Paul Masvidal

Gear Gods: Whenever I get the chance to talk to bands that were playing years and years ago, I think about how the tones that were available then were so different, and so much more limited. Cynic was trailblazing the ability to jump between so many different genres, which was a lot harder to do back in the early ‘90s. What were you and Jason playing through on the Focus tours? And how difficult was it to achieve the breadth of tones?

Paul Masvidal: Was I running an MP-1? I think I was. Yeah, at that time I was a rack guy. I had a 15-space rackmount. My main preamp was an ADA MP-1 and I used an ADA midi controller. I had a Roland GM-70 guitar synth, which was really cool back then because it had Portamento [pitch glide between notes, instead of set intervals]. You could assign custom midi controllers to the unit on your guitar. It was just really hip for its time. It was very clunky in terms of a big, bulky thing, but what you could do with it was phenomenal. It just had this natural, flawed, organic kind of thing that was very cool at the time.