Jack White’s penchant for oddball gear is no mystery. He wrote and recorded some of the White Stripes’ biggest songs on a 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas guitar. Last year, he enlisted Eddie Van Halen’s longtime luthier to create a custom build that blurs the line between guitar and bass.
But how he tracks down some of his strangest gear choices has been less clear.
Now we have an answer. The recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee sat down with Reverb to discuss his approach, revealing the lengths he’s gone to realize the sounds he hears in his head.
Most strikingly, he recalled embarking on an eight-year search for an amplifier he wasn’t even sure existed.
“My favorite thing to do — if I see an old clip of a musician and some equipment behind them — is to try to find out what that equipment is, if I don't know already,” Jack White explains.
“And that can lead to a lot of amazing things, because sometimes you'll find that amp and it's this one company, but this company also made a reverb unit or an echo unit, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a whole new world.’
“The shocking thing to me, having done that since I was a teenager — for 30-plus years — is still finding things that I’ve never heard of.”
White’s discoveries over that three-decade span have been vast and varied. Just the day before the interview was filmed, he stumbled across “some guitar synthesizer from the ’70s” he had never seen before.
“All the shops I've been in, all the bands I've played with, all the studios I've been in, and I have never, ever heard of this. And it's just amazing how often that happens.”
On other occasions, he has pursued gear that was only rumored to exist — searches that could prove long and maddening, as he discovered during his quest for a fabled amplifier.
“In the early days of the White Stripes, I had a 50-watt Silvertone amp,” he continues. “I was speaking to Danny Kroha from [blues-punk band] the Gories, who was in the Demolition Doll Rods at the time. I said, ‘Yes, it's got that crunch, but I don't have reverb on it, so I guess I'm using a Twin Reverb with this Silvertone so I get the crunch and the reverb.’
“And he goes, ‘Well, you should just get a 100-watt Silvertone.’ I was like, ‘They made 100-watt Silvertones?’ I didn't know that, and he goes, ‘Yeah, I think they did.’
“I looked for eight years before I finally walked into a shop and they fucking had a 100-watt Silvertone. I'm like, ‘It's actually real!’ I never saw a drawing or a photograph or an old catalog picture, or someone who had one. Nothing. Everyone just said, ‘I don't know if there is one or not.’”
Today, however, White could have discovered the amp in no time at all.
“Now that's a Google search in two seconds,” he says laughing. “Then at least I know it exists. That would have saved me a lot of stress.”
To prove his point, a quick Google search did indeed reveal that a number of those amps were built in the 1960s, typically with a 12AX7 preamp and 6V6 or 6L6 power tubes. Silvertone made 100-watt heads and combos, and some featured built-in reverb. They were very much modeled off the Fender amps of the time, but distinguished themselves with a dirty, lo-fi sound compared to Blackface Fenders.
Elsewhere, White has shared the advice Prince gave him and outlined the difference between rock and blues guitar players.
