![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/morse2.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/glover.jpg)
Too many buttons
Guitar World has another excerpt from the interview with Simon McBride slated to appear in the printed version of Guitarist.
“Steve [Morse] is a great player, but he’s a different sort of player, so that was a big thing for me – to get that big, powerful sound,” he tells Guitarist of his tonal task as the band’s chief shredder. “I have a lot of amps, but for most of the Purple stuff I use my live rig, which is the [Neural DSP] Quad Cortex.
“I can hear a lot of Ritchie Blackmore fans crying out, going, ‘No! He’s using digital stuff!’ But it’s brilliant.”
“I had to change my sound a bit because you’re dealing with Don Airey, who plays keys, the Hammond and Leslie, and a Marshall head and cabinet,” McBride explains. “He’s in a very similar frequency range to [my] guitar, so I had to figure something out to make the guitar sound more powerful.
“I was talking to the guys at Engl, who made Steve Morse’s signature amp, and Engl gave me an Artist Edition head,” he adds, having been turned off by Morse’s amps for having too many buttons.
“I asked them to tweak it and put a lot more power in the lower mids and low-end. I knew the Leslie and Hammond didn’t have that, so that could be my little space and would cut through but also make me sound powerful when we play a riff together.”
Read more in Guitar World and/or order a copy of the Guitarist from Magazines Direct.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Ironically, the Artist Edition is based on the Ritchie Blackmore Signature E650 amp head.
July 7th, 2026 at 06:23And what’s ironic about that? It has inherent logic more like! 😂
Simon’s concept of guitar sound is closer to Ritchie‘s than to Steve‘s. It‘s that British Isles thing.
July 7th, 2026 at 14:07I don’t know what Simon is about, but you can never have enough bottoms, shapely ones especially.
It’s refreshing that he at least admits to modeling his guitar sound, so many bands don’t and hide behind mock amps when their guitar sound is 100% digitalized. Not giving away names, but pale slithering reptiles were among the scaly culprits.
July 7th, 2026 at 15:10