John Frusciante & Flea – Not Great Men

Used on The Empyrean, particularly on the solo for "Enough of Me", as stated in this April 2009 Vintage Guitar interview.

The main stuff for guitar sounds was that rig, and I was treating it with a modular synthesizer. So the recordings usually had nothing more than a wah pedal, distortion, and fuzz. I use the Boss Turbo Distortion pretty regularly, and an Electro-Harmonix English Muff’n tube fuzz, which has really extreme EQ and a big, thick, meaty sound. I used it on the solo for “Enough Of Me.” I turn the EQ up, but leave my guitar Tone knobs down and use either the middle or neck pickup so the initial source sound is really dark and kind of plain. If you blast the tone controls on the effect, you get a really thick, beautiful sound that reminds me of an exaggerated Eric Clapton tone in Cream, where you have this really smooth fuzz. For that solo, I was jumping from low to high notes rather than following a linear train of thought. I was kind of thinking in two ways at once by alternately playing very low notes with high notes, where the octave was displaced by a couple of octaves, and it worked really well.

In this photo, John Frusciante can be seen playing a Martin D-18 (it is not a D-28 as there is no white binding around the body). This same guitar can be seen in John Frusciante's bedroom on the documentary "Funky Monks", filmed during the recording of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" (see at 57:05 on this link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z3Gnbgjq0M). This Martin D-18 is therefore possibly the instrument used during the recording of the song "I Could Have Lied". It is possible to notice that the bridge pin of the G string on this guitar is white while the others are black ; this bridge pin was certainly swapped with one of the bridge pin of the 12-strings guitar used by John Frusciante during the recording of the song "Breaking The Girl" (this 12-strings guitar has 11 white bridge pins and 1 black bridge pin as you can see in the photo of this link : https://www.groundguitar.com/john-frusciante-gear/john-frusciantes-12-string-acoustic-breaking-the-girl).