Mike McCready's Gear: Guitars, Amps and the Sounds Behind the Songs

Where the Sound Comes From

He learned, by his own account, by copying. "Everything I know, I stole directly from Ace Frehley, Angus Young and Keith Richards," he said in that 1995 interview; from the early AC/DC and Kiss records he went on to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Vaughan is the name that keeps coming back.

In 2023 he told Guitarist magazine, in an interview that Guitar World reported, that he knew exactly why he had fallen for the Stratocaster: he had seen Vaughan play four times. "I loved Hendrix: he was my first guitar hero, growing up in Seattle," he said. "But seeing Stevie was transcendent. He made me understand Hendrix better."

The other turn came from a film. Watching Muddy Waters in The Last Waltz, he said on the podcast Shred with Shifty in 2023, as Premier Guitar's summary of the episode has it, "It seemed like he could do more in one note than I was doing with all these thousands of notes." Both bear on what follows, because again and again an instrument came to him the same way: a player he loved had one.

The Guitars

The Stratocaster on Ten

The guitar McCready says he played on Ten and on the Temple of the Dog album was "an import Strat," as he put it to Vintage Guitar in 2021, that Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard got for him. He calls it a '62 reissue; Premier Guitar's 2023 account of the "Alive" solo calls it Japanese. Around the same time he bought himself a second reissue, a '57 with a maple neck, and recorded "Yellow Ledbetter" on it.

Neither survives whole. "I smashed a lot of guitars!" he told the magazine: the '57, he said, is in pieces somewhere, and the '62 reissue he smashed at the Moore Theater, at a Mad Season concert. He knew what the maker thought of it: "The people at Fender were not happy about what I was doing."

The Dream Guitar and the Year on His Wrist

The vintage Stratocaster came next, once Ten had made it possible. In Fender's 2021 announcement he called it the first significant guitar he ever bought, one he had never thought he could own before Pearl Jam. He called it his dream guitar because of Vaughan, whose own Stratocaster, the announcement says, was a 1959. On the year he bought it, one article holds two answers: Vintage Guitar's introduction says 1991, and in the interview beneath it he remembers 1992. On one point he leaves no room: "Well, I didn’t have it for Ten, of course," he said, "but I used it a lot live when we did all of those songs; I’ve probably played “Even Flow” on it 500 times."

On record, the earliest song he names it on is "Daughter," from Vs.; he also places it on "Life Wasted" and, on Gigaton in 2020, on "Superblood Wolfmoon" and "Dance of the Clairvoyants." On stage it took over "Yellow Ledbetter" as well.

For the thirtieth anniversary of Ten, Fender's Custom Shop set out to copy it, and Master Builder Vincent Van Trigt took the guitar apart to measure it, by Vintage Guitar's account, down to the chips and scratches. The work brought out something the band's luthier had known for decades, from date stamps on the neck: in the words of Fender's announcement, "his beloved '59 Strat was actually constructed in 1960." The luthier and the band's equipment manager had let him believe otherwise for 28 years, by the announcement's count, knowing his pride in owning a '59; by the same account he had the year tattooed on his wrist. McCready's own words for the guitar that spring, to Guitar World: "probably the best-playing guitar I have." Premier Guitar's 2013 gear list, for one, has it as a 1959 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster, the year it was then believed to be.

The Les Paul from Everett, and the Other Gibsons

"Well there’s the King of Kings, the 1959 Gibson Les Paul that I love and cherish," he told Premier Guitar in March 2013. He found it through Danny's Music in Everett, Washington, around the time of the Mad Season record, and traded in a number of guitars to get it; he was glad, he said, that he had. Its earlier life he told to Vintage Guitar in 2021: a guitarist in Them, Van Morrison's band, bought it in Seattle in the mid-1960s, took it back to Ireland and kept it in a bar, and when he fell ill sent it to his daughter in Seattle to sell. Gibson's page for its replica has the guitar going from Seattle to Belfast and coming back, and names no one; the two sources that do name the guitarist name two different men.

On stage, he said in 2013, it was the guitar he used for "Alive." He was weighing, in the same interview, whether to keep taking it on the road: "I probably shouldn’t but guitars are meant to be played." A second 1959 Les Paul Standard came right around the time of the first, he told Vintage Guitar in 2021; it sounds hotter and meaner, he says, and the older one bluesier. He laughed as he said it: "those are my technical terms."

Among the other instruments he described to Vintage Guitar in 2021 was a 1959 double-cutaway Les Paul Junior, which he said he liked for its New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders associations. The acoustics he reaches for, he said, are Gibsons, a mid-1960s Dove and Hummingbird among them, and he gave the reason: he saw the Rolling Stones with them in pictures from Exile on Main Street.

Amplifiers: One Solo, One Stage, One Report

Exactly one amplifier is tied to a recording in any of these accounts, and it is on the "Alive" solo. Premier Guitar's summary of that Shred with Shifty episode gives the rig for the take: the '62 reissue Stratocaster, a Tube Screamer pedal and a Marshall JCM800.

In March 2013 he told Premier Guitar that his main sound came from two heads run together, a 65amps and a Satellite, through Marshall speakers; a third, a Savage, handled the clean tone, and for solos, he said, he switched all three on. The gear list printed beside the interview differs: its clean amplifier is a 1963 blonde Fender Bassman through a Savage cabinet, and its wattages are not his. The rig was in motion even as he described it: "I just changed my rig around…I’m never kind of satisfied."

In March 2026 Guitar World reported that for Pearl Jam's most recent tour he had been running a digital modeling rig, and that he says it has sharpened his skills. So the 2013 amplifiers are a picture of 2013.

Pedals: What Was on the Board

One pedal runs through the whole story. A Tube Screamer is on the "Alive" solo, and the original Ibanez Tube Screamer, as he called it to Premier Guitar in March 2013, was on his board then for the same reason as the Stratocaster: "because Stevie Ray Vaughan used one and I’ve been using it ever since." No other effect is named both on that 1991 solo and on the 2013 board.

The rest of that board, as he ran through it: a Dunlop Crybaby wah, a Line 6 delay and phaser, an old MXR Phase 90, and an Electro-Harmonix POG2 octave pedal he had seen Soundgarden using at a rehearsal and had been using himself, he said, for the way it turns a guitar into something nearer a calliope or an organ. The magazine's printed list is longer and names a different wah. No account gives the order any of it was wired in.

Song by Song

The 1995 interview began with Temple of the Dog's "Reach Down," the first lead he had played on an album, he said, and a single take. For "Hunger Strike" he set the '62 reissue between the bridge and middle pickups for the opening, because he liked the softer sound, then switched, when the song turns heavy, to what he called the front pickup.

For the "Alive" solo he named his sources outright in that 1995 interview: "I copied Ace Frehley’s solo from Kiss’s She, which was copied from Robby Krieger’s solo in the Doors’ Five to One." "Even Flow" he called "me pretending to be Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a feeble attempt at that." In 2021 he told Guitar World that the band had recorded the track, by his estimate, 25 to 30 times, and that what they were chasing "wasn’t about the technique of it as much as it was about how it felt."

On Vs., he played the solo on "Animal" on a Gibson 335, and he played it, he said in 1995, for George Webb, who then looked after the band's guitars and amplifiers and was sitting there; that take is the one on the record. "Not for You," on Vitalogy, was the first time he used a 12-string Rickenbacker that Tom Petty had sent him; it simply arrived at his door one day, he said.

Away from Pearl Jam, Mad Season's album Above put a Gibson double-neck in his hands, and the sound of its last song, "All Alone," was an accident: with the switches in the wrong order, he told Premier Guitar in 2013, "I heard this chiming kind of thing coming out of the guitar."

Replicas, Signature Models and the Ordinary Kind

Three different things get called a Mike McCready guitar: the instruments above, which he is documented playing; a few that Fender and Gibson have built in his name; and the same makers' ordinary production models, which share a name with his guitars and are not copies of them.

The guitar Van Trigt built from that teardown is the Limited Edition Mike McCready 1960 Stratocaster, announced in 2021: a run of 60, with pickups wound by Josefina Campos. McCready told Guitar World that when Fender sent him the prototype he took it, at first, for his own guitar. He was speaking of a guitar made with him and named for him.

Fender followed it on September 12, 2023, with the Mike McCready Stratocaster, made in Ensenada, Mexico. By the announcement it has an alder body with a Road Worn lacquer finish, a rosewood fingerboard on a maple neck shaped to match his 1960, and pickups voiced after his. It is modelled on his guitar, and it is not his guitar.

Gibson Custom did the same for the Les Paul with the Mike McCready 1959 Les Paul Standard: a limited release of 50 signed guitars in the company's True Historic specification, filed under 2016 in the maker's archive and described there as "a hands-on replica." Like the Custom Shop run, it was a limited one.

The Stratocaster is Fender's long-running model, and the 2023 signature guitar belongs to that family. Gibson's catalog, as of September 2026, lists the Les Paul Standard, the Les Paul Junior and the Les Paul Special among its model lines; McCready's are 1959 instruments, and a new one is a different guitar that shares the name.

A signature model copies one instrument as it stood on the day it was measured, scratches included. What McCready put first, when Premier Guitar asked him in 2013 how he approaches a solo, was not an instrument: "Feeling is number one, which is such a cliché but it is definitely true."

Sources and Further Listening

Every statement above comes from the published interviews and makers' pages listed below, each with its date; Fender's two announcements are cited as Premier Guitar printed them, the Guitarist interview as Guitar World reported it, and the Shred with Shifty episode as Premier Guitar summarized it. For listening, follow the guitars: "Hunger Strike" and the "Alive" solo for the '62 reissue, "Daughter" for the 1960, "All Alone" for the double-neck.