John Valentine Carruthers

During his time with Siouxsie and the Banshees, his favourite guitar was a Hofner T6S, which was very thin with active electronics.[8] He developed a fast picking style.[8] On certain songs, he "tuned all the strings to one note, like an A. The first people to do that were the Glitter Band, and that's how they got that peculiar Yowl sound. It's mainly an effect; you fret across the strings with a bar to play melodies, but when you've got five strings all tuned to one note and the amp is turned up, it sustains forever".[8]

His other guitars were a Yamaha SG1000, a Yamaha SG000, an Ovation Breadwinner, an Ovation 12 string, a Yamaha FG 450 acoustic and a Self made Strat copy.[8] He used different audio effects including MXR Flanger "to get a really dirty sound," Drawmer Stereo Compressor, Eventide Harmoniser/Delay, Yamaha 1010 analogue delay and Ashly Parametric. The amplifiers he used with the Banshees, were a Peavey Heritage, a Marshall MV50 combo and a Roland Jazz Chorus 120.[8]

Carruthers stated that he used a similar amp set up to John McGeoch's. He used the "Roland Jazz Chorus with a splitter box, and put one signal to the Peavey for a lead sound, and the other to the Marshall which I have really distorted".[8]

On the Banshees' Tinderbox album, he ended up covering all the guitars parts four times. He left all the mistakes in on purpose, saying "I hate playing everything note perfect".[9] He stated that "a couple of the tracks have got eight guitar parts".[9]