Fender and Tom Morello have teamed up to create a replica of his ‘Arm the Homeless’ electric guitar, the DIY S-style on which the Rage Against The Machine guitarist found his sound.

We nearly caught ourselves calling this signature guitar a signature Stratocaster – it has the solid alder double-cutaway Strat body – but it’s really quite a different guitar.

This has a hockey stick six-in-line headstock for starters. For seconds, that headstock doesn’t even have the Fender logo. There are a pair of EMG active humbuckers at the neck and bridge pickup. And how many Strats do you know that ship with the string ends all wafting around the headstock “like bumblebees”?

As Morello explains in the video, that’s a stylistic choice after some hotshot player upbraided him for his unruly electric guitar strings when he was cutting his teeth as a player in Libertyville, Illinois.

The rest of the instrument is all make-do improvised luthierie after he ordered a custom-made guitar from a Hollywood guitar store that sounded and played horribly and required surgery to make it work for him.

“I knew nothing about making a guitar,” he says. “I checked a bunch of boxes, spent a lot of money on the crappiest guitar that anyone has ever played. That was super disappointing. It was unplayable. It sounded absolutely terrible. So, through the years, I changed everything about the guitar. The only thing that remained from that original guitar was the body.

“I changed the neck a number of times. I changed the pickups, the electronics, the whammy bar, every configuration until I finally – and this is probably towards the end of 1988 – I spent one day in a Hollywood rehearsal studio, maybe about four hours, dialling it in as best I could, and I finally just gave up.

“This is the equipment I’ve got, this is the sound that I have. It’s not what I envisioned at all, but this sound is just gonna be my sound. I’m not gonna worry about it ever again.”

And this became the ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar. Now, he’s not really selling it here, but rest assured this will be a player out of the box.

You’ve got the Strat body, the painted bolt-on maple neck – again, a painted neck? Not very Strat-like. The 15” rosewood fingerboard is kinda flat, too.

There are a pair of active EMG humbuckers, each controlled by its own volume pot, plus a master tone control. A three-way toggle switch is on standby for abuse.

Just turn the volume down on one of those pickups and start rocking that toggle for those gonzo machine gun staccato effects that Morello loves.

Hit a harmonic and start working the double-locking GotohGE1996T series tremolo. Go nuts. This is what the guitar was designed for, and when Morello says he gave up modifying it and then used this to create his own sound, he is not exaggerating. This is the guitar behind Bombtrack, Bullet In The Head, Know Your Enemy, Fistful Of Steel… Et cetera.

“The ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar has been my comrade for life in the sonic sphere. It allowed me to find myself as an artist,” says Morello. “I’ve played 22 albums in my life and ‘Arm the Homeless’ has been part of all of them. I know that there’s a lot of magic in the way that this weird island of misfit toys guitar has brought into my life, and hopefully some of that can be brought into yours.”

The ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar also has the same graphic finish as Morello’s original, including the eponymous slogan, the hippopotamus, and the Hammer and Sickle that Fender feels obligated to mention might cause you legal strife in some jurisdictions, e.g. Indonesia.

The ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar is priced £/$1,699, with a portion of the proceeds going to LA-based charities Midnight Mission and Covenant House, both hand-picked by Morello. For more details, head over to Fender.

Ernie Ball Music Man and former Rage Against The Machine bassist Tim Commerford have joined forces for a pair of StingRay signature bass guitars.

The collection comprises an active four-string StingRay, finished in a military spec Xavier Green paint job, and a passive version in Quentin Blue, each of them in a matte poly finish.

Both instruments have been released in limited quantities. They are only making 50 of each. Commerford has been involved with the design at all stages.

In the minds of many RATM fans, the StingRay is the Commerford bass. Commerford says it has been a long-standing relationship ever since he first set eyes on one in a pawnshop. No bass compares.

“This is a bass that I fell in love with at a pawnshop and used to play the first Rage record, and I’m proud to play these basses and to feel wholeheartedly that they are the best basses I’ve ever played in my life.”

Many bass guitarists would agree. Commerford and Ernie Ball Music Man last teamed up in 2021, for a run that included various takes on the StingRay. There were long and short-scale models, active and passive.

These are designed in a similar spirit; the only big aesthetic signature detail on these new StingRays are subtle.

You’ll find Commerford’s name engraved neck plate alongside his logo and the number of the model, but otherwise these are simply tailored to his specs – anyone who appreciates a StingRay (and who doesn’t?) will have a lot to like with these.

Both models have a similar build, of solid ash bodies, roasted maple necks that join the body with a five-bolt joint. The heel has been sculpted nicely. They have painted peg-heads to match the body’s finish. There are high-contrast parchment pickguards, in the classic oval profile.

The fingerboard is ebony, has an 11” radius and seats 22 stainless steel frets. All the high-end EBMM touches are present and correct; the gunstock oil and hand-rubbed special wax blend on the neck. The Ernie Ball Music Man neck is a modern wonder of the world.

Commerford has spec’d this up with black hardware. You’ll find custom lightweight clover-style tuners on the headstock, with tapered string posts to improve the break angle over the nut.

Everything is geared up to be just so on these basses – the nut is compensated to help make sure that intonation is on-point. The bridge is a string-through-body design with vintage-plated saddles.

The big question is whether to go active of passive. Both of these have a single neodymium Music Man humbucker, with the active model active model searched by an 18V preamp with a volume control and a three-band EQ.

The passive version has a three-way rotary pickup voice selector, giving you parallel, single-coil and series pickup configurations. It has a passive-boost via a push-pull on the volume pot, and a tone control, too.

In other words, both are hugely versatile. Perhaps the coolest signature feature here is the adjustable thumb ramp, a rest positioned just beside the pickup that is a godsend for a thumb player like Commerford.

“This is what truly makes this bass unique,” he says. “If you’re a thumb player and you anchor down like I do, to just have a few spots to be able to put your hand that are comfortable is really helpful.”

Also, in Commerford’s line of work, overdrive, fuzz, effects are not out of the question, so you will find adjustable mute pads on the bridge to help dampen some of the noise that comes with that.

“It’s a Music Man StingRay but, better than that, it’s my own version of that,” says Commerford. “This bridge, to me, is a work of art, and the mutes that are on it really are useful, especially for effects, distortion and whatnot.”

The Tim Commerford StingRay is available now, priced $3,099. See Ernie Ball Music Man for more details.

Tom Morello is very passionate about the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. Indeed, it seems the absence of one band has left him particularly vexed - no, not Rage Against The Machine (they were inducted in 2023), but Iron Maiden.

That much is clear from an interview Morello gave to Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk last week. He stated his intent to get Iron Maiden their long-overdue place in the Hall: "I will chew my leg off like a coyote in a trap if I can't get Iron Maiden in,” he said. “While there are many other deserving acts, Iron Maiden for me is the last, most egregious oversight in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

He continued: "Iron Maiden is like the gold standard of metal bands and they're not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I know Bruce Dickinson said he doesn't really care. Well, I care as a fan. I care very, very much about it. So I'm gonna do all I can to get, (using) whatever limited influence I have, to get Iron Maiden in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

Morello does have some influence – he’s actually on the organisation’s nominating committee. The guitarist first got involved several years back after a conversation with Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s manager and one of the Hall’s executives, about its credibility.

“My argument was this,” Morello recalled “If you're a little league player, your dream as a young baseball player is to have such a career that you would end up in the baseball hall of fame. I said, ‘A lot of young rock and roll guitar players have no respect for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. None of their favourite bands are in it’.”

The Rage man insisted that the Hall needed to be “a place that everyone who loves rock and roll aspires to be in because their heroes are there. And you don't have that right now.” Landau was impressed by Morello’s passion and invited him get involved. “To his credit, he put me in the room.”

Iron Maiden have been eligible for the Hall since 2004 and understandably have been a bit sniffy about an institution that seems to regard them with such disdain. Back in 2018 Bruce Dickinson memorably described the Hall as “an utter and complete load of bollocks”, an institution that’s “run by a bunch of sanctimonious bloody Americans who wouldn’t know rock ’n’ roll if it hit them in the face. They need to stop taking Prozac and start drinking fucking beer.”

Whether Morello’s passionate intervention on their behalf shifts the dial remains to be seen...

Rage Against The Machine “will not be touring or playing live again”, according to drummer Brad Wilk, who took to his own social media account to make the announcement on 3 January.

No official announcement has been made by the band, however posting on Instagram, Wilk decided to level with the band’s fans about the possibility of future live shows.

“I know a lot of people are waiting for us to announce new tour dates for all the cancelled RATM shows. I don’t want to string people or myself along any further.

“So while there has been some communication that this may be happening in the future… I want to let you know that RATM (Tim, Zack, Tom and I) will not be touring or playing live again. 

"I’m sorry for those of you who have been waiting for this to happen. I really wish it was…”

Rage Against The Machine previously announced a reunion tour in 2019. Scuppered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the dates were rearranged for 2022. However, RATM was forced to abandon the tour after 19 dates when vocalist Zack de la Rocha tore his achilles tendon on stage in Chicago.

Since then, bassist Tim Commerford has revealed that he has been battling prostate cancer, undergoing surgery before the band’s rescheduled reunion dates. “Two months before the tour, I had surgery and my doctors said I wasn’t going to be ready,” he said. 

“That was brutal. I would be on stage looking at my amp in tears. Then you just kind of turn around and suck it up.”

“When I got my physical, my doctor said I was in the best shape of any 50-year-old he’d ever seen there,” he said. “There’s plenty of people that are in great shape that have cancer. And I’m hoping to continue as long as I can be that. I work out religiously, and I try my hardest to stay in shape. I’m still very proud of who I am.”

In November 2023, Rage against The Machine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with guitarist Tom Morello being the only member of the band to attend the ceremony, accepting the award on his bandmates behalf.

Earlier last year, Morello spoke out on the band’s future, telling Rolling Stone that “Rage Against the Machine is like the ring in Lord of the Rings. It drives men mad. It drives journalists mad. It drives record-industry people mad. They want it. They want the thing, and they’re driven mad.” 

He added, “If there are Rage shows, if there are not Rage shows, you’ll hear from the band. I do not know. When there is news, it will come from a collective statement from the band. There is no news.” 

At the time of writing, RATM is yet to make that collective statement. 

Full marks for persistence to Rolling Stone; it kept pushing Tom Morello on when and if Rage Against The Machine would return to touring following vocalist Zach De La Rocha's Achilles tendon injury last year. But he was having none of it.

"There is no term," Morello replied when asked about how he'd describe the current status of the band and whether they would pick up the European dates they had to cancel. "Rage Against the Machine is like the ring in Lord of the Rings. It drives men mad. It drives journalists mad. It drives record industry people mad. They want it. They want the thing, and they’re driven mad. If there are Rage shows, if there are not Rage shows, you’ll hear from the band. I do not know. When there is news, it will come from a collective statement from the band. There is no news."

Strangely, there were no questions published in the interview regarding Rage Against The Machine's more pressing concern; bassist Tim Commerford's health following his surgery for prostate cancer ahead of the band's acclaimed comeback shows last year. But Morello did offer details on what he's up to musically right now. And it looks like he's keeping it in the family.

"I’m at home in my studio," he revealed about his next album that's in the works. "I’m working on new, exciting music of my own. It’s been a very fruitful period. I’ve been very inspired by my 11-year-old son [Roman]. I’ve been relegated to being the rhythm guitar player in my family now because my 11-year-old can shred circles around me. I’ve been inspired by him. He’s been writing some riffs, and I’ve been writing some riffs. It’s been fun."

Morello will also head out on tour with his solo band the Freedom Fighters Orchestra – including visiting South American. Meanwhile, Rage Against The Machine are up for consideration to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (for the fifth time) this year and though it's yet to be decided if the shadowy figures on the voting panel will put them through, Morello suggested he'd be up for playing at the November induction if they are.

"I will definitely be there," he said. "Beyond that, we haven’t discussed that. That’s really putting the cart before the horse. I would hope so, though."

One thing's for sure, Rage's inclusion would make them the most political rock band to ever get in. 

"An argument for Rage Against the Machine to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is that there has never been a band with politics that radical on the top of the charts. It’s not close. It’s not close," Morello said. "That is rarified air. The engine in me doesn’t turn off when Rage isn’t onstage. 

"The album I’m working on now will be my 23rd album," added Morello. "I’m super psyched. I’m going to be playing shows in Chile and Brazil and Italy and Belgium this summer with no less commitment to that music and message than any of the five sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden."

• Read the full interview at Rolling Stone 

Tom Morello put on his dancing shoes last night as he joined Måneskin for a live TV performance of their latest single, Gossip. Rage Against The Machine's electric guitar maverick has turned arch collaborator in recent years, with his solo work getting the likes of Eddie Vedder and Bruce Springsteen onboard for a cover of AC/DC’s Highway To Hell. 

Most recently, however, he visited some high-profile six-string action upon the new Måneskin album, Rush!, laying down some leads on Gossip. Morello and the Italian rockers – who shot to fame via Eurovision and high-profile support slots with the Rolling Stones – took to the stage at Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center to perform the track for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. 

This is far away from the hooded Morello in an orange boiler suit at Reading 2008; this was disco Morello, rocking out with his battle-scarred Fender Telecaster in a riff-by-riff joust with the irrepressible Thomas Raggi. 

For his part, Raggi relied on the Custom Shop '63 Stratocaster that he reserves for the big occasions – usually he is rocking the cheap electric guitar charms of a Squier. 

• Tom Morello on the guitar story behind Rage Against The Machine classic track Bulls On Parade

Gossip is a track that is all strutting rhythm, a sound that works a treat with single-coils fencing for dominance in the mix. They give it a scratchy dance feel that’s sustained by a propulsive rhythm from Victoria De Angelis on bass guitar and Ethan Torchio behind the drum kit. 

Now, you don’t send the email to Morello’s people and get the great man involved if you don’t want some anarchic pitch-shifting going on. When it comes time to solo, Morello does not disappoint, and brings the boot down on the Whammy. 

His first solo itself has a weird feel, calling to mind the Steve Miller Band’s Abracadabra melody, but maybe that’s the heat from the TV lights cooking the brain. The second solo spot finds him in conversational with Fraggi, with both finding lingua franca in the pentatonics.

Morello also appears in the official and NSFW promo video for Gossip, which was shot by Tommaso Ottomano. It might be the only time you'd see Tom Morello in an actual office. Check it out above. Rush! is out now via Arista Records.

This week celebrates 30 years since the release of Rage Against The Machine’s self-titled album, and we’re looking at the incendiary, Know Your Enemy.

Get the tone 

For the intro you’ll need a guitar with two pickups and separate volume controls for each and set the neck volume to zero – most LP-type guitars will do the job. 

Tone-wise you need an amp-like overdrive or distortion pedal and a DigiTech Whammy pedal set to harmony (classic mode) a 5th above the note you’re playing. 

Technique tips 

The intro is classic Tom Morello trickery! The Whammy is on here and with the neck pickup volume set to zero, you use the pickup selector to flick between bridge and middle positions while you hammer-on get that choppy sound. 

Think of the toggle down to bridge position as a picking downstroke, so you’ll need to keep your hammer-ons sync’d with hitting the toggle switch down. 

The next riff is a series of power chords with a load of upstrokes and rests and then the verse riff is just an off-beat groove! Tom also uses the whammy for the fast solo licks and some more toggle switch goodness, which I haven’t covered off in this lesson, but we’ll get to that one at some point! 

Learn more 

Check out this other lesson on my favourite riffs from Rage Against The Machine's debut album. 

Tom Morello shows us his Rage Against The Machine guitars

When asked to describe the lasting appeal of Bulls On Parade, the pulverising lead single from sophomore album, Evil Empire, Tom Morello can’t help but state the obvious: “Have you heard it? It’s a certifiable jam!”

Undeniably true, and this kind of unbridled attitude has always played a large part in the success story of a band intent on being not merely an explosive musical force but also a controversial and political message machine.

“Tipping over the apple carts of the powers that be was always at the forefront of everything Rage did,” Morello told us in 2011. “At the same time, when we got down to the very serious business of making music, we were hellbent on making equally strong statements. 

"To that end, I decided to rail against the accepted rules of ‘shred’ guitar, which in my opinion were making every six-stringer around sound the same. One night, I decided to be the DJ in Rage Against The Machine, but I was going to do it all on the guitar. Discovering how to ‘scratch’ on the guitar and how to work the toggle switch like two turntables was key.”

By the time Morello and the rest of Rage hunkered down at Cole Rehearsal Studios in Hollywood, California with fast-rising producer Brendan O’Brien in the autumn of 1995, Morello was already being hailed as one of the most inventive and exciting guitarists to emerge in the post-Eddie Van Halen era. And he put every facet of his renegade skills to use on Bulls On Parade.

“We didn’t know it would be the first single when we started jamming on it,” said Morello, “but we realised quickly that it was a most potent piece of music. We recorded cassette demos as we wrote and jammed, and Brendan didn’t want to lose any energy as we worked. Our method of working was pretty much ‘jam, roll the cassette tape, then cut the real track’. Not a lot of time for overthinking and overtinkering.”

Morello remembered the song as a true group effort, with bassist Tim Commerford, who was listening to a lot of jazz at the time, coming up with the syncopated riff that kicks off the song. “Then I came up with the wah-wah guitar part [played through a Dunlop Cry Baby],” recalled Morello. “I also came up with the music underneath the verses – I was listening to a lot of Geto Boys back then, so I wanted something dark and sinister.” 

Zack was responsible for the rhythmic swing that drives the chorus. “He comes up with guitar parts, too,” said Morello. “And Brad [Wilk] worked up that awesome, artillery marching beat. Hands were definitely on deck.”

Surprisingly, the knockout opening riff was at first intended as the song’s coda. “When Brendan heard it, he zeroed right in on it and said, ‘Why don’t you try beginning the song that way?’,” Morello recalled. “It was exactly what the song needed. That’s why he’s Brendan O’Brien.

By the time the band had laid down the basics, the track was well rehearsed. “Zack was still writing lyrics when we cut the main track,” says Morello. “But we knew all the changes and what we were doing.” The band recorded the rhythm track live, needing only a few takes to nail it. “We were pretty much a press-and-play band,” he says. “We rarely used click tracks. The instinctive speeding up or slowing down of a take can make it much more exciting.”

Throughout his career, Morello has relied on but a handful of one-of-a-kind guitars. For Bulls On Parade, he used his ‘Arm The Homeless’ S-style guitar, built from a Custom Performance body, a 22-fret Kramer Carrera neck with a locking nut, and outfitted with an EMG 81 in the bridge and an EMG 85 in the neck position.

“I used [it] on the entire song,” he explained, “and that includes the solo, which I improvised in the tracking room with headphones on. That was another toggle-switch workout, the ‘scritchy-scratch’ DJ part that I had previously worked into the live version of Bullet In The Head. I knew I wanted to find a home for it on record, and Bulls On Parade was the perfect place.”

Effects-wise, the wah was king. “You can play the solo with no effects – just turn your amp up to 10. But what I did was I clicked the wah all the way down so it gave me white noise. One pickup was set to 10, the other to zero, then I toggled between them while rubbing my left hand on the strings to create friction.”

The guitar went through Morello’s go-to amp setup: a Marshall 50-watt 2205 and a Peavey 4x12 cabinet. “I’ve used that amp at every rock concert I’ve played since high school and on every record I’ve ever made. It’s an indispensable part of my sound.”

When the reunited Rage play Bulls On Parade live these days, they tune to F#, but Morello remembered F as the key in which they recorded the track. “It just worked,” he says with a laugh. “I know – most bands tune down or keep it in standard tuning. We’re weird in that we tune up!”

Evil Empire reached No 1 in the US and No 4 in the UK chart. “The album was a strong piece of work,” reflected Morello, “and I would call Bulls On Parade a real banger. With Timmy’s quintessential bass sound booming throughout, it’s like the world is exploding. I would also give it up for Brad and his supreme drumming – he shifts on a dime but never loses one iota of power. And Zack’s lyrics are so sophisticated and multi-dimensional. As for myself, I just tried to follow the dots on the guitar neck and get some rockin’ sounds. Overall, I think I held up my end.”

Tom Morello interview: "I made a solemn vow to myself that if I'm not going to be successful I might as well play music that I just love. And that's when we formed Rage Against The Machine."

A while before Rage Against The Machine's return to the live stage after eleven years we got the chance to spend some quality time with Tom Morello and two electric guitars that loom large in the band's history, and indeed every project the guitarist has been a part of. 

"The two guitars are in the room here," gestures Morello as we met him before a solo show in Bristol supporting Muse, |[Arm The Homeless] is for all the ones in E and [the Tele] is for all the ones in drop D."

"There’s ten radio Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave songs recorded on this [Tele], playing on the neck pickup. This is a standard stock Telecaster," he says of the 1982 Fender guitar he dubbed Sendero Luminoso - Spanish for 'Shining Path', the name of the Communist Party Of Peru.

"To me it always sounded right to my ears," Morello says of his unusual approach to playing riffs on both guitars' neck single coil pickups, "and sometimes I think the heaviness of the riff hasn’t got anything to do with the amount of distortion on the guitar. There are plenty of bands and albums that are distorted out the ass and I just feel [they’re] not moving at all in a way that is compelling."

But Sendero Luminoso has special meaning to Morello that goes even beyond the iconic riffs like Killing In The Name Of he's used it for. 

“This one was my roommate Scott Tracy's, god rest his soul, he was a Hollywood musician and we were roommates for about five years. Maynard [James Keenan] from Tool taught me how to do drop D tuning, I was over at his apartment, which all the Seattle bands were doing at the time. But I couldn’t do it on [Arm The Homeless] because that one had a locking nut on it. 

"[Scott] had a Telecaster that could do it; I had an extra Marshall head and we had a prisoner exchange. [Scott] was a really great musician, had a band called Liquid Jesus who had a deal on MCA and he was one of the great woulda/coulda/shoulda artists and he passed away some years ago. He never got to tour so this tours for him everywhere.”

Arm The Homeless is a very different guitar. While the Tele is stock, this bitsa guitar took a lot of work to get match fit…

"The origin of the guitar dates back to 1986, pre-Lock Up," Tom told us back in 2012. "I was bumping around between some crummy Hollywood jobs, making $13,000 a year - no goldmine, but it did provide for some income, and it allowed me to save up and get a guitar.

"I went to this place in Hollywood that builds guitars. I'm no luthier, I didn't know anything about woods and what have you - you go to this place, check off all these boxes, and they build it for you. They made me the shittiest guitar in the world, but it's what would ultimately become Arm The Homeless.

"Everything about it was bad: it looked bad, it sounded bad, it was grotesquely overpriced, and over the course of the next two years, I changed literally everything about it except for the piece of wood. I got the guitar and hoped I would sound like I was playing Mr. Crowley on it, but it was pretty bad. I didn't know what to do - I had spent all of my money.

"Over time, I swapped necks on it maybe four times; pickups came and went maybe a dozen times; the whammy bar - I tried every different version of Kahler and Floyd Rose; all of the internal electronics were gutted, just me trying to get it right. I'm not much of a builder, so every time I got an idea I brought it to some new guitar shop and had it worked on.

"Finally, I found a graphite neck in a bin at a place called Nadine's Music, and I put that on. It's not a Kramer neck, but it's got the Kramer end to it - it's a knock-off. Then I put some EMG pickups in it, and the whammy bar was changed to an Ibanez Edge.

"At this point, I gave up and said, 'OK, it's never going to sound like what I hear in my head, so I'm going to stop worrying and fucking around, and I'm just going to play music.' Just to make it clear: I wasn't happy with where the guitar was at, but I settled."

And the hippos? "They're literally the only thing I can draw," says Tom, "and I can only draw them facing the one way. I drew them on and then painted them. As for my other change to the look of the guitar, this was in the early days of Rage Against The Machine. We were set to play at the Whiskey, and just before going over to soundcheck I scrawled 'Arm The Homeless' on the guitar. I liked the juxtaposition of that kind of provocative and militant situationist slogan with those four smiling hippopotamuses all facing in one direction.

"Then I started stringing the guitar the opposite way, with the balls coming out of the top so they can wave around. Actually, I did that in my high school band. I remember one of the guys in school - and a far superior musician - kind of looked down his nose at my little band. One day he said to me, 'Dude, cut your strings. You do not dare have floppy strings like that unless you're in the baddest band in town.' Well, when I was in Rage Against The Machine, I was in the baddest band in town, so I let my strings fly!"

“Only the body is original," adds Tom when we meet up in Bristol. [Points to Arm The Homeless's neck pickup] "This one is a single-coil [in humbucker casing] and this one [bridge] is a humbucker [EMG]. I use the lead [bridge] pickup but for the most part all the riff stuff is on the single-coil. 

"I’ve had the same guitar tech, Slim, since 1992. I’m a creature of habit. We have our little weird family – these are [guitars] the children and I’m his tour husband [laughs]. This one spends a lot of time in the air. When we end the big shows with the band I always chuck it to him as high and as hard as I can and only a couple of times... if he doesn’t catch it it’s usually my fault. I step on the cord or something.”

Tom Morello interview: "This is missionary work. I’m on a zealot’s mission out there"

Rage Against The Machine's comeback tour has been considerably delayed by COVID but they finally got to take the stage again at the Alpine Music Theater in East troy Wisconsin on 9 July after 11 years away. Unsurprisingly, they are still one of the most powerful live bands on the planet. 

While guitarist Tom Morello, drummer Brad Wilk and bassist Tim Commerford have remained musically active in the last decade with various live and recording projects – and playing together in Prophets Of Rage – little has been heard of vocalist Zack de la Rocha. The 19-song set proved he's lost absolutely nothing of his intensity in the intervening years in a show that proves again RATM are an extremely difficult act to follow for live power.

Tom Morello used his two traditional Rage weapons of choice for most of the set; his mongrel 'Arm The Homeless' guitar and 'Sendero Luminoso' Tele. But two more of his electric guitar collection were put to use too. 

Rage also played their thunderous take on Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost Of Tom Joad for the first time live since 2000, that saw Morello bring back his RATM armoury; a double-neck EDS-1275 with the six-string in drop D tuning.  

Morello's custom-made Ibanez Artstar hollowbody was also used for Guerilla Radio in the set. A red and black guitar that features onboard effects including wah, distortion and a treble / bass boost circuit.  

The band have lost none of their political weight either; taking aim at the US Supreme Court's overturning of the Roe Vs Wade and the constitutional right to abortion for millions of women in the USA with individual states now able to ban the procedure. Rage Against The Machine have donated $475,000 from tickets proceeds from the show and two shows in Chicago to reproductive rights organisations in Wisconsin and Illinois.

Tom Morello shows us his Rage Against The Machine guitars

There had been no shortage of rumours that Tom Morello was collaborating with Fender on something, but NAMM 2020 made it official, with the Soul Power Stratocaster unveiled as part of the Big F's Artist Signature Series. Now this highly desirable axe is finally available to buy

Based on the modded Designer Series Strat that Morello used with Audioslave, the highly-customised Soul Power features a whole host of ingenious appointments. 

But first the fundamentals. The Soul Power Strat has a bound alder body, a bolt-on "Deep C" profile maple neck with a 9.5"-14" compound radius rosewood fingerboard and 22 medium-jumbo frets for a vintage-modern feel. It has a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails humbucker in the bridge, with two Fender Noiseless singlecoils in the neck and middle positions.

To facilitate Morello's avant-garde style, the Soul Power Strat is equipped with a double-locking Floyd Rose tremolo, with locking tuners for added stability, and a kill-switch for those staccato, Morse code lead freakouts. This guitar should be a lot of fun.

It's finished in Black with a matching headstock and a chrome pickguard. The 'Soul Power' decal is included in the case. 

Fender and Morello will be collaborating further in 2020 with charitable endeavours, such as the Fender Play Foundation, which seeks to "equip, educate and inspire the next generation of players" from under-served communities. 

The Fender Tom Morello Soul Power Stratocaster retails for £1,309/$1,399/€1,449. See Fender for more details.