced with a kind of spirituality behind making music. “I find music to be incredibly mystical, and that songs become prophecies,” she reflects. “Artists have, in the best-case scenario, an antenna up that makes them a kind of psychic mirror to the society that they live in, right? Almost like a weathervane.
“There have been times that I have written something that in a way prepared me for, or, predicted something that I was about to go through, in very specific, very witchy ways,” she continues. “I’m not a person of like, faith faith, but I have known certain things in ways that are not rationally explicable.”
“I think producing the album myself was like managing various egos, but all of the egos were in my own brain.”
Musicians have a common language of creativity, in that for most, inspiration tends to emerge unpredictably, out of the ether, or perhaps as the result of neurons firing haphazardly. But they do seem to each have an individual way of keeping track of their ideas, whether that involves writing them down or committing them to memory; usually, it’s a balance between the two. “I’ve had the title ‘All Born Screaming’ since I was 22,” says Clark. “I knew that I was going to use it at some point, but I don’t think I was worthy of explaining the complexity or talking about it until this record.
“I don’t know how records get finished,” she elaborates. “But I trust the process enough to know that, if you just put in the hours and stick with it, eventually the big picture will reveal itself to you. I describe the process as making perfect little puzzle pieces—making sure every edge is perfect and ornately drawn, and I don’t know what the big picture is until I’ve finished every single puzzle piece. And that’s when I go, ‘Oh, this is what this is [laughs]. Nobody told me!’”
While Clark’s guitar playing got off to a typical start—the first couple parts she learned were the opening chords to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the iconic riff from Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”—her evolution as a player has made her increasingly savvy at envelope-pushing. Even on her 2007 debut album Marry Me, a singer-songwriter project at its core, the songs “Now, Now” and “Your Lips Are Red” lean toward the progressive territory she’s mined deeper and deeper since. It would be fair to call her soloing and style of arranging daring and subversive; she bends sound and songform as she sees fit.
“Artists have, in the best-case scenario, an antenna up that makes them a kind of psychic mirror to the society that they live in.”
By 2011’s Strange Mercy, whose collection includes the distinctively electroacoustic-yet-guitar-enforced tunes “Cruel” and “Surgeon”—which, as previously asserted, “rips!”—Clark’s guitar is cloaked in fuzz and couched in ambience and synthesizers. And, in the 13 years since, it’s pretty much stayed loyal to that description. The oddest thing, however, is this duality: That shrouding somewhat precipitates her guitar’s erasure from the foreground of the listener’s earscape, while yet maintaining its stitching throughout the songs themselves. I’ve listened to plenty of her discography, all the while forgetting it right as it’s there. Perhaps, the synths are the furniture, and the guitar is but a centered lamp, unifying the room’s elements within the same bath of light? But, personally, I have not been able to answer the question “How?”
Regardless, St. Vincent couldn’t care less about her image or sound as a “guitarist.” If she has ever made any kind of effort to “prove” herself on the instrument, I haven’t come across a record of it. An educated ear will recognize her august aptitude in her avant-garde playing style, and she has left it at that. In my eyes, this makes her an actual hero in an industry saturated with overcompetition and machismo.
“Sound has incredible meaning,” she summarizes, and the end of our conversation. “It led me to songs, and when you trust that you just will follow the things that will light you up inside, then you’ll be okay.”
YouTube It
On Later… with Jools Holland, St. Vincent rocks her Ernie Ball Music Man signature guitar in “glam tuning,” where all strings are tuned to the same pitch, enabling her to create a synthesizer-like effect with the help of a slide.
![Helmet’s Page Hamilton Rig Rundown [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-helmet-s-page-hamilton-2024.jpg?id=52471968&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
“I could not exist without guitar,” admits Helmet founding lead guitarist and singer Page Hamilton. “I know this to be true because I’m a miserable asshole if I don’t play guitar. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is play guitar. It’s an incredible instrument and I just love it.”
But what does one do with that creative codependency? Page Hamilton’s impactful contributions to rock music were cemented when Helmet wrote and recorded a pair of back-to-back blisters with 1992’s Meantime and 1994’s Betty. Those pillars of ’90s alternative metal and guitar granite forever chiseled out his place in hard-rock history.
Since 1989, Hamilton and Helmet have dished out a total of nine studio albums (plus a live set) that balance punishing, fastened-down ferocity with mercurial moments of melody that make their sledgehammer fall harder.
Beyond that legacy, Page was a part of David Bowie’s band for the 1999 Hours tour, playing Saturday Night Live and being included on two live albums from the Starman. Further diversifying his guitar vocabulary, he’s contributed to several film scores for Heat, Titus, In Dreams, Catwoman, and Chicago Cab. He’s explored the instrument’s outer realms with German avant-garde guitarist Caspar Brötzmann on a live improv album (1996’s Zulutime), and expanded his vocabulary by diving into jazz guitar, noting in our Rundown he’ll release an album next year. Hamilton has even put out a guitar instruction DVD, Sonic Shapes: Expanding Rock Guitar Vocabularyfor Hal Leonard. All of this (and more) accomplished because guitar is his lifeblood.
And we found out during our Rig Rundown—filmed May 7, 2024 at Nashville’s Exit/In—that most of this material was spawned from three key ingredients, all still in his rig: ESP Horizon guitars, Fryette amps, and DiMarzio humbuckers. These partnerships with each company are not gratuitous or grifting. He’s been aligned with ESP since 1989. He started working with DiMarzio in the early ’90s, and he and Steven Fryette have sharpened his sound since 1996. These three friendships have fostered an integral strand in Page’s tonal DNA, and Hamilton covers each at length with us. Plus, he breaks down the simplifying move from a complicated Bradshaw rack-switching system to something more modern and efficient, with five Boss boxes and a duo of H9s.
Brought to you by D’AddarioPunk Rock Pink
A friend suggested Hamilton visit ESP Guitars’ small NYC shop in 1989. He wanted to find an instrument that looked good and sounded better. After trying a few out, he landed on a magenta Horizon Custom that still shapes Helmet’s sound. After thousands of shows, several surgeries, and having the original Horizon Custom go missing for weeks when touring in Mexico, Hamilton now keeps the old friend at home, but he still honors his 35-year connection by bringing out the above relic’d ESP LTD PH-600 MG Page Hamilton Signature. The lone humbucker is a custom jobber from DiMarzio’s longtime chief design engineer Steve Blucher, who originally voiced the pickup with Hamilton in the early ’90s. (DiMarzio’s current offering of this pickup is the Air Zone model.) Helmet typically tunes to drop C or drop D depending on the era of material. All his guitars take D’Addario EXL140 Nickel Wound Light Top/Heavy Bottom strings (.010–.052) and he attacks them with Clayton 1.52 mm rounded triangle guitar picks made from acetal.
Like its inspiration, the pink Horizon Custom has a pointy reverse headstock and Floyd Rose tremolo.
Silver Is First
Most Helmet fans will associate Page Hamilton with his pink Horizon. Its radical hue and the trem spring in place of a neck pickup certainly make it a head-turner, but his first signature collaboration with the Japanese brand was this brushed silver ESP LTD PH-600. The look on this PH-600 is taken from an aluminum-leaf finish originally done in the ’90s by NYC artist Erik Sanko (of the Lounge Lizards and Skeleton Key) on one of Hamilton’s old guitars. When ESP and Hamilton were workshopping the collaboration, Page thought he’d use a neck pickup for film work and other projects, but quickly found out that the extra knobs and controls only got in the way during Helmet shows. (The production model featured a DiMarzio FastTrack in the bass slot.) This run of signature models included a Wilkinson VS-100N vibrato.
“I drive ESP crazy because they build me these beautiful guitars and then I have them rip everything out. I just can’t deal with a neck pickup in Helmet,” Hamilton laughs.
Let's Dance
When Hamilton was a part of David Bowie’s touring band for the Hours tour in 1999, this ESP Vintage Plus S-style joined the party with its custom DiMarzio HSS configuration. If you dig up Bowie’s Saturday Night Live performance of “Rebel Rebel” from October 1999, you’ll see Hamilton riffing on this same Vintage Plus ESP. Additionally, while only playing eight shows with the Thin White Duke, Page and this guitar were featured on a pair of live releases—Something in the Air (Live Paris 99)in 2020 and At the Kit Kat Klub (Live New York 99)in 2021.
Hamilton describes his brief time around Ziggy Stardust as “just hanging out with your super-cool uncle who happens to be a genius.” Hamilton shared a few more quotes that Bowie bestowed on him about Page’s approach to guitar: “He was really complimentary about my guitar playing, noting ‘that it sounds like it’s very abstract what you do, but it’s very thought out. And you remind me a bit of Phil Manzanera [of Roxy Music].’ That was an amazing experience.”
Viper
Here’s a late-’80s ESP Horizon Custom that Hamilton got around the same time he scored the original magenta Horizon that was his main dragster for decades. This one is wrapped in a snakeskin finish and still gets used on a nightly basis.
My Way
This sunburst Horizon is in a custom drop-D tuning (D-A-D-G-D-E) that gets used for “Sinatra” off Strap It On.
Fryette Firepower
Hamilton has worked with Steven Fryette for nearly 30 years when a VHT power amp (then owned and operated by Fryette) helped salvage the recording of Aftertaste. Since then, Hamilton has slowly morphed his live rig to only having Fryette gear, eventually landing on a KT88-loaded Pittbull Ultra-Lead 3-channel head over 10 years ago. Page uses complex chords in Helmet and doesn’t want the note nuances and melodies lost in the mix of a mushier amp. This head runs into a Fryette 4x12 cab outfitted with Eminence P50E speakers.
Page Hamilton's Pedalboard
Hamilton used to travel with a full Bradshaw rig with rack gear, but he’s reduced things to a digestible manner with a pair of Eventide H9 units and a handful of Boss boxes—a PS-5 Super Shifter, a MT-2W Metal Zone Pedal Waza Craft, a TS-2 Turbo Distortion, a NS-2 Noise Suppressor, and a FB-2 Feedbacker/Booster. A couple of Peterson Stomp Classic tuners keep the Horizons in check, and a Boss ES-5 Effects Switching System organizes all his sounds and settings.
Shop Page Hamilton's Rig
ESP LTD Horizon 87 Solidbody Electric Guitar
DiMarzio Air Norton
D'Addario EXL140 XL Nickel Wound Electric Guitar Strings - .010-.052 Light Top/Heavy Bottom
Eventide H9
Boss MT-2W Metal Zone Waza Craft
Boss DS-2 Turbo Distortion
Boss NS-2 Noise Suppressor
Boss ES-5 Effects Switching System
Pedaltrain Nano+