Re: Anybody own any celebrity owned gear?
I still don't get it, though; yeah, you got a guitar EVH used on stage that was set up for his playing style (just as an example, i.e. those stage-used EVHs from a couple of years ago): a style that he has had for 30+ years. So what? Are you going to adapt your playing style overnight to play on his setup? To what end? Are you a musician or a mockingbird? A musician has their own style and the hows and whys of someone else's tone are incredibly irrelevant. If you play a VH cover, don't worry that you don't have "The Brown Sound". Does your drummer have "The Alex" sound? Does your bassist have "The Michael" sound? Does your singer do a great DLR vocal sound? If not, then being the only guy in the band with "the right sound" is going to make you the only guy in the band with "the wrong sound" because the entire BAND will not sound TOGETHER because of you alone.
And unless you stole it off their truck, how do you know their setup wasn't reset to factory before it was shipped to you? You buy Joe Perry's Marshall that he used on whatever famous track, thinking it's going to get you that tone as soon as you turn it on, only to find the knobs were all zeroed when it was put in the box. Or, with the aforementioned hypothetical EVH, the strings were replaced and the bridge reset to factory specs before it was signed and shipped.
I played one of the $10K EVH Charvels at NAMM in 2008. The ones that, it was alleged, were set up exactly like his.
You wanna know how it was set up?
Go pick up any guitar in any store, because it was set up like every guitar in every store I'd ever played - factory default. It wasn't what I call high, it wasn't what I call low, it was that generic guitar store out-of-the-box-and-onto-the-wall setup.
Secrets of the universe, right there.
