John Nagle Gear

Because of the range of sound that John is able to produce from guitars, there has been some speculation on the subject of the equipment he uses. The bass sounds you can hear on a lot of the recordings are produced by a Roland VG-8 unit. This is connected to the guitar via a special Roland GK2-A pickup on the guitar.

Apart from the sound signal, the pickup sends additional information to the Roland VG-8 that allows the unit to produce the bass sounds from the lower strings, John has most of his electric guitars fitted with Roland GK-2A split pickups. This signal is fed into two Roland VG-8 virtual modeling units. These allow him to split separate the signal from the lower strings from the others.

The two signals are then fed into two amps: one for guitar and one for Bass. For live work there is also a splitter box to take direct signals to pre-amps and then directly out to Front Of House P.A.

Using this setup allows use of different strings for the bass sounds on different songs and sometimes this is even changed in the middle of a song.

The use of the two amps means that the signals can be precessed and produced completely separately and gives excellent distinction between the two sounds.

John's acoustic setup is more standard and he uses various different guitars to produce different tones and for different tunings.