Troy's guitars include a Jackson Soloist with Kahler vibrato system (far left), a scalloped-neck St. Blues (next, toward the right), a Washburn RG700 (next, toward the right), a Kramer bass (far right), an AST/Sustainiac guitar (not pictured), plus a broken Fender 12 string acoustic, which bit the dust when his then two-year son decided to "play" it.

"The Beast (my Jackson) tends to be my main guitar. This is the guitar I recorded on Exottica for the most part. I got it used in the late 1980s. It always played well, but it was this ugly mud-brown color. So one day I ripped it apart and took a few cans of spraypaint and laquer to it. Now it's every color... red, green, brown, yellow... and VERY ugly! I use a Seymour Duncan pickup in the bridge position, a Kahler vibrato system and a Sustainiac sustainer. I actually like to leave the sustainer on at a low level most of the time, because I record in the control room and when you do that you lose a little of the natural feedback and sustain caused by being in the same room with a loud amp. And the sustainer kinda makes up for that. I also wire the middle pickup out of phrase with the others intentionally, to get a wider tonal variation -- it creates a super piercing, hi-endy sound when you have two out-of-phase pickups on at the same time.

For a lot of things, though, I prefer the St. Blues. This one was given to me by a friend years ago. Tele headstock, Les Paul body shape, Strat-type pickup selector, pickguard and vibrato bar, and a humbucker lead pickup... it's a real mongrel! It's a very light guitar and you wouldn't guess by looking, but it's got tremendous sustain and a tone that rocks! I actually recorded all the solos of the Metal Lead Guitar method with this one. I slapped a Seymour Duncan in there, too. Then about 10 years ago I was looking for something to do one day, and took a file to the fretboard and scalloped it just to see what would happen. It tends to articulate the hammers and pulls a little stronger, and it makes string bending and finger vibrato a little easier to get crazy. It feels a little different, too, because your fingers never touch any wood. After you get used to it, though, it's just like playing anything else. I don't even notice it anymore. My other guitars are a Washburn and an AST which were both endorsements. They play pretty well and I use them as backups. Well, actually, they're all hanging up all around in the studio... I leave them in various tunings and just grab whichever happens to be closest to what I need at the moment. Oh, and I've got an old Kramer bass, too, that I bought for $150. Very limited in tone, but it plays well and does the job."

In a era of midi patching and multi-effect units, Troy's studio rig is totally low-tech. The guitar runs into a distortion pedal then a Marshall half stack. That's it. In one form or another, this is the setup that he used for all the various book/CD recordings prior to about 1999, and Exottica.

"Well, you don't need to change tones 'on the fly' in the studio since you can track each separately. So my old Marshalls work fine. The one on the left is a 1970s 100 watt lead head and old 4x12 cab with vintage Celestion Greenback 25s. It was beat to hell when I bought it, and now its far worse! The other is a 1980s 50 Watt JCM800 head, which I tend to use more often. That cabinet has Celestion vintage re-issues. My favorite distortion pedal is an old Boss PD-1 'rocker distortion'. They don't make 'em any more. It's got a pedal like a volume pedal that controls the amount of distortion. Another one I use a lot is an Ibanez TS-10 tube screamer. I've also got about 5 other stomp box distortions and various other pedals I use occasionally."

But he's not entirely resistant to changing technology. A Line6 POD was added to his arsenal in 2000, and this has changed his recording methods somewhat. Also, he picked up a Digitech whammy pedal recently.

"The POD is the first cabinet simulator, direct in, that sounded good to me. And it's so fast and easy... you've got like 30 different amps at the flip of a switch. So I find myself use it quite a bit these days. In fact, all the recent Sig Licks books -- Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters, and Modern Metal -- plus Total Rock Guitar were all recorded using the POD. I may still mic up the Marshalls sometimes, though. I mean, the POD isn't exactly the same as a mic'ed cabinet. I find it has a little less punch and harmonic variation, and a bit less high end frequency. But for most situations it's close enough. When I do a guest appearance with a band at a live show, I'll just walk in with a guitar in one hand and the POD in the other. It takes me about 10 seconds to soundcheck and I'm ready to rock 'n roll. Oh, the other new thing is a whammy pedal. I picked one up when I did the Rage Against The Machine Sig Licks recording, and I've been playing around with it ever since. Used it in some of the more industrial-influenced tunes I've been doing recently."

Troy uses medium-heavy to heavy gauge picks, of standard shape and size. His preferred string gauge depends upon tuning. For standard tuning he favors extra light (.009) sets. For lower tunings, he may string up 10s or even 11s with heavy bottoms.