“This is going to merge into a very hot topic among guitar players”: Why John Mayer decided against ditching his tube amps for modelers for Dead & Company’s Sphere residency – despite the venue’s shortcomings

John Mayer has opened up on the much-discussed amp setup that he took to the Sphere during Dead & Company’s groundbreaking residency at the state-of-art venue in Las Vegas last year.

Owing to the unique obstacles that come with playing inside a wholly enclosed space that has been designed in the way the Sphere has, the venue has proven to be something of a problem area for guitar players and their rigs.

Trey Anastasio once explained to Guitar World that “no-one will ever have an amp on stage at the Sphere”, while The Edge famously overhauled his entire rig and ditched tube amps in favor of Universal Audio amp modelers.

Abandoning his own stable of amps, though, was never on the cards for Mayer, who instead developed a unique solution for running his prized Dumbles and Fenders as close to normal as possible: he stashed them backstage in shipping crates deep in the bowels of the venue.

In the new issue of Guitar World, Mayer explains why he went to such extremes in order to keep his physical amps, and why he opted against following The Edge’s precedent to switch to a modeler.

“I grew up playing tube amps. I grew up feeling the combustion,” he reflects. “I really like the UA Enigmatic [’82 Overdrive Special Amp] pedal, and I think if you’re a young guitar player, that’s money well spent.

“But my style of playing relies on a certain amount of pushback. I need shocks on the tires. And I think that can only come from the ignition inside of a tube.”

Mayer isn’t completely against using amp modelers, and has used them on multiple occasions both on stage in the studio – he recorded some of Sob Rock with a Fractal Axe-Fx, for example – but he has equally been critical of their shortcomings in the past. Using one for Dead & Company’s previous residency (and their upcoming 2025 shows at the Sphere), then, was never an option.

As for why he decided to stash the amps in the way that he had, Mayer goes on to explain it has something to do with a phenomenon that all guitar players are familiar with: “pushing air”.

“This is going to kind of merge into a very hot topic among guitar players – something they like to call ‘pushing air,’” he continues. “The Pushing Air Debate. For me, I know for a fact that I need a larger space for soundwaves to come out of a guitar amp and be caught a little bit further away than an iso box allows. There has to be more of a comet tail so that the note can bloom a little bit.

“So we had to devise a system that would give a little more space to the speakers. And what we decided to do was use shipping crates as much larger iso boxes – kind of a ‘mini room.’’

Mayer recently shared a picture of that ‘mini room’ on his Instagram channel, which showed how his guitar tech Jeremy Nielsen had decorated the innards of the DIY iso box to make it look like the inside of a studio – couch and all.

“That gave us some dimension so that while I was playing, there was just that extra little bit of space for the note to grow,” Mayer notes. “So my amps were onstage, but the speakers were in these boxes on the loading dock of the Sphere.”

So, Mayer has his amps onstage and the speakers locked away in a cosy room somewhere in the back of the Sphere, but what about the cabs that are onstage? The answer to that, it seems, is pretty straightforward.

“The cabs onstage, let’s just say they’re there to help raise the heads of the amps so that I can reach them with my hand,” he reveals. “Otherwise they’d be sitting on the ground.”

To read the full interview with John Mayer and Bob Weir, head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar World.