Gear Timeline
Rick Nielsen bought an Orange amplifier at Cliff Cooper’s Orange Music store in London in 1968 or 1969, right after Cooper had started building his own amplifiers. He used that Orange 80-watt 2×12 combo to record almost the entire first Cheap Trick album in 1976 — and then kept it for fifty-plus years, eventually getting all his vintage amplifiers restored and returning them to the road. “I had them on the road until about 1981 and then they went into our warehouse where they were basically gathering dust and getting rusty.” An Orange amplifier that Nielsen bought as one of the first customers of a company that is now one of the world’s most recognized amplifier brands, used to record the debut album of a band that is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stored in a warehouse for forty years gathering dust, and then restored and returned to active touring service. This is the Rick Nielsen gear philosophy in its most concentrated form: everything is worth keeping, everything might be useful, and if you bought an amp at the very start of Orange’s commercial history, you still have it and you still use it, because it sounds better than anything else you’ve found for that application and because you are the kind of person who owns approximately two thousand guitars and has sold guitars to both Jeff Beck and Paul McCartney and considers Jeff Beck the greatest guitarist of all time and has been self-taught since the beginning and still throws guitar picks into the audience because throwing guitar picks into the audience is what Rick Nielsen does. Everything is worth keeping. The checkerboard Hamer Standard that has become one of rock’s most immediately recognized guitars. The five-neck guitar with thirty-eight strings. The Orange amp. The baseball cap. All of it.
Rick Nielsen was born on December 22, 1948, in Rockford, Illinois, into a musical family — his parents Ralph and Marilyn Nielsen were opera singers who also operated a music store, Ralph Nielsen Music, where Rick was exposed to instruments from the beginning and began developing the omnivorous guitar enthusiasm that has produced a collection of approximately two thousand guitars across his career. He is self-taught — which is relevant not because it produced limitations but because it produced the specific unconstrained approach to the guitar that characterizes both his playing and his collecting. The self-taught guitarist doesn’t approach the instrument through the canon of received techniques; they approach it through the question of what sounds good and what serves the song. Nielsen’s guitar approach — described by Guitar World as “a master of sustain (how he stretches those chords on ‘Surrender’) and showboating (as a white Chuck Berry on ‘I Want You to Want Me’)” — is the product of that unconstrained, music-first approach.
Cheap Trick’s specific musical identity — the power pop that combined the melodic sensibility of the Beatles with the aggressive energy of the New York Dolls and the hard rock power of the early British rock tradition — required a guitar approach that could serve all of these influences simultaneously. Nielsen’s rhythm guitar provides the hard rock power; his lead guitar provides the melodic directness; his songwriting provides the pop intelligence. The three are inseparable in the Cheap Trick context, and they are all the product of the same self-taught, music-first sensibility that produced both the checkerboard Hamer and the five-neck guitar.
His most direct statement of gear philosophy is this: “I don’t use any pedals or anything like that, so it’s like I just run straight into my amp.” This is, in the context of the rock guitar tradition, one of the more radical position statements available — a guitarist with two thousand instruments in his collection, who has played stadiums and arenas for fifty years, who has recorded with John Lennon, who has sold guitars to Jeff Beck, who has written some of the most widely known songs in classic rock history — that guitarist runs straight into the amp, no pedals, and the result is “Surrender” and “I Want You to Want Me” and “Dream Police.” The pedal industry would prefer that this fact were less well-documented.
The Cheap Trick at Budokan album — recorded at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in April 1978 and released in 1978 (Japan) and 1979 (US) — is the specific commercial document that established Cheap Trick’s global profile and confirmed that the songs and the band’s performance approach were capable of the kind of cross-cultural mass communication that very few rock acts achieve. The album went platinum multiple times. It launched “I Want You to Want Me” as a commercial hit after the studio version had failed to chart. It remains, in the assessment of anyone who has ever listened to it, one of the most exciting live rock albums ever recorded. Nielsen’s guitar work throughout is exactly what it was designed to be: loud, precise, enthusiastic, and completely in service of songs that deserved exactly this treatment.
Background: Rockford’s Music Store Kid, the Five-Neck Guitar, and the Art of Throwing Picks
The Rockford, Illinois origin — the mid-sized Midwestern city that Nielsen grew up in and that Cheap Trick essentially represents in the rock and roll geography of American music — is important because it establishes the specific cultural context of a musician who developed outside the coastal music industry centers. Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco produced specific music scene cultures that shaped the artists who came from them; Rockford produced Rick Nielsen, who absorbed the same music through records and radio and retail access to his parents’ music store rather than through geographic proximity to the scene itself. The specific self-sufficiency of this development — doing it yourself, figuring it out, finding your own approach because there was no local established approach to be given — is directly visible in both the guitar playing and the gear choices.
The five-neck guitar is the most extreme expression of Nielsen’s guitar philosophy and the most immediately striking physical object in his performance career. A custom-built instrument with five necks — each in a different configuration, with a total of approximately thirty-eight strings — it is a guitar that could not be fully played by a human being with two hands and ten fingers, which is partly the point. The five-neck guitar is not primarily a musical tool but a visual statement: a celebration of the guitar as an absurd, excessive, magnificent object, produced by someone who genuinely loves guitars to a degree that most people find difficult to fully comprehend. Nielsen owns approximately two thousand guitars. He built a five-neck guitar. These facts are consistent with each other.
His guitar collection is not a passive accumulation but an active relationship with the history of the instrument: he has bought, sold, traded, and researched vintage guitars for fifty-plus years, developing the specific knowledge of a genuine connoisseur. Selling guitars to Jeff Beck and Paul McCartney — two of the most celebrated and most knowledgeable guitarists in rock history — confirms that the collection is of genuine significance rather than merely of large size. The guitar collection was featured in the “Rick’s Pick” exhibit at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford — an institutional acknowledgment that the collection has cultural and historical significance beyond its entertainment value.
His contribution to John Lennon’s Double Fantasy (1980) — guitar work on “Losing You” specifically — placed him in one of the most significant recording sessions of the rock era, confirming that his reputation extended to the level of being a first-call guitarist for a Beatle’s comeback album. This is the specific peer recognition that a rock musician’s career needs to be evaluated properly: not just the commercial success, not just the critical acclaim, but the call from John Lennon wanting your guitar on his record.
The Rig: Rick Nielsen’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
The checkerboard Hamer Standard — the specific checkerboard-finish guitar that has become one of rock’s most immediately recognizable visual identities — is the instrument most closely associated with Rick Nielsen’s performance identity. Hamer Guitars, the Chicago-area boutique manufacturer (founded in 1973), produced Nielsen’s original checkerboard Standards in the early Cheap Trick period, and the guitar’s visual distinctive appearance — the black and white checkerboard pattern on the body, often combined with Nielsen’s signature stars-and-stripes ornamentation — established the Hamer brand’s profile and confirmed their ability to produce instruments worthy of a major touring artist. The Hamer Standard’s construction — mahogany body, set neck, humbucker pickups — provides the warm, sustaining character of the Gibson SG family that the Standard’s design is descended from. The checkerboard finish is the visual identity; the tone is Gibson-family warm with the specific character of Hamer’s particular construction. Nielsen has maintained multiple checkerboard Hamer Standards throughout his career, ensuring availability at any performance regardless of equipment failure.
Gibson produces a Rick Nielsen signature Les Paul — the formal signature relationship with the manufacturer whose Les Paul family has been central to Nielsen’s guitar collection and playing history. The signature Les Paul captures Nielsen’s specific requirements within the Les Paul format: the warm, sustaining mahogany/maple-cap construction, humbucker pickups appropriate for the hard rock power pop context, and the specific playability that Nielsen has developed over fifty years of Les Paul use. The Rick Nielsen Signature Les Paul represents the formal documentation of the Gibson relationship that the checkerboard Hamer Standards and the vintage Gibson collection have always implied.
Nielsen’s approximately two thousand guitar collection includes multiple significant Gibson vintage examples: a 1958 Gibson ES-335, a 1965 Gibson SG, a 1959 Gibson Les Paul TV Model Junior double cut in TV Yellow, a red Gibson Firebird III Reverse, a Gibson SG with P-90 pickups, and various other Gibson family instruments. Each serves a different tonal purpose in the recording context: the ES-335’s semi-hollow warmth, the SG’s lighter body and brighter character, the Les Paul Junior’s raw P-90 directness, the Firebird’s through-neck sustain. “They all have a different sound, but some sound better than others. Something that might sound great on one track just doesn’t fit with another track.”
Nielsen’s Fender collection includes a 1951 Telecaster and a Fender Esquire Custom — the single-pickup Telecaster-format guitar whose single-pickup physics theory he would appreciate even before Charlie Starr articulated it — alongside various other Fender family instruments. The 1951 Telecaster from the very first commercial year of Fender Telecaster production represents both the historical significance and the practical tonal value of the earliest Fender electric guitar instruments: the specific combination of the ash body, single-coil pickups, and the Telecaster bridge’s specific attack character that no subsequent copy quite replicates.
A Rickenbacker 12-string appears in Nielsen’s documented recent recording arsenal — the specific jangly, chiming character of the Rickenbacker 12-string that defined the sound of the British Invasion’s jangle pop and that suits Cheap Trick’s pop-rock melodic sensibility. The Rickenbacker 12-string’s specific tonal character — the doubled strings producing the characteristic shimmer of the 12-string, combined with the Rickenbacker’s specific neck pickup tone that differs from the Gibson or Fender 12-string equivalents — adds a textural dimension to the guitar palette that single-course instruments cannot provide.
The 1964 Epiphone Wilshire — a mid-1960s Epiphone solid-body with mini-humbuckers — appears in Nielsen’s current recording arsenal. The Wilshire’s mini-humbucker pickups provide a bright, articulate character different from both full-size PAF humbuckers and standard single-coils — the same Seth Lover mini-humbucker design as the Firebird’s but in a different construction context, with the Wilshire’s specific mahogany body and double-cutaway design providing its own acoustic character.
The custom five-neck guitar — approximately thirty-eight strings across five necks, each in a different configuration — is the most extreme instrument in Nielsen’s performing arsenal and possibly the most extreme instrument in any guitar player’s performing arsenal. It cannot be fully played by a human being; different necks serve different musical purposes in performance, with Nielsen switching between them as specific songs require specific configurations. The five-neck guitar’s visual impact — it is large enough to be visible from the back of an arena — is as much its function as its musical utility. It is a guitar built by someone who loves guitars enough to imagine what five of them would be like if they were all part of the same object, and then have that object built. Two thousand guitars in the collection. Five necks on the stage guitar. Consistency.
Amps
The Orange 80-watt 2×12 combo that Nielsen bought at Cliff Cooper’s Orange Music store in London in 1968 or 1969 — right after Cooper had started building his own amplifiers, making Nielsen one of the very earliest Orange customers — was used to record almost the entire first Cheap Trick album in 1976. This is one of the more historically significant specific amplifier purchases: buying from the founder’s own store at the very beginning of a manufacturer’s commercial existence, and then using that amplifier to record the debut album of a band that would eventually be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Orange amp then went into storage in Nielsen’s warehouse until the restoration project returned it to active touring service.
Nielsen’s primary live amplification in the modern touring period is a 4×12 bottom cabinet powered by a 1960s Marshall 50-watt head. The Marshall 50-watt EL34 head — the 50-watt variant of the Marshall family — provides the specific warmth and dynamic responsiveness of the smaller output power stage that the 100-watt equivalent sacrifices for higher headroom. The 50-watt EL34 Marshall’s specific quality of responding to pick attack more immediately than the 100-watt — the output stage reaching its working point at lower absolute power — suits the expressiveness and dynamics of Cheap Trick’s power pop guitar approach. The combination of a vintage 60s Marshall head with a 4×12 cabinet is the core of Nielsen’s live rig alongside the restored vintage amplifiers.
The Vox AC30 also appears in Nielsen’s live rotating amplifier combination — the standard EL84-powered British chime that provides a completely different tonal character from the Marshall’s EL34 warmth. The AC30’s specific bright, compressed, chimey quality suits the jangle-pop dimension of Cheap Trick’s sound — the British Invasion influence that the Rickenbacker 12-string represents tonally, matched in amplification by the British amplifier most associated with the Beatles and the Searchers. “About three amps are running full time. The other amps will be a rotating combination of other things.”
A Fender Deluxe Reverb modified by Paul Rivera of Rivera Amplification powers Nielsen’s Randall Isolation box backstage — the signal from the isolation box sent to the front of house PA and into his in-ear monitors. The Paul Rivera modification enhances the Deluxe Reverb’s tonal character for the specific application of providing a consistent, high-quality reference signal for both the house PA and the in-ear monitor mix. Rivera Amplification’s custom modification work is among the most respected in the professional guitar amplifier community, and their enhancement of the Deluxe Reverb for this specific touring application reflects the same attention to practical tonal optimization that characterizes Nielsen’s entire gear approach.
Selmer amplifiers — the British valve amplifier brand associated with the British Invasion era — appear among Nielsen’s restored vintage amplifiers returned to touring service. Selmer was one of the primary British amplifier manufacturers before Marshall and Orange dominated the market, and their specific British EL34 or EL84 character provides yet another distinct tonal option in the rotating live amplifier combination. “There’s a bunch of different colored Marshall heads and bottoms, some Selmers, and the Orange 80-watt 2×12 combo.”
The Ebo Customs Del Rio — a Nashville-made boutique amplifier — also appears in Nielsen’s documented live rig: “There’s a Vox AC30 and an Ebo Customs Del Rio, which was made in Nashville.” Ebo Customs is a boutique Nashville amplifier manufacturer producing vintage-voiced valve amplification with the specific warmth and character that quality boutique manufacturers achieve through careful component selection and hand-wiring. Its inclusion in the rotating amplifier combination alongside the Orange, Marshall, Vox, and Selmer confirms the breadth of amplification character available within Nielsen’s live setup.
Effects
Rick Nielsen does not use effects pedals. “I don’t use any pedals or anything like that, so it’s like I just run straight into my amp.” This is the definitive effects section for this article. The guitar — whichever of the two thousand he has selected for the occasion — goes directly into the amplifier — whichever of the rotating vintage and boutique amps he has selected — and the result is “Surrender” and “I Want You to Want Me” and the rest of the Cheap Trick catalog. No Tube Screamer. No MXR Phase 90. No Boss DD-7. No Whammy. No CAE Boost. No Fulltone anything. Direct. The amp makes it loud, the guitar makes the sound, and the songs make it music.
The guitar’s own volume control is the only dynamic processing available in the Nielsen signal chain — the same approach documented for Gary Rossington, Charlie Starr, and other players whose amplification philosophy involves using the guitar’s inherent controls as dynamic tools. Rolling back the volume produces a cleaner tone from the cranked vintage Marshall; pushing it forward produces the natural crunch. No pedal required. The guitar and the amp do everything.
Rick Nielsen throws guitar picks into the audience. This is not an effect in any conventional signal-chain sense. It is, however, one of the more immediately recognizable elements of his live performance approach, and it reflects the showman’s understanding — shared with Chuck Berry, with Pete Townshend, with Keith Richards — that the guitar and the guitarist are both part of the performance, and that the guitarist’s specific physical relationship with the audience is as much part of the show as the notes. Nielsen throws picks. The audience catches them. The circuit is complete.
Rick Nielsen is endorsed by D’Addario strings — the same manufacturer documented across multiple players in this series. The specific D’Addario gauge preferences are not comprehensively specified in available sources, but the endorsement confirms the standard professional relationship with the world’s largest guitar string manufacturer and provides the string quality consistent with fifty-plus years of professional performance.
The specific history of Cheap Trick’s recording approach across their classic catalog demonstrates the Orange amp’s centrality to their foundational sound. The first album (Cheap Trick, 1977) used the Orange 80-watt 2×12 for almost all guitar tracks — establishing the specific warmth and compression of the early Cheap Trick recording character that informed everything that followed. In Color (1977) — the second album, which contains the studio recording of “I Want You to Want Me” and “Southern Girls” — continued the warm, direct guitar approach of the debut. Heaven Tonight (1978) — the album containing “Surrender” — is the critical achievement that demonstrated the band’s commercial potential: “Surrender” opens with Les Paul-through-early-Orange-amp chords that sustain with the specific warmth of a valve amplifier pushed to natural saturation, no effects processing. Dream Police (1979) added orchestral elements while maintaining the core guitar approach. The arc from debut to Dream Police is five albums in three years, each one building on the same foundational guitar approach while expanding the sonic palette. The Orange amp is in all of them. No pedals in any of them. Two thousand guitars in the collection, and the same basic setup across the whole classic period.
His parents’ music store — Ralph Nielsen Music in Rockford — is worth returning to because it is the physical environment that produced both the guitar collection and the guitar sensibility. Growing up in a music store means growing up surrounded by instruments of every kind, in various states of playability and repair, at various price points and ages. You develop opinions about what sounds good and what doesn’t, about the difference between a well-made instrument and a poorly made one, about the specific qualities that distinguish one vintage guitar from another that looks superficially identical. This is the education of a guitar connoisseur rather than a guitar student, and it is the education that produced the two thousand instruments, the five-neck guitar, the Orange amp from 1968, and the checkerboard Hamer that has been one of rock’s most recognizable visual identities for fifty years.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Rick Nielsen plays guitar with the specific combination of hard rock power, pop melodic intelligence, and self-taught technical freedom that Cheap Trick’s music has always required. His specific role within the band’s guitar architecture — lead guitar and songwriting, with Robin Zander providing rhythm guitar and vocals — means that his guitar work is always in service of the song’s melodic content rather than existing as a demonstration of technical virtuosity. “I’m not a virtuoso. I’m a songwriter that plays rhythm guitar — and once in a while I have to play lead.” This self-assessment is characteristically modest and characteristically accurate: the guitar work on “Surrender,” “Dream Police,” and the live performances at Budokan is exactly in service of the songs rather than demonstrating what Nielsen can do independently of them.
The “master of sustain” description from the Illinois Entertainer — specifically noting “how he stretches those chords on ‘Surrender'” — captures the specific quality of his rhythm guitar approach. The stretched, sustained chord in “Surrender” is not a technically complex gesture but a musically intelligent one: holding the chord while the melody and the rhythm evolve around it creates the specific momentum and tension that the song’s verse section requires. This is the songwriter-guitarist’s understanding of the guitar’s role within the song — not as a technical showcase but as a structural element that serves the overall musical experience.
His Jeff Beck admiration — “Jeff Beck is definitely Number 1 and has been ever since I heard the Yardbirds back when I was a kid” — reveals the specific melodic and tonal quality that Nielsen values in guitar playing: Beck’s ability to extract maximum emotional content from minimal technical means, the specific quality of feel-based playing that the blues tradition values and that no amount of technical training can substitute for. This is the guitar playing that a self-taught kid from Rockford who grew up in his parents’ music store would recognize as the real thing, and the standard he has applied to his own playing throughout his career.
How to Sound Like Rick Nielsen
The Cheap Trick / Rick Nielsen tone requires: a Gibson-family guitar (Les Paul, SG, ES-335, or Hamer equivalent) with humbuckers; a vintage British valve amplifier (Marshall 50-watt, Vox AC30, or Orange 2×12) pushed to natural saturation; no pedals; and the specific chord-stretching, sustain-oriented rhythm guitar approach that serves the song’s melodic content rather than competing with it. The five-neck guitar is optional but recommended for large venues where visual scale matters.
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Marshall 50-Watt Gain/Volume | 7–8 (natural EL34 saturation) | No master volume — single volume control pushed to natural output-stage saturation. The 50-watt’s specific warmth and dynamic response at its working point is the foundational tone. Push it until you hear the EL34s working. This is the vintage Marshall approach that runs through the entire series. |
| Bass | 6 | Moderate bass — the Les Paul or Hamer Standard’s mahogany warmth provides natural low-end character. Controlled bass keeps the power pop chord rhythm clean and defined. |
| Mid | 7 | Present midrange — the Nielsen rhythm chord tone lives in the midrange. The stretched, sustained chord approach depends on harmonic presence in the midrange for the chord to sustain with the specific warmth of “Surrender.” Never scooped. |
| Treble | 6–7 | Moderate-to-present treble for the definition and cut of the lead lines and chord attacks. The humbucker warmth needs treble support for presence in the mix. Bright enough for presence; warm enough for the Gibson-family character. |
| Pedals | None | No pedals. Zero. Straight into the amp. This is the complete effects section for the Rick Nielsen tone. The amp does the work. The guitar does the character. The songs do the music. The picks go into the audience. |
| Orange 2×12 Combo (First Album Approach) | Volume: maximum comfortable; Tone: warm | For the specific early Cheap Trick recording tone — the first album’s specific warmth and directness — push the Orange 80-watt 2×12 combo to near its saturation point. The Orange’s specific EL34 character is warmer and more compressed than the Marshall. Both have the same guitar running straight in. No pedals. |
| Chord Stretching (Rhythm Technique) | Hold; sustain; let it breathe | The specific rhythm technique of “Surrender” and the power pop approach: hold the chord longer than strict eighth-note rhythm requires, let it sustain into the next phrase, create rhythmic momentum through strategic sustain rather than constant strumming. This is a compositional decision made in real-time — the guitarist as arranger deciding how long each chord should breathe. |
Influence & Legacy
Rick Nielsen’s influence on rock guitar is specific and well-documented: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green Day have all cited Cheap Trick as a primary influence, and the specific Cheap Trick qualities those bands absorbed — the combination of hard rock power with pop melody, the specific chord architecture of “Surrender” and “I Want You to Want Me,” the energy and enthusiasm of the Budokan performance — are Nielsen’s musical contributions translated into the cultural inheritance of the subsequent generation. The Nirvana connection is the most commercially significant: Kurt Cobain’s specific approach to combining aggressive rock power with pop melody clarity is audible in both the Cheap Trick catalog and the Nirvana recordings that followed, and Cobain was explicit about the influence.
The Colbert Report theme song — written and performed by Cheap Trick for the Comedy Central program that ran from 2005 to 2014 — is among the more unexpected pieces of the Nielsen legacy: the reach of a Cheap Trick composition into the specific cultural context of a nightly political satire program confirms the band’s specific versatility and the adaptability of their musical approach across contexts. The Double Fantasy contribution — guitar on John Lennon’s comeback album — is the peer recognition that places Nielsen’s quality beyond the commercial context of power pop.
For the broader AOR and power pop tradition, see Neal Schon’s Journey approach — a guitarist whose melodic rock sensibility parallels Nielsen’s in a different commercial context. The no-pedals direct-to-amp philosophy connects to Gary Rossington’s volume-pot-and-amp approach — another guitarist whose tonal philosophy eschews effects processing in favor of guitar and amplifier interaction. And the guitar collection of approximately two thousand instruments places Nielsen alongside Charlie Starr’s connoisseur approach — though at a scale that makes Starr’s collection look modest by comparison.
Two thousand guitars. Five necks. No pedals. An Orange amp bought from Cliff Cooper before Orange was famous. The checkerboard Hamer. The throws into the audience. “Surrender.” “I Want You to Want Me.” “Dream Police.” At Budokan. Jeff Beck is Number 1. John Lennon wanted his guitar on Double Fantasy. The five-neck guitar cannot be fully played by a human being with two hands and ten fingers. Everything is worth keeping. Rick Nielsen is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Orange 2×12 that he bought in 1968 is out of the warehouse and back on the road, where it belongs.
Frequently Asked Questions: Rick Nielsen Guitars & Gear
What guitar does Rick Nielsen use?
Rick Nielsen uses a rotating collection from his approximately two thousand guitar arsenal, but his primary visual identity guitar is the checkerboard Hamer Standard — the black and white checkerboard-finish guitar produced by Chicago-area boutique manufacturer Hamer Guitars. He also has Gibson Rick Nielsen Signature Les Paul models, multiple vintage Gibsons (1958 ES-335, 1965 SG, 1959 Les Paul TV Junior, Gibson Firebird III), a 1951 Fender Telecaster, a 1964 Epiphone Wilshire, a Rickenbacker 12-string, various Gibson SGs including one with P-90 pickups, and the custom five-neck guitar with approximately thirty-eight strings. In recording contexts, different guitars are chosen for specific songs: “They all have a different sound, but some sound better than others. Something that might sound great on one track just doesn’t fit with another track.”
Does Rick Nielsen use any effects pedals?
No. Rick Nielsen runs straight from guitar to amplifier with no effects pedals in the signal chain: “I don’t use any pedals or anything like that, so it’s like I just run straight into my amp.” This applies both to live performance and to recording. The guitar and the amplifier are the complete signal chain. This is the complete effects section of the Rick Nielsen gear setup.
What amplifiers does Rick Nielsen use?
Nielsen’s primary live amplification includes approximately three amps running full time. The main rig uses a 1960s Marshall 50-watt head with a 4×12 cabinet. A Vox AC30 is part of the rotating combination. An Orange 80-watt 2×12 combo — bought by Nielsen at Cliff Cooper’s Orange Music store in London in 1968 or 1969, right after Cooper had started building amplifiers — recorded almost the entire first Cheap Trick album and has been restored and returned to touring after decades in storage. A Fender Deluxe Reverb modified by Paul Rivera of Rivera Amplification powers a Randall Isolation box backstage, feeding the front of house PA and in-ear monitors. Selmer amplifiers and the Ebo Customs Del Rio Nashville boutique amp also appear in the rotating live combination.
What is the five-neck guitar?
The five-neck guitar is a custom-built instrument with five separate necks, each in a different configuration, for a total of approximately thirty-eight strings. It cannot be fully played by a human player with two hands and ten fingers — different necks are accessed for different musical purposes in live performance. The five-neck guitar is as much a visual performance statement as a musical tool: it communicates the absurd, excessive love of guitars that characterizes Rick Nielsen’s relationship with the instrument at its most concentrated. At arena scale, it is visible from every seat. It was built because Rick Nielsen wanted it built, and he wanted it built because he owns approximately two thousand guitars and a five-neck guitar seemed like the logical extension of that commitment.
How did Rick Nielsen learn to play guitar?
Rick Nielsen is self-taught — he learned guitar without formal instruction, developing his approach through listening, playing, and the specific practical education of working in and around his parents’ music store, Ralph Nielsen Music in Rockford, Illinois. His parents were opera singers, giving him early exposure to music in the household, but his guitar development was self-directed. The self-taught approach produced the specific unconstrained musical thinking that characterizes both his playing and his guitar collecting: approaching the instrument through the question of what sounds good and what serves the song rather than through the canon of received techniques.
What is Cheap Trick at Budokan and why is it significant?
Cheap Trick at Budokan is a live album recorded at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, Japan, in April 1978 and released in 1978 in Japan and 1979 in the United States. The album’s significance: it launched “I Want You to Want Me” as a commercial hit after the studio version had failed to chart; it demonstrated Cheap Trick’s extraordinary live performance capability to an international audience; it went platinum multiple times in the United States and is widely considered one of the greatest live rock albums ever recorded. The album established Cheap Trick’s specific commercial profile in Japan, where they had been stars before achieving comparable commercial success in the United States, and it remains the definitive document of the band at their most electric peak.
Which musicians has Rick Nielsen collaborated with outside Cheap Trick?
Nielsen contributed guitar to John Lennon’s Double Fantasy (1980) — specifically guitar work on “Losing You” — which is his most historically significant external collaboration. He sold vintage guitars to both Jeff Beck (his self-proclaimed number-one favorite guitarist) and Paul McCartney, confirming the quality and significance of his collection in the estimation of two of rock’s most celebrated figures. Cheap Trick wrote and performed the theme song for Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. Bands including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green Day have cited Cheap Trick as a primary influence. Cheap Trick has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2016).
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