Grateful Dead Music Forum

One of my other all time favorites, Johnny Cipollina along with Gary Duncan worked together as well as Bobby and Jerry. Happy Trails is still one of my top three favorite albums ever. John was an early gear head. Check out his rig here;

http://www.johncipollina.com/rock.html

Bobby?

Now that's a friggin rig. I have seen contraptions less funny looking at the circus.

very "steam punk" looking - cool, cool, cool
Cipollina is certainly up there in the guitar players that did not get their due IMHO

how exactly did the horns figure into this?

caspersvapors wrote:how exactly did the horns figure into this?

To quote the website this was taken from; "To create his distinctive guitar sound, Cipollina developed this one-of-a-kind amplifier stack. All of his guitars, including the one here, were wired with two pickups, one for bass and one for treble. The bass pickup fed into the two Standel bass amps on the bottom of the stack. Each Standel was equipped with two 15-inch speakers. The treble pickups fed the two Fender amps-a Fender Twin Reverb with two 12-inch speakers and a Fender Dual Showman- that drove the six Wurlitzer horns."

"I like the rapid punch of solid-state for the bottom, and the rodent-gnawing distortion of the tubes on top," Cipollina said.

So the horns added a lot of high end. Admittedly, his tone was a bit like having a nail driven through your head, in a good way of course. Great, unheralded player that played with finger picks and rode the whammy bar for his distinctive trem effects.