“Don’t spend a lot of time finding the right fretboard wood or the right pickup combination – they are all secondary things”: Matteo Mancuso says expensive equipment is less important than “knowing your gear well”

Know your tools and know them well. Such is the belief of Italian virtuoso Matteo Mancuso, who argues that having expensive gear doesn’t maketh the artist as much as knowing your equipment really well does.

Mancuso speaks in a new interview on the Mike Nelson Show, where he weighs in on gear and the extent of its influence on a musician’s sonic output.

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“I think that one of the most important things is having a gear that you know a lot, rather than having expensive gear,” the guitarist said [via Killer Guitar Rigs]. “It’s more important to know your gear very well rather than have a really expensive gear and not knowing everything about it.”

“I prefer to have two or three pedals, but knowing them pretty well, rather than having 12 pedals, but you can do only one thing with them. So it’s really important to know your gear rather than have a lot of gear. That’s it.”

And while everyone loves a fancy axe, it certainly isn’t necessary for you to sound good, Mancuso argues.

“When it comes to guitar, it doesn’t need to be expensive, but it needs to be reliable,” he says. “One of the most important things when you’re buying a guitar is that it stays in tune. That’s it. It stays in tune, you’re comfortable with it – then it’s a good guitar.”

“You don’t need to spend a lot of time finding the right wood for the fretboard or the right pickup combination – they are all secondary things. The important thing is that it is in tune – at least for me – because you need to make music with it.”

“If you want a particular sound, you can achieve that sound with the pedalboard. You can play around with the pickups – especially if you have single coils, I think they are really versatile pickups – so when you are playing around with your guitar, you really have a wide variety of sounds that are ready without pedals and without amps.”

For Mancuso, the guitar alone already gives you “a wide variety of sounds”.

“You don’t need to have a lot of different pedals in order to achieve different sounds, you just have to experiment with your guitar — maybe playing with the volume on five with a blended single-coil,” he adds.

“It’s really something that you need to explore more before buying gear. So yeah, I think it’s a matter of finding a guitar that stays in tune and finding a bunch of pedals that you know pretty well. And that’s it.”