This article series is about the tools of popular guitarists. What are their favorite guitars and how is it related to them? This time with Sam Wood (Wayward Sons)
When you start guitar playing and do you remember your first guitar?
I started playing the guitar when I was about 11 or 12 years old. My dad had an old bass that I started playing on, but I knew I really wanted to play electric. My parents bought me a Les Paul Goldtop copy by Vintage, which was my pride and joy! I still have it, and actually got Peter Green to sign the back of it when I went to see him play as a young teenager.
What are your influences and which guitar players are your favs?
For me, my hero above all other heroes is Mick Ronson. He wasn’t the most technical player in the world, but I love everything about his playing, from his note choices, to his attack, to his seemingly ‚whatever‘ attitude to guitar parts. The other huge influences for me would be the Thin Lizzy guys, particularly Brian Robertson, Scott Gorham and Gary Moore, along with Randy Rhoads. What I think they all share, and what I love about them, is that it always sounds like their playing is just on the edge of everything falling apart! It’s exciting to listen to, and there’s nothing clinical about it – you feel like it’s alive and raw, and that the wheels might fall off at any second. I find it very hard to get excited about super-clean shred players. It’s very impressive, but it doesn’t grab me like the sloppier guys who are really digging in!
How many guitars do you own and what are your favorite models?
Unsurprisingly, given my influences, I’m a Les Paul guy through and through! I used to collect them quite a bit when I was younger, and you could buy them cheaply from America or Japan and have them shipped over, but Brexit has made that a lot harder to do now… So I’m lucky that I have a few Les Pauls, and a few old vintage Gibsons that I love very much.
What do you think makes the perfect guitar and amp?
It has to be something that makes you get excited about playing it. I always remember going to see gigs when I was younger, and if there was a big wall of Marshalls and a rack of Gibsons on stage I’d be excited before it even began! Other than that, make sure your guitars are easy to play, there’s no sense in making life harder for yourself than it needs to be!
How do you feel about the question of modeler or tube amp?
I totally understand the modelling amp thing, and I know that they sound great, but I’ve yet to have an experience with one that’s felt as organic to use as a valve amp. There’s something about the immediacy of the attack of a valve amp, as well as the depth to it that I haven’t had yet from anything digital. I’m sure that from a listening perspective you would probably never know the difference though, and there are almost certainly hundreds of guitar tones I’ve heard that I thought were great and will have been a modelling amp!
Which guitars and amps were used on the new album or for recordings?
Amps for me in the studio are usually one of my Marshall JMP heads, I normally take a 100 watt and a 50 watt one with me, and have a late sixties Plexi head that I normally double against them. They’re the same type of sound once they’re all wound up, but different enough to sit in separate spaces in the mix. I have a JTM45 that I use occasionally too, but I’ve replaced the tube rectifier with a solid state one, so it behaves a lot more like a plexi. Guitarwise, I usually use one of my Les Paul Customs, and then double up with something different. Sometimes it can be another Les Paul Custom, but often it’ll end up being my Les Paul Jr or ES355, which both have a very different sound to them.
When you only can choose one guitar, which one will you take?
It will of course depend on what you’re choosing for, but generally if I could only take one, it would be my old white Les Paul Custom. I’ve had it since I was 15 or 16, and it’s not the best sounding Les Paul I own by any means, but it’s the one that I feel most at home with.
https://www.waywardsonsband.com/site/
