As architects of what would become known and loved as “shoegaze”, the specifics of Ride’s musical tools have always been of particular interest to a certain segment of society. So it’s kind of a tragedy that none of the guitar-centric articles from their first go-around seem to exist online… and by “none of”, I mean the one Going Blank Again-era feature in Guitar Player from 1992 that may or may not have had Neil Young on the cover and that I may or may not still have somewhere.
Happily, one of the by-products of their reunion in 2015 was that the music(ian) media apparatus was lined up to talk to them and they were more than happy to geek out about their guitars, amps, and pedals.
In their February 2016 issue, Premier Guitar talked to lead guitarist Andy Bell about what they used back in the day compared to what they had now:
The first time around I was using a Boss DS-1 Distortion, a Cry Baby wah, and a rackmount Roland GP-16 to handle all of the rest of the sounds. Now I use two pedalboards stuffed with stompboxes and no rack gear. My wish finally came true, though, and I have a backwards guitar pedal now. The Eventide TimeFactor makes it so I can do things like play the intro on “Seagull” more like the way we recorded it.
Ride’s Andy Bell: Addicted To Noise @ Premier Guitar
Total Guitar also turned an interview with Bell into a career-spanning feature with gear specifics from their early days through to walkthrough of his reunion pedalboard:
Andy Bell talks returning to Ride and his Rickenbacker’d rig @ Total Guitar vs MusicRadar
He also offered some tips to other six-stringers for Total Guitar‘s umbrella online outlet, MusicRadar:
Ride’s Andy Bell: my top 5 tips for guitarists @ MusicRadar
On the Chicago stop of their 2015 North American tour, they gave gear marketplace Reverb a look at the rigs they had built for themselves more than 20 years after last taking the stage, documented in both video and text and photos:
Reverb Soundcheck: Ride @ Reverb
And a fan shared some more shots of Andy Bell and Mark Gardener’s pedalboards on that tour with Effects Bay:
Pedalboards of Mark Gardener and Andy Bell of Ride @ Effects Bay
After releasing their first reunion record, 2018’s Weather Diaries, The Guitar Magazine chatted with Andy Bell but didn’t actually get into the specifics of what toys they had in studio:
And while not really gear-specific – I don’t think that archtop acoustic is on the record – it’s cool that Bell marked the one-year anniversary of Weather Diaries with an extended guitar lesson video for a few of the tracks on the record:
And because the rhythm section deserves some attention, drummer Loz Colbert talked to MusicRadar:
And bassist Steve Queralt gave an interview to Bass Player Magazine about crafting his parts for Weather Diaries:
Curiously, no one ran any features around the second reunion record, 2019’s This Is Not A Safe Place. Savages.
