Joe Perry Artist Study: Gear & Tone

Perry is an avid gear collector. He has a huge collection of vintage guitars and amps to choose from when playing live and in the studio. He’s well known for changing guitars & even amp rigs from song to song.

But for this tutorial we’ll use a Les Paul style guitar, which was always one of his favorites to use! And he prefers classic tube amps cranked to loud and saturated with gain.

For effects, he’s been known to use flangers, delays, reverbs, famously, a talk box! He prefers boost pedals (treble booster or clean boost) instead of pure gain or distortion pedals. But he has used a Klon gain pedal for a while live. For this tutorial we’ll use a gain setting to boost the signal, which makes it easier to get an overdriven, loud tube amp tone in the studio. But it’s important not to have too much gain, because you can always hear the basic tone of the guitar & tube amp in Perry’s playing.