Top Artists Guitar Rigs

There’s a site that contains a large database of the guitars, amps and effects that a lot of the great guitarists use.  The site is GuitarGeek.com (The Guitar Rig Database).  Once you hit the front page you will find a list of the top 100 rigs that includes the rigs of guitarists like Satch, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Kobain of Nirvana and many more.  What I like about this site is you can very quickly get a feel for the effects that are being used by these guys so you can see how to find the tone of your favourite artists or simply look at the common equipment that many top guitarists use.  For example, a lot of these guys go for individual pedals rather than multi effects units and I was surprised at how common the BOSS DS-1 and DS-2 are for the distortion in their rigs.

In terms of the wah pedals, I’m sure you could guess that there are a lot of them using Dunlop (e.g. Eddie Van Hallen,  Zakk Wylde, Toim Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Dimberg Darrel from Pantera) and Vox (e.g. Jimi Hendrix, Randy Rhoads from Ozzy Osbourne ) wahs,  but you can also see others using more specialized wahs.  Take a look to see the sort of wah your favourite guitarists are using.

I found a great information resource about the wah pedal: the wah pedal online advisor http://www.thomann.de/gb/onlineexpert_137.html. It goes through their origins and the original Vox and Dunlop Crybaby models, along with more recent innovations such as digital wahs. It also discusses things such as the filter design and the auto-wah. Worth checking out if you want to do a bit of reading about the pedal.