Get one of those gay Paul Stanley guitars...you'll probably pawn it anyway.

well for starters jason becker and marty friedman both played superstrats back in the cacophony days. as for pickups giving you those magical sounds...forget about it...while good high end pickups are kind of a necessity,99% of those sounds come from their amplifier setups...and i believe they both used rack mount setups. a lot like petrucci uses these days. essentially just utilizing some nice choruses and delays with a hint of some reverb(pretty much a standard sound of the eighties players). so that's a good place to start. get yourself into a decent chorus pedal,delay pedal,and some reverb and you should be able to get close.....running thru a couple of half stacks wouldn't hurt either. allthough these days a good Podxt unit can get you into those sounds as well....as far as guitars....something with a couple of humbuckers will get ya there...the EMG humbukcers are pretty popular(ala zakk wylde).....they tend to be pretty quiet when you need them to be.....look into the DEAN website....all kinds of odd shape guitars there....washburn as well....or even B.C. Rich if ya want really bizzare looks......

of course expect to pay some $$$ to get those sounds as well....

i agree with bach. i mean, cmon, who wouldnt.... he's frikkin bach! but seriously, look at the esp's, but i would warn against them. a couple friends of mine have them, and they were ok at the begining, but then, while being treated with care, one got a severely warped neck and messed up electronics, and the other got paint cracks within a few months. all of this while the ibanezes, strats and stuff looked like new after years of gigging. we pretty much think that esp stands for "extra strat parts" now. other than my opinion of that, listen to bach.... he has written many-a-good symphony....

sweet.
I am kind of leaning towards the ESP's. I don't want like an LTD or anything like that, no Squier's, no Epiphone's. I'm kind of bitchy about that shitlol.
As far as the paying lots of moolah part, I don't really mind, as I have an ampeg SVT classic bass Head and Ampeg 8 x 10 cabinet that are probably going to get sold. Pretty much all that that cab stands for is a bad memory of getting completely fucked by my last band, and I'm pretty much looking to move away from bass.
But ya, I'll start looking in to the guitar first, then start checkin out cabs and heads, I'm not really in to combo amps, as I plan on playing gigs and shit and I don't want to have to go and buy new gear when I decide to have that happen.
As far as the cacophony guys, I thought theyb played carvin guitars back in the day? I definitely remember seeing them in a bunch of Carvin commercial type things, but for sure whenever I think of them individually, it was Jason becker on Strats and Marty Friedman on Jackson's.
As far as Chorus and Delay pedals are concerned, what are some good ones? I used to have a Boss Digital Delay, but I had to hock it for food money during some rough times, but it seemed to be pretty decent.
My old guitarist had a Mesa Dual Rectifier solo head through a marshall 4 x 10, and it sounded pretty badass, although the head was like $2500. I'm wondering if a really good clean sound can be acheived with those heads, or are they mostly for distorted channels, because I remember my guitarists sounding pretty bad when clean.

hey, easy, i love my LTD.. lol

i believe that tone is largely based upon your technique no matter what gear you're using, but thats just my opinion