When I first heard music it hit me like a tidal wave. When I was a kid I remember waking into my cousin’s bedroom, he was blasting Iron Man out of an old cassette boom box while air-guitaring. It was so loud and so powerful. Ozzy’s Speak of The Devil record had just come out, so it was a live version. We listened to that record over and over. It sounded larger than life.

Another earliest memories of discovering music was watching cable and back then, between movies, HBO used to play music videos. Whodathunkit, but HBO played Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast… we were blown away! We went to the record store the next day. There it was sitting on the big rack at the front of the store. We walked out with it I listened to that record so many times I memorized it… the screaming guitars, the searing rhythms, the power of the vocals and the driving of the drums and bass. I was hooked.

I was lucky enough to get an electric guitar not long after these events. We went to Manny’s, on 48th St. in NYC. It was a Kramer Striker guitar with a Gorilla GG-20 Amp. The coolest part was that we drove from our home in New Jersey to New York. Lining the walls of Manny’s were autographed photos of Iron Maiden and so many other stars I had been listening to.

Now I wanted to play like the guitarists on these records, and I wanted my guitars to sound like theirs. So I bought & sold & traded tons of gear, searching for the coolest guitar sounds. I wanted the guitar to sound huge, with lots of distortion that was tight on the low end and thick on the high end.

I traveled to New York quite often in those days for guitar gear. I had fallen in love with ESP Guitar necks. These necks had ebony fingerboards and big jumbo frets. I would attach them to various Fender, Kramer and ESP bodies and experiment with Schaller and Seymour Duncan pickups. I had a ton of fun putting these guitars together and taking them apart with reckless abandon.

I was playing these guitars at shows in New Jersey and New York and hot rodding my guitars and my amp rig all along. For the amp set-up I was using modern rack gear and various pedals until one day, I went vintage! I had picked up an old Fender Bandmaster Head that I ran through a Marshall 8×10. I was still using pedals and preamps for the gain. Back in those days there was no E-Bay and there was no interest in older gear so you could pick up vintage gear cheap.

Then I got my first Marshall. It was a hand wired 1973 Plexi Super-Lead Head and a 4×12 from the mid-70’s. Once again, it felt like I was hit with a tidal wave! I had been playing a ’76 Black Les Paul Custom for a few years now and it wasn’t until I got that set-up: the vintage Les Paul and Marshall, that three things happened… I realized exactly what I could or couldn’t play on the guitar without all my rack effects, I realized what excellent tone was, and I became much more discriminating with my pedals.

Atomic Music in Maryland had a lot of gear that I would pick up. The first pedal I got after my Les Paul and Marshall that stuck was an EH Phase Shifter. I used that pedal for gigs in every style of music from hard rock to funk to R&B. I have an EH LPB-1 pedal which I used in the Video that’s linked on the Blog page. That pedal drives an amp so transparently!

So after years of playing guitar and experimenting with gear I found my ultimate guitar tone and learned how to play just like my hero’s. But I have two new hero’s now… my boys, Noah Hunter and Lukey Alexander. My boys are fearless and full of vigor, and they rock… and you can see in the video! The story is that I had just discovered Guitar World’s Betcha Can’t Play This series and I decided to give it a go. I had turned on my laptop and played it a couple times… then Noah comes up and starts listening… and rocking to my amazement!! Check it out! There are actually two versions on my http://www.YouTube.com/veryjimmy -one where Noah had just walked in, and then the one you see.

Thanks alot for reading! Thanks to Scott Mathews for finding the video!!

Best of Luck,

-Jimmy Maguire