EXPLORING TOM MORELLO’S “ARM THE HOMELESS” GUITAR

For nearly three decades, Tom Morello has been dazzling audiences with his utterly unique playing, which combines pyrotechnic shredding with an uncanny ability to coax startlingly inventive tones from his instrument. His style, coupled with his commitment to political activism have made him a fixture in bands that range from the agitprop musical bulldozer Rage Against the Machine to the howling grandeur of Audioslave. In short, whenever Tom Morello hits the stage, he makes a statement and more often than not, he makes that statement with his iconic “Arm the Homeless” guitar.

The origin story of the “Arm the Homeless” guitar is as interesting as Morello himself, filled with wild twists and turns, hilarious mishaps and huge victories. Per his telling, when he moved to Hollywood in 1986, the only thing he wanted was a custom-made guitar, just like his heroes. So he saved up his money from his day job, went to his local shop and commissioned what was, in his words, “the crappiest guitar that anyone has ever played. It was super disappointing. It was unplayable. It sounded absolutely terrible.”

But never one to stand down in the face of adversity, Morello spent the next couple of years modding every aspect of that terrible custom guitar – the neck, the pickups, the electronics, the whammy bar – until he, to his telling, “finally just gave up” and decided to make a virtue out of the instrument he had, an instrument that became the “Arm the Homeless” guitar. From there, Morello discovered his signature sound, which he has used to great effect on every record he has played on since. “I decided I was going to switch my practicing to the eccentricities in my playing,” Morello explains, “and I was no longer going to be practicing scales for eight hours. I might be practicing animal noises for eight hours or helicopter sounds for eight hours, and I began paying attention to my environment. Once I started practicing my eccentricities is when a whole new world of sounds opened up that started to sound like me.”

Given Morello’s highly specific sonics and occasionally unconventional approach to playing, it was very important that we replicate his signature “Arm the Homeless” model down to the last detail. This includes the Fender Stratocaster body – the only vestige of his first custom-made guitar that survived his modding – which he selected because he was a huge fan of monster players like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Yngwie Malmsteen.

However, the rest of the “Arm the Homeless” guitar is far from your traditional Strat. One of the major distinctions is the neck, which we meticulously recreated based on the one Morello has – a neck that he found in a bin of used parts at a music store, which he describes as, “an off brand, knockoff neck that just felt right to me.”

Another distinctive highlight of this guitar is its electronics. The bridge houses an EMG® 85 pickup for a powerful sound and harder edge, while the neck pickup is an EMG H, which Morello describes as a “single-coil pickup disguised as a humbucker,” which allows for a springier, funkier tone. The “Arm the Homeless” signature model also includes a toggle switch, a critical detail that is essential to Morello’s playing. This allows you to easily toggle between pickups and, for Morello, “acts very much like the same kind of kill switch that a deejay might use to do scratching.” He goes on to say that this control allowed him to “create sounds outside of the regular rock ‘n’ roll vocabulary.”

Finally, we’ve replicated Morello’s hand-drawn artwork, one of the major distinguishing details on the “Arm the Homeless” guitar. A combination of Morello’s cartoon hippos and “ARM THE HOMELESS” message scrawled in Sharpie® by Morello as a way of paying homage to Woody Guthrie, who wrote “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” on his legendary acoustic.

Needless to say, this model is identical to the one Morello played on over 20 albums and during thousands of shows. You’ll be able to replicate the sounds he makes while discovering your own. Check out the video to see Morello himself tell his story and show off every detail of this extraordinary guitar and then head here to learn more and grab one for yourself.