Alex Lifeson Biography

Alex Lifeson was famous as the lead guitarist of Canadian Rock Progressive band Rush. He was born with the name Aleksandar Živojinović in 27 August 1953. He's a Serbian descendant. I'm sure that many of rock fans was familiar with Alex lifeson guitar playing on Rush Band.

For Rush, Lifeson plays electric and acoustic guitars as well as other stringed instruments such as mandola, mandolin, and bouzouki. He also performs backing vocals in live performances, and occasionally plays keyboards and bass pedal synthesizers. During live performances, Lifeson, like the other members of Rush, performs real-time triggering of sampled instruments, concurrently with his guitar playing.

Alex Lifeson Profile and Biography

Full Name : Alexandar Zivojinovich
Date of Birth : 27 August 1953
Place of Birth : Fernie, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation : Musician, Songwriter, Producer and also an Owner of a Restaurant The Orbit Room.
Instruments : Guitar, mandolin, synthesizers, banjo, bouzouki, bass, mandola, vocals

How about the Equipments of Alex Lifeson in Rush?

In Rush's early career, Lifeson used a Gibson ES-335 for the first single and the first four Rush studio albums. For the 2112 tour, he used a 1974 Gibson Les Paul and Marshall amplification. For the A Farewell to Kings sessions, Lifeson began using a Gibson EDS-1275 for songs like "Xanadu" and his main guitar became a personally customized white Gibson ES-355. During this period Lifeson used Hiwatt amplifiers. For effects Lifeson used various phaser and flanger pedals, a Cry Baby Wah Wah, along with Marshall 100 watt Super Lead amplifiers and 4x12 cabinets. Beginning in the late 1970s, he increasingly incorporated twelve-string guitar (acoustic and electric) and used a Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and later, the Boss Dimension C.

By 1982 Lifeson's primary guitar was a modified Fender Stratocaster with a Bill Lawrence high-output humbucker L-500 in the bridge position and a Floyd Rose vibrato bridge. Lifeson increasingly relied on a selection of four identically modified Stratocasters from 1980 to 1986, all of them equipped with the Floyd Rose bridge. As a joke, he called these Hentor Sportscasters - a made-up name inspired by Peter Henderson's name, who was the producer of Grace Under Pressure. For the Moving Pictures and Signals albums, and on concurrent tours, Lifeson used up to four rare Marshall 4140 Club & Country 100W combo amps. In the mid 1980s Lifeson switched from vacuum tube to solid-state amplification, all with an increasingly thick layer of digital signal processing. He became an endorser of Gallien-Krueger and Dean Markley solid-state guitar amplifier lines and Dean Markley Blue Steel strings respectively, gauges .009-.046. In the late 1980s he switched to Carvin amplifiers in the studio. By 1987, Lifeson exclusively switched to using his Signature Guitar Co brand guitars onstage and in the studio. These guitars were most noted for generating his unique sound through the use of Evans single coil pickups wired to an onboard active preamp circuit. This enabled him to produce higher frequencies to "cut through" the heavy use and sounds of Geddy Lee's keyboards.

Lifeson primarily used PRS guitars during the recording of Roll The Bones in 1990/1991. When recording 1993's Counterparts, Lifeson continued to use PRS Guitars and Marshall amplifiers to record the album, and for the subsequent tour. Lifeson continued to use PRS along with Fender and Gibson guitars, Hughes & Kettner Triamp MK II and zenTera amplifiers and cabinets.

In 2005, Hughes & Kettner introduced an Alex Lifeson signature series amplifier with $50 from each amplifier sold will be donated to UNICEF.

For the 2007 Snakes & Arrows Tour, Lifeson replaced his PRS Guitars with Gibson Les Pauls. In a 2007 interview for Guitarist magazine, Lifeson states "I hear PRS on everything these days and I wanted a little bit of a change ... I love them [PRS] but they have a smaller sound than the bigger heavier Gibsons ... I just wanted to be more traditional."[citation needed] He has Fishman Aura piezoelectric pickup systems installed in his Les Pauls to model acoustic guitar sounds without changing guitars. As of July 2008, Lifeson uses Floyd Rose tremolos on his main Les Pauls. He has also replaced his Hughes & Kettner zenTera amp heads with Switchblade heads (which, like the zenTeras, include built-in programmable digital effects, such as chorus and delay, but use vacuum tubes instead of transistors) for the amplification circuits, while retaining his signature series H&K Triamp heads. His effects for the 2007 tour include a TC Electronic G-Force rack multi-FX, a TC Electronic 1210 spatial expander and a Loft 440 Delay Line/Flanger, as well as the effects built into his Switchblade heads.