THERE'S MORE TO A GREAT GUITAR SOUND THAN A GREAT GUITAR - FRANK MARINO (OUR SECOND CANADIAN GUITAR HERO THIS MONTH) TELLS TONY BACON ABOUT HIS AMPS, SPEAKERS, AND HIS STYLE.

For a man who is supposed to have suddenly started to play like Jimi Hendrix immediately after a bad acid trip in the 1960s, Frank Marino today comes on like a calm, Canadian hippy with a penchant for DIY equipment and a somewhat more relaxed approach to playing high-level rock guitar than I'd expected.

That's the impression I got when I met him at the soundcheck for the Mahogany Rush gig at Hammersmith Odeon in March. Watching Frank go through his equipment, yelling instructions at the on-stage monitor mixer ("Cut one-and-a-half K, no a little more, I said a little... etc) and unsuccessfully attempting to lose some of the very noisy hum in his amp set-up, I reckon it's fair to add to that description that Marino's a thorough musician.

But the hums get worse, Frank stays remarkably at ease, and the soundcheck drags on. Eventually, up in a dressing room behind the stage, Frank explains the problem.

"Yeah, we're getting more harmonic distortion sound here tonight than we do in America, because the amps are really designed to run on 60 cycles. We can change the voltage from 110 or 120 to 240 to run the amplifiers, but we can't change the cycles without a cycle-changer.

"Now the tubes are acting all funny, and they don't really know whether they're seeing 50 cycles a second on the input side as opposed to 60 cycles. So the timing, the phase relationship of the amplifier is kinda freaking out. It comes out as a brrrr, and that hum is almost as loud as the note!

"...MARINO'S PEDALBOARD... DESCRIBED AS 'A LOT OF FILTERS AND STUFF THAT WE DESIGNED OURSELVES'..."

"So when you go to play a note you get harmonic distortion. It's not as clear then, as I'd like it tonight, it's usually very clear. But I'll go and do it, and hope that with the echo and the hall and stuff it'll get better."

Now to be honest, I would have thought that Frank might have got his trusty engin-eer-cum-builder Nick to knock up a couple of cycle-changers to rectify this problem. Seems that between them they've built more or less anything else you care to name. Take Marino's pedalboard, for example, a baffling piece of hardware if ever I saw one. Frank describes the board more accurately as "a lot of filters and stuff that we designed ourselves", where existing pedals have been taken apart, opened up, and had parts knocked out, bits added on, and different sections combined. An experiment really but to the onlooker rather a mess. So — looking at the front of the board, what do you see, Frank?

"Oh, you can't tell," he grins, "it's just a bunch of boxes and wires and shit. One is like a fuzz-tone, another one is like an overdriver, one is like a high-end filter, all sorts of different flangers, stuff like that." I see. Any standard stuff? "Yeah - a chorus-echo, an Eventide flanger, and an Echoplex. I like the Echoplex — I don't leave it on all the time, naturally. But there's certain things you can do with it that's interesting. I always say they've never made a better echo than Echoplex, except they've never made a good Echoplex."

"...NO ONE'S MADE A BETTER ECHO THAN ECHOPLEX, EXCEPT THEY'VE NEVER MADE A GOOD ECHOPLEX..."

Noisy tapes seem to be the chief culprits here, and the guts hum a lot, Frank says. Where he uses the Echoplex to best effect is in a special section of the Mahogany Rush show where he steps forward for an unaccompanied solo that he calls "my symphony stuff", although the unit pops up for backwards-guitar effects here and there, or as a sound thickener. On the "symphony" bit, Marino manipulates his guitar, echo, fx, filters and Echoplex to create a huge solo sound. "It sounds like there's a bass player with me," he adds, "and a keyboard string sound — almost synthesisery."

For the guitar itself, Frank is pretty choosy — I'd always seen him with what I assumed was a fairly straightforward SG. Not quite so straightforward, as he explains.

"Actually they're not just SGs that I use, they're 1961-and-a-half SG/Les Pauls, it's the only year you can get them like that. They had a sideways tremolo bar on them, but I took that off and put the regular vibrola on. But they have the only neck for me that's really skinny, really thin, the only one I like playing.

"...THEY'RE NOT JUST SGs THAT USE, THEY'RE 1961-AND-A-HALF SG/LES PAULS, IT'S THE ONLY YEAR YOU CAN GET THEM LIKE THAT."

"Also it's got crown-shaped inlays. The sound doesn't matter all that much to me, because I filter it so much anyway that it doesn't end up sounding like a regular old SG. I've got a bunch of them, 13 in all - they're not all SGs. But every time I see that basic type of guitar, OK, I'll buy it. What the hell? I like the guitar, one day I'll use it."

But it turns out that Frank really considers his SGs as tools, as became clear when I asked why, seeing as he'd so much of his other gear built to order, he didn't have a guitar custom-built too?

"No, to me I'll never have a love affair with a guitar," he explains. "A guitar is an extension of what I do. It's a tool, like if I was a sculptor it'd be my chisel. It's something I have to use — I don't rely on it, I have to be able to play any guitar, because who knows, one day I won't be able to play my own guitar? See what I'm saying? So it's a tool for me, and I don't treat it with kid gloves or anything — it gets broken and fixed, broken and fixed. There it is."

"...AND RECKONS THAT THE FANES HE USES MAKE A DISTINCT DIFFERENCE TO HIS SOUND..."

His amps, however, while still a tool to achieve the desired sound are heavily worked over, specially modified by Frank and Nick. At the soundcheck I'd noticed a lot of activity when crew and musicians were huddled over what looked very much like a Fender combo — a Champ, perhaps? But it wasn't a Fender sound coming out of the cabinets in the backline, to say the least. Were my ears deceiving me? Frank puts me out of my misery.

"That's not a Fender any more. See, we build my amps, and that was one amp that was built in the Fender case before we built them into the rack units, because the case had the existing knobs that we needed, the guts and the tube sockets. So it's by no means a Fender, not by any stretch of the imagination.

"And it's not even an amp any more, it's a pre-amp. We're running that pre-amp into the power amp rack, which is behind my speaker cabinets. It's really tall with huge great power amps in it — 600 watt tube amplifiers with KT88-type tubes."

"AND WITH HARMONICS, FRANK HAS AN INDIVIDUAL METHOD."

Another bonus for Marino and his current enormous sound arrived when he recently discovered Fane loudspeakers. He describes the change the speakers made as "jumping from two to seven on a scale of 10, in one jump!" He says that the discovery really was a stroke of luck - not something they'd actually been looking for at all — and reckons that the Fanes he uses (including Crescendo 15s, Studio 12s, and HF250 bullet tweeters) make a distinct difference to his sound and that of his band.

"I have eight Crescendo 15/200Es on stage, and I don't know why I even have to use eight, I can't even blow two! They take a lot — they've been through a lot, been beat up, pushed, kicked, smashed, and they just keep on... I think they're only really scratching the surface, too, of how much they can do with those speakers."

I asked Frank how he felt about his overall stage sound, fx, pre-amps, amps, speakers and all. "It's a good sound, but it's a little more see-through than when I had the previous transistor system. That's the problem we're trying to overcome. If we can get a little more of the punch and clarity of the transistor sound, but still the warmth of the tubes, get rid of that see-throughness, then hey, I'll really be on to something! I've been trying for 12 years now."

"...OTHER GUITARISTS... FRANK'S DECIDEDLY KEEN ON THOSE WHO KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING..."

And in that 12 years, Marino's playing has, by his own estimation, become more adept and more mature. It's not, he says, all at number 10 at 60 miles an hour all the time. He's also learnt to treat the acquisition of technique as a useful aside, rather than as a goal in itself. His philosophical approach to the subject is, indeed, refreshing.

"I like to be able to do anything. So I have a command of what I want to do with the guitar. If I want to play picking, I can; if I want to play rhythm, I can; if I want to play with my fingers, I can. And so when you can do all these things, it's not just a question of saying, look what I can do, look Ma, no hands. It's not so that I can come up and show the audience what I can and cannot do, it's so that I can use the different techniques for different kinds of feel. I use the technique as an aid to what I want to create at the time."

A technique for which Frank is well known is what he calls tapping, and more exacting tutors might call double-stopping. This is where you fret a note with the left hand and then quickly hit a higher fret with a finger from the right hand. "I was using tapping years ago but it became so popular I was amazed," says Marino, who's obviously seen Adrian Belew recently. "I use tapping when I have to play a line that requires a very low note followed by a very high note, or vice versa, which is the sort of thing you can get very easily on, say, a piano, but not so easily on guitar."

And with harmonics, Frank has an individual and interesting method. "You may hear me do it tonight on the jam after Johnny B Goode, I get into this high register of harmonics and it's like so f—ing high — it's one octave higher than the guitar, and I've got it down so that all the notes are harmonics, the right notes.

"It's all right-hand harmonics, bouncing it off the hand. It's a technique where I'll hold the pick so that only the tiny little point protrudes. But you have to hit the string in the right place — almost like a trombone. A lot of guys just get into one right-hand position and keep hacking, while the left hand's moving and the harmonic changes from a tonic to a fifth and whatever. It starts to sound all funny — they don't really know what they're doing."

When it comes to listening to other guitarists, Frank's decidedly keen on those who know what they're doing, so his playlist is a short one. A player who he does like is Allan Holdsworth.

"I listen to him quite a bit," says Marino, "because he's got a strange way of playing that I appreciate. But generally now I listen more to saxophone players: John Coltrane, stuff like that. It inspires me. I try to take a Coltrane lick and learn it. Why not? It's music, I don't consider it a rip or anything, specially since it's a saxophone. When you can do a couple of Coltrane sax lines or Miles Davis trumpet lines on your guitar, which Allan Holdsworth does all the time, you come out sounding really good. You do things you didn't know you could do — it's interesting again and it's not a bore any more."

Frank was now almost ready to go on stage, and Lemmy from Motorhead was eager to discuss the direction of Western music with him, so I closed with a rapid question about solos. Frank retaliated with another strong argument for feel over technique.

"That's what it really is," he says, "not: I'm going to this note now, that note now, it'll be flashy if I do this now... a lot of guys try to do it like that, so consequently you'll see two or three shows by an artist and you'll see the same f—ing solo every god-damned time! I don't know how they can do that."