Ritchie Blackmore Rig

Ritchie Blackmore made his name in Deep Purple and Rainbow with a cutting Fender Stratocaster sound that mixed classical phrasing and hard-rock riffs. Before the Strat he recorded and toured with a 1961 cherry Gibson ES-335 into a Vox AC30 and a Hornby Skewes treble booster, including Child in Time and much of In Rock. Around 1969–70 he switched to CBS-era Stratocasters for their edge and vibrato, then had Marshall add an extra output stage to a 200-watt Marshall Major so the live amp ran about 280 watts from 1970 to 1975.

Onstage from 1974 he fed the Strat through an AIWA TP-1011 reel-to-reel used as both echo and preamp, which replaced the Hornby Skewes booster. He left those Marshalls in the mid-1990s for ENGL and still uses the ENGL E650 Ritchie Blackmore Signature. Since 1997 his main project is Blackmore's Night, built on Alvarez-Yairi acoustics plus the same scalloped Olympic White Strat; Fender's current Ritchie Blackmore Stratocaster is the production version of that guitar, with graduated scalloping and Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound SSL-4 pickups.