Simon McBride might have just sparked another footnote in the never-ending tone debate by sharing a rather novel hot take that you might not have heard before.
As Deep Purple prepares to release their second studio album with McBride, the guitarist has been fielding gear questions and has issued a red-hot take on the downside of truss rods.
McBride is the successor to Steve Morse’s decades-long tenure in the band and has brought a traditional blues approach back to their core, akin to Ritchie Blackmore’s legacy. As ever, everything goes through his trusted PRS 408 electric guitar.
“I played everything on this record with a prototype from PRS,” McBride tells Guitar World ahead of SPLAT!’s release on July 3.
“The idea is that there’s no truss rod,” he continues. “It goes back to the early days when guitars had no truss rods because I’m a firm believer that if you put a truss rod in a guitar, it sucks the tone and sustain out of it.”
Truss rods, typically made of metal or carbon fiber, run down the length of the neck of a guitar beneath the fretboard and work to reinforce the neck and counter the tension generated by the strings.
They are a necessary feature to prevent and remedy any nasty neck warps. For most, they’re a vital ingredient in guitar building. McBride disagrees.
“This guitar is like an animal,” McBride says of his PRS. “It’s hard to control because there’s so much natural sustain, and I don’t do high-output pickups.
“Acoustically, there’s such a difference without the truss rod,” he adds, alluding to the apparent increased sustain and resonance that comes with removing a chunk of metal from the guitar. “[The neck] must be the strongest piece of wood they could find because it doesn’t bend at all.”
Now, we aren’t expecting McBride to kickstart a trend of players yanking their truss rods out of their guitars – that really wouldn’t be advisable – but the thought that the truss rod actually harms a guitar’s sustain is certainly an interesting take.
Read McBride's full interview in the new issue of Guitarist, which includes a feature on the recent discovery of Eric Clapton's long-lost Summerburst. Pick up a copy over at Magazines Direct.
