Ritchie Blackmore - Equipment and Musical Style

Equipment and Musical Style

During the 1960s, Blackmore played a Gibson ES-335 but switched to a Fender Stratocaster in 1970. Since then, until he formed Blackmore's Night in 1997, he used Stratocasters almost exclusively. The middle pickup is screwed down and not used. Blackmore has also occasionally used a Fender Telecaster Thinline during recording sessions. He is also one of the first rock guitarists to have used a "scalloped" fretboard where the wood is filed and carved out into a shallow "U" shape between the frets.

In his soloing, Blackmore combines blues scales and phrasing with dominant minor scales and ideas from European classical music. While playing he would often put the pick in his mouth, playing with his fingers. He occasionally uses the diatonic scale, with rapidly changing tonality.

In the 1970s, Blackmore used a number of different Stratocasters; one of his main guitars was an Olympic white 1974 model with a rosewood fingerboard that was scalloped. Blackmore added a strap lock to the headstock of this guitar as a conversation piece to annoy and confuse people.

His amplifiers were originally 200-Watt Marshall Major stacks which were modified by Marshall with an additional output stage (generated approximately 278W) to make them sound more like Blackmore's favourite Vox AC-30 amp cranked to full volume. Since 1994, he has used Engl valve amps.

Effects he used from 1970 to 1997, besides his usual tape echo, included a Hornby Skewes Treble Booster in the early days. Around late-1973, he experimented with an EMS Synthi Hi Fli guitar synthesizer. He sometimes used a wah-wah pedal and a variable control treble-booster for sustain, and Moog Taurus bass pedals were used in solo parts during concerts. He also had a modified Aiwa TP-1011 tape machine built to supply echo and delay effects; the tape deck was also used as a pre-amp. Other effects that Blackmore used were a Unicord Univibe, a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face and an Octave Divider.

In the mid-1980s he experimented with Roland guitar synthesizers. A Roland GR-700 was seen on stage as late as 1995-96, later replaced with the GR-50.

Blackmore has experimented with many different pickups in his Strats. In the early Rainbow era, they were still stock Fenders, later Dawk installed over wound, dipped, Fender pickups. He has also used Schecter F-500-Ts, Velvet Hammer "Red Rhodes", DiMarzio "HS-2", OBL "Black Label", Bill Lawrence L-450, XL-250 (bridge), L-250 (neck). He used Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound Flat SSL-4 for several years and since the late 80s he has used Lace Sensor (Gold) "noiseless" pickups.