Phil Collen

In this video Phil shows us his signature guitar. Phil writes on his official site "This is one of the earliest PC1’s. It has a chunky neck, mahogany body and a maple top. The reason for the lack of color and glossy finish is the theory that the less paint and crap you put on a guitar, the more live and vibrant it sounds. I agree with this to a point as some heavily painted guitars just sound great, for whatever reason (go figure). This has to do with the age of the wood, type of wood and just plain old “being played in”, like my Jackson Bela guitar, which sounds awesome but is covered in stuff. Anyway, this guitar really has a vibe to it. It also has the original PC1 headtsock. It has been on lots of stuff, albums, etc., but it has a brother guitar, almost the same apart from having a koa body. So I do tend to get these two mixed up from a visual point of view."

I bought this guitar in a music store in Dublin, during the Hysteria writing sessions in 1984. I love how the neck felt, it's a huge baseball bat of a thing - but it sat around for ages as the bridge rusted and it really needed a re-fret. It came back to life with a new bridge, frets and noiseless fender replacement pickups. Then it became a touring guitar. I can honestly say it is one of my favorite guitars to play (I say that quite often, but there are about five times when I really mean it - this is one of 'em). It now has jumbo frets on it.

If you want to hear it, it's the intro and first verse guitar on the song "nine lives" and is featured a lot on the "Yeah!" album as part of the rhythm guitar sound.

Here we have a Jackson with a neck-through and a funky eighties crackly design. This was definitely my main guitar for the Hysteria tour and featured in tons of Lepp videos. I think I got the guitar in '86. It originally had a Kahler bridge until some time in the 90's. Then it was fitted with a Floyd Rose trem bridge. The finish was silver but basically covered in black and shrink dried until the black cracked, giving it its unique finish. I love this guitar and brought it back out on the 2006 US tour with Journey, after about a fifteen year hiatus. Oh, yeah, almost forgot, it has my name on the 24th fret.

You can hear this guitar on the intro lick to "Pour Some Sugar on Me"

You can see crackle jack on the "Sugar" video, "Women" video, in the "Round and In Your Face" DVD and countless other things. If I've left any out, please feel free to shoot me a line; or if you have photos and stuff of it, Send 'em over.

This is my only double neck guitar, For obvious reasons. They’re uncomfortable and heavy. But they look really cool. This has bats as fret markers as a tonic to the PRS doves. And now has a PC sustainer on the six string neck. The twelve string neck has an amazing sound. I used the guitar on the 2006 tour with Journey. I always make mistakes on this guitar, 'cause I can’t quite get a grip on it. However, I’ve been getting requests to take it out on tour again in 2009. The price of trying to look slick. You can hear the twelve string on Blood Runs Cold and Truth, both on Slang and the Later intro riff, being played by me and Viv at the same time, on the same guitar. Weird, huh?

This was the first signature model I had with Jackson. It was done over a long period of time starting during the Hysteria tour. I wanted something a bit different from all the guitars that were out there so we basically started with a shape on paper that kind of looked like a fender jaguar and stretched it to look kind of like what would become a Surfcaster. But Grover Jackson said "No, let's makes this more unique." and began a project that had Grover coming out on tour with drawings and specs, and ended in chopping at pieces of wood. Anyway, we finally settled on this shape, carved out of a single piece of wood, with a neck-through design and a beautiful carved arch top. Grover wanted it to resemble a Ferrari or a piece of art. The only problem was the amount of time it took to do all of this. They have machines now that would bang it out in about five minutes. But back then it had to be done the old-fashioned way.

This was the first working prototype. It has 29 frets, a Kahler trem and sounds great. You can see it featured on the 'Love Bites' video.

This is my first guitar. It’s a Gibson SG200, an entry level Gibson from the early seventies. It originally came with a strange pickup selector, switching system and two single coil pickups. But after playing it for a while I felt I needed a bit more oomph, so I had the local guitar shop, in Walthamstow, route out a hole and stick a Gibson humbucker in it. I loved it and couldn’t put it down. It also became obvious as I got a little older what a cool thing it was for my parents to get me this for my sixteenth birthday, as they weren’t exactly loaded.

I really love this. I got this during the slang tour in 96, I think it showed up at Irvine, just down the road from where I live. The color was a bit of an experiment, that went wrong. It was supposed to be the color, that ended up being chlorine, a kinda blue. But obviously turned a bit green. Making it really unique. My main guitar, for a few years. It has an amazing maple top and beautiful maple fingerboard. Bt also feels really solid to play and has a real thick sound. You can hear this as the main guitar on promises and also the solo.

This is a natural Jackson PC1. But it’s quite a bit different from the others as it has a lace wood body with maple top and a rosewood fingerboard. It also has a wider neck and feels very similar to my Charvel San Dimas. It sounds completely different from the other PC1s. it was nicknamed ‘?’ or The Riddler by Stan Schiller as we couldn’t quite think of name for it. It resides, these days in my bathroom, so it gets played a lot. I always wash my hands.

I nearly wore this guitar out. I got it when I was seventeen and working in a burglar alarm factory. I borrowed 3 hundred quid off of my mum and dad, paying it back 5 quid a week (Pounds Sterling). I thought it was the coolest guitar I’d ever seen and I’d prop the thing up and stare at it. But I wanted more gusto out of it and I’d heard of these American pickups called DiMarzios I had a super distortion put in and I’ve been using them ever since. (All my PC1’s have super 3 DiMarzios in the bridge position) this was the main guitar for my early bands Dumb Blondes, Lucy, Tush and Girl. You can hear it on the solos on Hollywood Tease (Girl) Rock 'Til You Drop, and Pyromania, among many others.

This guitar is a bit of a celebrity, getting in way more places than I can.

In 1985 Grover Jackson said to me “you know we can paint anything on a guitar and make it glow in the dark”. Really was my response. What about Dracula? Sure he said get me a photo of what you want and we’ll do a version. So I found a cool shot of Bela Lugosi and it was painted on this guitar. It originally had a Kahler trem on it and in the nineties it got a facelift, new pickup and Floyd trem. Incredibly, it still sounds great even with that crazy amount of paint on it. It also has a weird history. When the specs and design, along with the photo were left on a desk. A vampire bat apparently decided to sleep on the wall above the desk. Freaking everyone out the next morning.

I still play this guitar on tour, occasionally. It stayed at the rock and hall of fame for three years, in a case, and has been on the front of many magazines and appeared in tons of videos: Sugar, Animal, Armageddon It and Rock On among others. It also has the amazing Adam Revier titanium block put in by Scott Appleton, my tech. and changed the sound dramatically. Yeah, it rocks.

This was the main guitar on the Hysteria album. A Japanese made strat that I got for my 21st birthday from my mum (I know my parents were great to me.) This guitar has been around the block and it always delivered. Perfect intonation, even after being lost in China for a week or so. It was still in tune. It had a quite a bit done to it. It had a Kahler trem and an Ibanez humbucker from my original destroyer in it. That went in after meeting Eddie Van Halen and him saying “you know, you’re not going to be happy 'til you put a humbucker in that guitar”, or something like that. And he was right. This was my main guitar through the Girl days right up until I started using Jacksons. Unfortunately it all went pear shaped when I had a Floyd put in it, weakening the wood and making the bridge a little fragile. So at the moment I’m scared to mess with it.

This is on more records I’ve done than any other guitar I own. It's all over Hysteria, most of the solos, on Animal, the Girl albums etc. Right now I’ve retired it and it’s taking a well-earned rest.

How gorgeous is this? I got this guitar just before the Nine Lives video shoot. It’s called Chameleon, because at one angle it’s purple and at another it’s green (two colors I can’t see properly, being color blind). It also has a beautiful purple binding, I think, on the neck and is decked out with a titanium block and bridge saddles. I used it on the 2008 tour and it’ll be on the upcoming 2009 tour. Plays and sounds great and it’s fully loaded.

You can see it on the Nine Lives video and I used it at the Fender University seminar/clinic I did on March 6th.

When I started playing guitar, back in England, I used to see all of these classic American guitar players holding one of these see through, quasi-plastic guitars and it looked really cool. I found out that they were playing one of these Dan Armstrong guitars. I wanted one for years until they stopped making them and I’d forgotten all about them. Funny enough, in 2006 I had been wondering where I could get my hands on one and all of a sudden there was one, in a backstage Ampeg shack outside the venue we were playing with Journey. Neal Schon was in there checking some stuff out with Scott, who would later work with me. And there was this guitar. So I had to have one. This is a reissue and sounds amazing, considering it’s not even made out of wood. It made the odd appearance on that tour. And you can hear it on Viv's rhythm guitar part, which was originally just a guide (Stones tuning) on Nine Lives.

This one's famous. I had guitar companies copying this one, trying to entice me to use them. I receive this in the post after I returned from the "Girls" Japanese tour, in 1981. Soon it became my main guitar. I mean it looked weird and was like a parallel universe version of the Gibson Explorer with a bit more flash. There are three pickups (I used to salivate over three pickup Les Pauls) of which I only ever use the outer two. The inlays are flashy and my name is on the 12th fret. It has a Khaler Tremolo put in my Dave Story, the guy who invented the Khaler. This guitar could do it all and take me through any kind of journey, and it did that very well right up until the end of the Pyromania tour. I have three more copies of this guitar and you can see them later. This is the original one though. You can hear this on the solos on Photograph, Foolin', and Rock of Ages among others. It is also on the picture disc for the single version of Rock of Ages.

On this video for Premier Guitar, called Rig Rundown, Phil himself says he uses Jacksons PC1 and a new Jackson Supreme.

"And I got the chance to use my ’54 Gibson 175 on the song “Whiskey.” And I’ve also got this 330, a ’63 330, which -- it’s broken. Only one of the pickups works, which is luckily the neck one."

"And I got the chance to use my ’54 Gibson 175 on the song “Whiskey.” And I’ve also got this 330, a ’63 330, which -- it’s broken. Only one of the pickups works, which is luckily the neck one."

You can see at 33:18 the gold Marshall preamp in the rig.

" Fender put this little G-Dec. Do you remember the G-Dec? You could punch in and you could just play with them. It was the second G-Dec, it wasn’t the very first one. It was the second one, which I still use. It sounds great. I’ve actually done gigs with it. Me and Debbi actually did a thing in a theater, and I’m like, “There’s no way I’m going to hear this thing.” But I put it there anyway. I just tilted it up and used this thing and it sounded killer. So, it shocked me. I actually just used one of the standard presets on there as well and like, “Wow!” It was on fire!."

"Yeah, absolutely. I actually use a Cyber-Twin as well. Actually, I was on Jimmy Fallon -- I jammed with the Roots and everything -- and I played this Cyber-Twin. And I loaded all my presets from home on to the one in New York, and it sounded exactly the same. And actually, the big gig we’re doing next week -- I’ve got my Def Leppard C rig, which is my Marshall JMP-1, which I’ve been using for like 15 years, and a Fractal. And it’s my C-rig – we have an A rig, we have a B rig, and we have a C rig."

"[Interviewer:] From a guitar perspective, is it true that there are no traditional amps on Hysteria and that you and Steve Clark played all your parts through a Rockman unit, which is essentially a headphone amplifier?

[Collen:] Pretty much. I used a small Gallien-Krueger amp on the demo for “Love Bites,” which made it on to the record, and also on a bit of “Animal”—that little feedback thing in the intro is me leaning hard on the Krueger. But otherwise the sound is all Rockman. And the reason for that was there were so many layers of tracks, and the sound was so huge that if you had had a massive Marshall sound it wouldn’t have fit sonically. The guitars would have smothered the vocals and drums. They really had to fit in a specific slot. Plus, Steve and I weren’t playing straight power chords; we were doing all these inversions and partials and different things that required definition. That would have been lost with a big, overdriven-amp sound."

The Rock-Box was used for the recording of Hysteria

"On Pyromania the guitar sounds were recorded using a Marshall 100 watt amp." The image shows a Marshall JCM 800

In this video, band members of Def Leppard mention that they now use Axe-FX III's live.

"I’ve got a Pro Tools setup upstairs where I do vocals, but for the most part I use my Mac. And I use {Native Instruments] Guitar Rig 5. I think they’re on version 6 now, but I use 5. And pretty much every song on that album was done on that, I think. Yeah, at least nine of the songs on the album were recorded on Guitar Rig – I just plug in to the Mac."

"Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly what I use, you know, Superior Drummer, yeah."

A 33:18 you can see the Axe FX in the rack.