
How this storied player’s self-taught, nose-to-the-grindstone journey brought on one success after the next, and soon blossomed into an illustrious, historic career.
David Rorick, better known as Dave Roe, still isn’t sure how he got here. It’s been about 43 years since he left Hawaii and moved to Nashville to work as a bassist. He didn’t have any training or remarkable expertise—just enthusiasm, a work ethic, and a love for the open road. Over the next four decades, Roe parlayed those qualities into a legendary career, playing with some of the world’s greatest folk, Americana, blues, and country music stars.
On a Tuesday morning in early May, while taking a break from mowing the lawn of his home just outside Nashville, Roe almost sounds puzzled retracing his steps: touring and recording with Johnny Cash and Charlie Louvin, backing up Dwight Yoakam and Loretta Lynn, working as the in-house bassist for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound and as a coveted hired-gun session musician and mainstay in the Nashville gig circuit. “A jack-of-all-trades and an expert at none,” he quips.
That aside, Roe’s self-taught and intuitive upbringing on bass have made him a stylistic chameleon, with perhaps a deeper connection to the rhythms and feel of each genre he plays. His playing evidences a seamless quilting-together of his teachers—’50s, ’60s, and ’70s radio-pop sweetness, the swagger of his mother’s country records, the calm confidence of West Coast Americana, the flair and bravado of funk and disco. His bass parts are classic and unimpeachable, witness marks of a player who learned, with his body and spirit alongside his brain, how to play the bass in a way that people will want to hear.
Dave Roe lays down a track at his Nashville Home Studio, which he named Seven Deadly Sins.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Roe’s path from cover-band grinder in island tourist bars to one of the country’s most sought-after bass players might not make technical sense on paper. Thousands of others have started out the same way and never advanced beyond their hometowns. It doesn’t fit into the tidy algorithmic churn of modern life. But music isn’t about algorithms and optimization—not all of it, not yet. It’s still about feel and soul and heart, and a bit of luck.
Roe’s father was a military man, whose service eventually took him and his family to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He was stationed in a small town called EwaBeach about 40 miles outside of Honolulu on Hawaii’s third-largest island, Oahu. This is where Roe grew up. He was a drummer before he ever picked up a bass, but in high school, without any local bass players, Roe’s friends elected him to take up the instrument. His first bass wasn’t a bass at all: It was a 6-string Silvertone electric guitar, which Roe restrung with bass strings. “That didn’t last very long,” he says.
Roe didn’t have the money to buy a proper bass, so in 1969, his high-school sweetheart’s father went with him to a music store in Honolulu and signed for a Fender Jazz Bass and an old Guild amp for Roe. “That’s when I got my first really good gear,” he remembers.
Getting a real bass was one thing. Learning to play it was another. And Roe did it all himself—he’s still never taken a single formal lesson. “I sat down with records and taught myself,” he says. “I was a big Top 40 enthusiast. I loved anything that was on the radio.” That included the usual suspects: Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Cream, the Rolling Stones. “That’s really where I cut my teeth,” Roe continues, “just playing the blues and hippie rock and stuff like that.” Roe’s first band, a power trio playing covers by Chuck Berry and other early rock ’n’ roll pioneers, worked its way up to opening for Grand Funk Railroad in Honolulu.
Roe rips it up with guitarist Chris Casello at Robert’s Western World on Nashville’s Broadway entertainment strip.
Photo by Elise Casello
Roe moved east off Oahu to Maui in 1971 and joined a country outfit at a critical moment. Due to its relative proximity, the West Coast scene had an outsized impact on the island’s cultural imports, and once the hippie-country and Laurel Canyon folk waves swept over California in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it didn’t take long for it to reach Roe’s radio. His mother was a country fan and imparted some early affection for the genre, and, later, Roe would catch Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the Burrito Brothers when they toured Hawaii.
Roe didn’t sit still for long. After the country stint, he moved back to downtown Honolulu and played in a rhythm and blues band. In the mid ’70s, he went through a “real heavy” disco and funk phase, and dabbled in prog rock and jazz, too. “I was a working Top 40 musician,” says Roe. “When you work in a tourist town, you have to learn how to play a bunch of different stuff.” His learning technique was the same as ever: “I just would listen and play and try to pick up stuff and copy people. That’s all I did.”
But by the final years of that decade, the magic feeling was getting harder to find. There weren’t enough opportunities to create and live on playing original music, and after a decade of playing covers for tourists, it was time for something new. He settled on Nashville. “I just put my socks in a bag and took off,” says Roe.
Luckily, Roe had an insider in Music City. His cousin, a comedian and professional entertainer, lived in Nashville and let Roe crash with him when he arrived. More than that, he set Roe up with his first gig. His cousin knew folks at the Grand Ole Opry, and took Roe along to a show one evening. Roe was introduced to country artist Charlie Louvin that night, and as fate would have it, Louvin was looking for a bassist. Roe expected to be asked to audition, but Louvin simply told him when the bus was leaving for the tour. “That was a really good gig at the time, a highly respected gig,” says Roe. “That was really beneficial to me.”
Dave Roe's Gear
Roe gets ready for a take, with one of his Fender electrics along for the session.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Basses
- 1964 Fender Jazz Bass
- Alien Audio 5-string bass
- Lemur Music Jupiter upright bass (in studio)
- Blast Cult upright bass (live)
Amps
- Ampeg B4 Head and 410 Cabinet
Strings
- Dunlop .045–.105 flatwound strings for electric
- Pirastro Evah’s for upright
It can be hard to tell sometimes when a moment is the beginning of something, or if it started even before. Both things can be true, but playing with Louvin certainly seems like a critical moment in Roe’s career. After playing with Louvin for three months, Roe was recommended to Jerry Reed, who hired him for his live band. He says gigging with Reed and his band took things to another level. Reed’s musicians, including Kerry Marx and the Blackmon Brothers, were aces, and playing alongside them meant Roe was, too.
Roe says from then on, his career had “a movement to it.” After working with Reed, he joined Chet Atkins for a short stint (“It doesn’t even feel like I was really there,” he admits), and for the next 20 years, he worked the road with a rotating cast of country greats: Mel Tillis, Dottie West, Vince Gill, and Faith Hill all tapped Roe for touring. By the early ’90s, he’d begun doing session work in addition to touring gigs.
Roe was on a break from touring with Vern Gosdin in 1992 when he got a phone call at home that changed his life. On the other end of the line was an unmistakable voice. It was Johnny Cash. Cash’s publicist had jammed with Roe around town and mentioned him to Cash, who wanted Roe to play with him. “He just said, ‘I want you to come and play in my band, and you’re gonna have to play upright bass,’” recalls Roe, who accepted immediately. There was one problem: He had never played upright bass.
“I think it was sort of understood that I would know the style, but I didn’t,” laughs Roe. He did what he’d always done. He figured it out on his own. He borrowed an upright bass and started to teach himself the slap-bass rhythms and plucking styles of Cash’s rockabilly-leaning repertoire. “I had to pull my bootstraps up and get after it,” Roe chuckles. As that first call was winding down, Roe told Cash that he’d see him at rehearsal. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t really rehearse,’” says Roe. “Then I said, ‘I guess I’ll see you at soundcheck.’ He goes, ‘I really don’t do soundchecks, either, so I’ll just see you there.’”
Roe was encouraged to play the upright bass by a call from none other than Johnny Cash. Here, he cuts a track at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. He is a frequent contributor to Auerbach-produced albums, including Auerbach’s own Waiting on a Song and the Pretenders’ Alone.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Roe describes the first gig with Cash, around a week later in Charleston, West Virginia, as “completely flying by the seat of my pants, with my ear. I didn’t feel good at all. I just felt like I wasn’t the right guy.” But Roe kept working at it. He credits Cash with giving him a shot even though he wasn’t experienced. “He was very patient with me, and the rest of the guys in the band helped me along to develop that style,” says Roe. “There were other guys here [in Nashville] that were already doing that [style]. They could have easily got them. I can’t tell you to this day why they hung in there with me, but they did.”
Roe played bass with Cash until the Man in Black’s retirement from live performances in the late ’90s, and did session work on the singer’s intimate American records. For the first of the series, 1994’s American Recordings, Roe joined Cash and producer Rick Rubin to rehearse and feel out the songs before Cash ultimately recorded them solo. They practiced and recorded at Cash’s cabin studio near Hendersonville, Tennessee, and Roe joined them later when they did overdubs at Rubin’s Hollywood studio. The working relationship was one of the most profound and important of Roe’s career. “Johnny was sort of a Buddha to me, man,” says Roe. “He’s the nicest man I’ve ever had in my life. I learned a lot.”
Working with Cash marked another important transition period for Roe. Back in those days, he says, a professional musician moved to Nashville with the understanding that they’d work the road until they could land a studio gig and settle in one spot for a while. For Roe, that happened after he was hired by Cash and country singer Dwight Yoakam, with whom Roe played for four years. Given Yoakam’s and Cash’s high profiles and the proportionate pay for their musicians, Roe had more time to himself and less need to get back out on the road for another paycheck. Not that he didn’t like the road, though. “To be honest with you, if I had been offered another good road gig, I probably would’ve taken it,” says Roe. “But it just worked out this way.”
Dave Roe and his frequent collaborator Kenny Vaughan at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, Tennessee, with their band, the SloBeats.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Full-time session work required yet another pivot. Studio players in the city communicated and played with the Nashville Number System, a method of transcribing music by denoting the scale degree on which a chord is built, and thanks to his time in Hawaii, Roe was prepared. Some of the older jazz players back home had introduced him to the system when he was starting out, so he hit the ground running.
Roe spent the next 10 years doing session work and around-town gigs when his next “big break” came. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach called him up in 2015 and asked Roe to join a crew of veterans to back him up on his Easy Eye Sound recordings. It turned out that Cash’s engineer, Dave Ferguson, had recommended Roe to Auerbach. Roe became part of Auerbach’s in-house band at his downtown Nashville studio, where he got to work with a lot of the “old-timers”—like Bobby Woods, Russ Pahl, and Billy Sanford. Before long, though, he had joined their ranks. “I’m an old-timer now,” he laughs. And Roe considers his performance on Auerbach’s “Shine on Me,” from the Waiting on a Song album, among his best recorded performances.
Like most musicians, Roe has spent the last few years off the road. He’s focused on demo and custom tracks via work at his own studio, Seven Deadly Sins, and remote collaborations on platforms like AirGigs. He played on Brian Setzer’s 2021 solo record, Gotta Have The Rumble, and his long-time Nashville outfit the SloBeats, with guitarist Kenny Vaughan and Average White Band drummer Pete Abbott, is stirring from its hiatus. His son, drummer Jerry Roe, has worked his way into becoming a coveted Nashville session player. The apple didn’t fall far.
Like all great Nashville session bass players, Roe has the ability to learn tunes and adapt to different styles quickly, whether it’s blues, rock, country, R&B, or even improvised music.
Photo by Anthony Scarlati
Thinking back on his career, Roe is quiet, almost confused, like it’s all a dream he’s just woken up from. “I find myself always being in a state of awe, you know?” says Roe. He’s toured the world and made friends with the biggest names in American music. (He names CeeLo Green—whose track “Lead Me” is one of Roe’s favorite recordings—as the most talented artist he ever worked with, and Chrissie Hynde, Faith Hill, Ray LaMontagne, Carrie Underwood, Kurt Vile, Bahamas, and many others are also on his session resume.) Roe has come a long way from his makeshift Silvertone bass back in Ewa Beach, but that same do-it-yourself, fake-it-’til-you-make-it ethic has guided his career to soaring highs.“It always felt totally lucky and serendipitous to end up in those positions,” he says. “There’s always been people around that could have played those gigs better than me when I was doing them. But somehow, I ended up there. I just did the best I could.”
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Dave Roe’s experience of playing with Johnny Cash in the ’90s was just one of many remarkable successes in his long and fulfilling career.
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Samantha Fish: “Leaning Into the Edges—That’s Where the Real S**t Lies.”
In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
The rising blues-rock star has made a dozen records, topped roots-music charts, played 150 dates a year, and opened for the Rolling Stones. Now her new album, Paper Doll, finds her at a hard-playing creative pinnacle.
Samantha Fish is moving in new circles these days—circles occupied by the kind of people you see a lot on classic-rock radio playlists. First there was the invitation from Eric Clapton to play at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in L.A. Then there was the summer ’24 slot on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, followed by the Experience Hendrix tour, on which she dug into Jimi classics in the company of Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, and other luminaries. And, oh yeah, she opened for the Stones in Ridgedale, Missouri, on the final date of their Hackney Diamonds jaunt. That’s right, the Rolling Stones.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
Photo by Frank White
Guitars
- Alpine white Gibson SG
- Gibson Custom Shop ES-335
- Delaney 512
- Stogie Box Blues 4-string
- Danelectro baritone
Amps
- Category 5 Andrew 2x12
- Fender Hot Rod DeVille
Effects
- Dunlop volume pedal
- Analog Man King of Tone
- JHS Mini Foot Fuzz
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Boss PS-5 Super Shifter
- Voodoo Lab Pedal Power ISO-5
Strings, Picks, & Slides
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010-.046)
- 1.0 mm picks (any brand)
- Various brass and ceramic slides
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
“I do think that PTP circuits should stay that way, and circuits made for PCB sound great and don’t need to be handwired to sound good,” says R2R Electric's Cris Vincent, who is especially adept at creating vintage-flavored fuzz machines.
Do vintage parts make better pedals? Not always.
Treble boosters have been used by legends like Brian May, Tony Iommi, Rory Gallagher, Marc Bolan, Stevie Ray Vaughan—you name it. They have empirically proven their place in the evolution of rock ’n’ roll, and even paved the way for entirely new music genres. Naturally, as a pedal builder, I had to make my own. In fact, I was building treble boosters even before Sehat Effectors was born. Technically speaking, the circuit is simple—just a single transistor and a few components.
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But here’s the catch: The results didn’t meet my expectations. At least, not with the setup I had at the time: an old Japanese Iwama Strat copy and a small solid-state practice amp. The sound was terrible—just downright awful! I kept asking myself, “Did I do something wrong? Or was I missing some secret sauce?” My experiments with the treble booster ended up as a long-abandoned project, collecting dust in my workshop.
Years later, I stumbled across R2R Electric on Instagram, and man, I was blown away by this guy. He’s laser-focused on crafting treble boosters using all kinds of old, recycled parts, and they sound amazing! I couldn’t help but be influenced by what he showcased in each post. It was like a masterclass on how he builds treble boosters and how vintage fuzz pedals work their magic.
This curiosity led me to reach out to Cris Vincent of R2R Electric to ask him about his perspective on treble boosters and vintage fuzz.
Can you share the origin story of R2R Electric?
R2R Electric began officially five years ago. I had been saving old parts from reel-to-reel recorders, old radios, and other vintage audio equipment. I had no experience in building pedals, so I didn’t know what to do with all the parts.
One day, I met Tucker [Krishock] of Lamp Electric and asked him to build a Dallas Rangemaster from the parts I had collected. The first time we plugged in, it blew our minds! So, we began “Reel To Reel Effects.” I began practicing copying the pedal Tucker had made me, and selling them on Reverb under the brand “R2R.” Sadly, Tucker ended up passing away, and so I decided to carry on by combining our two names into R2R Electric.
“If you feel better playing a hand-built pedal versus a mass produced one, there’s something to that. Even if it’s only in your head.”
What fascinates you about treble boosters and vintage Fuzzes?
I became obsessed with vintage effects during my time working in recording. I would always be hunting for new tones or to replicate tones from classic records. I had picked up a Roland BeeBaa, which has a fuzz and a treble booster, and I decided to see what the booster sounded like. I loved it! There is something to the simplicity of these old circuits that I feel give a more natural feel and tone. A vintage boost or fuzz needs to be as equal in your rig as the guitar or amplifier—they have that much impact on the overall performance of a rig.
Do you believe vintage effects should ideally be paired with vintage amplifiers?
I think they can sound great through both vintage and modern amps. The drawback with some vintage amps is that they weren’t meant to be hammered by a huge fuzz signal. I’ve had to refine several vintage speakers that couldn’t handle fuzz. Most modern amps are designed with pedals as a fact of life and can handle most of the tones you throw at them. So, from a reliability standpoint, modern amps handle old fuzz pedals a bit better. But for those classic tones, the pairing of a vintage amp and vintage pedal is the only way to get there.
What inspired you to use recycled components?
That was all I had. I have no formal electrical experience, so I didn’t realize that old parts could go bad or be noisy. It took a lot of working with them to realize how unreliable they can be. I also feel like they have a sound that modern components can produce too. Using old parts to build old circuits just makes sense to me.
Do you think there's a tonal difference between PCB construction and point-to-point designs?
I don’t think one sounds better than the other, really. I think it comes down to the original design of the circuit and the limitations of that particular construction type. I do think that PTP circuits should stay that way, and circuits made for PCB sound great and don’t need to be handwired to sound good. The old PTP circuits tend to sound better, but that’s just my opinion. I think it all comes down to everyone’s own personal taste. If you feel better playing a hand-built pedal versus a mass-produced one, there’s something to that. Even if it’s only in your head.
Based on this brief interview, I’ve come to realize just how deeply spiritual and immersive the experience of finding the sound in your head can be. It’s a stark contrast to my own initial disappointment with the treble booster I built—it was something I felt was a failure and quickly discarded. Cris, on the other hand, exemplifies someone who devoted himself with unwavering focus, constantly seeking until he reached that moment of enlightenment—the “eureka” moment—that validated what he had believed in all along.
In a way, what I’ve done—like replacing electric guitar strings with nylon strings—was not technically wrong, but clearly not the right fit. The same principle applies to treble boosters, fuzz pedals, and perhaps many other effects pedals. They each have unique tendencies and characteristics that may be waiting for their own “eureka” moment to truly shine.
Geppetto Guitars introduces The Atomic Punk humbucker pickup set, handcrafted with high wind bridge and low wind neck pickups for superior tone. Featuring AlNiCo magnets and customizable covers, this set, developed for gigging pro Jason Soules, offers versatility and quality craftsmanship.
Geppetto Guitars has introduced its newest humbucker pickup set, The Atomic Punk. Featuring a high wind bridge and a low wind neck pickup, each pickup reflects Geppetto’s well-established ethos: made by hand, one at a time, with an emphasis on workmanship and superior tone.
The Atomic Punk bridge pickup features an AlNiCo 8 magnet and the neck is built with an AlNiCo 3 magnet, with wax potting available upon request. Atomic Punk pickup sets are available with polished nickel, raw nickel or aged nickel covers, as well as uncovered.
Geppetto Guitars owner Mike O'Donoghue developed the Atomic Punk at the behest of longtime customer and friend Jason Soules, a gigging pro who currently writes and plays guitar with the bands The Problem Eels (from Nashville TN) and Crimson Devils (Austin TX).
“I built it to Jason’s exact request,” says O’Donoghue, “and this set absolutely has the best characteristics in the bridge, neck, and middle positions. It really covers a multitude of voices as well as tones.”
The Atomic Punk bridge pickup’s DC resistance is approximately 13.5k and features an Alnico 8magnet. The Atomic Punk neck pickup DCR is 6.75k and features an Alnico 3 magnet.
Both pickups come with two-conductor wiring as standard configuration, although the AtomicPunk bridge pickup is available with optional four-conductor wiring.
The Atomic Punk pickup set carries a street price of $250 (including your choice of covers) and is directly from Geppetto Guitars via telephone at 512-630-8423, online at geppettoguitars.com as well as Austin Vintage Guitars, Austin TX.
For more information, please visit geppettoguitars.com.
Atomic Punk Demo - YouTube
With only three controls, this deceptively powerful pedal was designed to offer everything from light overdrive to full on distortion with all the clarity and blissful grinding.
"Sometimes pedals can change. Parts drift, pots break, transistors go bad. They go to new homes; they get neglected and resold. Sometimes people get in there and try to revive them to their original state and sometimes they just throw whatever is laying around inside and hope it does the trick. In this case, we’re pretty sure all the above happened to the fuzz pedal that made its way to James Murphy and ended up finding a forever home with LCD Soundsystem."
The Chelsea has been the chosen bass fuzz for several LCD Soundsystem recordings and has traveled around the world with them.
"It has been beat up and taped back together. It looks like it shouldn’t work but it always delivers. It is old, it is fragile, and it sounds massive. Too good to retire yet too tired to keep going. That is where we came in. We were tasked with replicating the exact sound of this pedal but it a reliable format that can withstand the stresses of this modern world. No easy feat, for sure, but we persevered and have brought you the Chelsea."
Features
- All-analog signal path
- True bypass
- Electronic relay-based switching
- Limited lifetime warranty
- Current Draw: 10 ma
- Input Impedance: 50 kΩ
- Output Impedance: <10 kΩ
- Retail Price: $179.00
Named after the guitar shop in which it was purchased back in 1989, the Chelsea recreates all the idiosyncrasies of the original but without the threat of total collapse. With only three controls, this deceptively powerful pedal offers you everything from light overdrive to full on distortion with all the clarity and blissful grinding that make the original so special. Just like the original, a Tone On/Off switch allows you to remove the tone control from the circuit, opening up a whole new world of midrange grind. Switch it off for a simplified and straightforward attack or leave it on for a full-bodied distortion with loads of low end with a slight natural scoop. Roll up the Sustain for wall-shaking bass notes or sustaining lead and adjust the Tone for a wild and wide frequency response from aggressive top end to low-end rumble. This thing is deep and will cover pretty much anything you can throw at it.
Each Chelsea is handmade at EarthQuaker Devices headquarters in always sunny Akron, Ohio, USA.