Yngwie - Stage Equipment - Discussion by Ian Ferguson
Duane Allred
Malmsteen the Magnificent
[Equipment discussion by Ian Ferguson, former Ritchie Blackmore guitar
tech and Yngwie's Trilogy/Odyssey guitar tech, in Guitar Buyer's Guide
1987-88, as told to Joe Lalaina.]
Lalaina: The Swedish terror had just received his new Bradshaw box
when we encountered him in our January 1987 issue. Guitar tech Ian
Ferguson laboriously
detailed Yngwie's signal-chain details for us then.
Ferguson: I'm in charge of handling all his equipment, not just his
guitars. I try to make sure that all the settings on his amps and
effects are exactly the way he
wants them. He changes his mind just about every gig, so I work with
him very closely. Yngwie doesn't just press a switch--he beats the
crap out of it. He often
breaks foot pedals because he steps on them so hard. He thinks the
harder he presses them the better they'll work.
Yngwie has about 10 Fender Stratocasters and an Ovation Legend
acoustic model 1767 on the road this tour. Like Ritchie [Blackmore],
Yngwie cares more about
what a guitar sounds like than what it looks like. Sometimes he'll ask
me to change a pickup from one guitar to another less than an hour
before a show, or he'll ask
me to switch a neck from one guitar to another. I usually never know
what he wants to do until the day of the show.
The pickup configuration on all his Strats is basically the same. The
neck and bridge pickups are DiMarzio HS-3's and the middle pickups are
disconnected because
Yngwie doesn't like their sound. The DiMarzios, which Yngwie helped
develop, are stacked so they fit in the Fender slot. Nine of the 10
Strats have stock Fender
tremolos. Only one has a Floyd Rose. The Fender Tremolos are easier to
work with and they sound very good. Blackmore also liked using Fender
tremolos. I've
never had any problems trying to get them to stay in tune, even though
both Ritchie and Yngwie are two of the most violent tremolo users
around.
I put a new set of strings on Yngwie's guitars every night. He sweats
so much and plays so aggressively that by the end of the show the
strings are pretty much
dead and have lost much of their sustain. He's currently using Ernie
Ball stainless-steel strings, gauges .008, .011, .014, .022, .032, and
.044. Yngwie is using a Nady
701 Diversity System on tour. He used to use a cable as a whip and
twirl his guitar around his head with it. But now that he's gotten
used to playing wireless, he
hates using a cable since it restricts his freedom. Blackmore was the
exact opposite--he refused to use a wireless because he thought it
altered his sound too much.
Yngwie's amp set-up varies from venue to venue. For the bigger shows
we'll set up 28 Marshall Mk.11 50-watt heads with 31 Marshall 4x12
cabinets with
Celestion G12 25-watt speakers. Basically, there's 10 cabinets on
stage-left, 10 cabinets on stage-right, three cabinets under the drum
riser and four cabinets on
each side of the stage facing in. Not all the amps will be on at the
same time, but we have the capability of using them all. A splitter
box--which the amps are fed
into--enables me to choose various amps at any given time. I plug all
the amps into the splitter box and feed them into as many speaker
cabinets as I want. No
matter where Yngwie is standing, his sound will be there.
Yngwie is now using an effects rack designed by Bob Bradshaw. It
includes a Korg KMX-62 six-channel mixer; two Korg SDD 1000 digital
delays; a Korg SDD
2000 sampling digital delay; a Hugh II-G noise reduction unit; a Box
Octave Divider; a Furman PL-8 light module; and a Marshall 400-watt
power amp, model 6040,
which is used to take a processed signal back to various cabinets on
the stage.
Floor units consist of various Korg units, including chorus, graphic
eq, Octave V, and noise gate, all of which are housed in a Korg PME
40X. Eventually, these will
all be mounted into the rack. Yngwie also uses Moog Taurus synthesizer
bass pedals. Back stage, Yngwie uses two Crate G60-GT amps with
Celestion G12
M70-watt speakers to warm up with before a show.
An Yngwie Axology
[By Matt Resnicoff, in Guitar World, June 1988.]
For rehearsals and photo sessions, Yngwie Malmsteen still relies
completely on the services of a vast collection of Fender
Stratocasters and their care and
reassembly by technician, baby-sitter, Bradshaw tweaker par
excellence, Ian Ferguson. Ferguson maintains the frequently brutalized
instruments, which he says
include several mid-sixties models outfitted with scalloped
fingerboards of either maple or rosewood and powered by DiMarzio HS-3
single-coil pickups. "He's got
about 100 guitars at home," muses Fergie, "and so many Fenders that I
can't even believe it. Those vintage Strats, though probably won't be
brought out on the
upcoming tour [Odyssey]. For that, he'll mostly be using his six to a
dozen Fender Yngwie malmsteen models, which he really loves because he
can just walk into a
store and get one, plug in and play straight away; that the way he
likes it."
According to John Grunder of Fender, Yngwie probably won't need to
take the retail route to procure one of his own signature instruments;
the company supplies
the guitarist with specimens crafted to Malmsteen's own highly
standardized specifications, which Grunder claims have been drawn from
a 1961 candy apple red
Strat with a maple fingerboard. "We'll be offering the guitars with
maple or rosewood fingerboards," he says, "which, like Yngwie's, will
be scalloped and fitted with
22 frets. The bridge is an American standard tremolo, which has a
two-point pivot and is definitely the best of the non-locking
systems."
Yngwie's choice of electronics have also been duplicated for the
production Malmsteen model. "We're using DiMarzio HS-3's in the neck
and bridge," grunder
continues, "because they're quieter and maintain a high output. We've
put an American Standard pickup in the middle, which is smacked down
flush with the body
since he never uses that position.
Yngwie is still using very light string gauges, despite their tendency
to bend out of tune in the scooped fret spaced of scalloped
fingerboards. "I use.008's," he
explains, "but the bottom E string is a .046. Everybody who plays my
guitar usually goes out of pitch, but I seem to be able to avoid that.
I don't need it that light, but
I play a lot on tour and I do a lot of real heavy bending; sometimes
from the high C# (E string, ninth fret) up to F# (fourteenth fret),
stuff like that. I could do it with
a .010, which I use sometimes, actually, but after awhile, if you
sweat and you do these kinds of bends, your callouses just kind of
die."
Yngwie recorded the acoustic portions of Odyssey with an Alvarez-Yairi
DY-92 luteback steel-string, and a CY-127CE nylon string thinline
classical guitar, which
features a cutaway and a built-in Alvarez pickup system. The guitarist
also remain faithful to his custom-designed effects switching system
built by Bob Bradshaw,
which he's been experimenting with to create long, sweeping repeats to
add lushness and dimension to soloing. "It's incredible," he remarks.
"I can't believe I've gone
so long without it. It's so quiet--no noise whatsoever. I love it."
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