Duff McKagan may be more known to us for his bass playing with Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver, but as the frontman for Loaded he plays a six-string guitar. As he explains, “For me, singing and playing guitar at the same time is much more comfortable than singing and playing bass guitar at the same time. I think of a singing bassist like Sting and I don’t know how he does it. He’s some freak of nature. When it comes to playing rhythm guitar, I learned from Izzy Stradlin where a rhythm guitar player needs to be within the band sound, and because of that I try not to overthink it.”

The Seattle-born McKagan, whose family background is Irish and has lots of relatives living in Dublin, started out as a bassist in a large musical family. “My brother Bruce taught me my first bass lines, but I also played drums in bands back then, including the Fastbacks, when I was 16. Bruce had a really cool Gibson Les Paul custom bass. He was left-handed and so was I. So I learned from him, but when he moved out all the left-handed guitars went too. I was doing a newspaper round to make a little money and I saved up for a right-handed bass. I got a Gibson EBO bass which was great for the punk stuff I wanted to play. It sounded like a foghorn.”
While playing with Guns N’ Roses McKagan employed up to four Gallien-Krueger 800RB heads with GK 4x10 and 1x15 cabinets. More recently, his bass set-up has a Gallien-Krueger solid state 2001RB head, fed to four GK 4x10RBH. That’s sixteen speakers giving him, and us, 2,000 watts. He has also been known to carry a Yamaha SPX-90 chorus, a Z-vex Wooley Mammoth fuzz, a Boss pedal, and an MXR M-80.
Over the years, he has used Kramer bass guitars and a Gibson Les Paul bass, but his main bass has been a white mid-’80s Fender Jazz Bass Special, which combines a maple neck, an ash body, and a rosewood fretboard, and which he now mainly keeps for studio work. It’s been marketed as the Duff McKagan signature P Bass model by Fender. He also likes the new Fender Aerodyne bass and the Duesenberg Star range. For pick-ups he usually opts for Seymour Duncan and goes with Rotosound swingbass strings.
But for his axeman duties for this tour with Loaded he’ll have a simpler set-up. As he told Hot Press, “I’ll bring my Gibson SG7, and both myself and Mike Squires, the other guitar player in Loaded, use Engel amps. I don’t really use any effects. I just play the guitar straight into the amp. Mike has a big Dunlop pedal board, God knows what’s on there! But I like the basic sound I get with the Gibson and Engel combination. I also have a couple of Japanese Gibson Les Pauls which are just amazing guitars. I was given one back in the nineties and they’re really hard to find now because of some trademark or copyright issues.”
While acknowledging that the technology has in some ways enhanced the live experience, it’s still not perfect. “When it comes to live gigs, there’s still the same old shit. You go into a new venue and you do a soundcheck and you hope to get it sounding good but you don’t really know until maybe it’s too late. You’d think after all these years some genius would have come up with a programme that would sort that out in relation to the acoustics of each venue.”
When it comes to recording, McKagan admits he’s from the old school. “I always have been. I think guys my age prefer that. When I recorded last week with Slash and Dave Grohl on drums for Slash’s solo album, I just did what I do live. We just brought the amps in, plugged in. tuned up, played and recorded. To me, that’s the way. You get the right feel, and you can more easily get the same sound live. I like those tracks where you capture that moment when you have eye contact with the rest of the band, that moment you’ll never have again. Sometimes you can anticipate what a musician is going to do a split second before he does it because you’ve seen that look in his eye. But the way some people record, that eye contact is gone. Also, the way they have to be squash the masters these days to fit the digital format means you lose some stuff that my ear knows should be there from the analogue days. In many ways I think some technological improvements have been good, some bad. “
The Loaded man is not overly fond of modern recording methods then? “I came through a time when you had to know every detail of every part you wanted to play. Your sound had to be spot on, and you worked on that even before you got to the studio. Now it’s easier for players to get lazy, and if they don’t get a part right they say, “Oh, shit, we can fix that, no problem”. I don’t think that makes for better players. I can even see myself getting lazy too, because of the technology.”
When he looks back over such an illustrious career, what works stand out for him as capturing those moments when he felt he really nailed it? “I think just about all of Appetite For Destruction was nailed. The recording had an urgency about it because we were on a tight budget. We were confident and worked really hard on the songs and we liked what we did. But I also think Contraband with Velvet Revolver was a really good record.”
One stand-out track on the Sick album is the somewhat dark ‘Mothers Day’ which arose from McKagan and bassist Jeff Rouse jamming together on basses. In fact they initially named the song ‘Two Basses’ before McKagan composed some words that were inspired by the well-documented toll drugs have taken on some of his friends. As he says, “There are really great moments on the Sick album. Some of it was really inspired. It’s a gateway record for our next album.

Duff McKagan’s Loaded play The Academy, Dublin on October 10. Their latest album Sick is out now on Century Media.