Tom Morello on not chasing gear and creating stuff

"It is my view that the kind of guitar you have, the kind of pick-ups, the kind of strings, amplifiers make no difference whatsoever with the kind of music that you make.

[...]

Here's the forest not the trees answer for you. This guitar that he's asking about my favorite one. It was horrible and I tried to make it sound great and I was unable to. I switched the neck ten times and the pickups ten times, and the strings and I put little pieces of dead weight on it. It never sounded great to me and I had this amp too that I was just like frustrated with. 

So one day I went in there and I just, I spent hours fiddling, and finally gave up. 

I got it as good as I wanted it to sound. I was not satisfied with it. It was not the tone I wanted. I marked the amplifier like this is the best that I can do and it's not what I want. 
This is the guitar, I set it aside. I'm never going to think about it again. I'm going to use this sound in this guitar to now make music. and what ever this sound is, is the sound that became the sound of Rage Against The Machine records, Audioslave records, The Nightwatchman records, and jamming with Bruce Springsteen records and I just like put it out of my head like I'm not gonna chase gear, I'm not gonna chase that stuff like that's gonna be locked in stone and now it's just gonna be about creating with what I got."

This was part of a Nerdist podcast episode with Tom Morello.

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