Simon McBride believes “truss rods suck the tone and sustain out of guitars”
If guitarists needed another excuse to argue about tone, Deep Purple’s Simon McBride may have just provided one.
Speaking to Guitar World ahead of the band’s upcoming album SPLAT!, the guitarist reveals he recorded the entire album with a prototype PRS that ditches one feature found in almost every modern electric guitar: the truss rod.
READ MORE: Deep Purple guitarist says Smoke on the Water is a “challenging” song to play: “It is easy technically, but it’s not easy to play”
For those new to guitar anatomy, the truss rod is the metal bar running through the length of your guitar’s neck beneath the fretboard. Its job is to counteract the constant pull of the strings, helping keep the neck straight and allowing relief adjustments over time.
In other words, it’s one of the least glamorous – but arguably most important – parts of a modern guitar. McBride, however, believes it’s also getting in the way of great tone.
“I played everything on this record with a prototype from PRS,” he says. “The idea is that there’s no truss rod. It goes back to the early days when guitars had no truss rods because I’m a firm believer that if you put a truss rod in a guitar, it sucks the tone and sustain out of it.”
According to McBride, the difference was immediately noticeable.
“This guitar is like an animal,” he says. “It’s hard to control because there’s so much natural sustain, and I don’t do high-output pickups.”
“Acoustically, there’s such a difference without the truss rod. [The neck] must be the strongest piece of wood they could find because it doesn’t bend at all.”
Guitarists, of course, are no strangers to passionate debates over what does and doesn’t affect tone. From tonewoods and guitar shape to pick material and even theoretical knowledge, there’s rarely a shortage of opinions. McBride’s truss rod theory is certainly one of the more unusual additions to the conversation, though we wouldn’t recommend anyone start pulling theirs out just yet.
Deep Purple’s new album SPLAT! arrives on 3 July. Check out their latest single below.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
