U2 – The Unforgettable Fire (Remastered)

The Edge can be seen using a Deluxe Memory Man in the documentary It Might Get Loud. It was his primary delay before The Joshua Tree, as mentioned in this ca. 1986 interview with "J.B.".

I'm looking into getting a TC Electronics delay, which gives you some of the same capabilities internally and has even more presets, which is interesting. I don't know whaat it'll sound like though. See, my first echo was a Memory Man, which was rather awful technically. It was analog, with all sorts of whines and hisses, but the actual sound of it was really quite musical. I didn't use it on this record, I used it pretty exclusively on Unforgettable Fire.

In this photo, The Edge is playing his 1973 Fender Stratocaster in a black finish. Fender later made a The Edge Signature Stratocaster based on his original 1973 model. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he talks about that guitar:

"But I really missed the Strat, so when we got a little money together – when we got our record deal – the first chance I got I bought my black Strat, which I still have."

He continues to describe some of its distinctive features:

"It has some interesting features: the bridge is a brass bridge, not like the standard Fender bridge, and again that adds some resonance. It has a little more sustain, a little more girth to the tone. And I put a DeMarzio pickup in, which gets that tone. In addition to my Fender amp, I play to a Vox, which is a very bright amp, so it gives a little more substance."

Later in the interview, the interviewer asks, "An unusual thing about your '73 Strat is that it has a DiMarzio FS-1 pickup in the bridge position. Did you mod that out yourself?" The Edge replies:

"Yeah. With the amps I was using, the bridge pickup was just too piercing. It was too thin-sounding for me, so I did some research and found the DiMarzio FS-1, and it was just a bigger-sounding pickup. It worked great. Whenever I've gotten Strats, I've always put one of those in."

When the interviewer points out that The Edge never plays out of the bridge pickup, The Edge says:

That's true most of the time, but there are some songs, like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Gloria," where I used the bridge pickup. I really got into the out-of-phase sound [where the guitar is set between the bridge and middle pickup] from The Unforgettable Fire onwards. Weirdly enough, I think "Pride (In the Name of Love)" was the first song that I really used that out-of-phase pickup position; I didn't use it on "Bad" or on the album. In rehearsal for the tour, I tried it and it was like, "Wow that's great. I love it! It's much better." So we did the tour.

I remember we did a live version of that and [Unforgettable Fire co-producer] Danny [Lanois] was in the studio listening to the guitar sounds from the show and he was like, "What the fuck, Edge? You sound so much better than the album. What did you do?" [Laughs] Then he got jealous, because the live guitar sound was better than what we got on the album. I said, "I'm sorry I didn't think of it!" But yeah, it's definitely better, this [laughs].

The full Rolling Stone interview is here.