Lee Ritenour Guitars & Gear: Captain Fingers Complete Guide- GuitarGangsters.net

The nickname came from the cartage guys — the roadies responsible for hauling his equipment to sessions across Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. They were carrying a case with fifteen guitars in it. They called him Captain Fingers. It stuck.

Lee Ritenour earned that name. By his mid-twenties he was logging up to 500 album appearances a year as a session guitarist. Steely Dan. Dizzy Gillespie. Sonny Rollins. Pink Floyd. Herbie Hancock. Quincy Jones. Aretha Franklin. B.B. King. Tony Bennett at seventeen. The Mamas & the Papas at sixteen. The breadth of his session work across the golden era of Los Angeles studio music is almost incomprehensible — 3,000 sessions and counting, spanning jazz, rock, funk, pop, soul, and anything else the studios could throw at a player who described his range as “not anything real magical. Basically it took a lot of sweat.”

Through most of it, a red dot-neck Gibson ES-335 came with him. And alongside it, a 1945 Gibson L-5 his father bought for $600 when Ritenour was thirteen and which he was offered $100,000 for in Japan decades later — and turned down.

This is the complete gear story of one of the most recorded guitarists in American music history.

Background: From the Mamas & the Papas at 16 to Captain Fingers of the LA Studio World

Lee Mack Ritenour was born January 11, 1952, in Los Angeles, California. He began playing guitar at age eight — a folk guitar his parents provided for a kid who was clearly already serious. By twelve he had decided music was his career. By sixteen he was playing his first professional recording session, invited by producer John Phillips to play on a Mamas & the Papas track. At seventeen, he was backing Tony Bennett and Lena Horne at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The difference between Ritenour’s formation and many of his contemporaries was the breadth of his education. Unlike most LA session players of his generation who came specifically from jazz, Ritenour was a rock and roll kid first. “I cut my teeth on rock & roll,” he explained in a Rolling Stone feature. “When I got into studio work, I wasn’t happy with the little amplifiers most of the guys were using. I always played with the pickups on my 335 full out, and I’d distort one of those little Princeton amps real easy.” That rock aggression, combined with jazz fluency he developed through studies with teachers including Joe Pass, Barney Kessel, and Howard Roberts, created a player who could navigate any genre without sounding like a genre visitor.

His formal education included classical guitar study at the University of Southern California — adding yet another layer of technical vocabulary to an arsenal that already included jazz, rock, and blues. He studied with Joe Pass — a connection his father made by cold-calling Pass directly, which required a considerable amount of nerve and produced considerable results.

The Steely Dan connection was early and formative. Ritenour appeared on their sessions, learning the kind of harmonic sophistication and studio precision that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen demanded from their collaborators. His work on Pink Floyd’s The Wall is documented but uncredited — he was brought in to beef up “Run Like Hell” and played uncredited rhythm guitar on “One of My Turns.” Being the uncredited guitarist on a Pink Floyd album is a very specific kind of professional confidence.

His first solo album, First Course, came in 1976. Captain Fingers followed in 1977 — and the title track’s Yes-influenced progressive complexity demonstrated that Ritenour was not interested in being anyone’s idea of what a smooth jazz guitarist should be. The nickname had been earned. The album confirmed it.

In 1991, Ritenour co-founded Fourplay with keyboardist Bob James, bassist Nathan East, and drummer Harvey Mason — one of the most successful smooth jazz groups in the format’s history, spending 33 weeks at number one on the Billboard jazz chart with their debut album. The Fourplay chapter extended his reach significantly into an audience that might not have sought out his fusion work or his session legacy.

Then came 2018. In October, the Woolsey Fire swept through Malibu and took Ritenour’s home, his Starlight studio, approximately 100 guitars, 40 amplifiers, and every pedal he’d ever owned. A week later, he was rushed to the hospital for aortic valve replacement surgery. From those two catastrophes emerged Dreamcatcher (2020) — his first-ever solo guitar album, recorded alone during the COVID-19 pandemic in a Marina del Rey rental home, built from the seven guitars he’d managed to grab in the final minutes before evacuating.

“Life threw some curves,” he said, with what appears to be significant understatement.

Tone note: A man who started at sixteen with the Mamas & the Papas and rebuilt at sixty-eight from a house fire and heart surgery. That’s the full arc of Captain Fingers.

The Rig: Lee Ritenour’s Guitars, Amps & Gear — Complete Era-by-Era Breakdown

Ritenour’s gear story is more varied than almost any other player in his stylistic space, partly because his session work demanded genuine tonal versatility — different sessions, different sounds, different equipment — and partly because a house fire destroyed most of it in 2018 and forced a rebuild from scratch. The full picture encompasses vintage Gibsons, a modified Stratocaster that played on Pink Floyd sessions, Japanese signature guitars, SynthAxe experimentation, and a post-fire rig built from what survived.

Guitars: The Red 335, the $600 L-5, and 100 Others Lost to Fire

The 1960 Gibson ES-335 (Red Dot-Neck) — The Primary Guitar

Ritenour’s most famous and most-used guitar is his red dot-neck Gibson ES-335 — a 1960 model he acquired in his late teens and has played throughout his entire career. He confirmed in a Vintage Guitar interview: “In my late teens I acquired my first 335, then I got a red 335 that I’ve played throughout my career; it’s a dot-neck. I think it’s a 1960 model; I can’t see the serial number on the label because the f-holes have been stuffed with foam.”

The foam-stuffed f-holes are worth noting. Semi-hollow guitars are prone to acoustic feedback when played at volume — particularly at the lower frequencies generated by the body’s resonant chambers. Stuffing the f-holes damps the internal resonance significantly, reducing feedback susceptibility and making the guitar more controllable in loud live and studio contexts. It’s a practical modification that many semi-hollow players have employed, but it says something about how Ritenour plays — at volume, with full pickups, not gently.

Gibson honoured the guitar with a Custom Shop signature model — the Lee Ritenour ES-335 VOS (Vintage Original Spec), produced in limited quantities and based directly on his 1960 instrument. The signature model featured an antique faded cherry finish, custom neck profile based on Ritenour’s specific L-5 neck (more on that below), ’57 Classic humbuckers, and the VOS treatment that gives the guitar a played-in, vintage feel from the factory.

In 2018, Ritenour evacuated the 335 from the Malibu fire along with six other guitars. It survived. He described the evacuation decision: “I wondered which guitars I should take… I didn’t even take the most expensive guitars. I just pulled out what I thought was important on that day.” The 335 made the cut.

Tone note: Foam in the f-holes. Playing at full volume with pickups wide open. This is not a gentle jazz guitarist. This is a rock and roll kid who happened to learn jazz.

The 1945 Gibson L-5 — The $600 Treasure

Ritenour’s other primary guitar — and by his own description his favourite — is a 1945 Gibson L-5 archtop that his father purchased from a Los Angeles musician moving to Las Vegas when Ritenour was thirteen years old. The price was $600. Ritenour told his father it would be the last guitar he ever bought. It was not. But the L-5 became irreplaceable.

In Japan, approximately twelve years before the Vintage Guitar interview (placing this in the late 1980s or early 1990s), a collector offered him $100,000 for it. He declined. The L-5 is a full-body archtop in the tradition of the great jazz orchestra guitars — deep, resonant, fundamentally different in character from the semi-hollow 335. Where the 335 has brightness and attack, the L-5 has warmth and depth. Used on jazz and ballad material, it brings a tonal character that no semi-hollow can replicate.

He also carried the L-5 out of the Malibu fire. Among 100 guitars, he grabbed this one.

Gibson produced a Custom Shop Lee Ritenour L-5 signature model in collaboration with Ritenour — the body slightly smaller than the standard L-5 for improved playability and reduced feedback, the neck copied directly from his 1945 original. The signature L-5 gave players access to the neck profile of the guitar Ritenour has played since he was thirteen.

Tone note: $600 in 1965. $100,000 offered in the 1990s. Still owned. The best gear decisions are always the ones that feel obvious at the time.

The 1958 Fender Stratocaster — The Pink Floyd Guitar

In the mid-to-late 1970s, Ritenour purchased a 1958 Fender Stratocaster with serial number 0335 — a coincidence of serial number and his primary guitar model that Ritenour has acknowledged as cosmically appropriate. The Strat became one of his primary recording guitars through the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the Pink Floyd The Wall sessions in 1979.

Between the early 1980s and 1987, the guitar was modified significantly:

3-ply pickguard added
Alembic Strat-o-blaster active preamp installed
String tree added
Floyd Rose tremolo with locking nut retrofitted
EMG S active pickups installed

The guitar was lost in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which also took approximately 99 other guitars from his collection. Ritenour’s description of the serial number — 0335 — became one of the fire’s more poignant losses: the guitar that linked his Strat world to his 335 world, gone.

Tone note: Serial number 0335 on a Strat used on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The universe has a sense of humour about gear.

The Ibanez LR10 Signature — The Japanese Era

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ritenour maintained an endorsement relationship with Ibanez that produced the LR10 signature model — a Japanese-made guitar that brought his playing style into a format that reflected the rock-informed aggression that set him apart from older LA session guitarists. Ibanez ran promotion for the LR10 in 1983, confirming it as an active part of his public gear profile during that period. A period Rolling Stone article noted that by the time Ritenour arrived at sessions, his equipment included “his red Gibson ES-335 or his new Japanese Ibanez.”

The 1949 Gibson L-5 — The Post-Fire Addition

After the fire, the Premier Guitar rig rundown for Dreamcatcher documents a 1949 Gibson L-5 in his rebuilt collection — a different instrument from the 1945 original, possibly acquired as part of rebuilding. The documentation lists this alongside two Gibson Custom Shop Les Pauls built by Mike McGuire, a Ramirez classical guitar, a Yamaha NCX3, a Yamaha Silent Guitar, a Taylor 326ce baritone, and a Taylor BT2 in Nashville high-strung tuning.

SynthAxe — The Digital Frontier

Ritenour was an early adopter of the SynthAxe — the mid-1980s guitar synthesizer controller that used MIDI to trigger synthesizer sounds from a guitar-like interface. The instrument appears in his live footage from the 1980s. The SynthAxe was notoriously difficult to play at the level of musical sophistication that players like Ritenour and Allan Holdsworth demanded from it, and relatively few guitarists mastered it. Ritenour’s adoption reflected his consistent interest in expanding the tonal palette beyond conventional guitar sounds.

He also used a more recent Xotic guitar synthesizer, documented in the Dreamcatcher rig, continuing his interest in guitar-synth integration into the current era.

Complete Guitar List

1960 Gibson ES-335 (Red Dot-Neck) — Primary career guitar; foam-stuffed f-holes; survived the 2018 fire
1945 Gibson L-5 — Father purchased for $600; declined $100,000 offer in Japan; survived the 2018 fire
1958 Fender Stratocaster (serial 0335) — Mid-to-late 1970s primary recording guitar; modified with Floyd Rose, EMG S pickups, Alembic preamp; used on Pink Floyd’s The Wall; lost in 2018 Woolsey Fire
Ibanez LR10 Signature (1980s) — Japanese endorsement model; promoted alongside the 335 in session contexts
Gibson Custom Shop Lee Ritenour L-5 Signature — Smaller body than standard L-5, neck copied from his 1945 original
Gibson Custom Shop Lee Ritenour ES-335 VOS — Antique Cherry, ’57 Classic pickups, custom neck profile based on L-5
Gibson Custom Shop Les Pauls (×2, built by Mike McGuire) — Post-fire; used for certain tonal contexts
Gibson Les Paul Custom — Documented in live performances at venues including Blue Note Milano
1949 Gibson L-5 — Post-fire acquisition; documented in Dreamcatcher rig
Ramirez Classical Guitar (1974) — Hand-made by a luthier who studied with the Ramirez family; one of his acoustic standards
SynthAxe — 1980s MIDI guitar controller for synthesiser sounds
Yamaha NCX3 — Nylon-string electro-acoustic for compositions and certain live contexts
Yamaha Silent Guitar (SLG110N) — Used for composition and practice
Taylor 326ce Baritone — Tuned down a fourth; for specific textural bass-register work
Taylor BT2 (Nashville high-strung tuning) — Bright, chimey guitar-within-a-guitar sound
Xotic Guitar Synthesizer — Modern MIDI/synth integration for current rig
Yamaha Revstar RS420 — Seen at NAMM 2018 during Yamaha endorsement period

Amps & Cabinets: From Vibrolux and Music Man to Mesa Boogie

Fender Vibrolux — The Early Session Foundation

Ritenour’s dissatisfaction with the small Fender Princeton combos that most LA session guitarists used in the early 1970s pushed him toward larger, louder options. His solution was the Fender Vibrolux — a Fender combo with more headroom than the Princeton, capable of handling his full-pickup attack without immediate compression. He described the Vibrolux as his go-to for “a low funk, dirty sound or for any kind of screaming sound” — language that immediately differentiates his approach from the jazz-gentleness that is often associated with his later smooth jazz context.

The Vibrolux was paired with a Music Man amplifier for “just about anything else” — using the two amps together for tonal versatility across different session requirements without changing guitars.

Mesa Boogie — The Fusion Era Power

Ritenour used Mesa Boogie amplifiers through the early-to-mid 1980s, concurrent with his Ibanez endorsement period and the more aggressive fusion style of his Rit album era. The Mesa Boogie provided the kind of gain and sustain that his harder-edged rock and fusion material demanded — a different amp character entirely from the Fender clean that had served the session world.

His live rig for certain periods used “two Fender Twin 65 reissue amps and a Mesa Boogie Road King with a 2×12 speaker in the middle” — a three-amp configuration spanning the tonal range from Fender clean to Boogie crunch, giving him the full spectrum required for live performance across his broad stylistic catalog.

Strymon Iridium — The Post-Fire Home Studio Core

After losing 40 amplifiers in the 2018 fire and recording Dreamcatcher in a rental home with no studio infrastructure, Ritenour used a Strymon Iridium amp modeler as his primary amp source for the album. The Iridium is a high-quality digital amp modeler that simulates the response of tube amplifiers with enough accuracy to satisfy professional recording standards. Its role in the Dreamcatcher sessions was partly practical — you can’t ship 40 tube amps from a rental home — and partly revelatory. The album sounds consistently great, and the Iridium was the amp for most of it.

The post-fire rig also documents a Ladner G-1 Hellion amp alongside the Iridium and a Fender Twin Reverb — a boutique amp brand that suggests his amp collection was being rebuilt with considered, non-mass-market choices.

Amp	Era	Notes
Fender Vibrolux + Music Man combo	Early 1970s sessions	Replaced smaller Princetons; Vibrolux for dirty/funk sounds, Music Man for general use
Mesa Boogie (various)	Early–mid 1980s fusion era	Used through the more aggressive Rit-era material and Ibanez period
Fender Twin Reverb ’65 Reissue (×2) + Mesa Boogie Road King 2×12	Live touring, various eras	Three-amp live configuration spanning clean to crunch across full performance catalog
Mesa/Boogie California Tweed	Current/post-fire	Documented in Dreamcatcher rig list alongside Fender Twin and Ladner
Ladner G-1 Hellion	Post-fire (2020–present)	Boutique amp in rebuilt collection
Strymon Iridium (amp modeler)	Dreamcatcher (2020)	Primary amp source for solo album recorded in rental home post-fire; used with Schoeps and SM57 mics

Pedals & Signal Chain: The Mu-Tron Sessions and the Board That Burned

Ritenour’s pedalboard history is one of the most dramatic in this list, for reasons beyond his control: the 2018 fire took every pedal he’d ever owned. The pre-fire board, documented most clearly from a 1983 session photograph and from his own descriptions, was a characteristically broad collection that reflected the needs of a session player who could be asked for any sound at any moment.

The Mu-Tron Bi-Phase — The Session Secret

In a Vertex Effects interview revisiting his biggest sessions, Ritenour discussed the Mu-Tron Bi-Phase — a dual envelope-controlled phaser from the 1970s — as a pedal he used across numerous studio sessions. The Mu-Tron Bi-Phase applies two phase-shifting circuits with controls that interact to produce sweeping, organic modulation effects that were particularly suited to the funk and fusion contexts of the 1970s studio world. Its appearance in Ritenour’s signal chain links him to the generation of funk-influenced session guitarists who were shaping what electric guitar could sound like in a studio-pop context.

1983 Pedalboard — The Full Documentation

A 1983 pedalboard photograph, confirmed via session documentation, shows Ritenour’s board including:

Ibanez FP-777 Flying Pan — Auto-pan/tremolo pedal positioned prominently on the left of the board
Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer — Midrange-focused overdrive; the standard session overdrive of the era
Mu-Tron Bi-Phase — Dual envelope phaser in the bottom right corner
Goodrich volume pedal — At the bottom of the board for dynamic control
TC Electronic unit — Modulation and/or delay processor at the top of the board

Post-Fire Rig — Built from Scratch

After losing every pedal in the fire, Ritenour rebuilt a lean, practical signal chain for the Dreamcatcher sessions:

Strymon Iridium — Amp modeler doubling as both amp and primary tone source
Neo Instruments Mini Vent — Compact rotary speaker simulator; Leslie-style modulation
Aphex Punch Factory — Optical compressor with Punch control for dynamic enhancement
TC Electronic Flashback — Delay; clean and musical repeat character
Xotic Super Clean Buffer — Signal integrity on a larger board with multiple true-bypass pedals
Xotic pedalboard — The physical platform

Earlier documented pedals in his career also include the Xotic XW-1 Wah (he described it enthusiastically: “I love how you can easily change the tone colors and the aggressiveness of the Wah”), a TC Electronic Flashback X4 Delay, and a Rodenberg GAS Distortion signature pedal — a German boutique distortion built to his specifications.

Tone note: 40 amps and every pedal he ever owned, gone in one night. The Dreamcatcher sessions proved that the tone lives in the hands, not the equipment room.

Strings, Picks & Setup

Strings (electric, ES-335 and Les Pauls): D’Addario strings gauged .009–.011–.015–.026–.036–.046. A slightly unusual hybrid that uses a lighter plain third string (.015 instead of the usual .016 or .017) — enabling easier bending in the upper register while maintaining the body of the wound strings in the lower register.

Strings (hollowbody archtops — L-5 etc.): D’Addario flatwounds gauged .011–.013–.017–.032–.042–.052. Flatwound strings produce the characteristic warm, dark, compressed tone associated with jazz archtop playing — reduced high-frequency content, smoother feel, longer life. The choice of flatwounds specifically for the archtops and round-wounds for the 335 and Les Pauls demonstrates Ritenour’s consistent awareness of how string choice shapes the character of each instrument’s contribution.

Picks: Not extensively documented in specific detail, but his early Rolling Stone profile description — “I always played with the pickups on my 335 full out” — combined with descriptions of his aggressive attack suggests medium to heavy gauge picks for most electric work.

Guitar setup: Low action for the semi-hollow guitars to facilitate the velocity of his technique across rock, funk, and jazz contexts; higher action for the archtop L-5 to allow the fuller resonance and reduced buzz that flatpick or fingerpick jazz playing requires on a hollow body instrument.

Tone note: Flatwounds on the archtop, roundwounds on the semi-hollow. Two string choices, two completely different sonic worlds from the same player. That’s what a 3,000-session career teaches you.

Tunings & Tone Philosophy

Standard tuning for the ES-335, Les Pauls, and archtops. The Taylor 326ce baritone is tuned down a fourth for bass-register textural work in compositional and recording contexts. The Taylor BT2 is strung Nashville high — standard tuning but with the bottom four strings replaced by their octave equivalents, producing a bright, chime-like sound used to layer with other guitar parts.

Ritenour’s tone philosophy is rooted in versatility — his entire career was built on the ability to deliver any required tonal character in any context, which means his philosophy is less about “my sound” and more about “the right sound for this song.” He described his approach in the Rolling Stone profile: “Being able to play just about any style — from the hardest rock to the most delicate jazz — isn’t anything real magical. Basically it took a lot of sweat.” The sweat included mastering the tonal vocabulary for each style, which is why his equipment evolved to cover such diverse territory.

The post-fire period brought a reorientation toward what was essential. Working from seven guitars in a rental room with a Strymon modeler and a small pedal chain, Ritenour made arguably his most personal album. The fire simplified everything, involuntarily. The lesson he drew from it was that the music doesn’t depend on the room being full of guitars — it depends on the player being present in the room at all.

Tone note: He has built his career on tonal versatility. He built his most personal album with seven guitars and a pedal chain in a rental room. Sometimes less tells you more about what matters.

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy: The Rock Kid Who Learned Jazz and Conquered Both

Lee Ritenour occupies a unique position in the guitar world: he is a genuinely influential jazz-fusion player who came to jazz from rock rather than the other way around. This origin story shapes everything about how he plays — the aggression under the fluency, the full-pickup attack that always sits just below the surface of even his most delicate material, the willingness to distort a Princeton rather than pull back to keep the amp clean.

The Session Mentality — Anything, Anytime, Perfectly

Three thousand sessions is not a number. It is a philosophy. Ritenour’s playing style was shaped by the demands of first-call session work in Los Angeles during its golden era: the ability to hear what a track needed, deliver it on the first take, and move on without imposing a personal style that the producer didn’t ask for. This kind of musical intelligence — reading the room, serving the song, being accurate — is entirely different from the individualistic virtuosity of a solo artist, and Ritenour developed it to an extraordinary level.

When Quincy Jones is watching you in a million-dollar session, you perform perfectly or you don’t come back. Ritenour came back. Repeatedly. For decades.

Tone note: The ability to perform perfectly under pressure is a technique that doesn’t show up in any gear list. It’s the most important technique any professional develops.

The Jazz Vocabulary — Wes, Pass, and the Jazz Archtop Sensibility

Ritenour’s jazz influences are explicit and foundational: Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Barney Kessel defined his harmonic language and his approach to improvisation. From Montgomery he absorbed the melodic directness and the thumb-picking approach that Montgomery famously developed. From Pass the harmonic sophistication of chord-melody playing and the discipline of jazz improvisation rooted in chord tones. From Kessel the ability to swing in a studio context without losing the musical flexibility that makes a session player valuable across genres.

His jazz playing — most clearly audible in archtop contexts with the L-5, where the instrument’s character naturally pushes toward a rounder, more traditional jazz vocabulary — is genuinely fluent, not ornamental. He can play a jazz standard with the authority of a player whose entire career has been jazz. He can also plug the 335 in full and distort a Princeton without sounding like he’s slumming.

Tone note: Joe Pass as a teacher, Wes Montgomery as a touchstone. That’s a jazz education in two names that would take a lifetime to fully absorb.

The Fusion Aggression — Captain Fingers in Full Flight

The Captain Fingers nickname captured the rock energy that always lived underneath Ritenour’s more polished surface. His fusion playing — particularly the title track of Captain Fingers (1977) and the complex fusion material of his Warner Bros. solo albums — demonstrated that he could play with a force and complexity that had nothing gentle about it. He described “Captain Fingers” as having “an almost progressive rock/Yes-type sound; very aggressive and complex” — and he wrote it after he had the title, not the other way around.

This fusion vocabulary — the ability to play jazz harmony at rock velocity, in complex meters, with genuine physical aggression — is what distinguished Ritenour from the smoother, more polished players who occupied adjacent territory in the LA session world. Larry Carlton had a similar foundation but a mellower delivery. Ritenour was always closer to the edge.

Tone note: He wrote “Captain Fingers” to justify the nickname the roadies gave him. That kind of self-awareness is rare. The aggression in the playing is rarer still.

The Brazilian Influence — A Third Language

Since the mid-1980s, Brazilian music has been a significant force in Ritenour’s playing — he has credited it as a major influence on his compositional approach and his melodic sensibility. He recorded tributes to Antonio Carlos Jobim and Bob Marley, explored Brazilian rhythmic patterns and harmonic colours, and brought the melodic warmth and rhythmic sophistication of samba and bossa nova into his jazz-fusion vocabulary. The Ramirez classical guitar — a nylon-string instrument associated with the warm acoustic tones of Brazilian music — sits in his arsenal alongside the archtops and semi-hollows for precisely this reason.

Tone note: Rock to jazz to fusion to Brazilian. The full Captain Fingers map covers more territory than most guitarists visit in a lifetime.

How to Sound Like Lee Ritenour: Building the Captain Fingers Tone

Ritenour’s tone varies considerably between contexts — the smooth jazz of Fourplay, the fusion aggression of Captain Fingers, the intimate solo guitar of Dreamcatcher, and the session work that covers everything in between. Here’s how to approach each major register of his sound.

The Guitar

Semi-hollow with humbuckers for the core 335 sound. The key detail from his own description: pickups on full, f-holes potentially stuffed if you’re dealing with feedback problems. The goal is maximum output with maximum control — not delicacy.

Gibson ES-335 (any era) — The obvious choice; the Custom Shop Lee Ritenour signature models capture his specific neck profile and pickup character
Epiphone ES-335 — Accessible starting point; consider pickup upgrade to ’57 Classic-style humbuckers
Gibson L-5 or signature Lee Ritenour L-5 — For the jazz archtop sound; paired with flatwound strings
For the fusion/rock contexts: any humbucker-equipped guitar with active pickups (EMG S for the Strat era, high-output passive humbuckers for the 335 context)

The Amp

The Ritenour amp philosophy is about having options. In the studio, he ran straight into whatever the session needed. Live, he used the Twin plus Mesa configuration. For home and simplified contexts, the Strymon Iridium proved sufficient to make a Grammy-nominated record.

Control	Setting (Clean/Jazz)	Setting (Fusion/Rock)	Notes
Volume/Gain	3–5 (edge of clean)	6–8 (early breakup)	Ritenour plays with full pickups — amp responds to his attack
Treble	5	6	Present without harsh; 335 humbuckers add warmth
Middle	6–7	6	Midrange is the jazz archtop’s home; fusion uses it more neutrally
Bass	5	4–5	The semi-hollow body adds bass naturally — keep the amp controlled
Reverb	2–3	1–2	Light for jazz context; minimal for fusion clarity

Tone note: Run the 335 pickups full out. Set the amp at the edge of breakup. Pick hard. That’s how you get from “smooth jazz guitarist” to “Captain Fingers.”

The Pedals

Volume pedal (Goodrich or equivalent) — For dynamic swells; a session guitarist’s fundamental expression tool
Ibanez TS9 or TS808 Tube Screamer — Midrange boost and light overdrive for fusion contexts
Mu-Tron Bi-Phase or modern phaser — For the funk and fusion session character; an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone or MXR Phase 90 covers the essentials if the original is unavailable
Delay (TC Electronic Flashback or equivalent) — Musical, musical, musical; never washy
Neo Instruments Mini Vent or Boss RT-20 — Rotary speaker effect for the L-5/archtop jazz context

Budget vs Pro Rigs

Budget — 335 session sound:

Guitar: Epiphone ES-335 (consider humbucker upgrade)
Amp: Fender Blues Junior or Fender Frontman 212R — set for edge-of-clean breakup
Pedals: Ibanez TS9, volume pedal, simple delay
Strings: D’Addario .009–.046 roundwound

Pro — Full Ritenour approach:

Guitar: Gibson ES-335 or Custom Shop signature, plus a Gibson L-5 with flatwounds for archtop contexts
Amp: Fender Twin Reverb ’65 reissue + Mesa Boogie California Tweed, or Strymon Iridium for simplified studio use
Pedals: Mu-Tron Bi-Phase (or Source Audio Lunar phaser), Ibanez TS9, TC Electronic Flashback, Neo Mini Vent, Goodrich volume pedal
Strings: D’Addario .009 hybrid for electrics; D’Addario flatwounds .011 for archtop

The Technique — The Sweat Part

Ritenour told you directly: it took a lot of sweat. The jazz vocabulary — chord tones, harmonic navigation, melodic improvisation that doesn’t default to pentatonic — requires years of dedicated study. The session discipline — delivering on the first take, reading the room, serving the song — requires hundreds of sessions to develop. Neither is accessible without the work.

Start with Wes Montgomery. Learn to hear chord tones in improvisation. Put the pickups on full and play through a clean amp that barks when you hit it. Pick hard. Then practice until you can control every degree of that attack.

Tone note: Three thousand sessions is not a gear achievement. It’s the result of choosing the sweat every day for five decades.

Influence & Legacy: The Session Giant Who Rebuilt from Ashes

Lee Ritenour’s legacy operates at two levels: the individual recordings where his playing is documented and recognised, and the broader influence he exerted on the entire culture of professional session guitar playing in Los Angeles during its most commercially potent era.

At the individual recording level, the credits speak for themselves. Pink Floyd. Steely Dan. Dizzy Gillespie. Sonny Rollins. Quincy Jones. Aretha Franklin. If you listened to American popular music between 1970 and 1990, you heard Lee Ritenour. You probably didn’t know it.

His Grammy for Wes Bound (1993) — a tribute to Wes Montgomery — was recognition of his jazz roots at a moment when his mainstream profile was primarily associated with smooth jazz through Fourplay. The album demonstrated that his jazz fluency was genuine and deep, not a veneer over session pragmatism. The 33 weeks at number one that Fourplay’s debut spent on the Billboard jazz chart demonstrated that his commercial instincts were equally refined.

His influence on other guitarists is less directly traceable than that of a star soloist — the session world tends to distribute influence diffusely, through the recordings rather than through acknowledged stylistic lineage. But the Captain Fingers approach to versatility — the idea that a serious guitarist should be able to play anything and play it at the highest professional level — influenced generations of players who grew up in the same LA ecosystem. Larry Carlton was a peer; players like Steve Lukather and Dean Parks came from adjacent territory and similar values.

The 2018 fire is, in retrospect, part of the legacy story. Dreamcatcher — made with seven guitars and a digital amp modeler in a rental room after losing 100 guitars, 40 amps, and every pedal he’d collected over five decades, plus surviving heart surgery in the same week — is one of the most improbable album origin stories in modern jazz guitar. The album is beautiful, personal, and completely itself. It may be the most honest thing he’s recorded.

The career continues. The 335 survived. The L-5 survived. Captain Fingers survived.

Tone note: He lost everything and made his most personal record. The fire clarified what mattered. The answer was: the playing.

In October 2018, Lee Ritenour stood at the edge of his property in Malibu with fire coming down the hillsides and made choices. He grabbed seven guitars from a collection of approximately 100. He grabbed the 1945 L-5 his father had found in 1965 for $600, the one a Japanese collector had offered him a hundred thousand dollars for thirty years later. He grabbed the red 335 he’d had since his teens, the one whose serial number he can’t read because the f-holes are stuffed with foam.

He left the 1958 Stratocaster with serial number 0335. He left dozens of instruments. He left the Starlight studio he’d built over four decades. He drove away.

A week later he was in surgery for a failing heart valve.

In 2020, alone in a Marina del Rey rental home during a global pandemic, with seven guitars and a Strymon Iridium and a small pile of new pedals he’d assembled from nothing, Captain Fingers made his first solo guitar album. It was everything a man who had spent fifty years playing with and for everyone else had learned about what music actually sounds like when it’s just you and the guitar and what you know.

Three thousand sessions. One house. Seven guitars. One record that sounded more like himself than anything before it.

The sweat paid off.

If Ritenour’s session versatility and semi-hollow guitar approach have your attention, don’t miss our deep dive on Larry Carlton’s complete gear history — the closest peer comparison in the LA session world, a player who made the 335 equally legendary in a slightly different direction.

And for the jazz guitar tradition that both Ritenour and Carlton were drawing from, check out our complete guide to John McLaughlin’s tone and rig — the player who demonstrated just how far jazz harmonic language could go when plugged into a Marshall in meltdown.

FAQ: Lee Ritenour Guitars & Gear

What guitar is Lee Ritenour most associated with?: A red dot-neck Gibson ES-335, believed to be a 1960 model, which he has played throughout his entire career since his late teens. The serial number is unreadable because the f-holes are stuffed with foam to reduce feedback. He carried this guitar out of the 2018 Woolsey Fire that destroyed his Malibu home. Gibson produced a Custom Shop Lee Ritenour ES-335 VOS signature model based on this instrument.
What is Lee Ritenour’s most prized guitar?: By his own description, his 1945 Gibson L-5 archtop — purchased by his father from a Los Angeles musician for $600 when Ritenour was thirteen. He was offered $100,000 for it by a Japanese collector in the early 1990s and declined. He plays it and the 335 “more than any other guitars, even today.” He also evacuated the L-5 from the 2018 fire.
What happened to Lee Ritenour’s guitar collection in 2018?: The Woolsey Fire in October 2018 destroyed Ritenour’s Malibu home and Starlight recording studio. He lost approximately 100 guitars, 40 amplifiers, and every pedal he had ever owned. He managed to evacuate seven guitars: his 1945 L-5, his 1960 ES-335, a Les Paul, a Ramirez classical guitar, a Yamaha guitar, and two others. He also underwent aortic valve replacement surgery approximately one week after the fire.
What did Lee Ritenour do after losing his gear in the fire?: He recorded Dreamcatcher (2020) — his first-ever solo guitar album — in a Marina del Rey rental home during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the seven guitars he had evacuated, a Strymon Iridium amp modeler, and a rebuilt compact pedalboard (Neo Instruments Mini Vent, Aphex Punch Factory, TC Electronic Flashback, Xotic Super Clean). The album received widespread critical acclaim and Grammy nomination recognition.
What amps does Lee Ritenour use?: His live touring rig at various points included two Fender Twin ’65 reissue amps flanking a Mesa Boogie Road King 2×12 — a three-amp configuration covering clean to crunch. He used the Mesa Boogie California Tweed in his post-fire rebuilt collection, alongside a Ladner G-1 Hellion boutique amp and the Strymon Iridium modeler for the Dreamcatcher sessions. Earlier in his career he used Fender Vibrolux and Music Man combos for session work.
What pedals did Lee Ritenour use on his classic sessions?: Ritenour’s pre-fire 1983 pedalboard included an Ibanez FP-777 Flying Pan, Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer, Mu-Tron Bi-Phase phaser (which he has cited as a key effect on numerous significant sessions), a Goodrich volume pedal, and TC Electronic processing. His post-fire rig uses the Strymon Iridium, Neo Instruments Mini Vent, Aphex Punch Factory, TC Electronic Flashback, and Xotic buffering.
What strings does Lee Ritenour use?: D’Addario roundwound strings in a hybrid gauge (.009–.011–.015–.026–.036–.046) for his ES-335 and Les Pauls — the .015 plain third string enabling easier upper-register bending. D’Addario flatwound strings gauged .011–.013–.017–.032–.042–.052 for his hollowbody archtops including the L-5, producing the characteristic warm, dark tone associated with jazz guitar.