A lengthy and very informative interview with jazz guitarist John Abercromie has recently been published by All About Jazz. Here’s a snippet:
AAJ: What kind of gear do you take on the road? One or two guitars? Do you bring an amp or backline one?
J.Abercrombie: I always backline. You can’t bring amps on the road anymore. You can barely even get your guitar on the plane these days. Lately I just take this Brian Moore guitar and a little box with some effects. The main effect I use, and I’ve been using it for about twenty years, is little stereo effects processor made by the Boss company, which is a subdivision of Roland, called the SE-50. It’s just a little half-rack unit that has multi-effects—reverb, delay, chorus and a lot of really useless stuff that I don’t use like distortion and compression. I just generally use it for the reverb and the delay and sometimes maybe a very little bit of chorusing. That’s changed over the years. I used to use a lot more of that effect. During the eighties, I was using more chorus; I was addicted to it. As I get older, I find that that sounds like too much to me. My sound is getting a little more pure over the years—less effected, more direct.
Read the full interview here.