Pete Thorn offers a tour of his live summer guitar rig

Pete Thorn
(Image credit: Pete Thorn / YouTube)

Pete Thorn is currently on the road with songwriter Vladimir John Ondrasik III, aka Five For Fighting, alongside fellow session aces bassist Sean Hurley (John Mayer) and Randy Cooke and he's filmed a tour of his rig for the 2022 tour on the Atlantic City stop, including a health mix of analogue and digital processing.

Thorn is one of many pros who has embraced the Neural DSP Quad Cortex as his main source of tones when touring. Thorn still uses tube amps live when it's practical but there's three fly dates on this tour that require a lighter rig so it makes perfect sense to have all his tones on one pedalboard.

He explains in the video above how he configures his outputs into the front of house and a Matrix power amp he's borrowed from Steve Stevens. This enables him to have two 1x12 Suhr guitar cabs onstage.

Alongside the Quad Cortex he's a got a few choice pedals: a 65 Amps Colour Boost treble booster (for a cover of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody), Dunlop Echoplex delay, MXR Script Phase 90 and Suhr KokoBoost.

Thorn also talks us through his wireless system, the Washburn acoustic guitar he used when playing his Chris Cornell's solo band (that Cornell borrowed), alongside a Taylor, two new PT signature Suhr electric guitars and a Supro David Bowie model for slide. 

But the best part of all is him demoing his fine selection of tones on the stage. You can check out more videos on the Pete Thorn YouTube channel

Rob Laing
Guitars Editor, MusicRadar

I'm the Guitars Editor for MusicRadar, handling news, reviews, features, tuition, advice for the strings side of the site and everything in between. Before MusicRadar I worked on guitar magazines for 15 years, including Editor of Total Guitar in the UK. When I'm not rejigging pedalboards I'm usually thinking about rejigging pedalboards.