Re: Warren DeMartini's Guitars?
Taken from
Dinosaur Rock Guitar (Best site in existence, IMO)
"Tone
Warren played Floyd-equipped super strats and you can certainly hear that sound on his recordings. His tone was pretty thin on Out of the Cellar, but got fatter and a lot warmer on Invasion of your Privacy. Compared to his contemporaries who used super strats, Warren's tone was less processed than George Lynch's and Ozzy-era Jake E. Lee's tone. It was warmer than Viv Campbell's tone, but not nearly as warm or middy as any of the guys who were using Gibsons at the time. Warren's tone is most similar to the Roth-era Van Halen tone, but a little more ragged and looser sounding, with more bottom. Compare the tone on Take Your Whiskey Home or Unchained to Warren's tone on Lay it Down, You're in Love, or Way Cool Junior — you find it's pretty close! The biggest difference is in the application of ambient micing. Van Halen relied on a lot of room sound to get his tone — usually in the opposite speaker to the main guitar. The basic tone is just a close mic SM57 on a Marshall 4x12. Warren does the same thing with his basic tone, an SM57 on a Marshall 4x12, but instead of using room ambiance, he used digital delay and reverb to artificially create the acoustic space. The result has more presence in the mix than Van Halen, and it's a little fuller, but still very much a Eddie inspired brown tone.
There's no secret to producing Warren's tone: take a single pickup super strat with a humbucker, and run it straight into an old 100W Marshall. Cabs were Marshall 4x12s with 30W Celestions. Warren used Seymour Duncan JB and custom Charvel pickups in his Charvel super strats, and they were all fitted with Floyd Rose tremolos. Although he was a Laney endorsee in the 80s, he doesn't seem to have actually used them much, if at all. His amps were modified by amp techs Jose Arredondo or Frank Levi to give them a little more gain.
One of Warren's trademarks is the use of heavy slapback echo on his guitar — not just on leads, but on the rhythms as well. You can't truly nail Ratt's guitar sound without it. This was added at mixdown or at the soundboard, never at the amp. Set your delay to eighth notes in tempo with the song and one or two repeats; tune to dropped D, and rip the opening to You're in Love and voila — it's 1984 and you're on stage at the Whiskey!"
