Players

Most guitarists build their sound by choosing tones. What Robert Fripp designed was the mechanism from which sound is born. Frippertronics, built from two tape recorders; the Roland GR-300 replacing the sound source; Soundscapes centred on an Eventide H3000. What stays constant as the gear changes is the attitude of building a system before playing. What does it mean to design a methodology rather than a tone?

In an era when tubes were treated as the only correct answer, one player defined a decade with a transistor amp. Dimebag Darrell and the Randall RG100ES. His reason for choosing solid state was neither cost nor availability. It was to stop the amplifier from rounding off the instant of the pick. The same choice of solid state came from a demand exactly opposite to Allan Holdsworth's. A story about requirements, not technology, deciding sound.

From the '70s to the '90s, guitar amps polished one value: the interaction of picking and distortion — making the attack feel good. In the middle of that, one player chose the exact opposite. Allan Holdsworth. Read his gear from there and it all makes sense: he was designing time, not tone.