I began playing the guitar almost by chance. I was watching my younger brother who studied classical guitar and I, who had never seen an instrument before, would tell him: “that's not the way to do it, this is how you should do it"... I, who had never played the guitar. From that point, to really getting started took nothing at all. It was the mid-Seventies and in that period I was increasingly keen on the music of the American West Coast, from Bob Dylan to Neil Young with Crosby, Stills and Nash and so off I went with the acoustic guitar playing Hurricane or Cowgirl in the Sand and Old Man, Harvest and The Needle and the Damage Done.
My first important guitar was a black Gibson Les Paul Custom, a gift of that saintly woman my grandmother, which I then sold for an Ibanez which wasn't even so high quality... ah, juvenile mistakes. In fact, in my present instrumentation there's a 1980 Cherry Sunburst Gibson Les Paul Standard, like Jimmy Page's to be clear, which I bought again because a Gibson should never be missing in the guitar fleet of an out-and-out Zeppelinian. In addition to the Les Paul I have a Paul Reed Smith, a great guitar which is really giving me great satisfaction, and a Chinese replica of the Music Man (I forget which model) which I use to practice, and a blue electrified acoustic Takamine.
Regarding amplification, I have a Fender De Ville (60 watt, 4 cones) which I use when I play blues, while for rock I use the pre Marshall JMP-1 with which I enter in the Marshall finale 9100 (100 watts) with a Marshall 1960 countersunk loudspeaker. In other words, I like the warm and aggressive tube sound, which is made to sing well with by both the Les Paul and the PRS.
In Synopsis I used the Les Paul for the clean parts while for all those with distortion I used the PRS; both guitars were channelled through the Marshall.

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