Before Thin Lizzy’s Robertson and Gorham harmonized their way into arenas. Before Iron Maiden’s Murray and Smith turned twin-guitar attack into a heavy metal religion. Before any of the great dual-lead guitar partnerships that shaped hard rock and metal through the late 1970s and beyond — there was Wishbone Ash. And at the melodic, blues-drenched heart of Wishbone Ash’s twin-guitar sound was a quietly revolutionary Birmingham guitarist named Ted Turner, who helped invent an approach to electric guitar interplay that the genre is still drawing from today, half a century later, without always knowing where it came from.
David Alan Turner — “Ted” to everyone who knew him, born August 2, 1950, in Sheldon, Birmingham — grew up in one of the most fertile musical environments in British rock history. Birmingham in the late 1960s was producing an extraordinary density of talent: Black Sabbath were rehearsing in the same city’s working-class suburbs, Judas Priest were a few years away from their own ascent, and the blues-rock scene that nurtured them all was a competitive, demanding, electrifying place to learn the guitar. Turner started playing around age twelve, absorbing the blues-rock tradition — Clapton, Page, Peter Green, all the British avatars of American blues who were rewriting the rulebook in real time — and honing his craft through club gigs and regional tours with a Birmingham band called King Biscuit, where no one was recording anything for posterity but everyone was learning how to play in a room with other musicians who knew what they were doing.
In 1969, Turner co-founded Wishbone Ash alongside guitarist Andy Powell, bassist Martin Turner (no relation), and drummer Steve Upton. What followed was a brief, intense, genuinely brilliant creative period that produced five albums in four years, culminating in the twin masterworks of Argus (1972) and the live document Live Dates (1973), before Turner — burnt out, creatively frustrated, and privately dissatisfied — walked away from the music business in 1974 at the age of twenty-three to literally travel the world. He ended up in New Orleans, then Los Angeles, working as a session musician and producer with artists including George Harrison and Billy Preston. Rock’s gain was the wider world’s gain, though Wishbone Ash’s loss was real and lasting. His replacement, Laurie Wisefield, was excellent — but the specific chemistry between Turner and Andy Powell, the particular way their guitar personalities complemented and sparked against each other, was gone.
Turner’s tone during the Wishbone Ash years was built around clarity and articulation — the specific sonic philosophy of a player who understood that in harmonized twin-guitar music, individual note definition is everything. If two guitars blur into each other, the harmonic effect is lost; the listener hears a thick, undifferentiated wash instead of two distinct melodic voices in dialogue. Turner chose his gear with that clarity goal in mind: bright, articulate guitars, powerful amps run to produce natural power-amp saturation rather than preamp gain distortion, and a minimal effects approach that kept the signal chain transparent. He has described his core philosophy with admirable directness: clarity and pure tones are what matter, the sound of the guitar itself rather than the sound of the processing. In an era of increasingly elaborate effects rigs, that discipline is both unusual and instructive.
Rolling Stone once recognized Turner as one of the top twenty rock guitarists in the world — a designation that reflected his genuine standing among the cognoscenti even as the wider public has sometimes failed to give Wishbone Ash the full credit they deserve for what they invented. That underrecognition is part of the Wishbone Ash story: they were hugely influential, critically acclaimed, beloved in the UK, and somehow never quite broke through to the American mass market in the way their talent deserved. But the guitarists who came after them knew. Ask Ritchie Blackmore. Ask Dave Murray. Ask literally anyone who’s spent serious time studying how two electric guitars can work together at the highest level, and Wishbone Ash — and Ted Turner specifically — will come up in the conversation.
Background: The Birmingham Boy Who Helped Build the Template
To understand what Turner and Andy Powell built with Wishbone Ash, you need to hear Argus — the 1972 album that remains their definitive statement and one of the finest British rock albums of the decade. Recorded at De Lane Lea Studios in London and produced by Derek Lawrence (who had also produced the early Deep Purple albums), Argus is a remarkably coherent, emotionally rich statement of purpose: seven tracks ranging from the epic sweep of “The King Will Come” to the searching melancholy of “Sometime World” to the barnstorming energy of “Blowin’ Free,” all unified by a sense of musical seriousness and melodic ambition that set it apart from the more aggressive or blues-derivative work of contemporary British hard rock bands.
Turner’s specific role within the Wishbone Ash twin-guitar dynamic was the melodic, introspective half of the partnership. Where Andy Powell was the flashier, more extrovert player — the one who wanted “a strong up-tempo rhythm part he could play to,” in Turner’s own description — Turner was the quieter voice, the intimate and melodic presence who wrote the wistful intros and the searching middle passages. He described himself as “the quiet passages man,” and you can hear it clearly in the Argus recordings: Turner’s guitar lines are often the ones that breathe, that create space, that lead you somewhere emotionally before Powell’s more extrovert playing takes the energy higher. The interplay between the two styles was the fundamental dramatic engine of the music — tension and release, interiority and extroversion, blues soul and hard rock muscle.
The recording of Argus was not entirely tension-free. Turner later acknowledged that Powell had “initiated a more dominant role” during the sessions, and that his own dissatisfaction had begun to build from this point — a creative friction that would eventually lead to his departure two years later. But the friction, if it existed, doesn’t manifest audibly in the final recordings. What you hear is two guitars so perfectly calibrated to each other’s strengths that the seams of the arrangement are invisible. The solo on “Sometime World,” which Turner identified as his contribution, is a piece of melodic guitar writing that stands comparison with the best of the era: lyrical, emotionally precise, technically accomplished without ever becoming a mere demonstration of technique. It says something, and what it says is available to every listener, regardless of guitar knowledge.
After leaving Wishbone Ash in 1974, Turner’s path was unconventional by rock standards. The world tour, the New Orleans period, the Los Angeles session work — these are not the biography of a man primarily motivated by fame or commercial success. They’re the biography of a musician who needed to understand more of the world before he could continue making music about it. He eventually returned to the Wishbone Ash fold for a reunion period in the 1980s, and has remained sporadically active in music since, though never at the level of visibility his early-1970s work deserved. In 2005, a significant portion of his guitar collection was stolen from his estate in Worcestershire — a loss that included irreplaceable vintage instruments accumulated over decades. It’s the kind of story that makes you understand why some musicians develop complicated relationships with material objects.
The Rig: Ted Turner’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
Ted Turner’s primary instrument throughout the Wishbone Ash golden era was a mid-1950s Fender Stratocaster with a maple fingerboard — a pre-CBS, pre-1959 instrument that, based on the maple neck, was almost certainly built between 1954 and approximately 1958, before Fender transitioned to rosewood fingerboards in 1959 and then became part of the CBS corporate empire in 1965. This guitar was used on every Wishbone Ash album through Live Dates, making it the sonic foundation of the band’s defining recordings. The pre-CBS Stratocaster is, by widespread consensus among vintage guitar enthusiasts, among the finest electric guitars ever produced: the lightweight alder bodies, the pure single-coil pickups wound to original vintage specifications, the maple fretboard with its bright, snappy feel, and the overall quality of components and construction combine to produce a guitar that is simultaneously more complex, more dynamic, and more musically responsive than virtually anything made before or since. Turner’s particular specimen, with its sunburst finish (documented in period photographs and source material), was a genuine vintage treasure even in 1972 — a guitar already nearly twenty years old when he was recording Argus. The Stratocaster’s three single-coil pickups were absolutely central to Turner’s tonal philosophy: the bright, bell-like clarity he prized for the harmonized guitar work, the note-by-note definition that kept the twin-guitar arrangements from blurring into sonic mush, the glassy, singing quality of the top strings and the warm, round quality of the lower strings — all of this is the Stratocaster’s natural voice, magnified and given purpose by Turner’s musical intelligence.
On Wishbone Ash’s self-titled debut album (1970), Turner’s guitar situation was considerably more modest: a Gibson Les Paul Junior was his “one and only guitar” at the time, by his own recollection. The Les Paul Junior is one of Gibson’s most stripped-down designs — a slab mahogany body (no maple cap), a single P-90 soapbar pickup, no binding, no frills, and a direct, powerful tone that many players have found more honest and expressive than more elaborate and expensive models. The single P-90’s output is raw and slightly gritty, with a midrange presence that cuts through a band mix with minimal encouragement. For a band building their sound in home-constructed speaker cabinets and playing live as the primary way of getting the music right, the Junior’s no-nonsense approach was appropriate. The debut album’s rawer, more blues-forward character compared to Argus reflects both the relative simplicity of the gear and the band’s position as a young group still finding their voice.
One of the most recognizable images in Wishbone Ash’s visual history is the Argus album cover — and in the band photographs from that era, Turner is famously pictured with a Gibson Firebird. The Firebird is a striking instrument in every sense: its reverse-body design (the bass horn extends further from the neck than the treble horn, opposite to the conventional Les Paul orientation), its distinctive “banjo” tuners, and its mini-humbucker pickups give it both a unique visual profile and a tonal character that sits between the warmth of a full humbucker guitar and the brightness of a Stratocaster. The Firebird’s mini-humbuckers have a clarity and articulation that complement the harmonized guitar approach well, and the guitar’s sustain and output are substantial without the thickness of a Les Paul Standard. For the Argus period, the Firebird was part of Turner’s arsenal alongside his primary Stratocaster, used on specific tracks where its particular voice served the music.
During the period roughly corresponding to the Sometime World album and the later Wishbone Ash era, Turner moved toward a maple-necked Fender Stratocaster as his main instrument — distinct from the earlier sunburst pre-CBS model — while also using Gibson Les Paul guitars for passages requiring heavier, thicker tones. The Les Paul’s full-size humbuckers produce a warmth and sustain that the Stratocaster’s single-coils don’t naturally offer, and for certain heavier passages within Wishbone Ash’s increasingly diverse musical range, the LP’s tonality was the right tool. Turner has always approached gear as a means to an end rather than an identity statement — he used whatever guitar best served the specific musical need, within the broader framework of his preference for clarity and articulation.
Among the instruments stolen from Turner’s Worcestershire estate in 2005 was a Gibson Les Paul Standard 1958 reissue in Tobacco Sunburst, with a highly figured quilt maple top, custom finished by the renowned luthier and guitar historian Tom Murphy. Murphy finishes are among the most respected and sought-after custom work in the vintage guitar world — Murphy’s expertise in aging and refinishing guitars to museum-quality vintage specifications is legendary among collectors and players. The loss of this instrument was particularly significant: a Murphy-aged, figured-maple-top ’58 reissue is an instrument of both considerable monetary value and genuine musical quality, representing the best of what Gibson’s custom shop has produced in the vintage-reissue category. Its theft, along with other guitars from Turner’s collection, represents an irreplaceable loss for a guitarist who had spent decades accumulating instruments of historical and musical significance.
Turner also played a custom Woodworm Stratocaster — a luthier-built guitar with a natural quilted maple top and figured maple neck. Woodworm was a guitar-building enterprise associated with the Wishbone Ash camp, and the resulting instrument was distinctly non-standard: it featured a P-90-style pickup in the bridge position (rather than the standard Strat single-coil), giving it a more aggressive midrange bite than a conventional Stratocaster configuration would produce. This hybrid character — Stratocaster body and feel, P-90 pickup voice — reflected Turner’s ongoing search for tonal combinations that served clarity and articulation while providing additional midrange presence for specific contexts.
Turner was also a notable practitioner of lap steel guitar, contributing slide and lap steel textures to various Wishbone Ash recordings. His collection included several vintage lap steel guitars, one of which had been fitted with a Roland GK pickup for MIDI guitar processing. The lap steel’s specific voice — that gliding, Hawaiian-inflected slide sound that predates rock and roll itself — added a textural dimension to Wishbone Ash’s music that distinguished them from contemporaries focused purely on electric guitar aggression. Turner’s lap steel work on the Argus album, particularly on “Sometime World,” is one of the track’s most atmospheric and distinctive elements, adding a searching, bluesy melancholy that no conventional guitar technique could quite replicate.
Amps
Wishbone Ash’s live sound during the classic early-1970s era was built on Orange/Matamp amplifiers — the distinctive British amplifier brand that had been developing its signature orange-cased, high-powered heads since the late 1960s in partnership with the Matamp company based in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. The Orange/Matamp relationship is one of the more complicated chapters in British amp history: Cliff Cooper’s Orange brand and Mat Mathias’s Matamp were initially deeply intertwined, with Orange ordering chassis from Matamp and rebranding them under the Orange name, before the partnership eventually dissolved and both companies continued independently. What the early Orange/Matamp amplifiers shared was a specific approach to power-amp design that produced a rich, harmonically complex overdriven tone when driven hard — not the preamp-gain crunch of later amplifier designs, but the natural saturation of a valve output section working at its limits. The band’s approach to these amps was characteristic of the era: use them at full power to get power-amp compression and natural breakup, while maintaining enough clean headroom that individual notes remained distinct and the harmonic relationships in the twin-guitar arrangements were preserved. This is exactly the right approach for the Wishbone Ash sound — you want warmth and sustain without the note-mashing compression of high-gain preamp distortion. Tragically, Wishbone Ash’s entire Orange backline from the 1973 American tour was stolen when their Ryder truck was taken — an event that not only ended the tour prematurely but deprived the band of irreplaceable touring equipment. The amps were partly what you hear on Live Dates, making their loss all the more poignant.
On the first Wishbone Ash album, Turner was using what he recalled as “probably a Marshall amp” — and he and bassist Martin Turner had built their own speaker cabinets to go with it. This DIY approach to backline was not unusual for young British bands at the turn of the 1970s: commercial 4×12 cabinets were expensive, the woodworking skills to build a functional box around four speakers were accessible, and the sonic results were often surprisingly good. The Marshall head of the period — almost certainly a Super Lead or similar pre-master-volume model — provided the tonal foundation for the debut album’s rawer, more blues-forward sound, before the band transitioned to Orange/Matamp for their more polished and expansive later work.
In his post-reunion playing, Turner has moved away from traditional amplification entirely and toward guitar modelling — digital amp simulation technology that he has described as serving his continued priority of clarity and pure tones. He has been explicit about this: “These days I’m using guitar modelling as opposed to amps. I’m always looking for a sound that’s not over-saturated or heavily distorted. Clarity and pure tones are important for our music. I’m interested in the sound of the guitar as opposed to the amp.” This is a fascinating and somewhat contrarian position for a player associated with the warm, powerful analogue tones of the early Orange era, but it’s entirely consistent with Turner’s lifelong philosophy: the gear serves the music, not the other way around. If modern modelling technology provides the clarity and transparency he wants with more consistency and less logistical difficulty than valve amplification, then modelling it is. The philosophy, not the technology, is the constant.
Hiwatt Custom 100 amplifiers also feature in the documented Wishbone Ash arsenal, a choice that makes perfect tonal sense. The Hiwatt, designed by Dave Reeves and produced from the late 1960s, is one of the loudest, clearest, most headroom-rich British valve amplifiers ever made — built to military-grade specifications by a workforce that included technicians with backgrounds in professional audio equipment. Pete Townshend famously used Hiwatts because they could withstand the punishment of his aggressive playing style at arena volumes, but their sonic character — tight, clear, enormously powerful, with a distinctive bright-but-not-harsh quality at clean volumes — made them equally valued by players who wanted maximum clarity and headroom rather than early breakup. For Wishbone Ash’s harmonized guitar work, the Hiwatt’s exceptional clean headroom was a genuine asset: it allowed both guitarists to play at substantial volume while preserving the note definition and harmonic clarity their arrangements required.
Effects
Ted Turner’s approach to effects was, by the standards of most rock guitarists, extremely restrained. His documented effects usage during the Wishbone Ash years was minimal — consistent with his stated philosophy that the guitar’s own voice should be primary, and that processing should serve clarity rather than obscuring it. He did not use overdrive or distortion pedals in the conventional sense: the “distortion” in his tone came from the natural saturation of the Orange/Matamp and Marshall amplifiers being driven at significant power-amp levels. This is the same approach that Robertson and Gorham used in Thin Lizzy, and that virtually all of the great British hard rock guitarists of the 1970s employed: the amp does the work, not the pedal chain. The result is a tonal character that breathes and responds to playing dynamics in ways that pedal-generated distortion simply cannot replicate.
Turner’s use of slide guitar — both on conventional electric guitar with a bottleneck and on lap steel instruments — was a distinctive part of his sonic palette. Slide guitar doesn’t fit neatly into a “pedal” category, but it functions as an effect in the broad sense of producing a different tonal quality from the same instrument. His slide work on Argus, particularly on “Sometime World,” adds a vocal, human quality to the guitar sound that conventional fretted playing doesn’t produce. The slight pitch ambiguity inherent in slide playing — the notes bending toward and away from their targets — creates an expressiveness that matches and extends the emotional character of the songs. Turner was, according to contemporary accounts, a more-than-competent slide player, and his contributions in this area are underappreciated relative to his harmonized-melody work.
In his later guitar work and collection, Turner had guitars equipped with Roland GK (Guitar to MIDI) pickups — including both a Fender Stratocaster with factory-fitted Roland GK pickup and a lap steel guitar with a GK pickup retrofitted. The Roland GK system converts guitar string vibrations to MIDI data, allowing the guitar to trigger synthesizers, samplers, and other MIDI-controlled instruments. For a player who has described his modern approach as guitar modelling and processing, the Roland GK system represents a natural extension of the same philosophy: use whatever technology best serves the musical result you’re after. Whether Turner actively used GK-driven synthesizer textures in performing contexts or primarily maintained the equipped guitars as studio tools is not extensively documented, but their presence in his collection reflects an ongoing curiosity about tonal possibilities beyond conventional amplified guitar.
Consistent with his move toward guitar modelling and digital processing, Turner’s modern gear arsenal includes Line 6 and Roland guitar processing hardware — the two dominant manufacturers in the guitar modelling and multi-effects space for much of the 2000s and 2010s. Line 6’s modelling technology, from the early Pod units through subsequent generations of floor processors and amp modellers, provides access to a wide palette of amplifier sounds and effects in a consistent, touring-friendly format. Roland’s guitar processing technology, similarly, offers synthesis and processing options beyond what conventional guitar amplification provides. The specific units Turner uses have not been extensively documented, but their presence in his rig confirms the pragmatic, music-first approach he has maintained throughout his career: if digital technology provides the clarity, consistency, and tonal purity he’s after with less fuss and logistical complexity than vintage valve amplification, then digital technology is the right choice.
Turner’s specific string gauge preferences during the Wishbone Ash era are not as thoroughly documented as some other aspects of his gear, but the sonic and playing characteristics evident in recordings suggest conventional-gauge strings appropriate for the vintage Stratocaster he was primarily using. Pre-CBS Stratocasters were typically set up with .009 or .010 gauge strings from the factory, and the bright, responsive quality of Turner’s recorded tone is consistent with lighter-gauge strings that allow the Strat’s single-coil pickups to vibrate freely and produce their characteristic bell-like clarity. For harmonized melody work requiring precise intonation and clear note definition, lighter strings that respond easily to the touch are a natural choice.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Ted Turner plays guitar from the inside of the music rather than on top of it. Where many rock guitarists of his era established their identity through virtuosic display — the fast run, the dramatic vibrato, the extended solo that demands attention — Turner’s approach was architectural and interior. He was building things: harmonic structures, melodic counterpoint, emotional atmospheres. His guitar lines on the Argus recordings are less interested in showcasing what he can do than in completing a musical picture that would be incomplete without his specific contribution. This is the most sophisticated kind of musical thinking, and it’s rarer than technical virtuosity.
His roots in the British blues-rock tradition — Clapton, Page, Peter Green — are audible in his phrasing and his relationship to the blues scale. But Turner filtered those influences through a more compositionally minded sensibility than most blues-rock players of the period. He was thinking about how his guitar line functioned harmonically relative to Powell’s, about the specific intervals that would produce the emotional effect the song required, about the space between notes as deliberately as the notes themselves. His Stratocaster was the ideal vehicle for this approach: its single-coil clarity meant every note in a harmonized passage could be distinctly heard, and its dynamic responsiveness rewarded the kind of subtle touch variation that Turner used to shape melodic lines into something more than scales over chord changes.
The lap steel work represents another dimension of Turner’s musicianship that extends beyond the conventional rock guitar vocabulary. Lap steel is an instrument that demands a completely different relationship with the guitar neck — no fretting, all sliding, intonation entirely in the hands rather than fixed by the frets — and the technique required to play it convincingly at any level of sophistication is substantial. That Turner added this vocabulary to the Wishbone Ash sound reflects a genuine musical curiosity and breadth that went well beyond “rock guitarist.” He was interested in tonal colors that most of his contemporaries weren’t even looking for, which is partly why the Wishbone Ash sound at its best is so much richer and more dimensional than most rock of the era.
His stated preference for clarity and pure tones over saturation and effects is not a conservatism or a limitation — it’s a musical philosophy arrived at through careful listening and deliberate experimentation. Turner understood that in the harmonic context Wishbone Ash was working in, every unit of added distortion or processing that obscured individual note definition was working against the music’s most essential quality. You can’t hear two guitar lines in dialogue if they’re both buried in compressed fuzz. The amp’s natural saturation provided enough harmonic richness; the guitar’s natural voice provided the clarity; and the music benefited from every decision that kept the signal chain transparent.
How to Sound Like Ted Turner
Getting into Ted Turner’s tonal universe starts with a quality single-coil guitar — ideally a vintage Stratocaster or a high-quality modern equivalent — running into a powerful British valve amp with enough clean headroom to stay relatively transparent even at volume. The goal is the sound of the guitar itself, not the sound of amplifier saturation covering up a less-than-ideal signal. Turner’s philosophy here is very specific: clarity and pure tones, not over-saturation. The amp should be providing warmth and power-amp bloom at high volumes, not preamp distortion at any volume. The Orange/Matamp tone characteristic of the classic Wishbone Ash era is a warm, slightly compressed, harmonically rich clean-to-slightly-dirty tone — the kind you get from a quality British valve amp running hard through efficient speakers.
For the harmonized melody lines that are the hallmark of Wishbone Ash’s twin-guitar approach, the most important technical element is interval selection and positioning. Turner typically harmonized in thirds and sixths — the same interval relationships used in Celtic and folk music, producing the characteristic bittersweet quality that makes Wishbone Ash’s melodies so memorable. Figuring out the right harmony intervals for a given melodic passage is an exercise in musical ear training more than gear selection, but the gear absolutely enables or hinders the result: with the wrong tone (too distorted, too compressed, too processed), even correct harmony intervals will sound muddy.
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Gain / Preamp Volume | 5–6 | Turner’s tone was significantly cleaner than the heavy rock players of his era. Preamp at moderate levels — the Orange/Matamp’s power-amp section provides warmth at high master volumes without requiring heavy preamp gain. Keep it clean enough that single notes in a harmony arrangement remain distinct. |
| Bass | 5–6 | Moderate bass — enough for warmth and body from the single-coil Strat, which naturally has less low-end weight than a humbucker guitar. Avoid pushing bass to compensate for the Strat’s lighter low end; it will mud up the harmonic arrangements. |
| Mid | 6–7 | Present midrange is critical for single-coil Stratocaster tone to project and cut in a band mix. The Strat’s bridge and middle pickups naturally have a slight mid-forward quality; support rather than fight it. This is where the vocal quality of Turner’s lead tone lives. |
| Treble | 6–7 | The Strat’s characteristic brightness is a feature, not a bug, for harmonized guitar work. Some top-end presence keeps individual notes in a harmony arrangement from blurring together. Turner’s tone is brighter than a typical Les Paul hard rock sound. |
| Presence | 5–6 | Moderate to slightly above moderate presence adds definition and helps the guitar cut through the mix without becoming harsh. Particularly important for the upper-range harmony lines to project clearly above the low-end weight of the full band arrangement. |
| Master Volume | 6–8 | Run the amp loud enough for the power section to start contributing warmth and compression. The Orange/Matamp character comes from a loud, fully-engaged output stage — pushing the master gives you the bloom and sustain characteristic of Turner’s Argus-era tone. |
| Pickup Selection | Middle or Neck | Turner’s melodic lead lines typically favored the neck or middle pickup positions on the Stratocaster for their warmer, more vocal quality. The bridge pickup’s extra brightness works for cutting rhythm parts; for harmonic melody work, the neck position provides the singing, rounded tone you’re after. |
| Overdrive/Boost Pedal | 0 | None. Turner did not use drive pedals — the amp provides all necessary saturation. Running a clean boost pedal (set to unity gain) as a simple buffer in the signal chain is acceptable; anything adding distortion moves away from Turner’s core philosophy. |
| Reverb | 2–3 | A touch of spring reverb — either from a built-in amp reverb or a dedicated unit — adds dimension and bloom to the Strat’s naturally dry, direct character. Keep it subtle: Turner’s tone was not heavily reverb-drenched, but the slight spatial dimension of a low reverb setting is consistent with the Orange/Matamp live sound of the period. |
Influence & Legacy
The debt that hard rock and metal owes to Ted Turner and Wishbone Ash is one of the genre’s most significant and underacknowledged. The twin-guitar harmony approach they developed — written melodic lines in thirds and sixths, two distinct guitar voices in musical dialogue rather than competition, the prioritization of the song’s harmonic architecture over individual player showcase — became the template for every dual-guitar hard rock and metal band of the subsequent decades. The genealogy runs directly: Wishbone Ash to Thin Lizzy (Robertson and Gorham have acknowledged the influence), Thin Lizzy to Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden to virtually every twin-guitar metal band of the 1980s and beyond. Turner was there at the beginning of this lineage, before it was a recognized approach, inventing tools that would be used by guitarists who had never heard his name.
The specific tonal choices Turner made — the Stratocaster over the Les Paul for clarity, the Orange amps for warmth without excessive compression, the minimal effects approach — also had influence beyond Wishbone Ash. The idea that a rock guitarist could use a Stratocaster as a primary instrument for high-energy, harmonically sophisticated hard rock was not universally accepted in the early 1970s; the Les Paul was seen as the appropriate hard rock guitar, and the Strat as something for surf players or Hendrix-style experimental work. Turner’s use of the pre-CBS Strat for Argus helped demonstrate that the guitar’s natural clarity and articulation could be assets rather than liabilities in a hard rock context, a lesson that many subsequent guitarists internalized. For a deeper look at how the twin-guitar philosophy evolved from these Wishbone Ash origins, see Scott Gorham’s account of developing the Thin Lizzy twin-guitar sound, and Andy Powell’s parallel gear history. The way these approaches fed into the broader British hard rock tradition is also visible in Brian Robertson’s Thin Lizzy work.
Turner’s decision to leave Wishbone Ash at twenty-three remains one of rock’s great “what ifs.” If he had stayed — if the creative friction with Andy Powell had been navigable, if the burnout of constant touring had not reached what he described as “a point of no return” — what might the subsequent Wishbone Ash discography have sounded like? The albums made without him are solid, professionally accomplished, and occasionally excellent. They are not Argus. They don’t have the specific chemistry, the particular quality of musical dialogue, that Turner and Powell generated at their best. That quality is probably irreplicable, because it emerged from a specific time, a specific set of people, and a specific set of instruments in a specific studio. But the recordings it produced are permanent, available to anyone with ears, and still as revelatory as they were in 1972. Pick up Argus on vinyl, put it on a decent system, and listen to what two electric guitars can do when the players who hold them are genuinely thinking about music rather than just about themselves. That’s the Ted Turner lesson, and it never gets old.
Frequently Asked Questions: Ted Turner Guitars & Gear
What guitar is Ted Turner most famous for playing?
Turner’s most iconic instrument is the mid-1950s pre-CBS Fender Stratocaster with a maple fingerboard that he used on every Wishbone Ash album through Live Dates — the guitar that is inseparable from the Argus sound. This was a genuine vintage instrument even in 1972: a sunburst Strat almost certainly built between 1954 and 1958, with the maple neck that Fender phased out in 1959. Its bright, articulate, bell-like single-coil tone was the foundation of Turner’s approach to harmonized twin-guitar playing — he needed that clarity and note definition for the harmonic arrangements to work, and the vintage Strat provided it in abundance. He also played a Gibson Firebird (pictured on the iconic Argus album cover photographs), a Gibson Les Paul Junior on the debut album, and various Les Paul guitars throughout his career. But the vintage Stratocaster is the one. It’s what you hear on the recordings that matter most, and its specific tonal character is central to what made those recordings sound the way they do.
What amps did Wishbone Ash use on Argus?
For the Argus recordings and the subsequent live work captured on Live Dates, Wishbone Ash ran Orange/Matamp amplifiers — the early British high-powered valve heads produced from the late 1960s by Orange (whose founder Cliff Cooper initially worked in partnership with the Matamp company based in Yorkshire). These amps were used at high power levels to achieve natural power-amp saturation: not preamp-gain distortion, but the warm, harmonically complex compression of a valve output section working at its limits. The approach was specifically calibrated to maintain note clarity at high volumes — essential for the twin-guitar harmonies to function properly. Tragically, Wishbone Ash’s entire Orange backline was stolen from their tour truck during the 1973 American tour, ending the tour prematurely. Marshall amplifiers also featured in the early years, with Turner recalling that the debut album was recorded through “probably a Marshall” — and he and Martin Turner had built their own speaker cabinets to go with it.
How does Ted Turner’s guitar role differ from Andy Powell’s in Wishbone Ash?
The Turner-Powell dynamic was built on complementary contrast. Turner described himself as “the quiet passages man — intimate and melodic,” while Powell was the “flashier” and more extrovert player who gravitated toward stronger, more up-tempo rhythm parts and more aggressive lead work. Turner wrote the wistful intros and the searching middle passages; Powell brought the energy and extroversion. On Argus, this dynamic is clearly audible: Turner’s guitar lines create emotional space and melodic depth, while Powell’s more driving approach lifts the energy for the harder-hitting sections. The specific intervals they chose for their harmonies — typically thirds and sixths — were influenced by Celtic and folk music’s modal character, which gave the Wishbone Ash sound its distinctive bittersweet quality. Neither player was trying to dominate; both were serving the song’s harmonic architecture. The fact that they both succeeded in doing this simultaneously is the fundamental reason Argus sounds the way it does.
Why did Ted Turner leave Wishbone Ash?
Turner left Wishbone Ash in the spring of 1974, citing creative dissatisfaction that had been building since the Argus period. He acknowledged that Andy Powell had “initiated a more dominant role” during the Argus sessions, and that his own “dissatisfaction reached a point of no return” after the success of Argus and the exhausting touring that followed. He was twenty-three years old. Rather than staying in the music business, he chose to travel the world — ending up in New Orleans and then Los Angeles, where he worked as a session musician and producer with artists including George Harrison, Billy Preston, and Al Stewart. His replacement in Wishbone Ash was Laurie Wisefield, who proved to be an accomplished player, though the specific chemistry of the Turner-Powell partnership was irreplaceable. Turner eventually returned to the Wishbone Ash fold for a reunion period, but his departure in 1974 marked the end of the band’s most celebrated creative era.
What happened to Ted Turner’s guitar collection?
In 2005, the majority of Ted Turner’s guitar collection was stolen from his estate in Worcestershire, England — a devastating loss for a guitarist who had accumulated instruments of significant historical and monetary value over decades. Among the stolen instruments were the pre-CBS Stratocasters associated with the classic Wishbone Ash recordings, a Gibson Les Paul 1958 reissue with custom Tom Murphy aging and a highly figured quilt maple top, a Woodworm custom Stratocaster with P-90 pickup, and various lap steel guitars including models fitted with Roland GK pickups. The loss represented not only considerable financial value but the irreplaceable personal significance of instruments that had been part of Turner’s creative history since the early 1970s. Whether any of the stolen guitars were subsequently recovered is unclear from available sources.
Was Ted Turner a significant influence on later guitarists?
Turner and Wishbone Ash were enormously influential on the twin-guitar approach that became central to British hard rock and heavy metal through the late 1970s and 1980s. Thin Lizzy’s Robertson-Gorham partnership drew directly from the Wishbone Ash template. Iron Maiden’s Murray-Smith twin-guitar attack was explicitly acknowledged as Lizzy-influenced (which in turn drew from Wishbone Ash). The harmonized melody approach that Turner helped pioneer — written harmonic lines rather than improvised interplay, specific interval choices that produce a characteristic bittersweet quality — became one of the most widely used techniques in hard rock and metal, employed by bands from Judas Priest to Thin Lizzy to Maiden to modern melodic metal acts without always acknowledging its origin. Rolling Stone’s recognition of Turner as one of the top twenty rock guitarists of his era reflected a genuine standing among serious musicians and critics, even if his wider public profile never matched his actual importance.
What is Ted Turner’s approach to tone and effects?
Turner’s approach to tone is fundamentally about clarity and transparency — the sound of the guitar itself rather than the sound of processing imposed upon it. He has described this philosophy explicitly: “I’m always looking for a sound that’s not over-saturated or heavily distorted. Clarity and pure tones are important for our music. I’m interested in the sound of the guitar as opposed to the amp.” During the Wishbone Ash years, this meant no overdrive or distortion pedals — all gain from the natural saturation of the Orange/Matamp or Marshall amplifiers running at high power levels — and a minimal approach to modulation and time-based effects. His single-coil Stratocaster provided natural articulation and note definition; the Orange amps provided warmth and power-amp bloom; everything else stayed out of the way. In his modern work, he has transitioned to guitar modelling technology, finding that digital amp simulation can provide the clarity and consistency he wants with less complexity than vintage valve amplification. The philosophy remains constant: serve the music, keep the signal transparent, let the guitar speak.
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