Steve Khan Guitars & Gear: The Eyewitness Jazz Fusion Master’s Complete Rig

Background

Steve Khan was born on April 28, 1947, in Los Angeles, California. His father Sammy Cahn’s status as one of the most prolific and successful songwriters in Hollywood history gave young Steve early access to the music world’s professional tier, but his own musical path was self-determined — he studied music seriously, absorbed the jazz tradition through records and through the Los Angeles music scene of the 1960s, and developed a guitar approach rooted in the bebop and post-bop jazz vocabulary rather than in the commercial pop world his father inhabited.

His early professional work was in the Los Angeles session scene — a world where the demands of commercial recording required technical precision, sight-reading ability, and the musical flexibility to serve very different musical contexts in rapid succession. Khan excelled in this environment while simultaneously developing his personal musical voice through study and practice. His move to New York in the early 1970s placed him at the centre of the jazz scene and opened up the opportunities that would define his career.

Session work for Columbia Records and CTI Records — the prestige jazz and fusion label run by Creed Taylor — gave him exposure to an extraordinary range of musical contexts and to musicians of the highest calibre. His work with Maynard Ferguson, Blood Sweat & Tears, and various other artists established him as one of the most reliable and musically intelligent session guitarists in New York. The specific challenge of the CTI context — sophisticated jazz and fusion recordings for an audiophile market that valued both musical quality and sonic excellence — refined both his musical and his tonal approach.

His own recordings began with two albums for Columbia — Tightrope (1977) and The Blue Man (1978) — before forming the Eyewitness band in the early 1980s with bassist Anthony Jackson, drummer Steve Jordan (later replaced by Manolo Badrena and others), and various percussionists. The Eyewitness recordings — Eyewitness (1981), Modern Times (1981), Casa Loco (1983) — showed Khan at his most fully developed as a bandleader and composer, with the specific fusion of jazz harmony, Latin rhythm, and sophisticated guitar technique that became his personal signature.

He has continued releasing albums and performing into the 2020s — his solo guitar recordings, band recordings, and collaborative projects maintaining the standards of the early work while showing continued musical development. His writing about music — detailed liner notes, website essays on specific musical topics — has contributed to the musical community’s understanding of jazz harmony, Latin rhythm, and the relationship between scholarship and spontaneity in jazz performance.

Steve Khan Guitars Gear: The Complete Rig

Guitars

Steve Khan’s guitar history divides into two distinct primary periods: the Gibson ES-335 period that defined his early and classic recordings, and the Ibanez period that followed it. Understanding both is essential to understanding how his tonal approach developed across his career.

His definitive instrument is the Gibson ES-335 — the semi-hollow thinline guitar that Gibson introduced in 1958 as a compromise between the full warm tone of a hollowbody archtop and the feedback resistance of a solid body. The ES-335’s construction — laminated maple body with a solid maple centre block running the full length of the instrument, two humbucking pickups, tune-o-matic bridge and stop tailpiece — produces a tone that has proved ideally suited to jazz fusion: warmer and more resonant than a solid-body Les Paul, clearer and more feedback-resistant than a full hollowbody archtop, with a midrange emphasis and natural sustain that serve both chord comping and single-note lead playing equally well.

Khan’s ES-335 was typically a vintage early-1960s example — the period when Gibson’s quality control and the specific combination of tonewoods and hardware produced the instrument’s most refined character. The original PAF humbuckers in these instruments (7.5k to 8.5k ohms DC resistance, Alnico II or Alnico V magnets) have the dynamic sensitivity that jazz playing requires: the ability to produce clean warmth with light touch and natural overdrive with heavier attack, without external gain processing. The neck pickup in particular — warmer, smoother, with the characteristic jazz guitar vocal quality — was his primary lead and chord voice, while the bridge pickup provided a slightly brighter, more focused character for specific melodic passages.

The ES-335’s feedback characteristics — better than a hollowbody but more complex than a solid body, with the hollow wing cavities contributing specific resonant frequencies that can be excited acoustically — were managed through careful amplifier positioning and volume management. In a jazz fusion context where stage volumes are generally lower than in rock, the ES-335’s feedback behaviour is manageable and can even be used musically — a slight feedback-induced sustain extension on held notes is a characteristic and welcome feature of the instrument in appropriate conditions.

The transition to Ibanez guitars — specifically various Artist and custom models — came as Khan developed a relationship with the Japanese manufacturer that produced instruments to his specific requirements. Ibanez’s Artist series guitars, introduced in the mid-1970s, were high-quality Gibson-influenced designs with their own specific tonal character. The collaboration with Khan produced instruments that incorporated features drawn from his extensive experience with Gibson instruments while adapting the design for his specific playing requirements.

His Ibanez instruments used various pickup configurations including DiMarzio humbuckers — particularly the PAF-replica DiMarzio PAF (not to be confused with the later PAF Pro), measuring approximately 8.0k to 8.5k ohms with Alnico magnets, and various custom-specification units. The DiMarzio units’ more consistent production tolerances compared to vintage Gibson PAFs gave his Ibanez instruments a different quality of consistency from the vintage Gibson instruments, whose individual character could vary significantly from guitar to guitar.

String gauges for Khan run medium — typically .011–.049 or .011–.052 — somewhat heavier than typical rock guitarists use but appropriate for the warm, full-bodied jazz tone he pursues. The heavier gauge provides more fundamental tone and sustain, and suits the right-hand technique he uses: a relaxed, warm picking attack rather than the more aggressive approach of rock players. He has used various string brands including D’Addario and GHS.

Amps

Steve Khan’s amplification philosophy has been consistent throughout his career: clean, warm, transparent amplification that reproduces the guitar’s natural character without imposing its own distinctive tonal signature. This is fundamentally different from the British rock approach of using amplifier distortion as a primary tonal tool — Khan wants the amplifier to get out of the way of the guitar’s natural sound rather than to shape or transform it.

His primary amplifier has been the Fender Twin Reverb — the 2×12 combo running two 6L6 output valves at 85 watts, with clean headroom sufficient to remain undistorted at significant stage volumes. The Twin’s specific character — clean, with a warmth in the low end from the 6L6 tubes, a slight compression at higher volume levels, and the onboard spring reverb that adds appropriate spatial dimension — suited Khan’s requirements precisely. The 6L6’s American tonal character provides warmth and bottom-end authority without the midrange emphasis of the British EL34 designs, giving chord voicings a natural fullness that suits jazz harmony.

The Jensen speakers in the blackface Twin Reverb — C12N 12-inch ceramic-magnet speakers with a sensitivity of approximately 100dB/1W/1m — add their own character to the amplified sound: clear, articulate, with a specific upper-midrange presence that gives single notes projection and chord voicings definition without the coloured midrange character of British Celestion speakers. For jazz guitar specifically, where harmonic clarity in chord playing is as important as projection in single-note lines, the Jensen’s articulate character suits the musical requirements better than more coloured British alternatives.

He has also used Polytone amplifiers — specifically the Polytone Mini-Brute and similar models — for specific performance contexts. Polytone amplifiers, designed specifically for jazz guitar, are solid-state designs that prioritise clean, warm amplification over any particular vintage character. Their full-range frequency response, from deep bass to extended treble, suits the full harmonic content of jazz chord voicings better than amplifiers with more limited bandwidth. The Polytone’s portability — significantly smaller and lighter than the Twin Reverb — was also practically attractive for the touring and session contexts where carrying a full Fender combo was impractical.

For recording, Khan has used various amplifier configurations depending on the specific requirements of the session — the Fender Twin, direct injection through a quality preamp, or various combinations of these approaches. His willingness to adapt his amplification approach to the recording context reflects the same practical musical intelligence that characterises all of his equipment decisions.

Effects

Steve Khan’s effects use is minimal by rock guitar standards and relatively extensive by jazz standards — a reflection of his jazz fusion context, where the jazz tradition’s preference for unprocessed guitar tone coexists with the fusion tradition’s willingness to use effects as musical tools. His effects chain is focused and purposeful: each element contributes something specific that serves the music.

A chorus pedal — specifically the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble in his earlier work and later the Boss CE-2 — has been a central element of his tone across much of his career. The CE-1’s bucket-brigade circuit produces a warm, complex chorus effect with slight pitch variation that gives chord voicings a shimmering quality without the artificial clarity of later digital chorus designs. In the jazz fusion context, the chorus effect adds the dimensional quality to sustained chord voicings that the otherwise dry, immediate guitar tone doesn’t provide, giving the playing a warmer, more enveloping quality when chords are comped behind soloists or on slow harmonic material.

A delay pedal — the Boss DD-3 Digital Delay in his later work, and tape-based units in the earlier period — provides echo for specific textural applications and for the spatial dimension that jazz recordings often require. Khan’s delay use is subtle rather than prominent — short delay times that add depth to the sound without creating obvious rhythmic echo effects, or longer delays used sparingly for specific textural passages.

A volume pedal is a consistent element of his live setup — allowing him to manage his overall output level in response to the dynamics of the ensemble and the specific requirements of different passages within a performance. The volume pedal also enables specific performance techniques, including the violin-bowing-style attack produced by turning the volume up while a note is already sustaining — a technique that eliminates the pick attack and creates a smooth, flowing note onset that suits specific jazz melodic passages.

An Ibanez Tube Screamer — the TS-808 or TS-9 variant — appeared in his chain for specific applications where a mild overdrive added warmth and sustain to the guitar’s natural clean tone without the heavier distortion of rock-oriented overdrive pedals. The Tube Screamer’s JRC4558 op-amp circuit produces a soft, warm overdrive with a specific midrange emphasis that suits jazz fusion guitar by adding sustain and harmonic richness without the high-gain saturation that would obscure chord voicing clarity.

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Steve Khan’s playing is defined by the intersection of deep jazz scholarship and genuine musical spontaneity — the combination of knowing exactly what is harmonically possible at any given moment and having the technical facility to execute whatever the musical inspiration requires. This combination — intellectual preparation and physical facility enabling genuine musical freedom — is the jazz musician’s fundamental achievement, and Khan demonstrates it at an unusually high level.

His harmonic language is rooted in the post-bop tradition — the school of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and John Coltrane, extended through the specific contributions of Wes Montgomery and his direct inheritors in the electric guitar tradition. The specific vocabulary of modal jazz harmony, with its characteristic scale choices, approach note patterns, and rhythmic displacement of phrases against the underlying harmonic rhythm, is deeply embedded in his playing at the level of instinct rather than calculation — the result of decades of intensive study translated into reflexive musical knowledge.

His right-hand technique is particularly sophisticated. He plays primarily with his fingers rather than a flat pick — the fingerstyle approach giving him independent control of multiple voices in chord passages and a different attack quality for single notes from what a pick produces. His thumb handling the lower strings and the first two or three fingers handling the upper voices produces a warm, full-bodied chord tone that the single-surface attack of a flat pick can’t replicate. He also uses a hybrid approach in some passages — pick and fingers combined — for specific textural requirements.

The Latin influence on his playing — developed through intensive study of Brazilian and Cuban music, and through the specific rhythmic environment of the Eyewitness band with its Latin percussion — gives his rhythm playing a quality of rhythmic sophistication that straight jazz playing doesn’t develop. The specific quality of groove in Latin music — the relationship between specific rhythmic patterns and the overall forward momentum of the ensemble — requires understanding the tradition at a deep level, and Khan has developed this understanding through both intellectual study and extensive performance.

Tonally, his philosophy is oriented toward the natural warmth and clarity of the guitar’s acoustic character, amplified faithfully without transformation. The ES-335’s specific combination of warmth and clarity, amplified cleanly through the Fender Twin, and supplemented by the CE-1 chorus for dimensional quality, produced a tone that served his musical requirements with unusual completeness. The additional effects — delay, volume pedal, occasional Tube Screamer warmth — were additions to this complete foundation rather than components of it.

How to Sound Like Steve Khan

Guitar Approach

A Gibson ES-335 — vintage early-1960s if available, or a well-built modern equivalent — with PAF-spec humbuckers (Alnico II in the neck, 7.5k to 8.0k ohms) is the starting point. The neck pickup should be your primary voice for chord comping and melodic lead work. Medium-heavy strings (.011–.049) provide the warm, full-bodied tone and sustain that his playing requires. Develop a fingerstyle right-hand technique — thumb handling bass strings independently, fingers handling upper strings — as the foundation of your chord and single-note approach.

The harmonic vocabulary is the most demanding element to develop. Khan’s jazz harmony — the specific scale choices, voicings, and approach patterns of the post-bop tradition — requires sustained study of jazz theory and intensive listening to the canonical recordings of the tradition. There are no shortcuts: this vocabulary develops through years of study, transcription, and performance, and the time investment is the same for everyone. The equipment is the easy part.

Amp Approach

A Fender Twin Reverb — blackface or silverface, with Jensen C12N speakers — is the authentic amplifier choice. Run it clean: the Twin’s clean headroom is one of its primary virtues, and the goal is warm, transparent amplification rather than any particular coloured character. The onboard spring reverb at a modest setting adds appropriate spatial dimension. The Boss CE-1 or CE-2 chorus adds the dimensional quality to chord passages that distinguishes his sound from purely dry jazz guitar.

Steve Khan Amp Settings (Fender Twin Reverb)

Control	Setting	Notes
Volume	3–5	Clean — Twin’s headroom means no overdrive at moderate volume
Treble	5	Neutral — ES-335 provides warmth, Jensen adds clarity
Middle	5–6	Moderate mids for jazz chord voicing projection
Bass	4–5	Moderate bass — ES-335 and 6L6 add warmth naturally
Reverb	2–3	Light spring reverb — spatial without wash
CE-1/CE-2 Chorus	Light-medium depth	Adds dimension to chord comping — subtle
Tube Screamer (optional)	Very low gain	Adds warmth and sustain for specific passages

Influence & Legacy

Steve Khan’s legacy operates primarily within the jazz guitar world — less visible than the rock and pop guitarists who receive broader cultural attention, but deeply felt among serious players who have engaged with his recordings and his musical writing. His specific synthesis of jazz harmony, Latin rhythm, and sophisticated guitar technique set a standard that subsequent generations of jazz fusion guitarists have had to reckon with.

His Eyewitness recordings — particularly the early-1980s trio of albums with Anthony Jackson — are considered among the finest jazz guitar recordings of their era. The specific quality of Khan’s playing on these records: the harmonic sophistication, the rhythmic precision, the emotional directness — showed what jazz guitar could achieve at the highest level of musical development. Players who have studied these recordings carefully have found in them a model of musical thinking that goes beyond the specific notes and techniques to the level of musical conception itself.

His contribution to the literature of jazz guitar education — the detailed liner notes, the website essays, the instructional materials — has provided the broader guitar community with access to the specific knowledge that his playing represents. This generosity of musical information, less common than it should be among musicians of his level, has extended his influence beyond the audience for his recordings to include players who might not have found their way to his music directly.

For players exploring the jazz fusion tradition that Khan represents, the rigs of Alan Holdsworth — who pursued a parallel development of jazz vocabulary through rock amplification from a British perspective — and John Abercrombie, whose ECM recordings explored similar territory from a more European jazz perspective, provide essential comparison. The Latin dimension of Khan’s musical world is illuminated through Neil Schon‘s work with Santana, which shows how Latin rhythm influenced rock guitar in a more commercial context.

The ES-335 in Jazz Fusion Context: Why This Guitar

The Gibson ES-335’s specific properties, and why they are particularly well-suited to jazz fusion guitar playing, deserve more detailed examination than a simple equipment list provides. The ES-335 occupies a unique position in the spectrum of guitar designs — it is neither a full hollowbody archtop nor a solid body, and this middle-ground position gives it properties that serve jazz fusion specifically well.

The full hollowbody archtop — the Gibson L-5, the D’Angelico New Yorker, the Benedetto Bravo — is the traditional jazz guitar, valued for its warm, woody tone, its natural acoustic resonance, and the specific quality of its amplified sound when driven through a clean amplifier. But hollowbody archtops have significant limitations in the contexts that jazz fusion typically involves: they are highly prone to feedback at stage volumes above a certain threshold, and the dense, harmonically complex sounds of jazz fusion — sustained chords over a rhythm section that may include drums, bass, and percussion — push that threshold lower than a hollowbody can comfortably accommodate.

The solid body electric — the Les Paul, the Stratocaster, the Telecaster — solves the feedback problem completely, but at the cost of the acoustic warmth and resonance that distinguish jazz guitar from rock guitar. A jazz guitarist playing a solid-body Les Paul through a clean amplifier produces a different kind of tone from a jazz guitarist playing an ES-335 through the same amplifier — not worse, but different in ways that matter for specific musical applications. The solid body’s greater note attack and faster decay, the different way its sustain develops over time, and the different harmonic character of its amplified sound all shape the musical result in ways that are audible to attentive listeners and musically significant to players who know what they’re looking for.

The ES-335’s solid maple centre block eliminates the severe feedback problems of the full hollowbody while preserving a significant proportion of the acoustic resonance that makes the hollowbody’s tone distinctive. The hollow wing cavities add warmth to the amplified sound — the air in those cavities resonates with the strings’ vibration, adding a dimension to the tone that solid-body instruments don’t produce — while the centre block provides enough acoustic damping to control feedback at the volume levels jazz fusion requires. This specific combination — the warmth of the hollowbody, the feedback resistance of the solid body — is why the ES-335 has become the dominant jazz guitar in fusion and contemporary jazz contexts.

For Khan specifically, the ES-335’s character served his specific musical requirements in several ways. The neck pickup’s warm, full-bodied tone suited both his chord comping and his single-note melodic work — the specific quality of a thick, warm, sustained guitar note that the neck PAF through a clean Twin Reverb produces is one of the most musically satisfying sounds in jazz guitar, and it was central to Khan’s tonal identity throughout his classic period. The bridge pickup, slightly brighter and more focused, provided the additional definition that specific melodic and rhythmic passages required. The instrument’s overall response — the way it reacted to different pick attack intensities, producing different tonal characters from clean warmth to natural mild drive — gave him the dynamic range that his playing required without any amplifier or effects assistance.

The Latin Dimension: Rhythm and Culture

Steve Khan’s deep engagement with Latin music — particularly Brazilian and Cuban traditions — is one of the most distinctive elements of his musical personality and the one that most clearly distinguishes him from other jazz guitarists of comparable technical level. Understanding this engagement and how it shaped his approach to his instrument and his equipment requires understanding what Latin music actually demands from a guitarist that straight jazz doesn’t require.

The rhythmic foundation of Latin music is fundamentally different from the rhythmic foundation of jazz. Jazz rhythm is characterised by the four-beat pulse of the walking bass and the complex, interactive polyrhythm of the jazz drum kit — a rhythmic environment in which the guitarist can phrase relatively freely against the underlying pulse, arriving at chord changes from above or below the beat, playing phrases that cut across the rhythmic structure rather than sitting squarely within it. Latin music’s rhythm is more rigidly defined by specific rhythmic patterns — the clave rhythm in Cuban music, the baião and samba rhythms in Brazilian music — that function as organisational frameworks that all the musicians, including the guitarist, must understand and respect in their playing.

For Khan, learning to play in the Latin context required not just learning new rhythmic patterns but developing a different physical relationship with the guitar — different right-hand patterns, different ways of accenting chords, a different understanding of where the pulse lived in the music and how to relate to it. This physical relearning, undertaken seriously and systematically, produced a rhythmic sophistication in his guitar playing that made his rhythm work qualitatively different from that of jazz guitarists who had not engaged with the Latin tradition.

The Eyewitness band’s specific personnel — Anthony Jackson’s contrabass (a six-string bass with a lower range than the conventional four-string bass) and the various Latin percussionists who contributed to the band’s recordings — created a rhythmic environment in which Khan’s rhythmic sophistication was both enabled and tested. Jackson’s extended-range bass provided a harmonic and rhythmic foundation of extraordinary richness; the percussion provided the specific Latin rhythmic frameworks within which all the other musicians had to locate their playing. Khan’s guitar work in this context — his ability to phrase melodically against the rhythmic complexity while maintaining harmonic clarity and rhythmic precision — is among the most sophisticated jazz guitar playing recorded in this era.

The equipment that served this specific musical context was not dramatically different from his standard jazz guitar setup — the ES-335 remained his primary instrument, the Fender Twin the primary amplifier, the CE-1 chorus the primary effect. But the specific way he used the equipment — the right-hand technique adjusted for Latin rhythmic patterns, the pick attack modified for specific rhythmic accents, the use of the volume pedal for dynamic control in the rhythmically complex ensemble context — reflected the specific demands of the music. The instrument is the same; what changes is the musical context and the specific knowledge required to play in it correctly.

Session Career: The Other Half of Steve Khan

Steve Khan’s session career — the recordings he made as a hired guitarist for other artists, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s — represents a significant portion of his musical output that is often overlooked in favour of his work as a bandleader and solo artist. The session work gave him exposure to an extraordinary range of musical contexts and developed specific aspects of his musicianship that the more specialised jazz and fusion context didn’t require.

His work for CTI Records — the audiophile jazz label run by Creed Taylor that produced recordings by Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Stanley Turrentine, and many others — placed Khan in studio environments of exceptional quality, working with producers and recording engineers whose standards were among the highest in the business. The CTI aesthetic — warm, spacious, audiophile-quality recordings that valued sonic excellence as highly as musical quality — demanded a guitarist whose sound was as attractive technically as it was musically, and Khan’s ES-335 through a clean Fender amplifier was precisely the right instrument for this context.

His session work for pop and rock artists — including Steely Dan, who used Khan on several recordings — required adaptability that the jazz context alone didn’t develop. The specific demands of different pop and rock productions — different tempos, different harmonic vocabularies, different production aesthetics — required Khan to adjust his approach, his equipment setup, and sometimes his instrument choice to serve the specific requirements of each session. This adaptability, developed through years of varied session work, gave him a musical range that pure jazz specialisation would not have produced.

The specific equipment Khan used in session contexts varied according to the requirements of the session — the ES-335 for jazz-inflected sessions, the Ibanez Artist or other instruments for different contexts, the Fender Twin or various other amplifiers depending on what the session required. His session work demonstrates the practical application of his fundamental equipment philosophy: the right instrument for the musical context, understood specifically and used with technical precision. That philosophy, applied consistently across an extraordinary range of musical situations, produced a session career of remarkable quality and breadth that stands alongside his work as a bandleader as one of the most significant contributions to American jazz and fusion guitar of the past fifty years.

The Polytone amplifier that Khan used for specific performance contexts deserves recognition as one of the more interesting choices in his equipment history — an amplifier that occupies a very specific niche in the jazz guitar world and that serves that niche with unusual precision. The Polytone Mini-Brute and its related models were designed by a company that understood, better than most amplifier manufacturers, what jazz guitarists actually needed from amplification: complete frequency linearity from deep bass to extended treble, sufficient clean power to fill a medium-sized jazz venue without distortion, and a lightweight portable form factor that suited the working jazz musician’s need to carry their own equipment to performances. The Polytone’s transistor amplifier circuit — which some guitar amplifier enthusiasts dismiss for lacking the warmth of valve designs — actually suits jazz guitar specifically because of its neutrality: it imposes no particular tonal character on the guitar’s signal, reproducing whatever the guitar sounds like through whatever pickup configuration is installed. For Khan’s purposes, this neutrality allowed the ES-335’s natural acoustic character to come through in amplified form without the tonal colouration that valve amplifiers — however musically pleasant — inevitably add. The Polytone is thus a philosophically consistent choice for a guitarist whose fundamental approach to tone is that the instrument’s natural character should be the primary tonal statement: the cleanest possible path from guitar output to listener’s ear, with the fewest possible tonal transformations along the way. That philosophy, expressed in the specific choice of Polytone amplification for certain contexts, is as much a part of Khan’s gear story as the more glamorous vintage Gibson and Fender components around which that story is usually organised.

Steve Khan’s continuing activity — new recordings, performances, and online commentary that maintains his engagement with the guitar community — reflects a musician whose relationship with the instrument has deepened rather than calcified across five decades of serious work. The equipment he uses is appropriate to the music he makes, and the music he makes continues to deserve serious attention from anyone interested in what jazz guitar is capable of at its highest level.

The specific quality of the Boss CE-1 chorus effect in Khan’s rig — chosen over many alternatives available at the time — reflects a discriminating sensitivity to how different chorus implementations affect different musical contexts. The CE-1, introduced by Boss in 1976, uses a bucket-brigade device (BBD) delay chip to create the chorus effect: the input signal is split, one path delayed by a variable amount (typically between 10 and 25 milliseconds), and the two paths combined, with the slight pitch variation between them as the delay time modulates producing the characteristic chorus shimmer. The BBD circuit’s analogue operation — the signal passes through a series of capacitors that store and transfer charge, with small imperfections in each stage adding a warm, slightly noisy quality to the processed signal — gives the CE-1 a warmer, more organic character than the digital chorus circuits that followed it. For chord voicings specifically, the CE-1’s specific modulation rate and depth produce a shimmer that adds dimension to sustained harmonics without the artificial clarity that makes some digital chorus effects sound synthetic. Khan’s use of it as a subtle background texture — moderate depth, moderate speed, mixed relatively low in the overall sound — reflects a guitarist who understood precisely what the effect was doing to his tone and had found the specific settings that served his musical requirements without imposing an inappropriate character. The combination of this subtle chorus, the clean Fender Twin, and the warm ES-335 neck pickup produced a guitar tone of unusual completeness — full-bodied, dimensional, warm but clear — that served the specific demands of the Eyewitness music with a precision that reflects both excellent musical judgment and careful equipment selection.

Khan’s relationship with Anthony Jackson — the bassist who co-created the six-string contrabass guitar and who was a primary musical partner in the Eyewitness band — is worth noting in the context of equipment, because Jackson’s unique instrument created a specific harmonic and timbral environment that shaped Khan’s equipment choices and playing approach. The six-string contrabass guitar, tuned B-E-A-D-G-C (a fifth lower than a standard bass), provides a harmonic foundation of extraordinary depth and range — a bass instrument that can cover the frequency range from deep sub-bass to the upper middle register of a standard four-string bass. This extended range shifted the harmonic foundation of the ensemble lower and wider, which in turn affected how Khan thought about the register and frequency range his guitar should occupy. With Jackson’s contrabass providing the low harmonic foundation, Khan was free to play in a somewhat higher register than he might have with a conventional bassist, which affected both his voicing choices and the specific pickup and amplifier settings that served those voicings. This responsiveness to the specific ensemble environment — adjusting equipment and approach to serve the specific musical context rather than applying a fixed personal setup to every situation — is a characteristic of the most musically intelligent players, and it is one of the things that makes Khan’s playing and gear choices particularly instructive for serious students of the craft.

Frequently Asked Questions: Steve Khan Guitars & Gear