Matt Bellamy's guitar strings: the Muse rig, sourced

Matthew James Bellamy was born June 9, 1978, in Cambridge, England. His family moved to Teignmouth, Devon, where he started piano at six and guitar at eleven. At Teignmouth Community School he played in a run of earlier bands, including one called Gothic Plague, with schoolmate Dominic Howard on drums. When other members left, Bellamy and Howard recruited bassist Chris Wolstenholme. In 1994, performing as Rocket Baby Dolls, the trio won their school's Battle of the Bands contest, a result serious enough that they renamed themselves Muse and started taking the band seriously.

Muse released their debut album, Showbiz, in 1999. The catalog since, Origin of Symmetry (2001), Absolution (2003), Black Holes and Revelations (2006), The Resistance (2009), The 2nd Law (2012), Drones (2015), Simulation Theory (2018), and Will of the People (2022), has sold more than 30 million records worldwide and won two Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album, for The Resistance and Drones. In June 2007 Muse became the first band to sell out the newly built Wembley Stadium.

Bellamy writes the songs, sings lead in a wide tenor range, and plays the guitar and keyboard parts underneath it. Total Guitar named him Guitarist of the Decade in its January 2010 issue; a 2010 BBC Radio 6 Music survey rated him the third-best guitarist of the previous 30 years. He's arguably just as well known for building his own guitars as for playing them: since the early 2000s he's worked with Devon luthier Hugh Manson on a run of heavily modified signature instruments, and in 2019 he bought a majority stake in Manson Guitar Works itself.

Ernie Ball's own blog names him directly, "lead-singer and Ernie Ball artist Matt Bellamy", and states in the same post that Muse play Power Slinky on guitar. His main stage instrument is the Manson MB-1, an instrument with more in common with a small synthesizer rig than a stock electric: a built-in MIDI touchpad controls an outboard Korg Kaoss Pad, a Fernandes Sustainer drives infinite feedback, and a kill switch cuts the signal to ground for rhythmic stutters.

Bellamy's first Manson collaboration came right after Showbiz broke in 1999. He wanted a Telecaster body wired with Gibson-style electronics, and the result was the DL-1, nicknamed "Delorean" for the aluminium body covering that mimics the time machine from Back to the Future. It carries a Seymour Duncan neck P90, a Kent Armstrong Motherbucker bridge pickup, a Roland GK-2a MIDI pickup, and a built-in Z.Vex Fuzz Factory, MXR Phase 90, and Graphtech Ghost acoustic preamp, all wired into the guitar's own circuitry. Bellamy hasn't played it live since 2005, but its silhouette became the template for nearly every signature Manson that followed.

The Bomber came next for the Absolution and Black Holes and Revelations touring cycles: an air-brushed chrome body embossed with rivets copied from a WWII-era Spitfire, an Ibanez neck, and a DigiTech Whammy controller built into the rear cavity. In 2007 Bellamy debuted the Red Glitter, sharing the Delorean's body shape but adding the two features that would define his sound for the next decade: a Fernandes Sustainer for infinite feedback, and an X-Y MIDI touchscreen for the Korg Kaoss Pad. The Red Glitter was destroyed after years of on-stage abuse in 2010. Its near-identical replacement became the commercially available Manson MB-1, the guitar Guitar World profiled in 2011 as Bellamy's "secret weapon."

Manson's own artist page today lists four current official signature models bearing his name: the MB-1, MB-1S, DL-1, and MB-2E. A 2022 blog post from the company details a limited MB-2 run (the original MB-1's black finish, twin hand-wound P90 pickups that combine into a "humbucker" mode, and a Sustainiac driver) alongside a DL-2 built around the Fuzz Factory and Phase 90 circuitry from the original Delorean. Mixdown Magazine's gear rundown counts roughly 30 different Manson variations across Bellamy's career, including 7-strings, a double-neck, and a genuine playable keytar.

Muse has spent most of its career as a three-piece: guitar, bass, drums, with Bellamy singing lead on top. A conventional guitar rig can't cover synth pads, pitch-shifted harmonies, and glitch textures on its own, not without a fourth touring member. Building the MIDI controller and effects loop directly into the guitar body solves that problem at the source: Bellamy triggers a Korg Kaoss Pad sweep or a Digitech Whammy harmony with his picking hand mid-riff, without reaching for a pedalboard or handing the part to a keyboardist.

The Diezel VH4's MIDI switching plays the same role on the amp side. In his own words from the Absolution era, Bellamy ran the Diezel head with a Line 6 Echo Pro sitting parallel to it, "so when I hit my MIDI foot-controller the amp brings it into the loop," keeping the guitar-to-amp signal clean until an effect is deliberately switched in. That's a live-performance answer to a studio problem: how to get one guitar to sound like several different instruments across one arena set, without carrying several different rigs to do it.

Three things across Muse's catalog that trace back to Bellamy specifically:

1. MIDI as a compositional tool, not a studio trick. Most guitarists who use MIDI pickups do it to double a part with a synth in the studio. Bellamy built the controller into the instrument itself and plays it live, mid-song, as a fourth voice. The Kaoss Pad touchpad solos on "Supermassive Black Hole" are a performance element, not a production overdub.

2. A kill switch used as a rhythm instrument. The MB-1's toggle kill switch grounds the signal instead of the pickup, cutting the sound dead when flipped. Guitar World's 2011 profile ties Bellamy's use of it directly to Tom Morello's rhythmic stutter technique, turning a mute switch into a percussive part of the arrangement rather than just a way to silence the guitar between songs.

3. Drop D reserved for specific, heavier songs rather than a default tuning. In his own words, most of Absolution is in standard tuning, with Drop D saved for "Stockholm Syndrome" and a brief dip to Db at the end of "Blackout." That selectivity fits a catalog built more on dynamic range, quiet verse to enormous chorus, than on a single down-tuned wall of guitar.

Sourced from Guitar World's 2011 MB-1 feature, Mixdown Magazine's gear rundown, Manson Guitar Works' own artist and product pages, and Wikipedia.