So to discuss what I use to create music is kind of a gigantic task. For starters, I'm a rampant tinkerer, so I'm always messing with different DAWs, Plugins, Software Instruments, Synths, Guitars, Basses, Pedals, and even my own home-made electronics (which you'll find all over the site).

Guitar - Probably 'I'm best known for being a guitarist, and being a pretty insane non-famous, non-rich guitar collector. However, my "collecting" philosophy is a lot like Billy Squier in that I collect them to PLAY them, but unlike Billy, I build them myself, so getting excessive in the guitar department is pretty easy to do when you've been a shadetree luthier for about 25+ years. For a Complete List of Guitars click Here - trust me, it gets pretty nuts.

That said, there are some axes that get used more than others, and sometimes it revolves around. Most of the time I prefer Fender Offsets, my Jaguar and Jag-Stang being my main gutiars, though I also like a good Floyded Shredder once in awhile as well. I tend to have an affinity for oddballs that don't get a lot of attention such as the aforementioned Jag-Stang or the Paul Dean guitars designed by Loverboy's guitarist.

I have two general guitar rigs, one digital, one analog. The analog rig is a 2008, 120 Watt, Bugera 333XL Head, armed with the classic British tube-crunch of 4x EL34s and 4x 12AX7s, with a 1987 Peavey 412M cabinet loaded with Celestion GK-85S speakers, and a home built speaker cable. Slamming the front end of the Bugera is a SKB-PS45 pedalboard with the following signal chain-> BOSS TU-2 Tuner->EHX PitchFork->CreepingNet SkullFuzz->CreepingNet FazzFuzz->Dunlop CryBaby GCB95 Wah Wah->Behringer PS9 Super Shifter->Digitech X-Series Flanger->EHX SmallClone EH4900 Chorus->BOSS DD7 Digital Delay->Behringer Noise Gate->AMP. I have plans to build a smaller solid-state 1x12 combo in the future for playing otu at the house or in the studio or smaller venues. I'm getting away from commercial products to cultivate my own sound. I use my ears more than I use any Electronics Engineering knowledge on these endeavors.

My digital rig is just a single Line6 HD500 that lives at my computer 90% of the time. Sometimes I use the soft-amps and pedals in GarageBand - usually when I'm in, well, the Garage, but most of the tiem it's the HD500. I program all my patches using Line6 HD Edit in a Windows XP Virtual Machine from Linux (because there's no good editor for Linux), or from MacOS Natively (though it pesters me about the drivers being "old" on occasion). I have "my sound" and I know how to get it regardless of whose setup I'm running through. After all, a big part of your sound is what you bring to the table as a player anyway.

For bass I just use a Squier VM Bass VI into the HD500, direct in, or through an amplifier that I borrowed (maybe someday I'll build a Bass Amp, I hear the TA2030A op-amp makes a GREAT Bass amplifier). I find it can emulate almost any bass with that setup. I just use the 7 or so pickup combinations a Bass VI has via those 3 selector switches and 3 Jaguar pickups it has. Yeah, I'm a bit of a Jaguar freak.

Studio stuff is generally swapped between Ardour (which I'm just learning) and GarageBand. I use GarageBand because I'm lazy, and I can just slap on some guitar parts, and bass parts (sometimes even using a guitar pitched an octave down using a virtual Octave effect), and then let auto-drummer do it's thing with some mild intervention from me. Ardour is me moving to full OpenSource though because I'm tired of lining the pockets of corporations when I don't make any real money doing this, and at my age, that's not the point. The point is that I enjoy doing it, warts and all. Guitars are usually recorded over USB interface via the Line6

When I played in bands I used to record with the analog rig in professional studios all the time. Usually in those scenarios I just used my Bugera 333XL and pedalboard, miced up on the lower right corner speaker of the Peavye 412M cabinet with a Shure SM57 or SM58 microphone, slightly offset ala Edward Van-Halen (where I got the trick from). I know my amp really well at this point so it's not hard for me to conjure up whatever I need from the Bugera. Sometimes I'll use other amps or other guitars from other people for overdubs, but that's rare, most of the time It's just me, my usual rig, and me just zoning out and going crazy while following the music.