Rigged: Starkill Guitarist Parker Jameson
To preview their current MetalSucks-sponsored tour with Wintersun, Arsis and Fleshgod Apocalypse, we asked Starkill guitarist Parker jameson to put together a rundown of his live setup for our Rigged series. Jameson was kind enough to share the specs of both his studio and live rigs, as well as those of co-guitarist Charlie Federici since both use essentially the same setup. Get dates for the tour right here. Here’s Parker:
My two main guitars are both Ibanez Xiphos models. The black one with white bevels was the main guitar I used for tracking Fires of Life. Maple neck-thru, mahogany wings, and a DiMarzio D Sonic in the bridge with an Air Norton in the neck. All of my solos were recorded on this guitar. The hardtail Xiphos is my newest guitar; custom vintage white paint job with black pin-striping and DiMarzio D Activator pickups. Super articulate and kind of woody sounding.
My Ibanez STM is stock, no mods. This was used on some parts of Fires of Life, but on the road it’s usually just a backup guitar.
My Ibanez RG570 is just an old, pink RG with a Super 3 / Tone Zone pickup combination. Mostly just sits around for practice purposes.
While our other guitarist and bass player are in drop C, I tune all my guitars to D standard. I use .9-.42 D’Addario strings as I prefer super-light string tension on my guitars.
Though our guitar and pickup preferences are different, Charlie (our other guitarist) and I both use the same setups in the studio and live. Here’s our studio setup.
The main tube amps we use are the Peavey 6505 and 3120. We blend in a Jet City JCA100 with our Peavey tone to add extra bottom end. I tend to favor standard dized cabinets like the Rocktron 4×12 and Marshall 4×12 as opposed to oversized cabinets, usually with Celestion Vintage 30s. Bigger cabs sound muddy to me, although I did use a Mesa Oversized 4×12 in the studio with the JCA to add a little bit of thickness to the Peavey tone.
We use the Axe Fx Ultra and Rocktron Prophesy II. I’ve always been a big fan of digital amps for lead tones, whether running them through a power amp and cabinet or just running them straight into the board. Their response and feel are extremely different from real amps, and I prefer it over traditional amps. I make all my own custom cabinet impulses and draw a lot of influence from Andy Sneap’s recorded tones. Pretty much always use the 5150 type amp. The Ultra was used for most of the solos on Fires of Life.
The Rocktron Velocity 300 is one of my favorite pieces of gear. It’s a really clean, dry sounding preamp, but you can add more warmth and thump than you’d realistically ever need with the reactance knobs. I think Alexi Laiho used one of these on Hatebreeder. They’re really articulate sounding.
Live we tend to default to the Velocity / Axe Fx setup, using the Peaveys as backups. We also use a Rocktron Midimate for channel switching.
Some other miscellaneous items I use: BBE Green Screamer, Maxon OD808, CryBaby Wah, Digitech Whammy and Jazz III picks.
