Scott Appleton: Guitar Tech for Def Leppard

“The whole crew is here and we’ve just been getting things motored in and ready to go so we can start rehearsals officially tomorrow,” says Scott. “The rehearsals are actually at Joe ’s house, because Joe [Elliott, Def Leppard lead singer/guitarist] actually lives here in Dublin, so we’re rehearsing in his studio. For the last few days, I’ve been getting Phil’s rig set up. We took all the gear out of our shipping container, brought it up here, got everything set up, and we’re now going through the rig making sure everything’s functioning properly, getting the guitars working and tuning things up. If you haven’t seen guitars for six months, you’ve got to go back, change strings and readjust things, and do a little chiropractic work every now and then!”

Scott started playing guitar as a kid and, funnily enough, it was Def Leppard who were one of his earliest musical inspirations. “I was sitting down with Phil about a year ago and we were talking about records that we had learned to play guitar with,” remembers Scott. “I had to sheepishly admit that one of the first records I learnt to play guitar to was Pyromania [Def Leppard’s breakthrough third album]! Believe it or not, these guys were some of my first inspirations to play. Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai those type of guys I really appreciated a lot. I was a child of the ‘80s!”

While he had been tech-ing on and off in a part-time or casual capacity since he left college, it wasn’t until quite some time later that Scott scored his first full-time pro tech-ing gig. Enter stage left Mr Peter Frampton. “A good friend of mine was working for Peter Frampton as a drum tech a while back, and I’d played in a band with this friend before,” Scott explains. “He didn’t know how I’d react, but he asked me if I’d be interested in working with Frampton that summer. And I was like, ‘Yeah, why not? It’d be kinda fun!’ I was still working another day job and I was looking to make a little career move there anyway. I kind of fell into it, really!”

Def Leppard currently have three rigs of gear that they variously ship around before, during and after their times on the road. The ‘A’ rig and ‘B’ rig are broadly similar, while the new ‘C’ rig is a scaled-down version for television shows and the like, including a TC Electronic G-System integrated guitar effects and controller, which replaces all Phil’s rack effects that form a part of both the ‘A’ rig and the ‘B’ rig. The costs of having multiple rigs is more than offset by the savings made from avoiding unnecessary freighting costs. “If we’re travelling overseas, we’ll have one rig that’s in transit while we’re using the other one,” says Scott. “So we don’t have to worry about flying stuff over.”

As far as extra protection goes, Phil Collen’s guitars, amps and other gear are more than kept safe by the choice of casing used during transportation. “We use the Kriz-Kraft style racks, which are really, really good, sturdy road cases,” explains Scott. “A&S Cases out of Los Angeles build them for us. And then we’ve got the vault-style guitar racks. I can carry six guitars inside one guitar vault, so I don’t have to worry about extra cases, which is kinda nice!”

“If I was using the ‘A’ rig, I’d probably bring along about eight to 10 electrics,” says Scott. “For this particular rig, I’ve actually got a new one that’s gonna come in, but it’s top secret, so I can’t reveal that one yet until we’ve heard from Jackson. We’re really excited about it. Phil also has his own Jackson signature, the PC1 model, that he’s used for years. He’s been with Jackson since, I guess, the early ‘80s. We’ll have five different PC1 models, varying from one that we call ‘Solar’, which is kind of a yellow-and-orange-burst type scenario that I’ve relic’ed over the last couple of years and made it look like it’s been around for a hundred years, even though it’s a new guitar [see box on opposite page].

“He also got a new one last year called ‘Big Boy’ — that’s its nickname. It’s got a huge neck on it — a big, beefy, almost ‘50s Les Paul-type neck — and it’s an unfinished guitar, which is kinda cool. It’s an oil finish over the top, so the guitar resonates really well. We use titanium saddle pieces and tremolo blocks on the Floyd Roses for everything, and that’s really helped refine his sound a little bit over the last couple of years. It gives you more sustain without being overly bright or brittle: very defined, but not sharp or harsh-sounding at all.”

Adam Reiver, who runs www.floydupgrades.com, has done a lot of the work and provided a lot of the customised products that now form an important part of Phil Collen’s Jackson axes, including the titanium modifications, which he’s now been using for about a year. “These titanium parts have worked phenomenally well for us,” explains Scott. “Adam brought out the sustain block on the bottom of the tremolo unit first, then he started bringing out the saddles and inserts and stuff like that as well. It’s just made an amazing difference to the instruments!”

As to what particular guitar is used by Phil for a particular song, that tends to depend on each instrument’s individual tone. “Every guitar that you have are obviously different pieces of wood and all instruments have different tones,” says Scott. “We usually match a guitar up to the sound of certain songs. It’s trial and error. Phil may go through a couple of shows and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that particular guitar on this song. Let’s try this one!’ It’s about what tone fits the song the best!”

Phil Collen will also be playing a new Guild acoustic for the two British and Irish dates. Def Leppard lead singer, Joe Elliott, whose acoustic guitars Scott Appleton also manages, will be playing his Taylor acoustic through a Samson UR-5D wireless into a Taylor K4 Acoustic DI.

“We have a TC Electronic D-Two delay, which is our main delay for everything, and a TC Electronic 1210 chorus unit, which is all the main chorusing. We also have an old MXR grey stomp box flanger that we run in a loop, and then we also use two Palmer PDI-05 speaker simulators for the rig. I run a Drawmer gate for a good noise gate on the outputs, which works fantastically well. The output of the Palmers actually goes to the monitor rig, FOH, and then the jump out of that goes into two old Randall RRM-2-250 solid-state power amps, which Phil’s been using since the early ‘80s. Those two amplifiers run four Marshall 4 x 12 cabinets on stage for the on-stage sound, but everything goes through the in-ear monitors on stage, so there’s no microphones on stage anywhere as far as the guitar rig goes!”

While there have been no changes made to the ‘B’ rig since it was last utilised by the band in Japan in October 2008, there will be changes made to both the ‘A’ rig and ‘B’ rig later in the summer. Scott explains, “We’ve been using the Palmer speaker simulators, and what we’re gonna do is run one after a power amp, because our front-of-house guy wants to hear one post-power amp to get a different dry signal. Typically, we just have a left-right stereo feed from the Palmers that our monitor guy in FOH gets from the guitar rig.”

Other than that change for FOH, Scott really doesn’t suspect there’ll be much more in the way of change. “Phil goes under the old operative, ‘If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it!’” he laughs. “We’ve had a great deal of success with this rig and it sounds fantastic!”

Scott carries spares of just about everything in the rig when Def Leppard are touring.

“I usually load in about noon-ish,” says Scott. “We’ll take all the gear out of the truck, bring things in and get things set up as much as possible. All of our speaker cabinets and stuff are all mounted on one side of the set, so I basically go and set up my work area and my guitar area on the side of stage left. I run my speaker cables, get them ready and the amps opened up. From then, I’m more involved in working on guitars, restringing, sorting any maintenance issues that may’ve occurred the night before, checking the wireless frequencies, that sort of thing.

“We’ll do soundcheck usually between four and five o’clock, and if there’s any small issues after that I’ll resolve those and then go back about an hour before the show and start tuning up, make sure everything’s ready for a full set change and everything’s ready to roll. Then we do one last quick line check to make sure everything is functioning properly before we actually start the show.”

When it comes to changing the ‘super-heavy’ 13- to 54-gauge strings on Phil Collen’s axes, Scott manages things with an eight-song rule. “I like to keep track of every song every guitar is used for,” explains Scott, who uses a computer in his work box to do this. “Each guitar will usually get about eight songs. He’ll use one guitar in one show for four songs and the next night he’ll use it for four songs, and I’ll change the strings after that. I’m gonna be changing anything from four to eight guitars’ worth of strings a day, depending on how they’ve been used.”

Meticulous stretching is an absolute necessity for Phil’s favoured combo of very heavy strings with a Floyd Rose tremolo system. “With the Floyd Roses, you really have to stretch those strings out in order to keep them in tune at any time, especially with such heavy strings,” says Scott. “You’ve really got to stretch them very heavily, but when you do that and get the Floyd Rose working, the guitar stays in tune so remarkably well. I know people tend to view the Floyd Rose system as being a bit of a pain, but once you get used to it and start working with them, they really stay in tune fantastically well!”

Checking the truss rods of Phil’s Jackson guitars is only an occasional on-the-road requirement. “The necks are so large on a lot of these guitars that they really don’t move that often,” says Scott. “I would say maybe on some of his smaller-neck guitars I might check the truss rods once or twice a tour, depending on weather conditions. If you go from a real dry climate to a real damp climate, sometimes they will move, but not terribly often!”

Scott always uses a Korg DTR-2000 digital rackmounted tuner. When it comes to cleaning, he uses Gorgomyte cleaner for the fretboards and a rather secret weapon on the actual guitar bodies. “A buddy of mine called Rick has got a secret polish,” laughs Scott. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s something he gets and then sells to us. I keep the bodies clean with that every night. There’s no finish on his necks at all, so you don’t really need to worry about polishing them. If his necks get a little gooey, I’ll just usually rub them with a little 0000 steel wool and that brings them right back to life.”

During Leppard’s shows, Scott has the added responsibility of managing all of Phil Collen’s program and effects changes using the rackmounted hardware that’s kept stage left.

“Phil has nothing on stage except for himself and the guitar and the speaker cabinet,” explains Scott. “I have to be on my game during the show to be doing all the program changes, but it’s kinda nice — it keeps me occupied every show! I might adjust the level at the beginning of a solo or adjust the level to tail out certain ends of notes and stuff like that. It’s pretty fun Phil plays the guitar and I play Phil!”

“We had opened maybe about 16 or 17 shows for Journey over the years,” enthuses Scott. “If they needed an opening act and no one was there, the crew would get up and play for a half hour. Rocko, our production manager for Journey, is also stage manager for U2, and those guys had heard about the band and asked us to come open a show. So we ended up opening the last show of the Vertigo tour with U2 and Pearl Jam in Honolulu at the big stadium there. It was a borderline out-of-body experience! It was fantastic and the audience was very kind to us. I think the hardest thing for me was walking off the stage and not taking my own gear with me!”  0