Prog rock instruments are covered exhaustively by specialist gear sites, and they will always beat me on specifications. What they rarely do is connect the equipment to the music: which player used what, on which record, in which year, and what the instrument actually made possible that was not possible before. That is what this section is for. It is not a buying guide and there are no recommendations in it. Below is the map, with the individual guides linked as they come up.

Keyboards: the instruments that made the genre possible

More than any other, this is the family that separates progressive rock from the rock that preceded it. The starting point is the Hammond organ, a 1930s American design running on spinning metal wheels, which was loud enough to hold its own against a rock band and cheap enough, in its spinet versions, for a teenager to buy. Then the Mellotron, built near Birmingham from 1963: a rack of tape players with a keyboard on the front, each note a real recorded musician, each note limited to seven or eight seconds. It is the single most identifiable sound in the genre and it came out of a machine that kept breaking down.

Synthesis arrives in two stages. The modular Moog was a wall of components joined by patch cables, and it reached the stage mainly because Keith Emerson was prepared to carry one there. Then the Minimoog of 1970 put a synthesizer in a case one person could lift, with no patch cables and no memory, monophonic by design – which is exactly why it became a lead instrument rather than an accompaniment. Underneath all of it, literally, sat the Moog Taurus pedals, played with the feet. The full inventory of one player who used nearly everything on this list is in Rick Wakeman’s keyboards.

Guitars: archtops, double-necks and one black Stratocaster

The guitar histories here are less about models than about individual instruments with biographies. The Black Strat is a 1969 Fender bought in New York in 1970, modified for fifteen years, hung in a restaurant for eleven and then brought back; it is the most documented electric guitar in rock. The wider chain around it, which matters more than the wood, is in Gilmour’s guitars and gear, the Big Muff and the Binson Echorec.

Steve Howe’s guitars are the cleanest case in the cluster of equipment shaping a sound: a collection built on jazz archtops, a lap steel and an electric sitar rather than on rock guitars, documented album by album. The Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck exists to solve one specific stage problem, and the EBow is a matchbox-sized device that makes a string sound without being touched. Further guides cover Alex Lifeson, John Petrucci, Robert Fripp, Steve Hackett, Frank Zappa, Steven Wilson and Devin Townsend.

The low end

Progressive rock has an unusually audible bass, and there is a technical reason for it. The Rickenbacker 4001 is bright where the standard rock bass is round, and its stereo output splits the two pickups onto separate amplifiers – which is how a bass line stays legible underneath a Hammond, a Mellotron and two guitars. Chris Squire built the sound and Geddy Lee bought one because of it.

Two players went further and changed instrument rather than technique. Tony Levin moves between electric bass, electric upright and the Chapman Stick, and invented funk fingers – shortened drumsticks strapped to the hand – to get a struck attack instead of a plucked one. John Myung moved to six strings, so that the bass could double the guitar in its own register rather than an octave below.

Drums: the kits that grew

The pattern here is consistent across bands: as the writing got more ambitious, the kit absorbed the parts nobody else could play. Neil Peart’s kit gained tubular bells and orchestra bells in the late 1970s and samplers in 1984, and turned on a rotating riser so one player could reach both halves. Bill Bruford and Carl Palmer took the electronic route early, and Mike Portnoy and Gavin Harrison carried the approach into the modern era.

The rest

Not everything fits a family. Ian Anderson’s flute is the clearest case of a single instrument defining a band from outside the rock tradition altogether.

A note on how these are written

A great deal of what circulates about this equipment is not documented. Which exact model was used on which track, which pedal produced which solo, which drum was which depth on which tour: most of that detail originates in fan research and equipment forums rather than in session paperwork or in anything the musician has said. It is frequently repeated as fact. In these guides, where a claim is documented it is stated; where it is not, I say that it is not, and leave it out rather than pass it on. That makes some of these pieces shorter than the competition, and it means you can check them.

Go deeper

For the musicians themselves rather than the equipment, start with the greatest musicians in progressive rock, and for the records the best progressive rock albums of all time. The full story of the bands behind all of this – British, Italian, German, American and modern – is told across the five books of my Beyond the Sound series.

Want the full story behind these records? The books map every scene and every era →

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