The secrets behind Billy Zoom's guitar tone on X's Los Angeles

Billy Zoom remains one of the most fascinating figures of the early punk rock scene, mainly because he never truly fit the mold of the typical punk guitarist. 

Inspired by Johnny Ramone, he adopted a similar spread-eagle stance on stage and unleashed a brutal wall of distorted powerchords, but his beatific smile contrasted the de rigueur punk scowl, and his gleaming vintage Gretsch 6129 Silver Jet was downright upscale compared to the pawn shop prizes most punk players preferred. 

Perhaps most unusual of all is that Zoom is an absolute brainiac when it comes to amplifiers. He can design and build amps from the ground up, whereas most of his peers could barely find the power switch.

Even before Zoom joined X, he ran an amp repair shop in Hollywood and sold custom amps long before the boutique craze began, and he still builds custom amps to this day.

On stage during the early days of X, he played through a brownface Fender Custom that he hot-rodded himself, moving on to a hot-rodded Quad Reverb followed by his own custom high-power half stacks and his current 20-watt “cowboy” amp. 

Zoom’s stage amps were far too loud for the studio, so when X recorded their first albums during the early '80s, he borrowed a Traynor YBA-1 Bass Master head from bassist John Doe.

Featuring a circuit based on the tweed Fender 5F6A Bassman (also the basis for the Marshall JTM45), the Traynor YBA-1 is known as the “Canadian plexi”. 

Thanks to their stalwart Hammond transformers and 6CA7 tubes (the American equivalent of the EL34), early YBA-1 amps deliver tight bottom-end crunch, smoothly compressed midrange and crisp treble cut, which was just perfect for Zoom’s punchy power chords and neo-rockabilly riffs.

Like he did with his playing, Zoom opted for a “less is more” approach with his rig, plugging his Silver Jet directly to the amp with all of the controls all of the way up, allowing the aged DeArmond pickups to grind menacingly. 

While many great rock rhythm guitar tracks have been recorded with Gretsch guitars (AC/DC, The Cult, The Who, etc.), Zoom is one of the few players to prefer single-coil DeArmonds over Filter’tron humbuckers.

Get the sound, cheap!

Gretsch G5230T Electromatic Jet with Bigsby

TV Jones T-Armond bridge pickup

Traynor YGL1

Tone tip: Set the Traynor’s mode switch to “Pure” to bypass the tone stack for an aggressive midrange boost.