Guthrie Govan made recent appearance at a Charvel guitar clinic in Dubai and once more made a persuasive case why he, a lifelong devotee of the tube amp, has fully digital guitar rigs as he tours the world with The Aristocrats.
This is the great 21st-century guitar rig conundrum as amp modellers have got better and a growing range of FRFR (full range, flat response) speakers have been launched to maximise their performance.
As ever, the debate is couched in terms of which is better, the amp modeller or the tube amp. Maybe both is the answer. Or that it really depends. But for Govan, he told those in attendance that all comes down to the F-word, freedom.
“Yes, I’ve sold my soul,” he said. “I grew up, what, using single-channel valve amps and here I am with this digital monstrosity, and I still want to feel like I have a real amp behind me. And that [points to Laney 4X12 FRFR speaker] creates that feeling and it inspires me. It makes me play differently – hopefully better.”
Laney leaned on Devin Townsend's feedback when developing its new range of LFR cabinets, a range of FRFR speakers that were designed to give players using amp modellers that same sort of feel as quote/unquote real guitar amplifiers, with air moving out of the speaker.
Govan was an early adopter, taking one of the LFR-412s on tour with The Aristocrats. As he noted in the Laney press bumf, the “real feedback” was what he was looking for.
Laney’s LFR-412 can take some of the credit for pushing Govan over the edge. There is one onstage with him during the clinic. The world’s first 4x12 FRFR speaker is a real beast, a 2600-watter, with a maximum volume that Laney says rivals a jet airplane at takeoff. You can see the appeal.
But it is not just that Laney has made it appealing, as Govan demonstrates. Not only is a practical piece of kit when touring, and especially so when with an orchestra as he is with Hans Zimmer, the options that Guthrie's Fractal FM-9 presents for creative adventures are too much for him to ignore.
“Why am I using this digital monstrosity when it flies in the face of all my principles that I have acquired over decades? Because it gives me freedom to do other things,” he said. “I figured out that you can load the impulse response of a violin body into the speaker block of the Fractal unit, and you can do [plays violin tones through his guitar].”
And when you hear him play those sounds, sounds far removed from the electric guitar’s usual range, it all makes perfect sense – especially since Govan has always been a player whose musical curiosity is aroused by the sounds he is hearing from the speaker.
“I’m a big believer in that kind of thing – if you listen to the sound coming out of the speaker, it tells you what kind of player to be,” Govan told MusicRadar in 2019. “I’m very responsive to how the rig is reacting. It’s nice to meet a new side of myself, especially like how I did towards the end of Last Orders. That all happened because it was an unfamiliar rig.”
Sometimes that’s the sound of an amp modeller loaded with the IR of a violin. Other times it could be the guitar itself, like when he got turned onto the Fender Jazzmaster after touring with Nile Marr on a Hans Zimmer run.
That’s how he ended up writing Spiritus Cactus from 2019's You Know What...? “I felt it was my duty to investigate his world just for one song,” he said. “It definitely made me play differently.”
Sometimes, that’s all we are looking for from our gear, digital, analogue or both.
