Joe Perry Rig

Joe Perry has been Aerosmith’s lead guitarist since 1970, chasing a hard-rock tone that sits on the edge of breakup instead of high-gain saturation. On the first albums he used an Ampeg V4 so he would not sound like every Les Paul-and-Marshall band, then spent the late-1970s Draw the Line and Live Bootleg tours on Andy Topeka–modified Music Man HD-130 heads. His 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard and a 10-string B.C. Rich Bich were the guitars of that era, and a homemade talk box supplied the vocal guitar lines on Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way.

Gibson’s 1996 Black Burst was his first signature, then the green-tiger Boneyard Les Paul became the mid-career Custom Shop model from 2003. Today his tech stacks a Marshall JCM800 with an Ibanez TS9 and original Klon Centaur, blended with Fender combos, while Perry’s desert-island guitar is the blowtorched Fender/Warmoth Burned Strat that tracked the 2025 Yungblud EP through an Orange Terror Stamp. The newest commercial signature is the 2019 Gibson Joe Perry Gold Rush Les Paul Axcess, a single-498T goldtop with a Wilkinson tremolo.