Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam) guitar rig

Along with Mike McCready, Stone Gossard provides the other half of Pearl Jam's guitar line up. Gossard is known predominantly for his rhythm playing, as well as being responsible for co-writing many of Pearl Jam's most well known songs.

In an April 1995 interview with Guitar World, Pearl Jam's guitar tech, George Webb, Gossard's approach to his guitar rig is described as simple.

"Stone changes his gear constantly," says Webb. "Fortunately, though, he keeps things simple. He doesn't like rack units, and he doesn't want to deal with MIDI or any of the crap. He basically wants to plug straight into an amp and use a couple of stomp boxes.

In that respect not much has changed throughout his time with Pearl Jam.

Guitar wise, Stone Gossard is known to play a mixture of Fender Stratocastor's and Gibson Les Paul's. If you ever see Pearl Jam play life, there is a good chance that he'll spend 95% of the show playing either one of those.

George Webb provided an overview of Gossard's guitar line-up as of 1995.

"Stone mainly uses Les Pauls. He has two Goldtops.. a '54 and a '72 and the sunburst Paul he's had since Mother Love Bone. He's also got a reissue Strat and a Hamer Duo-Tone electric/acoustic that he uses for 'Daughter.'" Gossard's tech Tim "Skully" Quinlan tunes all the guitars to their many alternate tunings using GHS Boomers 0.011's Gossard uses Dunlop Tortex 0.73mm picks.

In the early days Gossard played through a Marshall head and a Fender Bassman 4x10", which he would switch between using an Ernie Ball volume/pan pedal.

George Webb provided an insight into Gossard's back line as of 1995.

"Right now, Stone is playing though a Matchless H/C-30 head Bowering a Marshall 1960 100-watt 4x12, and an old brown Fender Deluxe. He uses relatively low-powered amps and drives them hard, so he gets the tone and warmth of the power tubes working. Stone doesn't push them to where they really distort though..he leaves that to the foot-pedals."

Gossard's Yield era amplifier of choice was a Savage Audio "Blitz 50" 2x12 50 watt. With the release of Riot Act he went back to his earlier preference from Marshall and Fender. For the recording of the album he used a 1968 Marshall "JMP" 50watt plexi, with channels 1&2 jumped and Tweed Fender Deluxe 1x12", as well as the lesser known Trentino 30 watt head through a Marshall 4x12 cabinet.

In the early days, Gossard's pedal board was relatively bare bones. Specific information is hard to come by, but it's rumoured that he was using an Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer, the Ernie Ball Volume/Pan Pedal and possibly a Boss Chorus pedal of some kind.

From the Vs. through to No Code era, Gossard relied heavily upon the Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer, Dunlop CryBaby Wah and Ernie Ball Volume pedal for the bulk of his tone. In 1995, his pedal board featured a couple of additions. This was covered in the 1995 George Webb interview with Guitar World.

"We use different pedals to achieve different amounts of distortion and overdrive: a DOD graphic eq pedal that boosts the signal and drives the amps' preamp sections harder, a Boss Hyperfuzz and an old Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer. Stone uses two amps, so we use Rocktron Rack Interface that feeds the amps two totally separate signals to eliminate any impedance problems.

Around the time the Yeild album came out, Gossard is thought to have added a Ibanez SD-9 Sonic Distortion to his board as well as a Boss DD-3 Digital Delay. Here's an image of his signal flow diagram from October 1998 taken from the Sony Music site.

The pedals, as indicated by the letters in the signal flow diagram are: a) Boss DD-3 Digital Delay, b) Diaz "Tremodillo" Tremolo, c) Dunlop "UniVibe" Chorus/Vibrato, d) Ibanez SD-9 Sonic Distortion, e) Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer, f) Fender Spring Reverb on/off switch, g) Dunlop "535" CryBaby Wah, h) Ernie Ball Volume Pedal.

Just in case computer generated images aren't your thing, his a low resolution image of his 1998 pedal board.

His board expanded again with the release of Binaural, with the Danelectro Dan-Echo Delay and Hughes & Kettner Rotosphere being added.

Gossard's Riot Act era pedal board was almost 'flight deck' big. Here's an image of his Riot Act board that you will often see doing the rounds on various forums.

From the bottom right to left: Dunlop CryBaby Wah, MXR M-132 Super Compressor, Hughes & Kettner Rotosphere, MXR Phase 90, MXR M-135 Smart Gate, MXR M-133 Micro Amp, Danelectro Dan-Echo Delay, Boss DD-5 Digital Delay.

From the top right to left: Morgan Miller DT-1 Boost, Acoustic Switch, some sort of "On/Off" switch I'm guessing, unknown, unknown, Ibanez FL-305 Flange with Delay.

Pictured below is an image of Gossard's Pearl Jam/Avocado era pedal board, as seen on the Given to Wail Pearl Jam fan site. As you can see, he cut back on quite a few pedals during the transition between albums, ditching the MXR pedals.

From the bottom right to left: Ernie Ball 6166 Mono Volume, Dunlop CryBaby Wah, unknown, Klon Centaur Overdrive, unknown, Keeley Compressor, some kind of custom switch/loop box and the Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler.

From the top right to left: unknown, A/B amp switch, Ibanez FL-305 Flange with Delay.

If you want an introduction to Pearl Jam check out either Vs. or Vitalogy both sitting high on my all time list of favorite albums.

If you have any comments, corrections or additions to this guitar rig, please feel free to post them in the forum here.