Last time I talked about some of the parameters I had set for myself for my debut solo album: 1. use every fuzz pedal I own; 2. write almost all lyrics and sing the bulk of the songs; 3. no overthinking performances, try to use first takes or within the first three as long as there were no complete clams of mistakes.

Now I needed inspiration to drive the songwriting process, and as I have for many years now, almost all the songs for this got written through the Songfight process.

What, you may be asking yourself, is Songfight? Good question.

Songfight is a website that originally started in the magical year 2000, by a fellow named Narbotic, just a guy who made websites and also had an indie band. As one did back then, he had an idea one day to have a song-making competition between himself and his indie band friends, and anyone else who found the website out there on the big, wide, world of the World Wide Web. The rules were simple: he’d give a title, and everyone who wanted to would make a song and submit it as an mp3 by a certain date. After that, anyone who wanted to could vote for whichever song they liked best. That’s it. That was Songfight.

The first few fights were populated by a small circle of pretty great musicians, actually (Narbotic himself of course, Gil Sans, metalmags, Lemon Party, Kissing Contest, and the mighty KOMPRESSOR, for example), and then suddenly within a few months a key group of people independently discovered the site, and that was kind of the first expansion of Songfight, also because these people were pretty dedicated to the concept: fluffy porcupine, Spud (octothorpe), Jeff Fal (add music), Frankie Big Face, John Benjamin, and my former college roommate Damian Hess. Dame had participated in I think one or two fights and one day we were hanging out and he was like, let’s do a Songfight. The title was “Stronger Than” and he cooked up a concept about Paganini and Beethoven in a WWF style wrestling match. I had a Roland 505 drum machine I’d picked up somewhere, made a simple drum loop, recorded some metal-ish guitars and bass. Dame recorded some noises of a flipped coin rattling on wood, and we were off to the races. We didn’t win, but like everyone else who was newly participating, I was hooked. We had a fun and also awful community on the old Dumbrella boards. That was the first Duboce Triangle song, a band named after the neighborbood in San Francisco where Dame lived at the time.

Little did any of us know that in a couple of years, Narbotic would get tired of running the site, and some of the people from my cohort, who had technical know-how and this weird attachment to the site, would then go on to maintain and operate it for the next twenty years, trying out different variations of the core concept over time and eventually settling in on something closely resembling the original idea but with a more regular cadence of titles and deadlines, plus the added twist of optional songwriting/production challenges. Songfight is still there, and for probably hundreds, maybe even thousands? Who knows? Of interested songwriters, it’s been a great place to basically force yourself to do something. There have been several actually successful and famous, accomplished musicians who have popped in now and again, but I wasn’t around for most of that, so I can’t really comment.

Anyway I needed to get to writing and producing songs, and the best way I knew to make myself do that was through the artificial framework of the Songfight competition deadline.

That week, the title was “Power Plants.” One of the things about Songfight is that everyone writes their songs pretty independently — I mean of course there are collaborations and team-ups and such, but people don’t usually share work-in-progress or anything like that, everyone makes their songs and then we all sort of find out what everyone else was thinking at the same time, when the songs get uploaded. Unsurprisingly there’s a bit of a culture of trying to be unique, not to write the same lyrical concept as someone else. That can be quite difficult with some titles, but this one seemed to me to suggest the idea of not the modern term of an electricity factory, but vegetation that was thought to contain power, and that’s how I got to looking into medieval witchcraft and alchemy.

On some witchy webpage I came across the term “death flower,” which was apparently used to describe a variety of different flowers used by witches in poisonous potions and for curses. Immediately it rolled off the tongue, and I knew I had a hook.

These days everyone talks about hooks in songs; I believe it was in the somehow Oscar-winning Hustle & Flow that I first heard the term “hook” bandied about very freely in songwriting production — perhaps it was prevalent inside songwriting circles, but at that time I don’t think I heard it used very much by the general public. A hook is a memorable bit in the song — it could be a particularly earwormy melody, a line that demands you sing along, the entry of the drums in Phil Collin’s “In the Air Tonight.” Rock songs, particularly indier ones, don’t necessarily have “hooks” per se, but a catchy riff has the same effect, and great pop songs often have an abundance of hooks that make you want to listen again and again, yet at the same time, not get tired of the song because there’s always something more to listen to. I should clarify that a song doesn’t need to have a lot of hooks, or necessarily any hooks at all, to be a good song, but it sure helps.

The riff for “deathflower” came from two influences, at least conscious ones. The first was Jack White’s 2022 album Fear of the Dawn. I had heard him do a couple songs on an SNL appearance, and “Taking Me Back,” the album opener, made a huge impression on me with its huge fuzz tones, simplicity, but with a riff that grooved just really hard. The second influence was Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” Bands since 1971 have struggled to master that riff and groove (to be clear, I am not in the camp of “you just have to feel it,” nor am I in the camp of counting all the extra beats and all that. I firmly understand the riff as a version of 4/4 with one extra beat, I will be taking no arguments thank you), and the story of how the riff was written is one I think about often. Although most people think of Jimmy Page, the ace guitarist, band leader, established recording artist, and Crowley aficionado as the main music writer for Zeppelin, some riffs came from bassist and multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones, whose professional career pre-Zeppelin was just as decorated as Jimmy’s, albeit less in the spotlight. Jones has said that if a Zeppelin song was more chord-y, it was most likely one of Jimmy’s ideas that was the foundation, and if it was more of a linear riff, it was probably one of Jonesy’s. “Black Dog” was one such riff, having been written by Jones while on a train, intentionally working out something recursive and difficult for other bands to copy.

In the case of “deathflower,” the riff wasn’t in any sense hard to play or to copy, I just wanted something that was a little sinuous and a lot groovy. Once I had the base musical and lyrical concepts, it was a question of fleshing it out. As is usual in my process, the music came first. I made the verses basically do a hold and climb concept, from C to D so that it could climb up to hit the riff, which was based around an E minor chord concept. Since the verses held on chords for a long time and the riff was a riff, I chose to go with long sustained chords for the chorus, Em D/F# G, another simple climb, but one that subtly shifts the feel from the minor-y atmosphere of the verses to a major chord, brighter, more happy feel — I find this kind of contrast really fun to play with, and in this case it worked well.

I mentioned last time that I had decided to use up all my fuzzes, and this song has tons of them. The main fuzz guitar, that shredded crackly sound that I find full of life, that’s my old black 1997 Les Paul Custom 1968 Reissue (a model that was specifically made in small quantities for Japan) through a ZVex Fuzz Probe, which is essentially a Fuzz Factory with a plate that senses the proximity of your foot, which you can use with some settings to create some really wild effects. I didn’t do that here though, I just dialed in something aggressive that had that sound of ripping velcro, which I wanted because I knew the lyrics were about a. witch using her magic powers to turn a encroaching king and his army to stone, which was one of the legends of how Stonehenge came to be. I thought of this as a kind of gothy metaphor for a romantic relationship that’s perhaps gone bad, and how one of the parties, the king in this case, feels like he can’t let go, and is stuck, frozen in time and place, unable to move forward and out of the relationship. Meanwhile, as a writer, both of words and music, you’re often admonished to “kill your darlings,” i.e. let go of things you’re being overly precious about if they aren’t actually vital to the meaning and intent of the artistic statement. Anyway, with such a sort of dark fairy tale, I needed matching sounds.

On the riff, I layered more fuzzes, including an Earthquaker Devices Black Ash (a very specially tuned version of a Mk II Tonebender, think Led Zeppelin I), an EQD Terminal Fuzz (based on the rare spitty Shin-Ei Companion Fuzz), a clone of a Pep Box (famously used by John Lennon), and a bit of a Green Russian Big Muff type tone from a JHS Muffuletta, which is a great little unit that has I think 7 or 8 different Big Muff circuit variants in one box that you can access with a dial. There’s a LOT of fuzz on this song.

The bigness of the chorus, however came from a totally different guitar recording trick. In fact, it’s a trick used often by Jimmy Page in Zeppelin, although at the time my reference point was actually the Van Halen song “Poundcake.” One of the tools in mixing music is the power of layering — while I admit that a lot of musical instruments, or just musical gadgets I have lying around I have just because I couldn’t resist them, judicious use of extra little instruments can really make a section pop. Think of how just a shaker or tambourine totally changes the character and movement of a chorus, or how using them fast in one section and slow in another makes it feel like something dramatic has changed. In an interview about “Poundcake,” Eddie Van Halen noted that he felt he was struggling with the song until Andy Johns suggested using electric 12 string guitars to flesh out the chorus. Just using two hard panned takes of 12 string guitar, the sound became immense. I used my Reverend Airwave 12, which I acquired after a lot of research in electric 12 strings (it intonates the best, which is one of the known problems with the Beatles or Tom Petty-style Rickenbacker 12, and also has the ability to jangle like a Ricky or just meaty like a Jimmy Page Fender XII or his famous double neck) with just raw Mesa Boogie amp tone, no pedals or boosts. It added an element of power but also lightness.

The bass guitar also got fuzz, via one of the Big Muff variants on the Muffuletta, if I remember aright it was the JHS mode, which I generally have liked for bass because it maintains some top end clarity along with the massive low end. You definitely want slightly different fuzzes for bass than guitar, because fuzz is a massively mid-scooped type of effect. By mid scooped, I’m referring to the EQ curve — if you imagine a flat, undisturbed EQ line, most fuzzes just literally have a big scoop of ice cream somewhere in the mid-frequencies, let’s call that somewhere between 350 hz and 3000 hz or so. For clarity’s sake, remember that in our A4=440hz world that the notes on a guitar from lowest to highest range from E2 = 82 hz to E7 = 2687hz (where a 24th fret on the high E string is, you can bend up to it on a 21 or 22 fret guitar). In other words, a guitar lives mostly in what we call the midrange, and so where you locate the center of that dip in the minds dramatically changes the vocal characteristic of the guitar’s tone.

(A quick aside: A4 = 440hz is much newer of a standard than most people think, it was actually established in 1926! By American musical instrument manufacturers! Previously many orchestras had followed the French (also Austrian) standard of 435hz, but even that was like the 1860s when it was established. So, like everything else in music, it’s all a matter of choosing which rules you’re going to follow and then actually following them. The 432hz debate is kind of silly though. I’m cool with 432hz but to expect it to have magic properties that “the ancients” knew about is frankly just a fun plot point for a potential fantasy series on Netflix.)

Following the standard pop song structure of verses, choruses, and a bridge, I decided to give my voice a rest and make the bridge a bass solo, and then instead of having a final verse, I made that the guitar solo section. I’m still an instrumental musician primarily, so this felt like a good way to keep the energy and sense of flow while adding some variety and tension to the song. Keeps you a little more interested in “ooh what’s he gonna do next,” especially when you hear a bass solo, as it is not the most expected choice. Frankly, there should be more bass solos in things, but I suspect we’ll have to wait for Taylor Swift to learn to slap da bass to get that happening (I know I just did an aside, but as an aside, Rihanna has Nuno! Fucking! Bettencourt! playing guitar for her live, Riri, get some smokin’ guitar solos back in pop music, please?).

Just to put the cherry on top, the guitar solo used a few different effects, but most prominently there’s a step filter on it courtesy of my favorite wah pedal, the only one I now own, the Sonuus Wahoo. I highly recommend it as it’s a dual analog filter for which you have complete digital control over every parameter. That means not just is it a wah pedal where you can tailor and fine tune the exact behavior of the wah (range, sweep, resonance, drive, Q, everything) but you can also send the filter through an envelope control or LFO control so it’s also an envelope filter (think Bootsy) or auto wah (like Prince), or a step filter, just basically any filter effect. For the uninitiated, a filter effect is essentially just a kind of EQ control that’s tuned in hopefully a really musical way that often gets used to funk things up, it can be throaty or boingy or any number of other feels. A step filter basically jumps between a few different EQ settings, in this case 8 of them, and to my ear that effect just sounds like the space age. To my mind, I was setting in another contrast, telling this sort of story of Stonehenge but then setting that against this science fiction guitar sound. Who knows, maybe it’s a reach, but for my ‘practice’ (hahahaha art jokes) I like the idea of putting the lyrical idea in conflict with the actual sounds.

And that basically is everything I have to say about the making of the song “deathflower.” Next time I’ll get into “nepo baby” and possibly also “co-pilot”, depending — I think I put in a fair amount of background here already, so the rest of these should go a bit faster.

Sometime in early 2023, I decided it was time to make my own solo album. The motivations for this were several. The main thing of course was my desire to improve my lyric writing, which I knew would happen no other way but by not allowing myself to work with other people on lyrics and vocals. To that point, I had always been a proponent of the common band theory that whoever sings should write the lyrics and melody because, well, they’re the person who has to sing them. That sounds like an obvious statement, but there’s some layers to it. When a pop star or a jazz singer sings a song, often what we’re listening to is their interpretation of someone else’s writing, which is a totally legitimate expression of the art of music. The argument is that classical musicians, for one example, have been doing that for centuries, as musicians whose job as performers and interpreters is separate from that of the composer or songwriter. Musical theater is exactly that as well, for the most part. It’s only been fairly recently, in the last century or so, that the idea that authentic emotional expression is maximized when the people who wrote the song also perform the song. That’s kind of the core of the idea of why today a band needs to write its own music, and why cover bands aren’t as cool as originals bands.

For me, that meant that as much as in a lot of bands I wrote much of the music, using my knowledge and interests in particular bits of pop and rock and jazz composition, the songs themselves kind of always ended up belonging to the singer. One of the long-running debates on Songfight and probably also most bands is whether or not a “song” has to have lyrics, or how essential the singer is to the writing of the song. Can an instrumental piece of rock music be called a “song”? One compelling argument in favor of vocalists being vital to a song is the fact that if you say the word “singer” you mean a vocalist, and that can be singing with or without words. The history of the English language tells us that “song” is another word for a poem that probably originally had a melody but now could be divorced from that melody, simply to exist in metrical rhythm. The other side goes something like this: stfu and play the song.

(An aside: one of the major points of friction in the first breakup of Jane’s Addiction, one of my absolute favorite bands in the 1.0 version, was about the percentages of songwriting royalties that each band member should get. Specifically, it was the singer making the argument that a song is 50% music and 50% lyrics, and since he wrote all the lyrics and also contributed the melody and to the music writing (structure, some riffs, etc), that he was entitled to the entire 50% for lyrics and an equal ¼ share of the other 50%, for a total ownership of 62.5% of every song. The other band members, by this logic, should only get 12.5% each of every song written, even though all band members were credited for every song. It’s a fairly common fight and factor in bands breaking up, because when they start, they often assume (not agree, because that would require discussion) that everyone just shares equally, or perhaps there’s an understanding that certain people are songwriters and others aren’t really, e.g. early Beatles where most tunes are Lennon/McCartney, so the other guys don’t share in the songwriting royalties. Personally, while I understand the argument, I also have traditionally been a music-first writer, and I think this is how it works in a lot of collaborative band writing situations–the instrumental music comes first and the lyrics and melody are shaped by the emotional and musical content of that instrumental, and then they each influence each other. I’m not in favor of the lyricist getting the lion’s share of something that wouldn’t exist if the music wasn’t there. If the lyrics came first, same thing, sure you *could* set it to any music, but you end with the music that can be made by the instrumental writer(s) that best fits their understanding of its message the same way that a lyricist hears the basic tracks and works off that inspiration to write lyrics and a melody. I’ve seen too many bands break up over songwriting rights to think that it’s fair for it to be any other way unless it’s actually the situation that one person writes the songs and brings them to sessions.)

When I did improvisational rock instrumental rock music in Shanghai, I certainly thought about what I was doing as songs, the compositional format was well within a verse/chorus/bridge type structure, along with long sections that were left open to improvisation in the moment. Nothing ever got played the same way. Most of the time people say that in the context of a rock band, they mean slight variations in fills and guitar solos and aspects of interpretation, but in the case of Glaze and Chairman Now!, we actually just went off the deep end, myself most particularly, as for me those bands were my excuse to practice live reharmonization of music in the moment (in something like the jazz sense of the term, i.e. taking a bit of a chord progression and then mutating it with the different ways you can substitute chords and layers of complication). At the time, I was ok at it, not great, and now having not done it in years, I’ve probably lost it all in terms of the instantaneous mental skill, although I have a lot more compositional knowledge to work with.

However that type of music, neither jazz nor rock, with no vocalist, could generously be called somewhat masturbatory by most audiences, especially since you’d be working out a musical idea in real time, maybe 10 minutes of a song, or 20 minutes would just fly by. I think we sounded pretty decent, actually, but that’s neither here nor there. I didn’t want to go down that type of path again, I decided I wanted to explore the road I hadn’t taken, and write the damn words, sing them too.

I am not a natural singer. By that I don’t mean I have a bad voice or anything, although to be honest, it was a much more powerful and nuanced instrument when I was younger. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost a lot of range and tremendous amounts of power. I remember once I went into a studio in San Francisco to record something, I forget for what or whom, and they wanted screaming. I was so loud and projected so much that I scared the pants off everyone in the control room — I am not a big guy and no one expected that much raw power and sound pressure level. I don’t have that anymore, nor do I have the falsetto I used to be able to rely on to get another octave or so (one time, in Shanghai, I was in an originals band and the singer — who honestly had a voice that was just ok but had a lot of character, great for indie stuff — wanted me to sing a backing vocal in falsetto and I was trying to explain that I’d lost my falsetto. He was unable to listen and therefore kept trying to explain back to me in really basic terms what a falsetto is and how to achieve it. It was a little annoying but one thing you learn in life is that most people talk to hear themselves talk so they can work their own shit out, and most lead singers are even more so in that mode. It’s not about you, and you can’t take it too seriously. Or just leave the band).

So for me, this would be a major challenge, learning to use my limited vocal talent but also being fair and objective enough with it to mix it properly instead of trying to hide my voice with effects and EQ. I would only be somewhat successful there.

My close friend and “cousin” Mei (who is, by the way, someone you should be reading) used to listen to my earlier bands, many of which were archly ironic in the way of indie bands, and with lyrics to match written by the singers, and comment to me that she really enjoyed the music but felt that the lyrics were trying too hard to be clever instead of saying anything true or real or serious. I took that to heart as well, not just because Mei’s an award winning writer from a family of award winning writers, but because she was right. At the time, I wasn’t too bothered with it because a) they weren’t my lyrics, and b) those bands were supposed to be that way, by concept. At least that’s what we told ourselves. By contrast, this album would have lyrics that were personal.

Another objective, or creative rule that I set for myself besides doing the bulk of the lyrics/singing was that I decided I would use all of the fuzz pedals I owned on the album. For those of you who are less into effects pedals, a quick history of the fuzz effect might be in order. Fuzz is a version of distortion, something that is one of the key hallmarks of electrified music. When you have a sound wave, it has a top and bottom. When the top and bottom, crest and trough, of the wave exceed the limits of the container they are in, parts of them get cut off because the strength of the input signal is too great for the amount of available bandwidth. Now there’s lot of ways to make this sound unmusical, but when it’s done well, with sets of EQ filters emphasizing and demphasizing certain frequencies, and the formula is different for everyone, you end up with a sound that is weirdly pleasing because it’s full, saturated, and rich with harmonics. It sounds like crazy energy barely contained.

Early electrified music shied away from distortion of any kind, the goal was the loudest possible replication of clean, mostly unaffected tone. But guitar players quickly discovered that cranking amps pushed them way past clean and made them sound, well, awesome. Huge, richly harmonic sounds that felt like power made tangible and gave you the capacity for near-infinite sustain, that’s distortion. Eventually someone built a fuzz pedal, which is a particularly square wave version that sounded either amazing or horrifying depending on your point of view. For the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, trying to emulate a horn section one day while recording a new song, his Maestro FZ-1 Fuzztone sounded amazing enough that “Satisfaction” never did get a horn section to do that iconic riff. Fuzz quickly took off and reached new heights with Jimi Hendrix and David Gilmour’s searing use of the Fuzz Face pedal, Ernie Isley’s massive Big Muff tones, Jimmy Page and his Tonebender on Led Zeppelin I, the 70s King Crimson albums and Fripp’s romance with the Burns Buzzaround. Fuzz became popular for a time, then faded from use during punk and the evolution of metal, with their embrace of high gain amps, but came back with alternative rock, perhaps most famously with Smashing Pumpkins and later the White Stripes and Jack White’s work. Nowadays a fuzz feels like an essential part of every rock electric guitarist’s arsenal, and tastes in fuzz can be intensely personal.

Over the years I had collected some of my favorite fuzzes, with an eye to covering many different flavors of this historic effect. For a long time my most-used pedal was a ZVex Fuzz Probe, a particularly untameable version of a fuzz circuit that could produce everything from the smoothest vocal tone to the most broken squall of noise. It turned out that actually I did not particularly cotton on to some of the most famous fuzz circuits like the aforementioned Fuzz Face, Tonebender, or Big Muff, not in their commonly seen versions anyway (a Fuzz Probe/Fuzz Factory is loosely a modified Fuzz Face, for example). To be honest, they were too smooth and nice-sounding for me. I like fuzz tones that are big, nasty, and sound like you’re listening to raw electricity bursting out. As a result, I had collected several other lesser known fuzzes and hadn’t really managed to use them on any of my recent recording projects, as they simply didn’t call for them. Agony Sauce and Yaks of the Industry in particular worked with aesthetics that were not great fits for unruly fuzz tone. Thus I also decided on the overarching genre of rock — I called it fuzz rock, sort of loosely inspired by Jack White, with a healthy dose of NIN, some Zeppelin spicing, some Cars-esque synthesizer hooks.

One of things that had frequently bothered me about my albums with programmed drums has been that I am bad at programming drums, mostly because I am lazy about it and don’t want to do it, so often I write riffs or chords and then try to find MIDI grooves, preprogrammed drum loops, really, that sort of fit, and sometimes they aren’t perfect fits, sometimes the fills that come with the groove package don’t work for what I have written, but I have used them anyway because I have such reticence to programming drums. I made myself either re-program the drums to match my riffs this time, or rewrote my riffs to match the drums once I found drums I liked, in a process that took a little longer but I think the results are much improved. Additionally I set one more rule for myself. Complete takes, no punch ins–most of this album is actually first takes, once I have guitar parts or bass parts or whatever written, it’s just grip and rip. Several songs are actually, if you can believe this, first takes of just playing riffs to the drum tracks, where I knew only the structure of the drums. This adds a lot to the immediacy of these songs, to my ear, they sound like they might go off the rails sometimes because literally, I was trying to keep them on the rails.

I intend, for the next couple of weeks or so, to give short posts on each song of the album, although I will likely do all the “fragments” at once, because there’s not that much to say about them. I don’t expect to retain audience or anything; like the album itself, I’m doing this for me, but I hope that it also means something to you. What I hope it means, what I hope you get out of this is that you are not alone. At the very least, I’m here for riff some fuzz rock for you.

A final note:

There’s a lot of pressure that goes into a solo album, especially your first. Even though I know I will not promote this album particularly, I don’t have a label or any kind of plan or live performance band or schedule, or anything like that, for you as the artist you think, this is my statement. What if I never make another one? What if people get the wrong idea about me from this one? What if I don’t express everything I wanted to express? How perfect do I need to make it? These things are somewhat easier when you know you have more albums to follow, that you don’t have to get it entirely perfect the one and only time. In a sense, doing this on your own, without the pressure and watchful eyes and hungry wallets of a record company is a benefit. On the other hand, the truth is that I could not have made this album before now.

Every album is a document of who you are at that moment in time, as a, not to be too hokey about it, but as a soul. It is a record of your understanding of who you are, have been, and think you might be at one point in time. It will change. You will change. I didn’t really know that, before now. I mean, I did know it, and certain have recognized it in my guitar playing and my compositions. But I now can say writing lyrics and singing them adds a different dimension. deathflower is an album that, for me, tells a story arc of my rejection of the person I thought I was, who was the only person I thought I could be, twenty or so years ago, and expresses my hopes for the person I hope I can be.

Is that pretentious, or just ambitious? Or is it just a mission statement, perhaps.

To be continued with more about the actual songs, the making of, and the ideas behind things.

Hi everyone, I know it’s been a minute since I last posted. I got distracted by a bunch of other things, but the primary distraction, outside of work and family things, has been that I decided to write and record a solo album.

“But Mo, you seem to be releasing a fair amount of music the last few years, what’s the deal here?” is the question that no one asked that I will answer a little bit in this post.

In the last few years since I’ve come back from China to the US, I’ve managed to record enough with various partners and bands to have released four albums: Agony Sauce — Agony Sauce, Yaks of the Industry — Yaks of the Industry, Influence — Moody Vermin, and Elks of the Economy — Yaks of the Industry. Every album is always a document of a time and place in the multifaceted stories of the people making them. In my case, these albums each also reflected specific guitaristic as well as musical choices and intentionality. Since no one will ever be knocking down my door to interview me about these things, I thought I’d put some of these thoughts down.

If some thinking about making rock records in a home studio over the internet doesn’t appeal to you, I fully understand. Go ahead and skip this entry. No one will cancel you.

Back when Glenn Case and I first discussed working together on an album project, I had already done several sessions for his own solo albums as a guitar soloist. We’d met online via Songfight, a website that was started back in I think 1999 or possibly a couple of years earlier, during the dotcom era. At that time, my former college roommate Damian, who later evolved into the massive fronter that he was always meant to be, was living in San Francisco doing web design as a day gig, and I was in grad school out there as well. One day we were talking and he said he’d come across this website and thought it would be fun for us to do some songs. In college we had worked with 4 track tape recording units, and even some studio work, but now we all had PCs and copies of Cool Edit Pro–well, he did. I eventually got one myself but the earliest recordings were all done at his apartment. Some of those Duboce Triangle songs (we named ourselves after the neighborhood Damian lived in) were received reasonably well, sort of indie pop rock that was mostly given personality by Damian’s singing and my renditions of Pixies-inspired riffs. At that time I was very much into the concept of guitar solos for emotional affect as opposed to anything exploring technical skill, and as a result, DTri had very few guitar solos, and those were usually quite short and sweet. So it was a little ironic that years later, having stayed in touch with only a few people from that era of Songfight, Glenn would ask me to play some guitar leads on a few songs he was working on.

Eventually, many years later, Glenn and I finally decided to team up for that year’s Nur Ein songwriting competition. My recollection is that Glenn was going to participate anyway, and he thought it might be fun to work together, as he had already won that competition as a solo artist. It made sense, Glenn is an experienced lead and backing singer, very accomplished self-taught multi-instrumentalist, and had lots of hard-won experience writing and recording songs. In the intervening years, I had much less songwriting and recording experience, and was interested in getting back into that game. I however had also stepped up a lot of guitar and general musical knowledge, starting from when I had an accident with a wineglass in I think early 2005, in which I severed the nerve connecting to my ring finger on my fretting hand, and almost also severed the tendon. The surgeon managed to sew the nerve back together when I got my stitches, but as a result for a couple of years I had zero feeling in just my ring finger, even now one side is normal and one side is a little numb. I had gotten back into guitar a few months after the surgery as a way to reconnect the nerve to my brain and exercise the hand, so I ended up working on guitar technique in a far more disciplined way than I had as a kid, when I was really rebelling and switched from violin to guitar, classical to rock music. But back then I already had years of technique built in from classical violin, and the application to guitar was not a difficult move. Now I was rebuilding, and that took more effort.

I started a couple of low key bands in Shanghai, and gigged out a few times, but not very much. It was a little frustrating, actually, because the bass player and I were ready to take our licks on stage and woodshed to get better, and honestly the drummer never felt comfortable enough to want to gig. He is a very talented musician himself, who had studied raga forms on tabla in India, but it seemed to me that he held himself to an impossible standard, or maybe it was just nerves. Either way Glaze made very few appearances. Possibly also because improvisational instrumental psychedelic rock bands have never been a particularly popular proposition. Following that, I just worked for a few years until David Bowie passed away. To make a long story short, the Bowie Tribute show that we put on was a pretty big success, and that band led to other performances, but also other tribute bands, and I was asked to be in several more acts, so for a few years, I was one of the guys in that scene in Shanghai. I feel like I had a good rep as a good player, a good teammate, a good hang, someone who came prepared and knew when to be professional and when to hang loose. I did everything ranging from Elvis and Little Richard tunes through 70s classic rock to Van Halen (Roth era) to the Steely Dan tribute and the Foo Fighters tribute band, the last of which is still active, having gone through a lot of great players in Shanghai. I never really got into the sessions scene although I did do a few sessions for TVC music. Nor did I really get into the blues and jazz scene, which was quite prominent, although I did do a few paid gigs of each style.

At any rate, by the time Glenn came calling my chops were beyond what they had been and my exposure to different music scenes meant that I had a lot more varied songs under my fingertips and a very good working understanding of music theory for composition as well as improvisation (related but a little different in their approaches). Our band Agony Sauce, an anagram of Case and Ouyang, made it to the finals of that year’s Nur Ein, where we faced off against the mighty Vowl Sounds and lost to their excellent entry. I became fast friends with the Vowl Sounds duo of Huan-Hua Chye and Tom Morton, and we would collaborate on several tracks later.

Those songs got remixed and remastered, with three new songs that were written much later, into the Agony Sauce album, a heady stew of rock and pop that integrated influences from the 60s up through the early 2000s. It was very eclectic, commercially viable songs with catchy choruses sitting right next to heavy rockers and spacey dissonant tunes. Glenn handled the lyrics, with some input from me, mostly just editing and maybe a line here or there, as well as discussing directions for the lyrical concepts, and we split the music duties writing-wise and performance-wise. A lot of the drums were done by a Brazilian guy Glenn met on the internet, Caio. Although we would eventually later work on tribute songs to Rush, Van Halen, and Aerosmith together, it wasn’t all smooth. Glenn and I didn’t always see eye to eye on things, and Caio being on a different continent and also very much a younger ROCK guy, didn’t always get the feel right on the takes he sent up, which were also often pre-mixed and compressed in a style totally different than what we were going for sonically. But we got there, everyone wanted to make a good album and I think we did. The album cover art from Chris Ryder capped the whole thing off.

Some time after we released Agony Sauce I was back into the Songfight world, but as someone who didn’t really sing lead or write lyrics, I was looking for collaborators, and mostly did one offs here and there with different people. Then at some point I hit a really creative spell and suddenly I was doing two bands at the same time, Moody Vermin with Evermind and Roymond, and Yaks of the Industry, with a conglomerate of old guard Songfighters who mostly came in right around the time I did, or were around before I left the site the first time when I went to China: JB, Ken Mahru, Future Boy, Sam Douglass, and some contributions from Huan-Hua.

For several fights in a row, spanning a few months, I was writing and recording music with both bands for the same fights. Moody Vermin was more oriented towards progressive rock, a genre that Evermind, Roy and I all loved but was sorely underrepresented on Songfight (genres and categories underrepresented on Songfight could be its own essay I suppose). We had very few illusions about performing well but we knew that we had a vibe going. Moody Vermin music ended up mostly being written and structured and arranged out by me, as well as mixing and mastering. Evermind played bass, mixed a couple songs and wrote most of the lyrics, Roy wrote lyrics and contributed as needed. When we hit the end of that first spurt of creativity, we had some 6 or 7 songs and had established a concept. We were doing songs each time that were inspired by and in a sense an homage to our progressive rock influences. We went through Rush, King Crimson, Bowie, some ELP, Pink Floyd, a smattering of Genesis, NIN, Tool. When it came to finishing a whole album however, the last few songs took several more months to get through, just because of life and how hard it is to keep one creative spark going over long periods of time, especially when the people are in different parts of the country. But eventually we got there, with an album cover painted by Tom Morton. The overall album concept came together in the title, Influence, with songs that talked about video games, addiction, cults, social media, the surveillance state, and the right-wing grift machine. I know it’s unlikely that album finds its audience but I’m really proud of it. The guitars for this were primarily humbucker guitars, my trusty old Les Paul Custom 1968 reissue with OX4 low wind pickups and a purple 2001 Ernie Ball Music Man Axis for occasional bits that needed whammy or just a heavier tone. These were chosen as guitars that fit the profile of the ones used in the bands we were looking to for inspiration–they are pretty much all Les Paul bands, and especially the Custom (except for Pink Floyd of course, but the song we wrote based on their style was an acoustic tune, for which I dabbled in writing the lyrics for the first time in quite a while).

Yaks took a totally different approach, going for 80s style synth pop. Yaks was an easy lift for me, and by design it was a relatively easier lift for everyone in the band, because each of us just did a role and we took turns as producer. So I was the guitar player. Ken wrote lyrics. JB sang. Future Boy contributed Rhodes and synths, Sam specialized in gated reverb electronic tom-tom riffs. Of course we all were opinionated and were more than willing to contribute whatever was necessary, but also we all were happy to stay in our lanes and not have to take all the burden on any one individual. For the first album, I would say 90% of it was initially derived from JB mucking around with Logic and making riffs and loops in a relentlessly synthpop style, and the rest of us decorating on top. It was generally happy, upbeat, uptempo music, and I wrote some of my best guitar solos for that music. I was able to spend time focusing on writing and playing solos that were musically a little different, coming from slightly oblique directions but also hopefully not just matching the feel but adding new dimensions to the emotional content. To get those tones evocative of 80’s synthpop, I specifically only used my Stratocaster in the middle/bridge notch position with cleanish amps into a chorused digital delay, which to me is pretty much one of the defining guitar sounds of that era. There were plenty of guitar sounds in the 80s of course but certain sounds are so heavily associated with the time, and that’s one of them.

The second Yaks album was taken from our semi-final reaching effort in Nur Ein from last year, interestingly that music was written entirely differently than the first album. For the most part the music was produced by Future Boy, who wanted the practice in preparation for doing his own solo album. I produced a couple of the tracks when Future Boy could not due to schedule issues. But the composition was largely the efforts of myself and Future Boy, because JB had less time available then. Everything was always a team effort of course, but I mean the first instrumental music idea seeds, initial chord progressions, arrangements, mixing tricks, etc. This was also the album we learned that if you want to win things, just have Future Boy play a Rhodes solo. For this album, I used my newly acquired Custom Telecaster, again to keep with the skinnier single coil sound that left more space to the synths and other instrumentation, but also because I had installed a palm operated B-bender on it, which is such a great, non-invasive mod to make to a Tele, and allows you to add a very unique color. It just makes guitar parts sound classy.

We do in fact already have music for a third Yaks album to come out hopefully early next year, and from the guitar side, that will mostly be dominated by what was my new acquisition at the time, a Reverend Airwave 12 string. Their marketing hype is that it’s an electric 12 that solves most of the very annoying intonation and stability problems of most previous electric 12s, and also allows you to get reasonable ballparks of the tones of the most popular types of electric 12s. Frankly I love this guitar and it’s an amazing secret weapon, like with the B-bender Tele, it’s a way of getting simple guitar parts to just sound more interesting and engaging in a relatively unobtrusive way.

All of this background has been to say, I’ve always been a good team player and I think an excellent guitar player, fitting into roles. Sure, I’ve had opinions about every aspect of the music and I’m not particularly shy about sharing those opinions, because they are there to help improve things, not to criticize other people. People who’ve worked with me know I’m quite hard on myself too. I don’t want things to go out if they are just, in the words of Charlie Cole, bullshit. And by bullshit I mean “not meaningful.” Sometimes that meaning is simply a moment of joy or a sly aside, but something that provokes either an intellectual or emotional response, preferably both.

I realized at some point earlier this year whilst in the middle of mastering the Moody Vermin album, before I got around to doing the second Yaks album, that I needed to challenge myself to write music that was representative of fully me, myself, where I am in my artistic/musical journey beyond my abilities as a team player. I would have to *shudder* write lyrics and sing my own songs.

To be continued…

My friend Andres is not only a really good flamenco guitarist, but he’s been my bebop teacher for a while now, and he really loves playing jazz. For a long time on gigs though, he used whatever backline amps were provided until last year, when he decided to get serious about having a consistently good tone. Last year, he wanted rig built for maximum portability, so he went with a small pedalboard featuring a Mooer preamp pedal and power amp/speaker cab simulation pedal. The advantage of this kind of setup, besides ease of transport, is that sound techs love it — it plugs right into a PA system and your tone will always be the same. But over time, Andres began to realize that even though the tone was consistent, it just wasn’t that inspiring.

It’s the worst feeling to have, when you try to express your musical ideas but the tone just isn’t cooperating. Even if you are professional and experienced enough that you can find a way to play through bad tone, it can be a profoundly depressing ordeal. Really good tone, on the other hand, takes your playing to new places, allows you to confidently explore and expand the limits of what you can do. I know it sounds magical and fantastic, but it’s true. And so Andres decided that he needed to take the plunge and commit to an amplifier.

But what amplifier to get? There are so many options today for so many different niches, that the world of amplifiers can be daunting. This article is not intended to solve your amp selection problems as much as it will describe a certain thinking process for a bebop jazz player. The most important question is, what kind of tone do you want? In Andres’ case, he needs a superb clean tone that is strongly fundamental, fat, and round. What does that mean?

When you play a note, you aren’t just hearing the indicated note, you’re also hearing overtones and harmonics. It’s the resonance between all of those frequencies that creates the character of the tone. Strong fundamental tone means that the tone emphasizes the base note that is being played, so you get less overtones. For a rock or blues trio, you might want more overtones, which make the tone sound more energized, on the edge of feedback with the right gain structure, but for Andres, he wanted a strong fundamental tone because in the kind of jazz he plays, he often needs to play with a pianist, so for his comping he wants a tone that will stay in its lane and fit into the band a bit more. At the same time, he needs notes to sound fat, meaty, and thick, without the muddiness that comes from fighting the bass guitar or the kick drum. And traditionally, bebop guitar tone features a rounded top end, just enough to cut through and be heard, but without the kind of sizzle you need in, say, a hard rock band.

Once you understand what you’re looking for, the traditional amps that people use for jazz just make sense: Fender tweed and blackface amps, known for their clean headroom, rounded treble, and bell-like tone — the tweeds of course have less headroom and more hair, while the blackfaces are cleaner with more volume. Polytone and Roland JC solid state amps are built to produce exactly that kind of strongly fundamental clean tone as well. Part of the reason you find not so many players using Vox or Marshall amps for bebop jazz (but they are abundant in fusion and funk, where more gain is desirable) is the sparkling treble, those amps often don’t sound round enough for a traditional bebop tone without a lot of help.

Andres decided quickly that with the main guitar he planned to use, a Hofner Verythin, which is a thinline semihollow similar to a Gibson ES-335, he really wanted to use a Fender blackface type combo amp. Choosing a Fender blackface type also comes with other advantages — most of those amps come with a spring reverb, and sometimes a tremolo, which means that you get options for effects without having to carry a pedalboard, or maybe just one gain effect for solo boosting — although again, generally with a high headroom clean amp, it is easy to control your volume level from the guitar controls. The combo amp made sense for portability as well.

The only remaining question was, what size amp to get? The vaunted Fender Twin Reverb, named for its two 12" speakers, was a terrific tonal choice, but at 85 watts, reaching the sweet spot in the amplifier meant having to turn up much louder than most of his gigs required — causing problems for the sound tech, the venue, and the other members of the band, especially singers. Remember that as we’ve discussed before, the relationship between power and volume is not linear, but logarithmic, meaning that a 50 watt amp is actually nearly as loud as a 100 watt amp. A 10 watt amp at full volume is half as loud as a 100 watt amp, and a 1 watt amp is half as loud as a 10 watt amp. So for all practical intents and purposes, a gigging musician needs to consider the kind of music s/he plays and the kind of band in order to have the appropriate amp.

In the end, Andres decided to save up for the Fender Princeton Reverb, a tube combo amp that stays pretty clean and gets the type of EQ that Andres wanted for his bebop tone. At 15 watts, it has the power to compete with a bebop jazz drummer and enough volume to be used as its own monitor, and even to be the only source of guitar sound at a small gig.

Were there other choices? Yes, many! There are plenty of other boutique and custom amps that might even provide better tone or more flexibility, i.e. more options for gain that make them versatile for use in more genres. However, in general, I usually recommend the simplest circuit for what you need, as I tend to believe that the less things in between you and your expression on the instrument, the better. That doesn’t make someone using an Egnater Tweaker or a Mesa Boogie with a billion switches and options wrong, definitely not. But for Andres, the Princeton was the perfect choice, simple, easy, with a tone that he finds inspiring every time he plugs in.

You can check out Andres’ gigging all over Shanghai with various jazz, folk, funk, and flamenco groups, and if you see him, don’t forget to tell him how great his tone is!

Check out his YouTube at http://yt.vu/+andrescoca

Belcat 50 Watt Amp Head

You got your first electric guitar, maybe it came as part of a starter kit, with a little solid state amp and a terribly flimsy cable. You’ve played for a couple of years and you can play a few songs, so now you’re ready for a “real” amp. But which one to choose?

We live in a great era where options exist for all levels of expertise and practical needs, all at our fingertips. There is something perfect for you out there; you just need to keep a few simple points in mind.

1. How Loud Do You Need to Be?

If you are just getting a little amp for home practice, the fact is that you don’t need a large amplifier at all. Decibels are the measure of how loud something is, but the trick of it is that the relationship between power, as expressed in wattage, and loudness is logarithmic, not linear. That mouthful of words simply means that a 50 watt amp is not only half as loud as a 100 watt amp. It’s actually almost as loud, to the human ear. If you wanted an amp to be half as loud as a 100 watt amp, you’d have to be playing a 10 watt amp, as the ratio of power to loudness is about 10:1, not 1:1. For regular home use, a 5 watt amp is plenty loud, on its own, to create havoc with the neighbors. Why would you ever want anything more?

Well, if you want to play with a drummer, you’ll immediately find that you need quite a bit more volume. A 15 or 20 watt amp can be a great solution here for your rehearsal room. And if you play small gigs where the amps aren’t going to be miked into the PA, a 15–20 watt amp is really the minimum in order to get enough sound projection that the room will hear your funky rhythms and searing solos. Of course, the bigger the rooms, the bigger the amp you might need, if you aren’t going through the PA. But have no fear — these days most of the time for any decently sized venue, you’ll be able to mic your amp and run the guitar through the PA, so if you like the tone of your smaller amp, you can just use that, and have the amp itself function as your monitor.

2. How Much Headroom Do You Need?

The sonically defining characteristic of the tube amp over solid state is that actually, the signal is never really 100% clean. Tube amps introduce rich, saturated distortion, the kind our ears like, very early on in the sound reproduction cycle, which you often hear as more harmonics and a warm dynamic presence that you don’t often hear in cheaper solid state amps. But in a tube amp, as there’s more signal and more power introduced into the circuit, you get more gain/drive and distortion. The reason why a 100 watt amp was necessary for early rockers like Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimi Hendrix et al. wasn’t just the need to reach the back of large rooms, it was to reach it with the right amount of gain in the amplifier tone. A 50 watt amplifier might be almost as loud, but at the same volume, the signal will be much more distorted in a 50 watt amp, and cleaner in the 100 watt amp. So you need to know, how clean do you need to be?

3. What Genre of Music Will You Play?

Once again, you have to know what application you intend for the amplifier. If you’re playing bebop jazz, you need an amp that will stay pretty pristinely clean through most of the volume range, which is why so many jazz players swear by solid state amps like the Roland Jazz Chorus, the Polybrute, and more recently Quilter — they stay clean no matter what — or big old Fender tube amps like a Twin, Pro, or Super. If you’re playing blues, you want an amp that sounds good when it’s sitting right on the edge of overdrive. When that amp is just starting to break up, you can control whether your tone is clean or singing dirty with the force of your picking, a beautiful sound. Fender Vibroverbs, Supers and Deluxes will do this, and don’t overlook the slabs of tone you can get from a Princeton Reverb.

If you play harder rock or anything gainier, with more distortion, you need more gain from the amp, and that’s when higher gain circuits like the Marshall JCM800, and all the modern high gain amps — Soldano, Mesa, Diezel, Engl, Peavey 6505, and such come into play. No matter how much you push an amp designed to be relatively clean and low gain, it won’t be able to do that kind of tone without a pedal.

Once you’re able to answer these questions, we’re ready to move on to even more detailed considerations. Over the following articles, we’ll consider a few different cases with hypothetical players, and find the perfect tube amps for them!

I’m Ready for My First Tube Amp was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

About once a month, I go out with a guitar buddy or two to the local guitar shop and check out the new overdrive pedals. They are the fastest selling, quickest growing segment of the stompbox market — virtually every guitar effects manufacturer has a signature overdrive effect or two that put them on the map. There are so many it’s hard to keep track of the different drives and what they will do for your tone. How can you pick the perfect overdrive for your playing and needs?

The first thing to know is that most overdrives are really just variations of a few tried and true circuits. Some of the most legendary ones:

1. Tubescreamer. This is the big one. Famous for being used by SRV and everyone else, the Tubescreamer is a medium-gain drive pedal that has a strong mid-hump and is relatively compressed. These, in fact are the three characteristics to look at when evaluating drive pedals: how much gain does it have, what is the EQ profile, and how much compression does it add? Being able to tell the differences here will be invaluable to selecting the right overdrive for you and your amp.

For example, SRV paired his TS-808 (later TS-9) with powerful Fender amps, which are known for their scooped mids and big bass. As a blues player, he didn’t need a lot of gain, just enough to push the amps a little harder for sustain and fatness. The TS mid-hump accomplished two things for Stevie, it filled in the mids that his Fender amps lacked, making the sound fatter and fuller, and chopped off some of the bass even before it hit the preamp, tightening up his sound a lot, which meant that his guitar wouldn’t fight the bass for a clearer, more powerful overall band sound. Kirk Hammett also famously used a TS-style circuit with his Marshalls. Kirk doesn’t need a lot of gain from a pedal either, not with his high gain Marshalls, but the low end tightening from using a pedal sounds more aggressive and chunkier than dialing out the bass after the preamp as in the Marshall amp circuit. Once again, the mids fill in a bit more for a fluid lead sound. In both cases, the compression is pleasing as well for lead applications, where consistency in the presence of the notes matters more to the listener.

Both SRV and Kirk Hammett use their TS pedals as high level, low gain — i.e. as a color boost. That’s because they were able to use amps that were cranked already. Certainly many others crank up the gain on their TS pedals and get great, smooth, creamy tones as well — there’s no wrong way to use the pedal.

Most overdrive pedals are variations on the Tubescreamer, as it is a relatively simple circuit. Component replacements can change the EQ profile, compression levels, and increase gain. Common TS mods/variations change the degree of bass cut, change the edginess (TS pedals use symmetrical clipping, which sounds smoother; asymmetrical clipping, as in a Boss Blues Driver, is much edgier and spikier. Other mods reduce the level of compression, making the tone more dynamic and “natural.”

If you like the basic Tubescreamer tonal palette, the overdrive world is your oyster. I literally don’t have the time or space to list every variant of the Tubescreamer, but most of the time, anything that is green or says green, or vintage in the name of the overdrive is a TS-style circuit with some variation.

2. Bluesbreaker. Way back in the day, Marshall made pedals to replicate the paradigm-shifting sound of the Marshall Bluesbreaker combo amp, used by Eric Clapton in his deity days on the “Beano” album. As one of the early “amp-in-a-box” type stomps, the Bluesbreaker was only lightly compressed, fairly low gain, with a large dynamic range compared to a TS type, less of an obvious mid-hump, more brightness, and retained more bass. Since it replicated an early Marshall amp tone, it didn’t have the upper mid snarl that is more familiar to rock fans — we will certainly talk about amp types at a later date. Instead, in the days before the boutique pedal boom, it came to market, did ok, and eventually got scrapped.

Some time later, the Bluesbreaker style circuit was revived in the Analogman King of Tone, one the pedals that did actually kick off the boutique pedal craze. It became the go-to option for people who didn’t want or need a lot of gain, so they wanted a color boost, but one with more dynamics, openness, and perceived transparency than a Tubescreamer.

3. Klon Centaur Professional Overdrive. When Bill Finnegan came up with this huge headroom overdrive circuit, there was no way to know how much it would change the guitar world. But soon pro players everywhere lauded its use as a “special sauce” circuit, something that added both fatness and sparkle to their sound, with its unique take on the midrange. The thing to remember is that the guitar is by nature a midrange instrument, and the human ear can perceive extremely subtle variations in the midrange frequencies — it’s part of how we tell different people’s voices apart. In a sense, to a human ear, the guitar is just another voice. The Klon circuit is unique in the way that it alters the voltage, driving 18 volts into the op-amp instead of 9v like most regular circuits. The different response of the op-amp is a key element to the Klon sound.

The differences between all of these overdrives can be quite subtle, but the fundamentals are the same: gain range, EQ voicing, and compression level. Once you play around with enough pedals, you will start to hear the TS heritage of the Wampler Clarksdale, Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive, and many others; the Bluesbreaker heritage of the KOT, JHS Morning Glory, CMAT Mods Butah, etc.; and the Klon heritage of the Wampler Tumnus, EHX Soul Food, J Rockett Archer, and anything “Mythical” or “Legendary.” Which one suits your playing and tonal needs is an individual call, the only real way to know is to go out and try them all!

*NB. Due to limitations of space and time, I am not going to delve into other fantastic overdrive circuits like the Timmy or my personal favorite, the Subdecay Liquid Sunshine. Let’s just note that of the overdrives I use myself, I prefer low gain drives that are relatively more transparent (transparency is a canard, actually, since anything that adds gain will change the EQ curve, adding mids in particular, and needing to cut bass before it just flubs out) and less compressed, because I mostly like to use a “clean+” tone where I can vary between gain levels just from turning the volume knob on the guitar and most importantly, from my own pick attack.

Styles of Overdrives was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now that we’ve gone through the different types of overdrives, let’s step back for a moment and ask a question. When we play an electric guitar, what comprises the instrument we play? Well obviously, you reply, the guitar is the instrument. But an electric guitar needs an amplifer of some kind, whether tube, solid state, or digital, in order to make sound that can be effective with the rest of a band. And that requires a cable, at the very least. Guitar, cable, amplifier. Well, the guitar itself can be broken down into strings, pickups, wood, hardware, wiring harness. The amplifier has a preamp, power amp, transformers, rectifier, speakers. What I’m getting at is that every element in the signal chain is part of your instrument when you’re playing the electric guitar — and that’s before you even talk about the room that you’re hearing the sounds in.

To me, the great strength of the electric guitar is exactly that it isn’t just an acoustic instrument, limited to acoustic sounds. If you want to just play with a sparkling clean tone, with the minimum amount of signal processing, you can do that. But that’s no less valid than the player who has every stompbox under the sun in the signal chain, because the electric guitar is a particular kind of modular synth, and that’s part of what is so unique and individual about it.

Overdrive is one of the most common tonal flavors

Here are the main uses of overdrives:

1. Solo boost. You’ve got a kicking rhythm tone and are rocking out (or jazzing out, or funking, or bluesing, or bossa-ing, it’s up to you), and it’s time to take your solo. But you want a different guitar tone, at the very least you want to be louder, to declare yourself in solo mode, to take the sonic spotlight. Here, a boost or overdrive set relatively clean is enough to take you to the next level.

2. Lead tone. You have a clean or relatively clean amp, but you want a different flavor for your lead parts, not just a volume boost, but more gain and saturation, to go from a snappy, spanky clean tone to singing sustain. An overdrive pedal can get you there — as you turn up the gain, you’ll get more compression, saturation and sustain. You’ll need to listen carefully to the EQ, and adjust the tone knob/s to taste.

3. Sweetening your base tone. Whether clean or dirty, some players want a little more oomph to their clean or dirty rhythm tone, the one they will be in for most of the song/set. Here, a boost or drive pedal can help you get the tone you like from almost any amp set relatively flat and clean. This way, you can get consistent amounts of fatness, saturation, sustain and clarity from any amp that might be available to you in the studio or at a venue.

4. Consistent tone at any volume level. One of the bugbears of electric guitar playing is how to keep the tone you like regardless of whether you’re playing at home, in a quiet recording studio, in a rehearsal room, or on various different stages, in various different situations. Using the right overdrive pedal or pedal combinations can help you achieve the tone that feels and sounds right to you no matter what the acceptable volume level is for the situation you’re in.

Stay tuned for the next installment, when we dive into the basic different types of overdrive circuits, so you can make great choices of which kind of overdrive suits you best!

• Louder
• More Sustain
• Fatter/Fuller
• Less Harsh
• Tighter Bass

One of the stories about Eddie Van Halen’s famous Frankenstein strat, one of the world’s most famous partscasters (in the company of Clapton’s Blackie and Gilmour’s Black Strat. And Hendrix’s favorite…black strat. See a trend here?) is that when young Eddie put in a rewound Gibson PAF from his ES-335, he couldn’t figure out how to wire the tone control in the circuit, so he only had the volume potentiometer active, and stuck the knob labeled TONE on it. There is a lot of truth to the idea that turning up a guitar and amp makes it sound better, so let’s understand why that is.

When you turn knobs on most guitars and tube amps, it’s vital to remember that all of those controls are subtractive, not additive. That means that at 10 on the volume knob, for example, you are getting the maximum signal possible from the guitar’s passive circuitry. The guitar isn’t adding any extra volume. Same thing for the tone knob, it can only reduce brightness from a maximum level, it can’t add any. That’s true for all of the amp controls as well, usually, unless you have one of the not very many amps that use active EQ circuitry. When the controls are all dimed, that is the maximum potential of your guitar and amp combination. If your pickups are lower output, you will get more dynamics but less volume than a guitar with high output pickups. If your amp is designed to have a big, loose bass at top volume, then there’s nothing you can really do about it. And heavens forbid if you love the tone of your guitar and amp when its cranked but you have to play a gig where you can’t crank it.

That’s where drive pedals come in. When Keef first hit the Maestro or Clapton first hit the Dallas Rangemaster, they were suddenly able to get more sustain, fatter tones, and ones that sounded like the amps were really cooking, even if they weren’t. That, in a nutshell, is what drive pedals do.

Drive pedals can be understood in four basic categories:

1. Boost pedals. Boost pedals are some of the simplest circuits, because they simply increase level. Some boosts increase level at specific frequencies more than others, even as they increase the total overall level, these are generally referred to as color boosts, or, they can be specifically refer to the boosted frequencies, aka treble boosts or mid boosts. These pedals increase level and not gain, so in front of a clean amp, they just make everything louder. In front of a dirty amp, they will push the preamp into clipping faster, so you can get more of your amp’s natural overdrive sounds at a lower volume level.

2. Overdrive pedals. These are pedals that increase both level and gain, so they can do what a colored boost pedal does, and for some pedals, they can even be close to a clean boost. Normally they don’t really do truly clean boost though, because the circuit is built to an EQ profile that will sound good with the gain control. The difference between gain and volume is crucial here. In an overdrive pedal, volume is the final level of the effect that goes out after processing. Gain is the level that goes in to be processed by the effect. Do you see the difference? Gain is like your guitar’s volume knob, and Volume is like the amp’s volume knob. The more gain, usually the more saturation, bass, and treble attenuation, as well as making things louder. Volume is just loudness. So an overdrive pedal basically puts a preamp in front of your amp, and many manufacturers actually just make preamp pedals that can be used as overdrives. What this means practically is that overdrive pedals give you one more level of tone shaping over a boost pedal. Overdrives, even the so-called transparent ones, usually have a mid-hump EQ, i.e. they cut some bass and treble while emphasizing mids. The Tubescreamer is the most well known example of this, but the Klon and the Bluesbreaker also cut lows, round highs, and push mids, just to different degrees and in different frequency ranges. This is really because otherwise drive circuits would produce an ugly, fartily large bass and harsh, ear-splitting treble when they increased the gain. Increasing mids is part of what makes overdrives sound smooth and pleasant.

3. Distortion pedals. Distortions operate in some ways very similarly to overdrives, but the clipping is different. Clipping describes how the signal behaves when it gets bigger than the circuit can cleanly handle. A soundwave looks like a squiggly line inside a box. But when you add gain and volume, the wave gets squished up against the top and bottom of the box, and how the wave handles that is called clipping.

What an overdrive does is typically soft clipping, as you can see from the image above, when the waveform approaches its limits, it rounds out, creating a smoother type of sound. Distortions generally use hard clipping, which starts approaching a more trapezoid-shaped wave. That means that distortions often sound a bit edgier and more aggressive, even as they also push mids. The difference in most distortions is really in which they push and by how much over the range of the circuit. Think of the venerable ProCo Rat as opposed to the Tubescreamer, and you can imagine how with the different things they do, why they are such a potent combination.

4. Fuzz pedals. Fuzz pedals are the square wave, mid-scooped distortion. Keef used it to substitute for horns in “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, but Hendrix really started showing the range of the fuzz as his main tone shaper. With a germanium Fuzz Face, Hendrix was able to create thick slabs of massive, fat, in-your-face sustain, but he also rolled back the guitar’s volume knob to change gain levels and get a uniquely wiry clean-ish tone. Gilmour used his Fuzz Face for those regal, buttery tones on Dark Side of the Moon, showing the versatility of the effect in a mix compared to Hendrix.

All of these four options give you different ways to control gain levels going into your amplifier, and as a result, they create different kinds of tones. This brings us back to the original question, why do you need an overdrive?

In Part II, we will continue to explore the enormously rewarding world of drive pedals!

I’ve Got a Great Amp, Why Do I Need an Overdrive? was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the characteristics I like most about guitar players is that most of us are always trying to improve at the instrument. When you’re constantly looking at how to get better, it’s inevitable that you will eventually find yourself in a rut. You’ll find that you’re playing the same things over and over, the ideas aren’t fresh anymore. You might be getting more adept at doing the things you know how to do, but you need some ideas to spark your next wave of creativity.

The simplest answer is: do something different. But the things that each person knows and is good at in their guitar playing is unique and individual, so what follows here is by no means a comprehensive list. Instead, it is more of a general guide to different categories of ideas, music theory, techniques, and more that we can explore in greater depth in future guitarticles.

1. Explore New Techniques. It seems like a cliché now, but when I first started playing guitar, I was entranced by Eddie Van Halen. His playing simultaneously sounded both effortless and urgent, and while his personal attack played a large part in that, it was the fingertapping technique that stood out to me, a violin player. These were fluid arpeggios that didn’t even sound like a guitar. Diving down the well of the tapping technique took me to new places and new ways of thinking about the fretboard, and even though I don’t tap much anymore, I gained an immense amount from having gone down that rabbit hole. Of course, tapping isn’t the only technique — you can pick whatever is new and interesting to your personal taste. Harp harmonics, using the whammy bar as a way to play melodies ala Jeff Beck, hybrid picking, slide guitar, learning all of the natural harmonics (you can play the entire chromatic scale!), new right-hand strumming patterns — guitar techniques are an endless source of inspiration that you can use in any song.
2. Explore New Genres of Music. A few years ago, I got tired of playing the same blues and classic rock songs that my bands were doing. It just didn’t feel challenging anymore, because the songs all felt the same anyway. That’s when I got a Johnny Hiland TrueFire course and all of a sudden my mind blew wide open. His brand of country-style chicken pickin’, not just with hybrid picking, but the concepts of how to use chords or sit them in different places in the rhythm changed my thinking. I’ll never be a great country or bluegrass player, but being able to use some of that vocabulary, or just the feel, can help add spice to a song. The world is your oyster. Learn a little bebop. Learn some folk fingerstyle, or rockabilly licks, or Moroccan music, or classical — it’s all right there for you to integrate into your own style.
3. Explore Music Theory. One of the great things about learning more about how and why the music you love actually works — why this chord follows that chord, or why you can play this scale over this chord, but not that scale, is that it directly applies to the music you’re making now, and can quickly help you sound fresh with new applications of things you already know how to do. For example, the minor pentatonic scale is a shape that pretty much everyone knows, and uses. But you’re not just limited to using the minor pentatonic based on the root note, the lowest note, of the scale. Let’s say we’ve got a vamp of G7, and we need some ideas of scales we can work with. What we know is that we can play G minor pentatonic, at the 3rd fret. But what we know from music theory is that G7 is the V chord of C major. The minor chords in that scale are the ii, iii, and vi, so suddenly we can play minor pentatonics from D (the ii), E (the iii), and A (the vi). E minor pentatonic will sound good too because it is the relative minor of G, which means it will have the notes of G major pentatonic, another useful flavor. Once we leap into G major, we realize that B minor pentatonic also becomes available because it’s the iii of G major. And we haven’t even started talking about how to use the other minor pentatonics as versions of altered scales. Whew — all that just from the same shape that everyone knows and loves!
4. Try New Sounds. The manufacturers should be lining up to give me money now, right? The truth is that you don’t always need to spend big money on a new pedal, amplifier, or guitar, although that is of course often a great way to get new inspiration through new sounds. Most people play with the pointy end of their guitar pick. But there’s a huge difference in tone if you play with the rounded part instead. Or if you hold the pick at a different angle to the strings — it can sounds raspier or smoother. Choking up on the pick or holding it more loosely will also get you different effects. So experimenting with what you already have can be a fun way to get to know other sides of your familiar gear, and the new tones you find will generate more new ideas.

“Doing something different” sounds so simple and easy, but as you can see, once you really start taking the dive, there’s a whole new world under that sea.

The 21st century has been a veritable guitar bonanza. Non-US production has made it possible for companies to build very serviceable guitars at a fraction of the price that even standard guitar lines go for, let alone premium or custom shop guitars. For the experienced player, it may take a little time, but finding that Squier, Epiphone, or any one of the myriad inexpensive electric guitar brands that come out of the same Chinese, Korean, or Indonesian factories with a good feeling neck, solid intonation, and a good playing feel is eminently achievable.

Some of the corners that have been cut to make decent guitars at this price point are unchangeable, but some of them are easily improved with simple modifications that almost anyone can do. It is vital that the contemporary guitarist know which is which, because just a little bit of elbow grease and a small investment could deliver outsized tonal benefits.

First, let’s talk about the things that can’t be changed. It’s really down to wood and construction type. The quality and type of wood can’t be changed, unless you’re stripping parts for a totally different guitar. If you have a snappy, attack-heavy sounding ash Strat, but you really wanted a more mid-rangey, smooth alder tone? Better off trading in your guitar. If the placement of the bridge is off, it will never intonate correctly. And if you really wanted the percussive sound of a 25.5" scale solidbody Fender, a 335-style semihollow with 24.75" scale will always sound a bit different. Not bad, but different — that’s why it’s always important to, as the hashtag says, #knowyourtone.

However, if you think your neck feels too big, it can be shaved down. Pickup changes are so ubiquitous that a lot of players buy a new guitar already knowing what aftermarket pickups are going in as soon as they get home. New tuners can have a tonal impact, besides improving how the guitar holds tune, although these days it’s usually not the tuners that are a problem.

The single biggest corner-cutting move that you can mod is the wiring harness of your guitar, that is the potentiometers, capacitors, and wiring that makes up the volume and tone circuits of your guitar. For the most part, these are parts you can’t see, which may be why it’s so easy for factories to cheap out on them. Pots and caps with low quality tolerances create the annoying effect where the volume knob is either on or off, with no gradations of volume in between. Same issue with tone control, either the treble is full up or it’s completely mud. The wire used to connect the electronics is often thin, plastic-coated wire. The insulation doesn’t matter so much, but a bigger, sturdier wire can be a better conduit for signal.

I made this change on my old partcaster. Instead of the old dime-sized pots, I replaced them with correct value full-size CTS pots (in this case, 500k pots as my partscaster is loaded with humbuckers), Russian paper-in-oil capacitors, which are great and cheaper than branded Gibson ones, and Formvar cloth-coated wire like vintage 50s Strats. Solid body guitars are the easiest platforms to do these mods; a semihollow or hollowbody means you need to take the extra step of hooking on a wire or thread so that getting the pots back up through the correct holes is easier.

On plugging in, I immediately heard the difference. People say it’s like a blanket being taken off the speaker, and I found that accurate. There was more clarity and complexity to the guitar’s base tones, and an extra brightness that wasn’t harsh, just detailed. Suddenly, the tone controls because much more useable, as they delivered at least 6 distinct different levels of treble roll-off instead of only full on or full off. Similarly, the volume control became a good gain control, able to go from clean, to edge of breakup, to light crunch, to heavy crunch, to singing sustain, just with a quick touch.

The best bit? All of these parts can be had for relatively inexpensive prices, even considering getting a soldering gun — there are plenty of soldering tutorials on YouTube, even such that I could do it. Doing this one mod will help you find tones in your guitar that you didn’t even know were there. And it’s not limited to cheap guitars — sadly many top of the line guitars may not be using the best parts either. But never fear, great tone is right around the corner.