So let's explore where these myths came from and why they existed, because in all myths it seems there's a tiny shred of truth that maybe at one time applied, but does not now.

Telecasters are for Country - this probably started because ALL Electric guitars were used in COUNTRY originally. Rock N' Roll did not really start taking off until about 1955 or so. So what did you have? Who were the high earners? Country and Jazz musicians of course! And those guys NEEDED electricity to follow what Charlie Christian and Les Paul started. And guess what, not all those guys used Teles, some did use Gibsons, Gretsches, hollowbodies, some even used Stratocasters when they came out. I've noticed something odd in all this - the country guys seem to appreciate guitars in general more, and tend not to give as much of a fuck about brand or model so much.

Strats are really for everything - Bill Carson was a country guy, I think Bob Willis used a Strat, Dick Dale was Surf rock, Buddy Holly was Pop Rock, Hendrix was basically Hard Rock, and Iommi used a Strat on Early Sabbath. Name me one Genre the strat has not touched! I swear I've seen someone - maybe Pat Methany, with a bloody Strat. Honestly, IMHO, if you say a Strat is limited to this or that, you're freakin' stupid.

Jaguars & Jazzmasters are for Surf - actually, if the Jazzmaster was intended for anything, that's Jazz, but the Jazzmaster's wild and crazy pedigree with Surf, New Wave, Post-Punk, Grunge, indie, and Post-Rock is any indication, it's just more proof that the name does not matter at all, nor does the design. I've been using Jazzmasters for hard-rock/shreddy stuff for about 15 years to this point, ditto Jaguars for even longer.

Gibson Les Paul/SG are Classic Rock - Oh really, I guess the guitar's namesake LES FRICKIN PAUL himself - never got the memo. Anything you can do on a Les PAul, you can do on another guitar. It's preference, not a law. I'm so tired of some fatted up fuddy duddy dad rocker giving me shit because I choose a Jag-Stang over a Les Paul, or some hipster telling me to buy a Les Paul because that's what those guys use. Look, I get it....so let's dive in to why this is....

Two Words - AMP & PEDAL TECHNOLOGY!!!!

See, when all these guitars were starting off, guitar amps were designed by science-minded types to be as clean, and efficient at STAYING CLEAN as possible. And most of the players they targeted - high dollar, high value, rich, popular, Jazz and Country musicians who were famous and NEEDED amplification to reach their audience - played CLEAN! Remember, this was also the days before guitar center, when your local guitar shop was run by short haired, suit-clad, business types who would not even let Bob Willis or Bill Haley touch a guitar in the store without them paying for it first!

This is where amp technology comes in. Blues players wound up with second+ hand equipment, which meant last years guitar models, last years (inefficient and less as powerful) amplifiers, and due to a lack of support from the manufacturer or the store, meant that some real oddities would come out of an otherwise - at the time - straightforward approach. So all that "bluesy overdrive" was really the result of the African American bluesmen trying to fill a roadhouse with sound from a used instrument, used amp, and the inefficient amp design feeding back and distorting slightly being pushed to it's limits unwittingly by a musician just trying to do his job.

So then, the original hipsters - blues rockers, who are now today's boomer dad-rockers - heard these blues guys and their amazing sound and made up words for it like "Mojo" and "Voodoo" - almost bordering racist territory here - to describe how "magical" that sound is, and wanting it themselves, they found a whole second hand market of far more affordable options, and started using those.

But the thing was, to get that sound, you had to crank an amplifier to ungodly loud volumes. That's how rock has always been loud, rock was a guitar-centric genre, like the blues is, and electric-guitar centric at that. And to get "that sound" you had to crank the shit out of your crappy little 15 watter tube amp and Danelectro U-series or Fender Duo-Sonic. I think this contributed to the "Rebellious" image rock got in the beginning. It was not rebellion, it was just a bunch of young, suburban, mostly yuppie white boys in garages trying to make their guitar sound like the blues guys. So they cranked it way up, like Link Wray did....and so we get the first wave of overdrive users in rock. This is where all of our rock legends got their start, and this is why you hear baby boomers talk a blue streak about "real tone" coming from plugging a guitar straight into a cranked up tube amp, because that's all they know. They're not interested in anything beyond their age group.

But as the sixties went on, these new blues-based rock legends started pushing the envelope further. You had Dallas Arbiter making products like the Rangemaster treble booster, or the Fuzz Face. Those legendary guys - Hendrix, Clapton, and Page - as well as the Beatles, the Byrds, and Pete Townshend - all started using this new technology. This created a second wave of guitarists who were working with whatever they had. And as the population grew, and more teenagers and young adults filled the "scenes", concerts got bigger, amplification got bigger, and soon, the old guys who designed amps - like Leo Fender - were either adapting (Leo), or left in the dust. Now your average rig was a high-headroom Marshall Stack amplifier, based on a Tweed Bassman circuit most likely, with a Fuzz, Phaser, Wah, and being mildly overdriven by a Gibson guitar with 8.4K ohm humbucker pickups in it.

Which brings us to the 70's. The 70's, despite being the Disco Days, were a time of GREAT change in the electric guitar realm. More distortion became the name of the game. Brian May achived this running a bunch of VOX AC30 top boosts cranked to hell and back with delays between them to make the sound bigger. Ted Nugent used a wall of Fender Twin Reverbs cranked all the way up - getting the front end slammed straight in by a shortscale dual Humbucker Gibson Byrdland. People started to discover, you did not need a ginormous amplifier to get a big sound, especially in the Studio. Sound reinforcement had become a genre all it's own thanks to the improvements in sound engineering from the 60's megaconcerts during the british invasion and things like Woodstock. So some people did not need a big stack, while others did, and that's where the "Mythos" of having a wall or Marshall JMP45s or Plexis behind you became a trope. Not hte 60's - in the 60's, you had everything from a Tele and a AC30 Top Boost to Flip Top Voxes, to maybe a Wall of Marshalls if you here Hendrix or Townsend (the latter having a LOT to do with the proliferation of giant walls of amps BTW, and he has the tinnitus to prove it!). But in the 70's, if you were "Rock" you had a wall of some kind of amp. And the gain levels kept going up. Early 70's "high gain" was something like Marc Bolan from T.Rex, or the fuzzed out guys in the MC5, by the end, it was cranked to hell Plexis with the rest of the Band going through sound reinforcement. So most peopel who grew up in the 1970's and were out of the scene by the time a certain Van-Halen game around - are going to say you need a Gibson, a Marshall, and maybe a few pedals if you're not a "tone purist".

Does anyone get where I'm going with this one? Basically put, in the 1970's, we had the earliest effects pedals, they were designed by non-scientists in a lot of cases, on breadboards, and put together using whatever could be obtained from Archer or Radio Shack, and not all truly bypassed everything, and even then, footswitches do leak some signal off...so you DID get an alteration of your guitar tone from having pedals tback then. That's why some guys like Ted Nugent were vehemently anti-pedals - using rock mythos as an excuse not to do it, while other guys - like our next subject, used them strategically to GET Their own sound.

By the end of the 1970's, guitar technology started getting a real kick in the pants beyond the cranked to hell Marshall trope and a line of Tone-altering pedals in front of the amp, by ways of the most influential innovators of the modern electric guitar since hendrix - Edward Van-Halen truly changed the whole game. Here was a guy who found out he could lower the voltage of his Marshall and crank the hell out of it, to play small clubs with that "big" rock sound - using a voltage controller called a "Variac". Then he put some transformers or high power resistors behind the amplifier - what we call a "Dummy Load" - and then put some of his effects between that and the cabinet - mainley his modulation effects, a script Phase 90 all the way at 0, and a MXR Flanger. So here, we had a guy with a traditional, one 4 channel, non-footswitchable Marshall Plexi, getting gain on par with a lot of modern guitarists, with a sleek, thick, and detailed modulation effects due to them coming AFTER the Preamp and power amp.

This, plus advances in integrated circuit technology - brought us the 1980's, which is truly where the MODERN Guitar sound started. And back then, the only way to get it, was to buy a costly Marshall amplifier - which had 4 inputs, and what looked like one-channel to most people - and then get some guy like Jose Ardonnio to mod it. This lead to other guys trying the same stuff. The early 80's was FULL of god-tier tone! Neal Schon of Journey and his various ever-changing setups of cutting edge equipment. Paul Dean of Loverboy taking the Van-Halen principle to Hiwatts and 50 watt Marshalls and playing his own chambered necked guitars he built himself. Brad Gillis using Mesa Boogie amps and the eons of gain those could produce. Everyone got a Floyd Rose at some point in the eighties. The eighties I think pushed guitar further than ever on all levels. Players got faster, and people experimented. Guys like Edward Van-Halen and Paul Dean alone did things like punk musicians would do - but unlike the punks, they did it cleanly, and with a purpose - total DIY. And they got killer tone because of it. And so this generation was the start of people experimenting with gear en-masse. And the guitar aftermarket started too with Mighty Mite, Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, and Warmoth all becoming a thing as the 70's grew to a close. As computer technology got better, and the invention of MIDI in 1983, gutiar sounds got even MORE elaborate. Choruses, delays, reverbs, pitch shifters (go listen to some Big Country for that one), even guitar synthesizers (Andy Summers of the Police and Elliot Easton of The Cars being two I know off he top of my head - oh yeah, and J.Y. of STYX, go listen to "Eddie" off Pieces of Eight - that's a guitar Synth!). Even the underground college crowd was experimenting with WHAT THEY COULD AFFORD. Which is how a lot of the legendary tones got started like Van-Halen, Lynch, and Dean did at first beforee they got famous for what they were doing.

Then the 1990's came around, and a new term "Retro" was invented because all those college rockers started getting signed up - Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Tad, Melvins, etc. And those guys were not using 60's guitars and 70's pedals to be "retro", they were using that stuff because all the poodle hair shredders of the 80's were driving the prices on things like Charvels and Jacksons up, and high gain amplifiers. A lot of those guys really did like the 80's guys, but they wanted to stand out, so they took - much like Dean, Van-Halen, and Lynch did - stock of what they could afford and use - and made use of it. Notice a trend here for about 3 decades? Brian May, Edward Van-Halen, Paul Dean, and Kurt Cobain, all come from around the same tree gear-wise. They used what they could afford, cultivated their own sound around that stuff, and then when they got popular, the prices shot waaay up. So the next generation had to design around what THEY had. Some guys, like Cobain and Dean - tried to keep prices down, while guys like Ed and Brian, offered their stuff very expensive and "Booteek" when they reproduced it.

Which then enters MY lifetime as a guitarist and where I think this is a total myth that there is a gear for a genre. By the time we hit the 1990's, the gear was already at a point where you could get a satisfactory sound for what I wanted to do without having to look to far for it. By 1995 - when I started out - we already had transistorized high gain guitar amps, digital recording was in it's infancy but starting to be usable for the average professional, by the end of the 1990's, Johnson Millennium and Line6 were making the first Amp Modelers, and Nu-Metalers were pushing the gain enevelope either using multiple pedals, and driving the amplifier designers to make even higher gain guitar amplifiers, sometimes with 3-4 channels! Anyone remember the Marshall JVM? Not to mention all the 90's guys were using Fuzz Pedals which have considerably more gain than a stack, even a Nu-Metal guitarist's stack. THAT is why the 1990's guys could use Jaguars and Jazzmasters with old 60's equipment and get that grungy sound with a pair of single coils and 1 meg ohm pots in their guitar - because the pedals compensated for that!

But as I Was starting out, not to extend this already long diatribe on the guitar-per-genre trope any further than necessary to make the patterns visible - anyone with a few more brain-cells than average could see that you could easily slap just about any electric guitar on just about any modern-style transistor or tube multi-channel amp, and get the kind of gain only 10 years before that required a variac for volume control, and a inefficient tube amp cranked to 10 to get a good, high gain, rock sound out of it. No matter what guitar I put in through these modern transistor practice amps at the guitar store, I could get a good sound. JAzzmaster into a Crate GX-15? That thing could shred. Fender Mustang into a Peavey Classic Chorus 212 - chunky and thick! I probably tried out tons of of Stratocasters and copies thereof I would not have kicked off the rack - because they had that sound. I lived in the practical Garden of Eden of guitar tones. Put em' through tubes and it just sounded even better. Jaguar through a Mesa Heartbreaker? KILLER. The tech thought I was playing a Flying V. Telecaster into a Traynor YCV60? Chunk and sustain for days. And these are all SINGLE COILS into high gain amps.

So here I am, living in a time where, as a guitarist, the world is your oyster! You could buy a Squier Strat copy for under $100 at any pawn shop and a decent 50 watter for about $200 and have enough power to play a live show in a Nu-Metal band. But you had all these assholes complaining about gear. When I joined Lithium, Hawk was playing a $50 Kramer KS-400 strat copy (samick built) into a Peavey Special 130. I was lucky to have a P.A. system at that time to run direct into with a BOSS ME-6 with a $450 Jag-Stang, at the time, running anything direct to board with strings on it that was not a bass guitar, was unheard of, especially in a metal band. And we sounded HUGE.

So here's where I start busting this myth....

The first part of it - as you should be able to deduct from my long historical diatribe, is each generation has a different association as to what the perfect "guitar rig" is. For a young adult from the 50's who grew up on rockabilly, and then got married and had kids in the 60's - it's going to be a Gretsch into a Fender amp. For a teen or young adult from the 50's and 60's, it's going to be a Les Paul or Stratocaster into a Vox or Marshall amp. Someone younger would cite Gibson into a MArshall. Even younger - superstrat into Marshall. Even Younger, Jazzmaster into a Big Muff into a Fender Twin, evne younger - Schecter into a Mesa Boogie. By the time we all hit our 30's, we stop following this shit so obesessively, and start following what we personally like the best, assuming we stop acting like highly social teenagers by age 30.

One thing I've noticed, is my older influences - ie Elliot Easton, Neal Schon, Paul Dean, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Edward Van-Halen even to an extent - EMBRACED new technology. Because, as professionals, they know how much work goes into running an obsolete half-stack setup with a row of analog pedals, and how cantankerous, inconsistant, and moody older stuff can be. I hate to destroy anyones magical illusions, but Eddie did not tour with the "Magic Marshall" past about 5150, maybe even earlier, because it was more reliable to run a row of JCM800s. Elliot Easton was promoting amp modeling 10 years ago. Paul Dean is running a Neural Cortex amp modeler now. Metallica has used modeling as well in their back-stage rack rigs for a decade at least to this point. Heck, even this new tech stuff carries over to the 80's. Night Ranger - the marshalls were for show - they really had miced up Mesa combos backstage.

But this is about the myth of guitars, for a genre - and if I have not made the answer more obvious by now, here it is spelled out in plain. Modern day amps, and amp modeling, has way more gain, way more EQ sway, and way more capabilities than any of these old amps, guitars, and pedals, that likely older people are referencing as "elite". You can do so much more, for so much less money now than ever, to the point that nobody should really give a rats ass if you are playing a Les Paul into a Marshall or a Telecaster into a Line6 HD500 direct to board. If it works for you, it works for you, and that's all that matters. I've been watching, playing with, and performing with local groups for over 25 years now, and I have yet to see one band hit the stage with "Bad tone" - sure, some are really quiet, mostly the bedroom-shredders who never learned that midrange is your friend, but none of them ever actually had a guitar tone that made me want to cover my ears.

And to finish up, an opinion cannot be either a truth nor a myth. People are not going to like certain guitar tones, but most of it has to do with this immature tribal mentality we have as musicians. We get snarky towards each other because of our cultural differences between our chosen genres. We are all - save for a few of us who know what we have - trying to pander to some social norm for acceptance from our fellow guitarists, rather than trying to innovate and create, and find a unique identity for ourselves. And this myth is an exponent of that, is a big reason "everything we can do with a electric guitar has been done", because nobody has imagination, just hero worship and social pandering.

At the end of the day, I say use what you like, screw anyone who says otherwise, and if you find something good sounding with that setup that you like, use it. That's how I've been doing for 25 years and it works for me.