Chasing The Sound
A 40-Year History of My Evolving Guitar Setup
I was about to use the word “rig” to describe my guitar setup, but I hesitated. Rig? Setup? Maybe I’m a little traumatized by the excellent Rigs of Dad Instagram page. Old guys and their guitar rigs are a cliche and a wellspring of hilarious memes and awkward images. It’s an entire genre of nerddom and hobbyist obsession. Yes, I’m a hobbyist now. But since I was a kid, seeking out great electric guitar sounds has been a constantly evolving pursuit and passion. This post won’t be interesting to many of you, but I expect it will be fascinating for a few of you. And that is the point of it.
I messed around on a crappy gut-string guitar since about age 9, but I started playing for real at age 16. My grandmother gave me the choice on my 16th birthday to either receive some stock or a guitar. She strongly implied that it would call my character into question if I chose the guitar. Of course, I chose the guitar. She shook her head in disappointment.
I played in a cover band in 9th Grade called The Brats with this guy named Whitney. I played drums and Whitney was the singer. We did mostly Police songs. He had a cool-looking black early 70s Fender single-pickup student model guitar called a Bronco he didn’t really play. I bought it for $150 and that was a great day.
I signed up for lessons at a downtown music store that summer, where flashy local cover band player with a new wave look named PK convinced me to buy a little Crate combo amp. It had a switch on front for “saturation,” basically a distortion channel. “Check it out,” he said. “If you flip this switch, it sounds just like a Marshall Stack.” He illustrated his point by ripping into a Van Halen-style, two-hand riff. It did sound amazing! By the time I brought it home, however, it just sounded OK. First lesson learned: Great tone has more to do with the player than the rig.
[Fender Bronco, 1983]
I took lessons that summer from a Berklee student named John Swihart. John became famous decades later as the guy who composed and performed the music for Napoleon Dynamite, and he’s made a nice living as a creative musician. Back then, he was a Bloomington kid home from his first year at Berklee, and he really made an impression on me. He taught me a bunch of tunes I wanted to learn and some basic theory. The lessons convinced me guitar was the instrument I was meant to play. I played the drums back then, but once I learned how to play some lead guitar there was no turning back. I know that John planted the seed in my mind about Berklee, so it’s fair to say he had a huge influence on my life.
I spent a year woodshedding with the Bronco and Crate amp, and I bought my first pedal: a yellow DOD 250 Overdrive/Preamp. I was in a few hardcore punk bands at this point, playing drums. The most “successful” band I played in was called (ahem) Killing Children. KC was more of a joke than a serious hardcore band, a hardcore parody of sorts fronted by Scott Colburn aka Captain Colby, proprietor of Gravelvoice Records. Scott was a couple years older than me, a freshman at Indiana University from nearby Columbus, Indiana. He played a Gibson SG through the DOD pedal into a Sound City amp. We switched instruments during our shows, so I got to mess around with Scott’s setup and I LOVED it. I bought the pedal to see if it helped my sound. It was a small improvement and I had the ability to change the sound with a footswitch (I’m sure the Crate had a footswitch, but PK never let me in on that little secret). I decided I needed a better amp to play guitar onstage.
I saw an ad in the back of my local newspaper for a Peavy 4X12 stack, so I got my mom to drive me out to some guy’s trailer west of town to have a look. The trailer reeked of cigarettes and beer, and the guy in his 30s had a thick mustache and a shag haircut that today you would probably call a mullet. He explained that he was getting a Marshall, but that this was a great amp that he hated to let go. I plugged in to the 200 watt Peavy Roadmaster and messed with the knobs until I found a good sound. Then he said go ahead and turn it up. I did, and it was unbelievably loud. I bought the head and 4x12 cabinet for $250 and hauled it into the back seat of my mom’s Oldsmobile.
I loved that Peavy amp. I guess I sold it or maybe gave it away when I moved to Boston. I remember going to see Sonic Youth in 1987 and Lee Renaldo was playing one onstage. I felt a deep sense of regret, having convinced myself that the Roadmaster wasn’t “cool.”
Peavies generally aren’t cool, by the way. My dear friend and longtime collaborator Ed Ackerson used to put a disclaimer on each of his albums, “No Peavy gear used in the making of this album.” One time he came to Bloomington to rehearse for a tour, and he refused to sing into a microphone affixed to its stand on a Peavy mic clip. He unscrewed the clip and duct taped the mic to the stand. I never told Ed about the Roadmaster, and how much I loved it. Everyone in town used to borrow that amp for shows, because it was loud enough to fill a large hall. That was an age before we had sound men, before your mic a guitar to mix in the PA. Stage volume was room volume, and we all wanted to be as loud as possible.
I brought my Bronco for my first year at Berklee, and I quickly understood that it wasn’t good enough or certainly cool enough for a Berklee student. I ordered a Japanese Fender Stratocaster with a locking tremolo, which became my main instrument at the beginning of Blake Babies. I had a little Marshall practice amp called a Lead 12 (12 watts of power), which suited my needs. It had a master volume so that it would break up nicely, and it was loud enough to be audible over a drummer. At some point during that year I acquired a bigger, nicer amp, a Fender Princeton II. I loved this amp, and I just looked it up and learned that one of these in poor condition costs over $1,000. It’s a great amp, and I held onto it into the early 90s when I gave it away to an ex-girlfriend. She’d borrowed the amp and was slow to return it, so when she got married after a couple years I said OK, that’s your wedding present.
The Lead 12 had a headphone jack, and I realized I could take the headphone jack out into the Princeton and get a fantastic sound. That became my first Blake Babies rig: I’d set it up on its side and run them together with my DOD overdrive and a few other pedals I picked up: a digitech digital delay with a one-second loop, a Boss chorus, and an Ernie Ball volume pedal. I pained all the pedals and gave them different names. I loved messing around with my looper, getting all sorts of weird sounds with my pedals. But I didn’t really use any of the pedals in Blake Babies at first - I used the volume knob on my Strat to control the distortion. Then I got my first Rat pedal and integrated that into the sound. So that was my rig for the first couple years: Strat into a Rat pedal into the Lead 12 into the Princeton. I think that’s what I used during this period, though it’s hard to see, but that is for sure the Princeton II.
Juliana is playing a silverface Fender Vibrolux in this clip. Very soon after this show, we became a trio and I had to rethink my sound for the stripped-down setting. Juliana got an Ampeg SVT bass amp (lugging that thing was a great workout), and I appropriated her Vibrolux and continued to use the Lead 12 as a preamp. We also started using stage tuner pedals around this time, such a revelation! For a brief time I used a student model Gibson that Juliana got in high school, and I’d set the Lead 12 on top of the Vibrolux and run the headphone jack into one of the channels. So I had the straight-in clean sound, and the big volume boost on the lead channel. That’s what I’m doing at this show:
I stuck with that basic approach into the 90s with Blake Babies, though at some point I jettisoned the Lead 12 for a more pedal-focused approach. I wish I knew what happened to my early 80s pedals, I guess I just gave them away at some point. That’s a topic for another post, why I lost so much gear over the years that would be worth a fortune now. But suffice to say I had stolen or destroyed three beautiful vintage Gibson guitars, a ‘68 Les Paul Custom, a ‘69 gold top Les Paul Deluxe, and a ‘72 SG with a Bigsby. It hurts to type those words, but around 1990 I met my true love, the Fender Jazzmaster.
I had a buddy in Bloomington (he’s a buddy, but I haven’t seen him in 25 years) named David Baas. David had a great guitar shop called Roadworthy, and I spent a lot of time there. His main employee was Jason Wilbur, who later played lead guitar for John Prine for decades. These guys knew guitars. I let David know that I wanted a Fender Jazzmaster. It’s Gary Smith’s Jazzmaster that I play on practically every Blake Babies song Gary produced. I realized it was the perfect instrument for how I wanted to sound. David found one at a guitar show, a 1959 beauty that was probably sunburst, but had all the paint removed to a natural finish. I got another one like it on tour with The Lemonheads. I used those guitars as my tools for years, looked after them better as a slightly older, wiser person.
When we started Antenna, which became Velo-Deluxe, I rethought my entire approach to live guitar. I got very lucky via my guitarist friend John Byrne. He purchased a Marshall 100-watt Jubilee series head at auction after Farm Aid 4 in Indianapolis. It was Slash’s backline for the show. This is the amp that was later reissued, in an inferior incarnation, as Slash Signature Series. But boy oh boy, what a great amp. The first time I ever felt like I’d truly nailed my sound was the Jazzmaster into that Marshall, but always with a second amp. I used a Fender Bassman for a while, then a Sovtek Mig 50. I also embraced Electro Harmonix and MXR pedals. My favorites were the EH Small Stone and Electric Mistress, the MXR Phase 45, a number of Big Muffs, and a Crybaby wah. I used all that shit, all the time. Here’s an example of what that sounded like:
I love watching that clip. I’m not sure if we were any good, but we were absolutely trying to be great. Which makes it sort of poignant. But it also felt really good to play like that.
[Echo Park Studio, Bloomington, making the Velo Deluxe album]
Around that time I started playing guitar with The Lemonheads. Evan Dando is very into nice guitar gear, So he really accommodated me. The band bought me a Vox AC-30 because Evan wanted it to sound badass. I still use that amp. I used the Marshall, but I’d concluded that the tonal complement the Marshall needed was an AC-30. And I was absolutely right! What a delightful sound I had with those two amps blended together. I have no desire to be a touring musician anymore, but I wish I could bask in that sound for many more hours. I used the boost channel on the Marshall and a bunch of pedals, powered by batteries and scattered on the floor. I’m not sure why none of our backline guys encouraged me to have a pedal board, because it would have been a LOT easier. Somehow my guitar is very prominent in the mix on this clip. Which suits me fine right now, you can hear how great the tone is!
Here’s a longer performance, same tour, slightly different lineup. That tour went on just about forever.
When the Lemonheads tour finally ended, I followed Heather to Birmingham. I found a whole new music community full of great players, great songwriters, and artists who should have been way more popular. I used to play quite a bit around the Southeast, and I had a fairly steady lineup of a band from ‘98 through 2001, when I started law school. We toured the Southeast a lot, toured the entire country once, and even toured Europe (mostly Spain). Around then the Marshall started gathering dust because it was so much to carry to gigs. If I did something bigger, like a festival, I’d bring out the entire setup. But for most things, I stuck with the Vox AC-30.
I devised a more intricate, better thought-out application for my pedals, and I got more organized, used a power supply and basic board. I used two Rat pedals. The series started with a Boss tuner, then into a Rat with a slightly depleted battery (by design) with the distortion dialed back pretty low. That one stayed on all the time, and gave the Vox the sort of tone you’d get at much higher volume. Then I’d have a second Rat with the distortion and volume turned way up. Next was a Big Muff, then the Cry Baby. Somebody reading this is gonna flinch when they read that. Wah after the dirt? That is wrong. But that’s something Ed Ackerson taught me, such an important lesson. Sometimes the wrong way to do it turns out to be the right way to do it, at least for you. I wanted to have a dentist drill effect to make my point. Mission accomplished.
[2016 Blake Babies reunion]
That got a little nerdy, and that’s a good opportunity to talk about guitar pedal nerds (like me). There used to be very few of us. Pedal dancing, as Lou Barlow so brilliantly described the delicate steps and brutal stomps of the 90s guitar gods. Every touring guitarist is a pedal nerd to some extent, that’s obvious. Again, tools of the trade. Means to an end. We learned about pedals and how to use them from each other, at band practice or sound check. The idea that there would ever be educational videos watched by millions would have been insane. But now…
A few years ago, a friend invited me to join a Facebook community of pedal obsessives. Some members of the group have incredibly elaborate, intricate and obsessively-conceived pedal boards that would be too big and heavy to check on an airplane or for one person to easily lift…and they don’t play gigs. There’s a huge hobbyist culture of pedal obsessives, and I’ve learned from them. Some of them earnestly believe there is a right way to do things, which is endearing. Others are complete freaks with an eye on the fourth dimension. It’s all very comforting to me; knowledge is power. It’s a far easier world to navigate.
I haven’t substantially changed my approach to pedals since the 90s, but I’ve fine-tuned. As I’ve traveled around the country in recent months playing shows using house amps in various venues, I’ve been grateful that I can plug in my pedal board and sound good, the way I want to sound. I leave the Jazzmasters at home, and I use one that a buddy built for me so that I wouldn’t miss the ‘59s too much. It’s worked. Here’s my pedal board from the fall dates. I have a looper for when I play solo electric - I run loops in many of the songs. I’m still working on the approach, and I hope I can play more solo electric sets so I can get it right. Because it’s always a work in progress…
I have a lot more pedals than this, especially overdrives and distortion pedals. One thing that’s a little unusual is that, of all the overdrives and distortion pedals I own, I prefer these Stigtronics pedals. They were built in Bloomington by a guy named Michael Stiglitz, who I’ve heard has passed away. I never met him, but I wish I could have told him how much I love his pedals.
I don’t consider myself a real gear head or pedal nerd. Ed was way more extreme than I ever was, and there are people who’ve never played a show or released music who are way more extreme than Ed. I’m a pragmatist, and my goal is to make the greatest guitar sounds I can pull off. Guitars, pedals, amps, and all the connective wiring are tools. They are the means, not the end. But it’s been a fascinating journey getting there.
Watching that Blake Babies 88 at the Rat video was like being on drugs! Wow
Great post. I'm a big fan of putting a wah after a distortion, myself — you can get some really nasty and abrasive sounds that way.