Vernon Reid Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to Living Colour’s Guitar Genius’s Rig

The guitar that Vernon Reid played in Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” music video in 1988 — a multicolored ESP shredstick, as he has called it — now resides in the Smithsonian Institution. The song won a Grammy. The video put Living Colour on MTV. And the guitar ended up in America’s national museum of cultural heritage. This specific trajectory — from a guitar chosen for its visual impact to a Smithsonian collection artifact — documents the specific cultural weight that “Cult of Personality” carries, and the specific weight that Living Colour’s emergence carried at that particular historical moment. A Black rock band in 1988, fronted by Corey Glover and built around Vernon Reid’s extraordinary guitar playing, winning a Grammy and reaching MTV audiences who had not previously been given Black rock as a viable commercial offering: this was an event in American cultural history, not just in rock music history.

The Journey

Vernon Reid was born on August 22, 1958, in London, England, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He is British-born American, which gives him a specific outside-and-inside relationship to American music traditions that has shaped his guitar playing’s extraordinary range. He founded Living Colour in New York City in 1984 and served as its primary guitarist and co-songwriter through the band’s original run (1984-1995) and its reunion (2000-present). He was named number 66 on Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time and number 42 on their 2023 list. He is, in the Guitar Player characterization, someone who approaches his gear collection from “managing levels of OCD” as a “gear-obsessed hoarder” — which is to say, one of the most encyclopedic and eclectic collections of instruments and effects of any guitarist in this series.

His guitar playing is the most genre-transgressive in this series — and this is a series that includes Tom Morello, Adrian Belew, and Frank Zappa. Reid’s specific combination includes: jazz harmony and improvisation (he studied jazz seriously, played with jazz musicians throughout his career, and his harmonic vocabulary draws from post-bop jazz as much as from rock), funk and rhythm and blues (the James Brown tradition that informs Living Colour’s groove-centered rock), avant-garde and experimental music (his Guitar Oblique project with Elliot Sharp and David Torn specifically, and his general willingness to engage with noise and abstraction), and the hard rock and metal that Living Colour uses as their primary commercial medium. He is a plectrum fetishist, as he himself has said. He is obsessed with gear. And the specific complexity of his signal chain — the Parker or PRS guitar into the Roland VG-99 into two Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifiers in stereo — reflects the specific complexity of the music he makes from it.

Background: From Brooklyn to Mick Jagger to the Smithsonian

The specific musical formation that produced Vernon Reid began in Brooklyn in the 1970s, in the African American musical community that encompassed jazz, funk, soul, and the emerging punk and new wave scenes that were reshaping what rock music could sound like. His father — a Barbadian immigrant — played guitar, providing the foundational exposure. His musical formation encompassed Jimi Hendrix (who died when Reid was twelve, but whose influence was already transforming what rock guitar could be), James Brown’s rhythm sections, Miles Davis’s jazz, and the New York experimental scene that he would later enter as an adult musician through the Black Rock Coalition he co-founded in 1985.

The Black Rock Coalition — founded by Reid alongside music journalist Greg Tate and producer Konda Mason — was a cultural and political organization that argued for Black artists’ right to play rock music without the genre segregation that the music industry and radio formats imposed. “Black people aren’t supposed to play rock” was the unofficial industry belief that the BRC explicitly contested. Living Colour was its most commercially successful expression; the BRC’s broader argument — that Black artists’ musical range should not be artificially limited by commercial genre segregation — was an argument for the cultural plurality that has subsequently become increasingly normalized in American music. Reid co-founded the organization that made the argument before he proved it with Living Colour’s commercial success.

The Mick Jagger connection — Jagger produced Living Colour’s demo and helped them get their Columbia Records deal — is one of the more surprising patron relationships in rock history. Jagger saw the band perform, recognized the quality and the commercial potential, and used his connections to get them signed. The Rolling Stones’ specific blues and R&B credentials — their entire career built on the claim that they could play Black American music — gave Jagger’s endorsement of a Black rock band a specific cultural weight that was not lost on the industry. When Mick Jagger says “this band should be signed,” Columbia Records signs the band.

His solo and side project work — the Yohimbe Brothers with DJ Logic, the collaborations with jazz guitarist Melvin Gibbs, the Guitar Oblique project with Elliot Sharp and David Torn — documents the full musical range that Living Colour’s specific hard rock context constrains. Guitar Oblique specifically is the most complete expression of his experimental and avant-garde identity: three guitarists from different traditions (Reid’s jazz-rock fusion, Sharp’s no-wave and experimental rock, Torn’s ambient and cinematic approaches) in conversation about what the guitar can do in completely open, non-genre-constrained contexts. The music is genuinely experimental — not commercially accessible, not genre-familiar — and it demonstrates that Reid’s Living Colour presence is a performance for a specific audience in a specific commercial context rather than the full extent of his musical imagination.

His parallel career as a jazz and experimental musician — the Guitar Oblique project, his collaborations with Ronald Shannon Jackson, his work with jazz musicians including James Blood Ulmer — demonstrates the musical range that Living Colour’s hard rock context doesn’t fully display. He is genuinely a jazz musician who also plays hard rock, not a rock musician with jazz pretensions. The jazz harmonic vocabulary in his Living Colour solos is real; the avant-garde noise experimentation in his side projects is equally real. The range is not a pose but a genuine musical identity that the guitar community has increasingly recognized as the Grammy wins and Rolling Stone rankings have accumulated.

His photography exhibition — Fetishes, Moments, Mementos — and the play he wrote document a creative range beyond music that is worth noting. He is a visual artist and a playwright as well as a guitarist, and these activities reflect the same restless intellectual curiosity that characterizes his approach to the guitar. The Healing Hands Percussion Circle, which he formed in 2000 after seeing a photograph of civil war victims in Sierra Leone whose hands had been amputated, demonstrates a specific ethical and political engagement that runs through his work from the Black Rock Coalition forward. He is not primarily a rock star; he is a musician and an artist for whom rock is one mode of expression among several.

The Rig: Vernon Reid’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects

Guitars

Amps

Effects

The Living Colour discography — Vivid (1988), Time’s Up (1990), Stain (1993), the reunion albums Collideoscope (2003), The Chair in the Doorway (2009), Shade (2017) — spans nearly three decades of sustained creative engagement with the hard rock and funk-metal territory the band established. The range across those albums reflects Reid’s specific compositional intelligence: Vivid’s accessible hard rock with “Cult of Personality” as its commercial peak; Time’s Up’s more ambitious exploration of political and musical complexity (Rolling Stone’s album of the year for 1990); Stain’s more intense, metal-influenced approach; the reunion albums’ various evolutions. Each record sounds like Living Colour — the specific combination of Corey Glover’s voice, Will Calhoun’s drums, Doug Wimbish or Muzz Skillings’ bass, and Reid’s guitar — but each record also sounds different from the others in ways that reflect deliberate artistic development rather than formula repetition.

His relationship with technology reflects the most comprehensive engagement with digital guitar processing in this series. The Roland VG-99 brain, the iPad Audiobus integration, the Fractal Axe-FX III modeling, the Eventide H9 algorithms — Reid’s signal chain is both the most complex and the most deliberately organized in this series, with each technological element serving a specific musical purpose rather than accumulating for accumulation’s sake. His quote about “a combination of new high-tech stuff and the old-fashioned straight-jacked method” captures his specific relationship with technology: neither a Luddite who refuses digital processing nor a tech fetishist who abandons analog tools, but a pragmatist who uses what the specific musical moment requires from the full range of available options.

The “gear-obsessed hoarder” self-description — “managing levels of OCD” — is both characteristically self-deprecating and accurately descriptive of the guitar collection that encompasses Hamers, Tom Andersons, ESPs, Parkers, PRSs, Reverends, and whatever else caught his attention. Where some guitarists settle on a primary instrument and maintain the same setup for decades (Hetfield’s ESP, Trower’s Strat, Setzer’s Gretsch), Reid’s collection expands continuously as new instruments and new manufacturers offer new tonal possibilities. The plectrum fetishism is the micro-expression of the same impulse: every tonal variable is worth exploring, from the largest (which guitar, which amp) to the smallest (which pick, from which angle).

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Vernon Reid’s playing style is the most musically eclectic in this series — the full range from free jazz improvisation to funk groove to hard rock riffing to experimental noise, deployed within the same band’s catalog and sometimes within the same song. His harmonic vocabulary draws from jazz post-bop (the altered dominants, the outside playing, the modal experimentation), his rhythmic vocabulary from funk and soul, his physical approach from hard rock and metal, and his sonic adventurousness from the experimental and avant-garde tradition he participates in through Guitar Oblique and related projects.

The jazz foundation is real and specifically documented. He has played with jazz musicians throughout his career, his harmonic choices in Living Colour solos include specifically jazz-derived substitutions and outside playing that metal guitarists don’t use, and his description of his own music as existing across genre boundaries is not marketing language but accurate description of what he actually plays. The “plectrum fetishist” approach to tone — treating the pick as a tonal variable rather than a fixed tool — reflects the jazz musician’s attention to tonal nuance that hard rock rarely requires.

His tone philosophy is summarized in the quote about “That’s What You Taught Me”: “I like to use a combination of new high-tech stuff and the old-fashioned straight-jacked method.” The Roland VG-99 is the new high-tech; the vintage Fender Deluxe Reverb is the old-fashioned method. The combination of both — modeled and vintage, digital and analog — reflects his willingness to use whatever produces the right result for the specific musical moment rather than committing ideologically to either tradition.

How to Sound Like Vernon Reid

Getting Vernon Reid’s tone requires accepting that there is no single “Vernon Reid tone” — his range encompasses clean jazz, funky rhythm guitar, massive rock riffing, and avant-garde noise within a single band’s catalog. The primary signal chain gives access to the hard rock end of his range.

Guitar: Parker MaxxFly or PRS Vela VR for the authentic approach. Any guitar with active or high-output humbuckers and a Floyd Rose tremolo for the whammy-bar techniques that characterize his solos. The Roland GK synth pickup (or Roland GR-55/VG-99 hex pickup system) for the synthesis and modeling capabilities that are central to his live sound.

Amp: Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier in stereo (two heads, two cabs, hard-panned) for the full live experience. The Rectifier’s modern high-gain channel for the heavy Living Colour material; the vintage channel for the cleaner funk and jazz passages.

Amp Settings (Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier, Modern High-Gain Channel):

Influence & Legacy

Vernon Reid’s influence on guitar playing operates through his specific demonstration that the genre segregation of rock guitar — the implicit assumption that rock guitar is for white musicians and that Black musicians should play R&B, jazz, or hip-hop — is a commercial convention rather than a musical reality. Living Colour’s commercial success proved this at the most visceral level: the Grammy, the MTV play, the Smithsonian guitar. But Reid had been proving it for years before the mainstream recognition through the Black Rock Coalition’s specific cultural and political argument, and he has continued proving it through the sustained range of his musical output.

His influence on subsequent Black rock guitarists — Gary Clark Jr., H.E.R., and the broader community of Black musicians who have entered rock and electric guitar contexts that were historically less accessible to them — is specific and acknowledged. The Black Rock Coalition’s cultural work preceded their commercial careers; Reid’s presence at the intersection of jazz, funk, and hard rock demonstrated the range of what was possible for a Black guitarist in American music.

For context on where Reid fits in the hard rock guitar tradition he operates within, the comparison with Tom Morello’s approach to guitar as sonic experiment at #20 — the guitarist who Rage Against the Machine used to make the same general argument about Black and Latinx musicians in hard rock — shows the parallel cultural work being done through guitar playing. Both Reid and Morello used technically extraordinary rock guitar playing as an argument about who rock guitar belongs to.

The comparison with Jimi Hendrix’s foundational approach to Black rock guitar at #1 — the guitarist who most directly made the cultural and musical argument that Reid’s generation built upon — shows the specific lineage: Hendrix established that a Black musician could be the most technically innovative and most commercially celebrated rock guitarist in the world; Reid extended this in a specific 1980s context where the argument needed to be made again, differently, with a full band rather than a trio.

And the comparison with Gary Clark Jr.’s contemporary position in blues-rock at #91 shows the generational transmission: Clark’s specific position — the guitar hero of Austin blues who has Grammy recognition and Rolling Stones collaborations — is possible partly because Living Colour made it commercially and culturally possible for Black rock guitarists to occupy that space without the genre-segregation assumptions that Reid fought against.

Vernon Reid is sixty-seven years old in 2026. Living Colour continues. The PRS Vela VR signature is the current primary. The Roland VG-99 is still the brain of the live setup. The plectrum collection has not been reduced. The Eventide H9 has the full algorithm library. The Mesa Dual Rectifiers are in stereo. The Smithsonian guitar is in a display case in Washington, D.C. The Grammy is from 1989. The argument the Black Rock Coalition made in 1985 has been substantially won, though never completely. And somewhere in the jazz harmonic substitutions within a hard rock context, in the whammy dive-bombs that follow a delicate chord-melody passage, in the experimental noise that appears between the funk-rock verses of a Living Colour song, is the specific music that Vernon Reid makes from the widest possible guitar vocabulary in the widest possible genre context. A genre unto himself, as Rolling Stone might have said if they’d needed to describe him. They ranked him 42nd instead. Both assessments are accurate.

The Grammy for “Cult of Personality” — Best Hard Rock Performance, 1990 — is one of the more culturally loaded Grammy wins in the award’s history. A Black rock band winning a hard rock Grammy in 1990, at the moment when hip-hop was establishing its commercial dominance and the music industry’s implicit assumptions about which genres Black artists should occupy were at their most rigid, was a specific cultural event. The Grammy validated both the music and the argument — Living Colour was commercially recognized by the industry’s own formal recognition system for doing exactly what the Black Rock Coalition had argued Black artists should be permitted to do. The argument was proven, formally, by the very system that the cultural conventions the BRC contested had emerged from. The guitar ended up in the Smithsonian. The Grammy validated the argument. The music continues.

His Rolling Stone ranking evolution — 66th in 2003, 42nd in 2023 — documents the gradual upward revision of his formal recognition over two decades. The 2023 ranking’s improvement reflects both the continued quality of his output since 2003 and the gradual shift in how Rolling Stone’s audience thinks about the relationship between guitar playing and cultural significance. A guitarist whose contribution includes the founding of an organization that changed American music culture, the creation of a band that demonstrated what Black rock guitar could achieve, and a twenty-year sustained engagement with jazz, funk, hard rock, and experimental music simultaneously deserves a higher ranking than his initial placement suggested. The 42nd ranking approaches accuracy without quite achieving it, which is characteristic of any ranking system attempting to capture genuine musical complexity in an ordered list.

The “Cult of Personality” riff — the guitar figure that opens the song and that has been one of the most recognizable rock guitar openings since 1988 — deserves its own documentation within the gear story. The specific tonal character of that opening: the wah pedal’s filter, the specific pickup selection of the ESP multicolor guitar, the amplification that gave it the specific weight and presence it has in the recording. These tonal elements came together in a recording studio in 1988 and have been reproduced in live performance thousands of times since, each reproduction requiring the same fundamental elements: a guitar, an amplifier, a wah pedal, and the specific right-hand attack that Reid brings to the riff’s rhythmic execution. The riff’s endurance in the rock guitar canon — thirty-five years later, still immediately recognizable, still taught in guitar lessons, still appearing in movie trailers and sporting event soundtracks — is the measure of its cultural success. The guitar that played it is in the Smithsonian. The riff is everywhere.

Vernon Reid is sixty-seven years old in 2026. Living Colour continues to tour. The PRS Vela VR signature is the primary guitar. The Roland VG-99 is still the brain. The plectrum collection has not been reduced and will not be. The Mesa Dual Rectifiers are in stereo. The iPad is in the rack, running Audiobus. The Smithsonian guitar is displayed in Washington. The Black Rock Coalition’s argument has been substantially won. The Grammy is from 1989. The Rolling Stone ranking is 42nd. The music that started in Brooklyn in the late 1970s, with the specific education of a British-born American musician in jazz, funk, and the full range of Black American music, combined with the specific hard rock commercial context of Living Colour and the specific political conviction of the Black Rock Coalition — that music is still being made. It is still the widest possible guitar music that anyone working in a recognizably rock context is making. The plectrum fetishist is still fetishizing plectrums. The gear hoarder is still hoarding gear. The musician is still playing.

Frequently Asked Questions: Vernon Reid Guitars & Gear