Article & photos: bit.ly/311RigRundown
Before their career-spanning show at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works, guitarists Tim Mahoney, (and singer) Nick Hexum, and bassist Aaron “P-Nut” Wills (above right) walk PG through their various instruments and talk about how they use their impressive load of gear to cover material from 14 studio albums.
Tim’s longtime No. 1 is “Ol Blue”-a PRS Custom 24 that has been used on every 311 album and tour since he got it from Paul in 1999. When testing out new gear or pickups, Tim goes with “Ol Blue” because he’s most familiar with its tone and can hear the slightest changes to the sound produced out of the speaker. He used to use Seymour Duncan Antiquities and PAF-style humbuckers, but before this tour he put in Seymour Duncan Pegasus (bridge) and Sentient (neck) pickups.
Frontman/guitarist Nick Hexum’s gear lust started when he was 14 and traveling with his dad to a camping trip in Canada where they found a 1963 Gibson Les Paul goldtop in a pawn shop. Sadly, the guitar no longer exists-snapped neck-but his love for Les Pauls is still there. He uses this natural Gibson Les Paul on most of the band’s early work like “Down” and “Homebrew.” All of his guitars take Ernie Ball Slinky .011-.048 strings.
Influenced by Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher who rocked Warwick in the ’90s, a young Aaron “P-Nut” Wills loved how Norwood’s sound “was greasy, distorted, funky, and at the same time, the bass looked like it had just been freshly cut from a tree,” and he’s been popping and rocking ever since on Warwicks. This particular 5-string is from his signature series and based on the Streamer II body that Wills first played decades earlier. One request on the body design is that they sandwiched purpleheart in between to slabs of Australian blackwood burl (top) and afzelia (back). It comes stock with MEC pickups and preamp, but P-Nut has upgraded with a Seymour Duncan Music Man humbucker and a slanted Seymour Duncan Apollo.
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