John Frusciante

"One that I've found recently that I really like...using this Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress effect and then using this DOD Analog Delay that Omar has that I'm borrowing right now. I turned off the original signal and had an echo maybe half a second long, or a little longer. And set it to one repeat or a couple of repeats," says John Frusciante, at 2:29:00 in this interview, talking about his use of the EHX Electric Mistress and DOD Analog Delay.

The Fender 63 reverb unit can be seen here at the front of John's 2002 By The Way pedalboard.

in this picture john frusciante is seen holding a 1960s fender jaguar lake placid blue in 1993 although this guitar looks similar to his fender jaguar seen in the under the bridge music video it is not, the jaguar in the music video is a 1966 seaform green jaguar and the lake placid blue jaguar has some kind of sticker just below the bridge. There is little known about this guitar, it has only ever been seen in one picture and there are no videos of him playing it. The guitar may have been sold or was destroyed in the fire in john frusciantes house in the 90s.

Here John is pictured with a Fender Duo-Sonic. The year of this guitar is unknown but it is rumoured to be a 1965 Duo-Sonic.

In a May 2005 interview with Total Guitar magazine, John Frusciante is posing with a vintage Gibson ES-175 guitar. The photo is captioned, "John with vintage Gibson ES-175 - a real peach too" Below the Gibson ES-175 photo of Total Guitar magazine, Frusciante got the ES-175 because Steve Howe played one.

In this interview from an April 2001 issue of Guitar One magazine, John Frusciante talks about the recording of his solo album, "To Record Only Water For Ten Days".

Guitar One: Your first two solo albums were recorded on a 4-track. On what was this album recorded?

John Frusciante: It was all recorded on a digital 8-track machine -- a Yamaha MD8. Then I had somebody dump it onto 2" tape so everything could be separately EQ'd at length, and separate types of compression could be given to each separate thing. I don't have any understanding of the science of how to "separate" things with the equalization, and most of these songs have a lot of different types of sounds going on; it's important for you to be able to hear each thing. On a lot of my mixes, you couldn't really hear the acoustic guitar because I would sort of favor the drum machine or the synthesizers or something; I'd kind of bury my voice and my guitar a lot, which actually should probably be the main things. So the guy who mixed it made those the main things.

In this scan from the magazine Guitar World Acoustic (USA), April/May 2005 issue, Frusciante is asked, "Do you write all your songs on acoustic guitar?" He confirms that he owns a 1940s Martin 0-18:

FRUSCIANTE: "Pretty much, although sometimes I write on an unamplified electric guitar. I have a few old Martins, two small-bodied 0-15's and an 0-18, at my house that date from the Forties. I usually write songs on one of those. And I always bring a couple of acoustic guitars on the road with me to write with. Writing songs on an unamplified electric has its drawbacks. The guitar is so quiet that I sometimes sing in a high falsetto voice that doesn't really work when I do the final recording. So I've learned to write on the acoustic and actually sing in the style that I want to use on the final recording."

In this photo, John Frusciante can be seen with a Gibson ES-335 in a sunburst finish (the 335 is the second guitar from the left). In an article from Vintage Guitar, John Frusciante talks about this same guitar. He says, "...I’m not sure what years the ES-175 and 335 are from. I don’t play those much; I bought them because Steve Howe played them, but they don’t really go with my style that well. I feel like Strats are an extension of me, and a Jaguar feels like the next closest thing to being an extension of me. Les Pauls and SGs seem like a further stretch. With a 175 or 335, I feel like a totally different person. I barely see a relationship to the way I play and the way those guitars are set up. You grow up developing a style on a Strat, and that’s what you play all the time."

Later in the same interview he says, "Sometimes I go through a phase where I learn a lot of jazz, where my 175 or 335 will come in handy."

Frusciante's ES-335 has a Bigsby vibrato.

John Frusciante's MXR Phase 90 with block logo can be seen in the middle of his pedalboard (circa 2000) in this photo.

at 0:36 seconds on the Dani California music video you can see john frusciante play a Gibson "fool" sg replica

John Frusciante used a Fender Toronado electric guitar in an orange finish in the "Can't Stop" music video. You can see him with this guitar at 0:54, 1:02, 1:12, and so on throughout the video.

John Frusciante in a band called H.A.T.E. along with Flea. Roland JC-120 can be seen behind him.

"What microphones did you use to record your guitars?

I use a Shure SM57 positioned on axis a couple of inches from the cone. On some tracks the engineer, Ryan Hewitt, added a Royer R-121 ribbon mic, positioned about 15 feet away, in order to capture some of the room sound. We used a Telefunken Ela M 250 tube condenser mic on the acoustic guitars."

From a Vintage Guitar Magazine article, "John Frusciante: Red Hot On The Empyrean" it is revealed that John Frusciante owns a circa 1961 Gibson SG/Les Paul Custom in Cherry Red finish.

Article can be found here.

"But Frusciante now calls the Shadows Collide with People recording experience “frustrating.” Although he doesn't disown the album, he speaks with more affection about the demos he made for it with Klinghoffer on a Tascam 488 mkII 8-track cassette recorder."

"One that I've found recently that I really like...using this Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress effect and then using this DOD Analog Delay that Omar has that I'm borrowing right now. I turned off the original signal and had an echo maybe half a second long, or a little longer. And set it to one repeat or a couple of repeats," says John Frusciante, at 2:29:00 in this interview, talking about his use of the EHX Electric Mistress and DOD Analog Delay.

"I think the P-Bass might be a ’61. I play that one at the end of “Dark/Light” on my record." - John Frusciante.

John Frusciante used a DOD FX65 on stage during the Pinkpop Festival in 1990. The pedal appears very clearly in this video taken from the concert around 2:41 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfOdTdv_sJo&list=RDNfOdTdv_sJo&start_radio=1).

"Renoise is my main DAW, and I also use some drum machines, sequencers, and other hardware, along with my Doepfer, Arp, and other modular synthesizers."

In this screenshot from an entry by John Frusciante on his official website, he talks about using his Mosrite Ventures guitar on recordings of unreleased music of his past: "I have put up a 19 minute group of 6 songs recorded on 4-track cassette in May 2010, the instrumentation being 3 guitars and one drum machine. It is a bunch of weird anti-rock star guitar solos, played mainly on a Mosrite Ventures guitar..."

According to JFtab.com he used a DigiTech Whammy for a short amount of time. In an Interview Dave Lee (Frusciante's Guitar tech) confirms he used the Digitech Whammy from april - july 2007. (http://www.jfeffects.com.br/2016/12/jf-effects-interviews-dave-lee-guitar.html)

It can be heard in intro Jams like Cochella 2007 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO_iw2HdQbE)

The Mosrite FuzzRite appeared on John's 2006 Stadium Arcadium tour pedalboard. Shown here as no.5 on his pedalboard.

In this photo John Frusciante can be seen using His Gibson Les Paul Deluxe with a Goldtop. This also may be his Gibson Les Paul Classic.

In this photo, you can clearly see that there's a red wah pedal on Frusciante's board. Because of the knobs on the side of the pedal, it's admittedly that is a Xotic XW-1 Red Limited Edition.

The Guyatone VT-X tremolo was included on John's 2006 Stadium Arcadium tour pedalboard. It is marked as no.15 on this image.

This was the only guitar that John had with him when he first joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in 1988. He only used it for a couple of gigs with the Peppers [Red Hot Chili Peppers John Anson Ford Theater October 8, 1988], and for some of the early concerts with HATE (sideband project with Flea).

This particular guitar is somewhat of a mystery. What we do know is that the guitar had 24 fret maple neck with dot inlays, long banana headstock, strat-style body with sharper horns, and an HSS pickup configuration. It also featured a custom paint job, perhaps something inspired by Eddie Van Halen who John looked up to in the early days.

As far as the exact model, the closest possibility seems to be the Kramer Pacer Custom II. As one of our readers pointed out, this seems to be the only model with an HSS config where the humbucker isn’t slanted like for instance on the Striker model, which features the same pickup layout.

What doesn’t fit with the usual configuration of Pacer Custom II model is the 24 fret maple neck featuring long banana headstock. By 1986/87 when the model was first introduced, Kramer already started using pointy headstocks, so John’s guitar must have been one of a kind. Even the few of the Pacers that featured maple necks all came with pointy headstocks finished in black, so again quite unusual seeing that particular setup on John’s guitar.

As far as to what happened to the guitar post-1988, we were able to spot it in the 1993 short documentary recorded at John’s place. This means that John kept the guitar for at least five years, even though by then he switched to playing Fender Stratocasters almost exclusively.

In this rig diagram three 1960B cabs can be seen

The Ampeg Dan Armstrong was used on the Californication tour.

“The Roland MC-202 [an early-’80s synthesizer/sequencer] is one of my favorite instruments,”

via Premier Guitar

In this photo of Frusciante's "live room", included in this June 16, 2016 article on his official website about The Almighty Instrumental Mixes, a Supro amp can be seen at the back of the room. Based on the pin pattern that attaches the grill cloth to the cab, it appears to be the 1624T Dual-Tone model.

My live room, created by contractor Jacques Lacroix, acoustician Vincent Van Hoff, and my studio manager Anthony Zamora, was the main place I got room sounds, reverbs, and atmosphere on these recordings. I sent sounds and performances from my computer into the room where they would come through a speaker, making the room reverberate, which would then be picked up by a room mic, the cable of which would bring this sound to my mixing board, from where it would return to the computer, where I would combine the rooms acoustics with the source sound. I’d generally do a certain amount of subtractive eq on my computer when sending the sound into the room, then on my mixing board when the sound came back to me, and also on the computer again when fitting it into the entire mix. These are two pictures of the room, each from opposite angles.