I met him at a Consumer Electronics Show, at the Cello suite. He is a consummate douchebag.
Did she ever straddle their speakers, like the Howard Stern fan in Private Parts?
With all due respect, this is just wrong.
Touring pros use whatever guitars they want to get the tones they want on stage. Gibson, PRS, Fender, Rickenbacker and even more expensive vintage or custom made instruments.
The difference between the pros and non-pros is usually the non-pros are more gear obsessed and love to discuss the intricacies of this piece of gear or that. They also tend to be more brand snobbish.
The problem is that a valuable “vintage” instrument is just too valuable to take on the road.
Todd Rundgren used to own Eric Clapton’s old guitar from his Cream days, “The Fool”. It was in his regular touring collection but he eventually got into a tax squeeze and sold it - after having two copies made. He’s been playing one of the copies on his most recent tour, which is a performance of his classic album A Wizard/A True Star. But his main one these days is a P-Project Strat copy built in 1991. It’s just silly to carry around something worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Much less famous is my friend Reverend Payton. He plays a couple of old National resonators and a reproduction '29 Gibson. He’s love to have a real '29 Gibson, but most of the real ones couldn’t take being played every single day. As it is, the Nationals are in danger of falling apart - his luthier has warned him that he can only rebuild them so much.
Do you play? Or hang out with touring musicians? I do. There are no absolutes and if the band has enough money to afford the security or it is a special gig, then yeah, they’ll use the expensive stuff. But even Billy Gibbons rarely brings out Pearly Gates anymore. Big gigs are more about showmanship and switching between songs correctly, not replicating that special tone you get in an intimate setting in a room full of thousands. And please note that when I say “they’ll use touring guitars” - those can still be expensive Custom-Shop built - but those are a few thousand $$ vs. some vintage which are tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in value…
And **Sam Stone **- yeah, room prep is key - with my story about the HP exec, that room had been fully prepped; he commented about how it was acoustically set up and the bazillions of small speakers arrayed around the room were designed to match it…