Most of Christie Lenée’s guitar parts for Coming Alive were recorded in a secluded cabin where she was staying on Lake Lure in North Carolina.
During the Covid pandemic, musicians often responded to the crisis by turning inward and scaling down. For example, Matthew Stevens, guitarist for Esperanza Spalding, made the album Pittsburgh on a 1950s Martin 00-17 with no overdubs. Renowned pianist Brad Mehldau, holed up in Amsterdam, offered Suite: April 2020, a collection of short, intimate solo pieces. And Christie Lenée, award-winning fingerstyle acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter, took stock of her artistic journey in a cabin on Lake Lure, near her home in Asheville, North Carolina. But the results were not what you might expect.
Gradually, the material for Lenée’s latest release, Coming Alive, came into focus. It is the antithesis of a solo guitar album. As some of the most rock-oriented, electric, anthemic music of her career to date, it features esteemed Nashville bassist Adam Nitti and Steely Dan drummer Keith Carlock in the rhythm section, and Charlie Lowell from the Christian alt-rock band Jars of Clay on organ and keyboards. Lenée made a point of posing with her recently acquired Fender Strat for the album cover.
“Around the cabin,” she says, “there was a kind of silence I’d never heard in my entire life—no planes or cars, nothing. At first, I thought I might go a little crazy. I was reflecting on being in this tiny little place in this massive world, and I almost started to speak louder in a way. I’d turn my guitar up, start belting when I sang, play my electronic drum set at all hours. In the woods there’s a frequency I discovered, and my writing and singing changed. My inner voice was able to get a little bit louder. I felt amplified.”
It’s worth noting that Lenée didn’t get louder overnight, nor was this direction purely and simply the result of quarantine. She had ventured into a bigger, poppier, more electric and vocal sound on her 2016 album Stay and farther back on her Give and Take In EP, in contrast to her wholly acoustic 2014 instrumental gem Chasing Infinity. One might call Stay a transitional album, with Lenée rocking out unapologetically on “Journey of My Own,” but reserving space for shimmering acoustic pieces like “Sunset Rebirth” and “Soaring over Glacier Bay.” Give and Take In, similarly, is unafraid to rock but closes with a solo acoustic showstopper, “Evolution”—a fine example of the hybrid-tapping technique Lenée became famously associated with after winning the International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship in 2017. (A tonally brighter take of “Evolution” appears on Chasing Infinity.)
On Coming Alive, Lenée wanted to slightly buck her reputation as an acoustic guitarist by bringing more electric guitar into the mix.
Lenée is, of course, not the first to be recognized for her tapping talents. Michael Hedges and Stanley Jordan, in very different ways, did much to popularize the style in the ’80s. And then, there’s Eddie Van Halen. You can see Lenée’s method in action on “Song for Michael Pukac,” her winning competition entry, where she moves seamlessly between standard fingerstyle and a percussive two-hands approach on the neck, keeping righthand bass notes and patterns going while hammering-on and pulling-off lefthand melodic lines and counterpoint. For good measure, she uses live looping to sustain parts while keeping time with stomp box and foot tambourine.
“I was reflecting on being in this tiny little place in this massive world, and I almost started to speak louder in a way.”
This is still a norm in live solo performance, and Lenée has not abandoned it. It’s a language that lends itself not only to originals like the dreamy waltz “Sterling Highway,” but also interpretive feats like her Beatles medley, which features “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Yesterday,” all woven together in a rhythmically compelling, story-like whole.
“I was getting to be known as a guitar tapper,” says Lenée, “and I didn’t want to be known completely for that. I want it to be a part of what I do. This album is about taking what I’ve been trying to do on just one guitar and allowing other instruments to play their part, to fully realize the vision that’s in my head. Every song has acoustic guitar except ‘Beautiful Ride’ and ‘Fly Away,’ which are completely electric. I tracked all the guitars like a mad scientist, overdubbing mostly here at home.” Matthew Odmark from Jars of Clay was her main co-producer, although lead vocals were done primarily in Lenée’s hometown of Tampa, Florida, with Spencer Bradham at the board.
In line with the emphasis on electric guitar on Coming Alive, Lenée chose to pose with her Fender Strat on the album cover.
On Coming Alive, however, there is no tapping at all. The arena-rock energy hits right away on the title and opening track, co-produced by session ace (and former Wings guitarist) Laurence Juber. And while acoustic guitar still drives the bus, the album is a meticulously crafted blend, with Lenée playing everything from open-tuned 12-string to her Gretsch White Falcon and that trusty Strat. The sound is poppy and accessible, yet the harmonic and rhythmic involvement of her writing is still present in the 7/4 intro of “Beautiful Ride,” and the frequent meter changes and ethereal chamber-like instrumental bridge of “Another Day Goes By” (featuring Jeff Coffin on soprano sax).
What we get is a full picture of Lenée in all her versatility, playing tasty Strat fills and leads, or keyboard-like chordal pads using the Bigsby arm on her Gretsch. Her acoustics are open-tuned, usually to DADGAD or variants, such as C–G–D–G–B–D (capo on the 4th fret) for “Wildfire” or C–G–D–G–A–D (capo on the 5th fret) for “Beautiful Ride,” or drop D. The key choices are more than incidental: DADGAD, with a capo on the 3rd fret, puts “The Victory We’ve Won” in F, which is “related to the heart chakra,” Lenée says. “It’s a love song and that’s the key of love. I do use my evolving knowledge of sound healing, which looks at what keys are relevant to different moods, and sometimes it’s a part of my process.”
When writing, Lenée considers sound healing and how certain keys are associated with different moods and chakras.
“The Victory We’ve Won” is one of the gentler songs on Coming Alive, incorporating cello and viola (played by Jonathan Yudkin) as well as the mandolin-like soprano Veillette Gryphon 12-string guitar (which Lenée used more prominently on songs from earlier releases “Sweet Little Piece,” “Raining a Miracle,” and “Eastward Horizon”). The song works on two levels: as a paean to the love in Lenée’s life, and as a statement affirming LGBTQ+ equality and dignity. “I am very proud of who I am, and proud of who I love,” Lenée recently told Country Queer. “Being queer informs my emotional experience, which informs my music, and it is all a part of who I am.”
“This album is about taking what I’ve been trying to do on just one guitar and allowing other instruments to play their part, to fully realize the vision that’s in my head.”
Along with her undeniable chops and many talents, what makes Lenée special is her collaborative spirit. If you look back on her catalog, you can treat yourself to her other remarkable compositions, including the hypnotic “Electric Train,” her feature on 2020’s Phil Keaggy & Friends: Instrumental Duets, or the sonorous Keaggy-Lenée single “Peaceful Heart,” not to mention her fun-filled onstage encounters with the great Tommy Emmanuel (“Cleopatra’s Eyes”), or her duos with Laurence Juber (“Calling on the Love”) and Tim Reynolds (“Latin Improv” from Chasing Infinity). On Live at Hideaway Café (2014), we get a feel for Lenée’s full-band show, a real community event, where her acoustic sensibility is in the spotlight (“Daylight Comes”) but her distinguished lead guitar work (“Before I Go”) also has a chance to emerge.
Christie Lenée's Gear
Lenée’s virtuosic tapping skills on acoustic guitar have garnered her major accolades, including the title of International Fingerstyle Guitar champion in 2017.
Guitars
Live
- Maton EM100 808, for “The Messiah”
- Maton Solid Road Series SRS70C-12
- All her Matons are equipped with the AP5 Pro pickup system.
Studio
- Martin D12-35 50th Anniversary 12-string
- Martin J-40
- Martin D-18GE Golden Era
- Gretsch White Falcon
- Fender 2006 American Series Stratocaster
- Soprano Veillette Gryphon 12-string
Amps
- 2000 Fender Deluxe Reverb
Effects
- TC Electronic Polytune Mini
- Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster
- Eventide H9 Max
- Boss DD-20 Giga Delay
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Boss RC-30 Dual Track Looper
- TC Helicon Harmony Singer (vocals)
- EBow (on “That Voice”)
Strings, Picks, and Accessories
- Savarez Christie Lenée Signatures (.013–.060)
- D’Addario (electric, .011-.049)
- D’Addario medium (12-string acoustic, .012–.056)
- Dunlop Tortex Standard (.50 mm)
- Acrylic nails: done in salon, filed round on top and underneath, smoothed out with Micro-Mesh 1500 to 12000 grade
- Kyser capos
- Fox 17 Nashville Custom capos
- Maton capos
At this writing, plans were afoot to release a few tracks from Coming Alive without vocals. Clearly Lenée remains committed to exploring that instrumental space wherever she can. But singing is no less central to her authentic self—so much so that her video for “Fly Away” finds her joyously alone, on a beach, with no guitar in sight.
“Recalling that my first instrument is actually voice—just that mental shift completely changed the way I sing.”
“I was so used to the guitar leading everything,” she says, “but I had to learn how to let my voice stand on its own. I was really self-conscious at first, but I pushed past it. My parents divorced when I was 11, and from then until about 17, I didn’t sing much. I put all my feelings into the guitar. But later I realized I was a singer first: I was the youngest member of a group called Entertainment Review in Tampa. I was singing ‘All My Exes Live in Texas’ [by George Strait] at state fairs at the age of 4. Recalling that my first instrument is actually voice—just that mental shift completely changed the way I sing.”
It can take years for an artist to reconcile the many facets of their talent, and when they do, the audience connection grows that much stronger. Acoustic and electric, folk and rock, fingers and pick, playing and singing … rather than dwell on these categories and the boundaries placed between them, Lenée sees the whole continuum and ponders her place in it all, drawing on what feels right and true. “It’s an infinite journey,” she says, “and it’s never perfect. The songs are always changing.”
Christie Lenée and Tommy Emmanuel - "Cleopatra's Eyes" - Dynamic Guitar Duo
Christie Lenée’s collaborative spirit—and playfulness and pure fire–are on display in this duet with fellow acoustic virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel.
- Rig Rundown: Tommy Emmanuel, CGP ›
- Listening Deeply to Acoustic Guitar Sound ›
- Acoustic Guitars and Fender Amps ›
Effects Bakery MECHA-PAN BAKERY Series MECHA-BAGEL OVERDRIVE
Konnichiwa, guitar lovers! 🎸✨
Are you ready to add some sweetness to your pedalboard? Let’s dive into the adorable world of the Effects Bakery Mecha-Pan Overdrive, part of the super kawaii Mecha-Pan Bakery Series!
🍩 Sweet Treats for Your Ears! 🍩
The Mecha-Pan Overdrive is like a delicious bagel for your guitar tone, but it’s been upgraded to a new level of cuteness and functionality!
Effects Bakery has taken their popular Bagel OverDrive and given it a magical makeover. Imagine your favorite overdrive sound but with more elegance and warmth – it’s like hugging a fluffy cat while playing your guitar!
It would have been easy for Wampler to simply make a Mostortion clone and call it a day, but they added some unique twists to the Mofetta pedal. While the original Mostortion had a MOSFET-based op amp, it actually used clipping diodes to create its overdrive. The Mofetta is a fairly accurate replica and includes that circuitry, but also has a toggle switch for texture, which lets you choose between the original-style diode-based clipping in the down position and multi-cascaded MOSFET gain stages in the up position.
Luscious Low Gain and Meaty Mid-Gain
The Mofetta’s control panel is very straightforward and conventional with knobs for bass, mids, treble, level, and gain. The original Mostortion was revered for its low-gain tone and is now popular among Nashville session guitarists. Wampler’s tribute captures that edge-of-breakup vibe perfectly. I enjoyed using the pedal with the gain on the lower side, around 9 o’clock, where I heard and felt slight compression that gave single notes a smooth and silky feel. I particularly enjoyed the tone-thickening the Mofetta lent to my Ernie Ball Music Man Axis Sport’s split-coil sound as I played pop melodies and rootsy, triadic rhythm guitar figures. The Mofetta has expansive headroom, and as a result there’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much. Even turning the gain all the way off yields a pleasing volume bump that would work well in a clean boost setting.
There’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much.
Switching the texture switch up engages the MOSFET section, introducing cascading gain stages that elevate the heat and add flavor the original Mostortion didn’t really offer. Classic rock and early metal are readily available via the MOSFET setting. If you need to stretch out to modern metal sounds, the Mofetta probably isn’t the pedal for you. Again, the original Mostortion was, first and foremost, a low-to-mid-gain affair, so unless you’re using it as a boost with a high-gain amp, the Mofetta is not really a vehicle for extreme sounds.
One of the Mofetta’s real treats is its responsiveness. Even at higher gain settings the Mofetta is very touch sensitive. You can tap into a wide range of dynamic shading just by varying the strength of your pick attack. I enjoyed playing fast, ascending scalar passages, picking with a medium attack then really slamming it hard when I hit a high climactic note, to get the guitar to really scream.
The Verdict
Wampler is a reliably great builder who creates pedals with a purpose. I own two of his pedals, the Dual Fusion and the Pinnacle, and both are really exceptional units. The Mofetta captures the essence of the Mostortion and makes it available at an accessible price. But even if you’ve never heard or played an original Mostortion, you’ll appreciate the truly versatile EQ, touch sensitivity, and the bonus texture switch, which expands the Mofetta’s range into more aggressive spaces. The wealth of dirt boxes on the market today can make a player jaded. But Wampler pushed into a relatively unique, satisfying, and interesting place with the Mofetta.
Filthy, saturated fuzz is a glorious thing, whether it’s the writ-large solos of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s live “Ball and Chain,” the soaring feedback and pure crush of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” or the sandblasted rhythm textures of Queens of the Stone Age’s “Paper Machete.” It’s also a Wayback Machine. Step on a fuzz pedal and your tone is transported to the ’60s or early ’70s, which, when it comes to classic guitar sounds, is not a bad place to be.
Catalinbread’s StarCrash is from their new ’70s collection, so the company is laying its Six Million Dollar Man trading cards on the table—upping the ante on traditional fuzz with more controls and, according to the company’s website, a little more volume than the average fuzz pedal, while still staying in the traditional Fuzz Face lane.
The Howler’s Viscera
Arbiter Electronics made the first Fuzz Face in 1966. The StarCrash is inspired by that 2-transistor pedal, but benefits from evolution, as did almost all fuzz pedals in the ’70s, when the standard shifted from germanium to silicon circuitry to improve the consistency of the effect’s performance. The downside is that germanium is gnarlier to some ears, and silicon transistors don’t respond as well to adjustments made via a guitar’s volume control.
While Fuzz Faces have only two knobs, volume and fuzz, the silicon StarCrash has three: volume, bias, and low-cut. Catalinbread’s website explains: “We got rid of that goofy fuzz knob. We know that 95 percent of all players run it dimed, and the remaining 5 percent use their guitar’s volume knob to rein it in.”
I suspect there are plenty of players who, like me, do adjust the fuzz control on their pedals, but the most important thing is that the core fuzz sound here is excellent—bristly and snarling, with a far girthier tone than my reissue Fuzz Face. It’s also, with the bias and low-cut controls, far more flexible. The low-cut control allows you to range from a traditional, comparatively thinner Fuzz Face sound (past noon and further) to the StarCrash’s authentic, beefier voice (noon and lower). Essentially, it cuts bass frequencies from 40 Hz to 500 Hz, resulting in an aural menu that runs from lush and lowdown to buzzy and slicing. And the bias control is a direct route to the spitty, fragmented, so-called Velcro-sound that’s become a staple of the stoner-rock/Jack White school of tone. The company calls this dial a “dying battery simulator,” and it starves the second transistor to achieve that effect.
Sweet Song of the Tribbles
Playing with the StarCrash is a lot of fun. I ran it through a pair of Carr amps in stereo, adding some delay and reverb to mood, and used a variety of single-coil- and humbucker-outfitted guitars. While both pickup types interacted well with the pedal, the humbuckers were most pleasing to my ears with the bias cranked to about 2 o’clock or higher, since the ’buckers higher output allowed me to let notes sustain longer before sputtering out. Keeping the low-cut filter at 9 o’clock or lower also helped sustain and depth in the Velcro-fuzz zone, while letting more of the instruments’ natural voices come through, of course.
With the low-cut filter turned up full and the bias at 10 o’clock, I got the StarCrash to be the perfect doppelganger of my Hendrix reissue Fuzz Face. But that’s such a small part of the pedal’s overall tone profile. It was more fun to roll off just a bit of bass and set the bias knob to about 2 or 3 o’clock. Around these settings, the sound is huge and grinding, and yet barre chords hold their character while playing rhythm, and single-note runs, especially on the low strings, are a filthy delight, with just the right schmear of buttery sustain plus a hint of decay lurking behind every note. It’s such a ripe tone—the sonic equivalent of a delicious, stinky cheese—that I could hang with it all day.
Regarding Catalinbread’s claims about the volume control? Yes, it gets very loud without losing the essence of the notes or chords you’re playing, or the character of the fuzz, which is a distinct advantage when you’re in a band and need to stand out. And it’s a tad louder than my Fuzz Face but doesn’t really bark up to the level of most Tone Bender or Buzzaround clones I’ve heard. In my experience, these germanium-chipped critters of similar vintage can practically slam you through the wall when their volume levels are cranked.
The Verdict
Catalinbread’s StarCrash—with its sturdy enclosure, smooth on/off switch and easy-to-manipulate dials—can compete with any Fuzz Face variant in both price and performance, scoring high points on the latter count. The bias and low-cut dials provide access to a wider-than-usual variety of fuzz tones, and are especially delightful for long, playful solos dappled with gristle, flutter, and sustain. Kudos to Catalinbread for making this pedal not just a reflection of the past, but an improvement on it.
Catalinbread Starcrash 70 Fuzz Pedal - Starcrash 70 Collection
The release of a newRed Panda pedal is something to be celebrated. Each of the company’s devices lets us crack into our signal chains and tweak its inner properties in unique, forward-thinking ways, encouraging us to be daring, create something new, and think about sound differently. In essence, they take us to the sonic frontier, where the most intrepid among us seek thrills.
Last January, I got my first glimpse of the Radius at NAMM and knew that Red Panda mastermind Curt Malouin had, once again, concocted something fresh. The pedal offers ring modulation and frequency shifting with pitch tracking and an LFO, and I heard classic ring-mod tones as the jumping off point for oodles of bold sounds generated by envelope and waveform-controlled modulation and interaction. I had to get my hands on one.
Enjoy the Process
I’ve heard some musicians talk about how the functionality of Red Panda’s pedals are deep to a point that they can be hard to follow. If that’s the case, it’s by design, simply because each Red Panda device opens access to an untrodden path. As such, it can feel heady to get into the details of the Radius, which blends between ring modulation and frequency shifting, offering control of the balance and shift ratios of the upper and lower sidebands to create effects including phasing, tremolo, and far less-natural sounds.
As complex as that all might seem, Red Panda’s pedals always make it easy to strip the controls down to their most essential form. The firmest ground for a guitarist to stand with the Radius is a simple ring-mod sound. To get that, I selected the ring mod function, turned off the modulation section by zeroing the rate and amount knobs, kept the shift switch off and the range switch on its lowest setting. With the mix at noon and the frequency knob cranked, I found my sound.
From there, by lowering the frequency range, the Radius will yield percussive tremolo tones, and the track knob helped me dial that in before opening up a host of phaser sounds below noon. By going the other direction and kicking the rate switch into its higher setting, a world of ring-mod tweaking opens up. There are some uniquely warped effects in these higher settings that include dial-up modem sounds and lo-fi dial tones. Exploring the ring mod/frequency shift knob widens the possibilities further to high-pitched, filtered white noise and glitchy digital artifacts at its extremes.
There are wild, active sounds within each knob movement on the Radius, and the modulation section naturally brings those to life in more ways than a simple knob tweak ever could, delivering four LFO waveforms, a step modulator, two x-mod waveforms, and an envelope follower. It’s within these settings that I found rayguns, sirens, Shepard tones, and futuristic sounds that were even harder to describe.
It’s easy to imagine the Radius at the forefront of sonic experiments, where it would be right at home. But this pedal could easily be a studio device when applied in low doses to give a track something special that pops. The possible applications go way beyond guitars.
The Verdict
The Radius isn’t easy to plug and play, but it’s also not hard to use if you keep an open mind. That’s necessary, too: The Radius is not for guitar players who prefer to stay grounded; this pedal is for sonic-stargazers and producers.
I enjoyed pairing the Radius with various guitar instruments—12-string, baritone, bass—and it kept getting me more and more excited about sonic experimentation. That feeling is a big part of what’s special about this pedal. It’s so open-ended and controllable, continuing to reveal more of its capabilities with use. Once you feel like you’ve gotten something down, there are often more sounds to explore, whether that’s putting a new instrument or pedal next to it or exploring the Radius’ stereo, MIDI, or expression-pedal functionality. Like many great instruments, it only takes a few minutes to get started, but it could keep you exploring for years.
Red Panda Radius Ring Modulator/Frequency Shifter Pedal
