
Isaiah Mitchell onstage with the Black Crowes. He’s been a member of the band since their 2019 reunion tour.
The modern twisted-blues-rock hero and his long-jamming power trio, Earthless, take cues from vintage Japanese psych and folklore to tell the epic musical story of Night Parade of One Hundred Demons.
There’s no lack of instrumental, improv-based guitar music being made these days, but few bands in that niche exude the muscular power, cosmic intrigue, and impressive blues-rock bite of San Diego-based power trio Earthless. The band’s records undulate through melodies and hypnotic grooves that are fresh yet familiar, and breathe new life into many of the rock guitar tropes that have inspired so many players to fall in love with the instrument.
Since forming in the early 2000s, Earthless’ psychedelic-tinged explorations have channeled the energy and fire that made the first wave of English blues-rock such potent stuff, with the same captivating vitality as Cream, Hendrix, and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac. At the core of the band’s sound is Isaiah Mitchell, a full-fledged guitar hero whose undeniable chops and creativity are matched only by his penchant for conjuring the kinds of killer tones many of us have spent small fortunes chasing. Bolstered by groove guru Mike Eginton on bass and powerhouse drummer Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket from the Crypt, OFF!, Hot Snakes), Earthless is the ideal vehicle for Mitchell’s unfiltered, incendiary playing. Outside of the band, his work includes the coveted lead guitar slot in the Black Crowes—a gig he landed during the group’s unexpected 2019 revival and perhaps the ultimate testament to his ascending status as one of today’s absolute finest blues-rock players.
Earthless from left: bassist Mike Eginton, drummer Mario Rubalcaba, and guitarist Isaiah Mitchell.
Photo by Marta Estellés Martín
While Mitchell’s commitments with the Crowes have sadly been consistently stymied by complications from the pandemic, Earthless have recently returned to the recorded form with a sprawling, hour-long instrumental adventure: Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. The sinister subject is the musical translation of a story pulled from Japanese folklore about a chaotic night in which the supernatural world collides with our own and a cavalcade of demons runs rampant through the streets of Japan. While the record is entirely instrumental, it’s the band’s first to feature a specific sonic story concept—and it’s one of the most musically intense releases in their discography.
Mitchell explains the album’s unexpected direction: “There’s a darker vibe to it. It could be some frustrations from the pandemic, but we’re pretty light, happy people for the most part. It’s just the music that came out.” The concept came from the band’s bassist. “Mike and his son are really into Japanese folklore and art,” Mitchell explains, “so he brought in the idea of calling it Night Parade of One Hundred Demons and explained the story, and it just made perfect sense with the music we had been writing. Then we were like, ‘Well let’s actually tell that story!’
Night Parade Of One Hundred Demons, Pt. 1
“When we started writing, we noticed that the music was reminiscent of Japanese bands that we loved, like Flower Travellin’ Band, Blues Creation, and Shinki Chen. We just ran with that sound,” explains Mitchell. Those esoteric hard-rock and proto-metal groups that came out of Japan in the late ’60s and early ’70s filtered Western heavy rock through a uniquely Japanese lens, making for music that was fundamentally familiar sounding yet totally exotic, relative to the British and American bands that influenced it. For Mitchell, no one does heavy guitar music quite like the Japanese, and the concept of the album “opened up the possibility of really getting inside of a Japanese scale approach” and guided his note choices in a new direction.
Mitchell says the recording experience “was a fun challenge to try to pay homage to that music” and explains, “a lot of what was going on in my mind—if we can talk in intervals—was like root, flat second, minor third, flat sixes—all of these weird combos that aren’t in your blues scale or your Mixolydian or Dorian things, but more Locrian in nature. It’s a totally different thing.” He adds that he was inspired by traditional Japanese music and instruments like the koto as well.
Night Parade opens with a positively lush six-minute guitar intro that Mitchell says is meant to paint the picture of a Japanese village at sunset. It’s an idyllic, tranquil scene that’s conveyed through passages of delicate, Hendrix-informed clean-toned guitar work. “We paint this pretty picture and then … boom, all hell breaks loose and these demons show up!” Mitchell explains. “The idea was to have more of a direction with it, trying to tell a specific story and putting the music to that story. Nothing else we’ve done has ever had any greater meaning or specific subject attached to it, so this was totally different and was a lot of fun.”
“I try to go into each improvisational section or solo by telling myself, ‘Here’s this moment that is for you. Be very present in it and mean what you’re doing!’”
The arrival of the demons from the Japanese legend is marked by a churning, turbulent, and downright evil-sounding riff fest that puts all of Mitchell’s gifts on full display. On the latter half of “Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, Pt. 1,” his guitar work bridges the chasm between Clapton’s sense of melody and feel and the extreme intensity and hellish string-bending and whammy-bar theatrics of Slayer. Across the album’s three long tracks, the band still has a foot firmly in the blues-rock world, but there’s fuzzed-out mayhem, searing proto-metal lead work, and an element of adventure and danger that is sorely missing from much of today’s improv-based rock ’n’ roll.
Dramatic trem-bar moves haven’t been a calling card for Mitchell in the past, but they’re an important facet of Night Parade’s sonic storytelling. Mitchell explains that aggressive whammy-bar techniques were something he’d avoided in the past, opting to block the bridge of his battered main Strat for years because he could never get the stock trem system to stay in tune. However, for the new record, he says, “We wanted to evoke a feeling, a mood, a sensation—and that required overbearing whammy bar! Totally Jeff Hanneman or Neil Young trying to break his strings at the end of a set, just freaking out! It’s perfect for making a song sound like hell and murder and death and chaos. It’s frantic and it’s anxious and paranoid and a mood of terror.”
Mitchell credits his friend Phil Manley (Trans Am, The Fucking Champs), who recorded the band’s From the Ages album, with changing his attitude. “[He] turned me on to Callaham Guitars, and I got a whole new trem system for my Strat from them. I just slapped that thing on and had it floating a little bit, and all of a sudden I was throwing bigger Hendrix dives into my playing and it wouldn’t go out of tune. I was amazed.” He adds that “it’s like having a totally new guitar. The thing with Earthless is I’m not going to be able to retune in the middle of an hour-long song. You’re fucking out to sea swimming and there’s no stopping.”
Isaiah Mitchell, wielding his go-to Strat, tweaks his Echoplex as Earthless jams.
Photo by Marta Estellés Martín
Night Parade was tracked to tape and a key part of its charm and immediacy is its organic production aesthetic. While the album tells a tale of the spirit world, it still sounds like three humans in a room attempting to blast their way into the void. There’s 60-cycle hum in the clean parts, there’s the obvious sound of air hitting mics, and Mitchell confirms that amps and speakers were indeed harmed in its creation. “We wanted to keep it as real as possible,” he says, “but we also wanted to make it sound great and not deliberately mess it up, but also not over-polish it.”
Rig Rundown - Earthless
As a player who’s spent the lion’s share of his career in improvised music, Mitchell knows how to pull something out of nothing with his guitar. “I try to go into each improvisational section or solo by telling myself, ‘Here’s this moment that is for you, be very present in it, and mean what you’re doing!’” he says. “I don’t want to just shoot notes here and there. I want to really try to play off what everyone else is doing and listen.”
TIDBIT: The concept for Night Parade of One Hundred Demons was inspired by a story that bassist Mike Eginton and his son found in a book of traditional Japanese ghost tales.
It’s no surprise that his inspiration comes from the classics: “What really got me into that approach was listening to Live Cream and Hendrix just taking off forever, really feeling what guys like Clapton and Hendrix, or even Neil Young, had in their phrasing. It’s like they’re breathing, you know? There’s an intention in everything they played. They’re trying to convey something. They want to make you feel something, and it’s just very tasteful and about presence in the moment. That’s the best place to come from when you’re improvising. Building and trying to tell an interesting story melodically—that’s my approach. Tasteful phrasing is about not laying all your cards on the table right away or blowing it all up right out the gate—build it, build tension!”
Mitchell’s dedication to his craft as a player and tone-shaper naturally helped him land his high-profile spot with the brothers Robinson in the revived Black Crowes, and he’s still drinking the experience in. “I was a fan growing up and watched their music videos on MTV, so it’s a really surreal experience,” he ruminates. “I’ve been friends with Chris [Robinson, Black Crowes frontman] for maybe 10 years now, but it’s so cool to be brought into the fold and to play with people that love music like they do. The whole band is fantastic and getting to hear Rich [Robinson, Black Crowes guitarist] and Chris together is a sound and it’s powerful. It’s a wonderful experience musically and getting to play those songs that I grew up with—and being able to put my stamp on it and still honor the song—is important to me.”
“We paint this pretty picture and then … boom, all hell breaks loose and these demons show up!”
He approaches his position in the Black Crowes with the same level of care he brings to his own band. “The fans are used to a certain thing,” he explains, “and you can do too much to bring yourself into it. I don’t think that’s always the right choice.” Contrary to Earthless, which is built around his own creative instincts, Mitchell points out that in such a classic, established band, it’s of utmost importance to know “where and when to be yourself.” And while Earthless calls for a more maximal, up-front guitar sound, playing in the Black Crowes alongside another guitarist and keyboardist is “a totally different way of filling musical space. I love being in different places and playing different roles and trying to be as selfless as possible for the sake of what the music needs.”
As both the longtime lead voice in Earthless and now the guitarist in the Black Crowes, Mitchell has risen from unsung underground guitar hero status into the mainstream. It’s a position he revels in, but he brings respect for the history of the band’s guitar chair. “My favorite part about the Crowes growing up is that the songs were fantastic,” he says, exclaiming, “but I really fucking loved Marc Ford’s playing. He was one of my dudes, growing up!”
The Gear Behind Isaiah Mitchell’s Heroic Tone
Mitchell performs with Earthless in Berkeley, California, at the Cornerstone on February 20, 2022.
Photo by Samuel Cuevas-Coria
Guitars
- ’50s-style Fender Stratocaster
- Gibson Custom Shop 1956 Les Paul Goldtop reissue
- Prisma Guitars custom build (made from recycled skateboard decks)
- Ian Anderson T-Style
Amps
- 1971 100-watt Marshall Super Lead
- 1979 Marshall 2203 JMP
- 1968/1969 Fender Super Reverb
- Vox AC15 head
- Orange Custom Shop 50 head
- Satellite Amps 2x12
- Orange vertical open-back 2x12 with Celestion Creambacks
Effects
- Strymon Flint
- Make Sounds Loudly Klon clone
- Make Sounds Loudly Tone Bender clone
- Make Sounds Loudly Night Witch
- Carlin compressor/distortion clone
- ’90s Fender brown-panel Reverb unit
- Tym Guitars Seaweed Isaiah Mitchell Signature Fuzz
- Maestro Echoplex EP-3
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- Vox wah
- Xotic EP Boost
Strings & Picks
- Dunlop (.010-.046)
- Dunlop .88 mm Tortex
Mitchell has some of the best tones in rock ’n’ roll. On Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, he kept things relatively simple and turned to some classic pieces.
For a clean tone, Mitchell relied upon a Fender Super Reverb from ’68 or ’69, which he sometimes mixed with a Vox AC15 head played through a Satellite Amplifiers 2x12 cab, paired with an Xotic Effects EP boost. He embraced his rig’s natural hum: “That tone just sounds so good and there’s something about hearing that hum that feels organic, and it doesn’t take away anything from the music for me. If you listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Little Wing,’ you can hear his amps humming. It’s organic and I think there’s something beautiful in keeping the recording what it is. You’re getting this beautiful tone and hearing that hum is a piece of that tone.”
To create the record’s burly-but-dynamic distorted sounds—the “full-blown stuff,” as Mitchell calls it—he used his primary 1971 100-watt Marshall Super Lead until it released the magic smoke that all tube amps run on and was placed on the injured list. “It sounded fantastic until it blew up!” the guitarist exclaims. “I’m not sure what happened, but luckily the transformers were fine.” He borrowed a friend’s ’79 JMP 2203 as a replacement. He also occasionally used an Orange Custom Shop 50 through an Orange 2x12 vertical open-back cab loaded with Celestion Creambacks.
For guitars, a thrashed but beloved Fender Strat (with its new Callaham trem and the ’50s style deep-V neck it came with) that Mitchell bought from a friend’s father as a teenager did the heavy lifting. That guitar now sports a set of signature Stratocaster pickups Mitchell concocted with Australian builder Mick Brierley. While Mitchell says the process of arriving at the desired sound involved many prototype sets with too many different spec recipes to recall, he says the pickups they ultimately arrived at are “dialed-in to have a lot more midrange than most Strat sets and are very clear, clean up nicely, and add a lot of warmth to the sound.”
“We wanted to evoke a feeling, a mood, a sensation, and that required overbearing whammy bar!”
Backing up the Strat was a recent ’56 Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul Goldtop reissue loaded with P-90s, which Mitchell used for the album’s beefier riffs. For some of the cleaner sounds, the guitarist also employed a custom build from Prisma Guitars that was made from recycled skateboard decks.
Mitchell shaped his tone with a stash of effects that included a tried-and-true Echoplex EP-3, a standard Vox wah, a Cry Baby wah, a crew of overdrives and fuzzes by Make Sounds Loudly, Mitchell’s signature Tym Effects Seaweed fuzz—based on a Triangle Big Muff circuit—and a reissue of a little-known compressor made by Carlin in the ’60s. “Reine Fiske of Dungen is probably the top dude for me right now. He’s an amazing guitar player and his tone is just impeccable. I was reading interviews with him, and he spoke about the Carlin compressor, so I got a remake of one of those. That’s a really cool pedal that’s noisy and kind of shitty, but in a vintage way that isn’t trying to clean up a bunch of stuff, and you can overdrive it like a fuzz.”
To represent the sound of demons “swirling around each other,” as he puts it, on “Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, Pt. 2,” “I used a Leslie cab to be the sound of one of the demons and then the regular guitar rig to represent the human. Creating a different personality with the Leslie was a fun way to get there.”
EARTHLESS Los Angeles, CA. 2-25-2022
In February, Earthless ripped a blistering set for nearly two hours at the Echo in L.A., presented here in all its psychedelic glory.
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John Doe and Billy Zoom keep things spare and powerful, with two basses and a single guitar–and 47 years of shared musical history–between them, as founding members of this historic American band.
There are plenty of mighty American rock bands, but relatively few have had as profound an impact on the international musical landscape as X. Along with other select members of punk’s original Class of 1977, including Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Talking Heads, the Los Angeles-based outfit proved that rock ’n’ roll could be stripped to its bones and still be as literate and allusive as the best work of the songwriters who emerged during the previous decade and were swept up in the corporate-rock tidal wave that punk rebelled against. X’s first three albums–Los Angles, Wild Gift, and Under the Big Black Sun-were a beautiful and provocative foundation, and rocked like Mt. Rushmore.
Last year, X released a new album, Smoke & Fiction, and, after declaring it would be their last, embarked on what was billed as a goodbye tour, seemingly putting a bow on 47 years of their creative journey. But when PG caught up with X at Memphis’s Minglewood Hall in late fall, vocalist and bassist John Doe let us in on a secret: They are going to continue playing select dates and the occasional mini-tour, and will be part of the Sick New World festival in Las Vegas in April 12.
Not-so-secret is that they still rock like Mt. Rushmore, and that the work of all four of the founders–bassist, singer, and songwriter Doe, vocalist and songwriter Exene Cervenka, guitarist Billy Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebreak–remains inspired.
Onstage at Minglewood Hall, Doe talked a bit about his lead role in the film-festival-award-winning 2022 remake of the film noir classic D.O.A. But most important, he and Zoom let us in on their minimalist sonic secrets.Brought to you by D’Addario.
Gretsch A Sketch
Since X’s earliest days, Billy Zoom has played Gretsches. In the beginning, it was a Silver Jet, but in recent years he’s preferred the hollowbody G6122T-59 Vintage Select Chet Atkins Country Gentleman. This example roars a little more thanks to the Kent Armstrong P-90 in the neck and a Seymour Duncan DeArmond-style pickup in the bridge. Zoom, who is an electronics wiz, also did some custom wiring and has locking tuners on the guitar.
More DeArmond
Zoom’s sole effect is this vintage DeArmond 602 volume pedal. It helps him reign in the feedback that occasionally comes soaring in, since he stations himself right in front of his amp during shows.
It's a Zoom!
Zoom’s experience with electronics began as a kid, when he began building items from the famed Heath Kit series and made his own CB radio. And since he’s a guitarist, building amps seemed inevitable. This 1x12 was crafted at the request of G&L Guitars, but never came to market. It is switchable between 10 and 30 watts and sports a single Celestion Vintage 30.
Tube Time!
The tube array includes two EL84, 12AX7s in the preamp stage, and a single 12AT7. The rightmost input is for a reverb/tremolo footswitch.
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Big Black Sun
Besides 3-band EQ, reverb, and tremolo, Zoom’s custom wiring allows for a mid-boost that pumps up to 14 dB. Not content with 11, it starts there and goes to 20.
Baby Blue
This amp is also a Zoom creation, with just a tone and volume control (the latter with a low boost). It also relies on 12AX7s and EL84s.
Big Bottom
Here is John Doe’s rig in full: Ampeg and Fender basses, with his simple stack between them. The red head atop his cabs is a rare bird: an Amber Light Walter Woods from the 1970s. These amps are legendary among bass players for their full tone, and especially good for upright bass and eccentric instruments like Doe’s scroll-head Ampeg. “I think they were the first small, solid-state bass amps ever,” Doe offers. They have channels designated for electric and upright basses (Doe says he uses the upright channel, for a mid-dier tone), plus volume, treble, bass, and master volume controls. One of the switches puts the signal out of phase, but he’s not sure what the others do. Then, there’s a Genzler cab with two 12" speakers and four horns, and an Ampeg 4x10.
Scared Scroll
Here’s the headstock of that Ampeg scroll bass, an artifact of the ’60s with a microphone pickup. Doe seems to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this instrument, which has open tuners and through-body f-style holes on its right and left sides. “The interesting thing,” he says, “is that you cannot have any treble on the pickup. If you do, it sounds like shit. With a pick, you can sort of get away with it.” So he mostly rolls off all the treble to shake the earth.
Jazz Bass II
This is the second Fender Jazz Bass that Doe has owned. He bought his first from a friend in Baltimore for $150, and used it to write and record most of X’s early albums. That one no longer leaves home. But this touring instrument came from the Guitar Castle in Salem, Oregon, and was painted to recreate the vintage vibe of Doe’s historic bass.
A dual-channel tube preamp and overdrive pedal inspired by the Top Boost channel of vintage VOX amps.
ROY is designed to deliver sweet, ringing cleans and the "shattered" upper-mid breakup tones without sounding harsh or brittle. It is built around a 12AX7 tube that operates internally at 260VDC, providing natural tube compression and a slightly "spongy" amp-like response.
ROY features two identical channels, each with separate gain and volume controls. This design allows you to switch from clean to overdrive with the press of a footswitch while maintaining control over the volume level. It's like having two separate preamps dialed in for clean and overdrive tones.
Much like the old amplifier, ROY includes a classic dual-band tone stack. This unique EQ features interactive Treble and Bass controls that inversely affect the Mids. Both channels share the EQ section.
Another notable feature of this circuit is the Tone Cut control: a master treble roll-off after the EQ. You can shape your tone using the EQ and then adjust the Tone Cut to reduce harshness in the top end while keeping your core sound.
ROY works well with other pedals and can serve as a clean tube platform at the end of your signal chain. It’s a simple and effective way to add a vintage British voice to any amp or direct rig setup.
ROY offers external channel switching and the option to turn the pedal on/off via a 3.5mm jack. The preamp comes with a wall-mount power supply and a country-specific plug.
Street price is 299 USD. It is available at select retailers and can also be purchased directly from the Tubesteader online store at www.tubesteader.com.
The compact offspring of the Roland SDE-3000 rack unit is simple, flexible, and capable of a few cool new tricks of its own.
Tonalities bridge analog and digital characteristics. Cool polyrhythmic textures and easy-to-access, more-common echo subdivisions. Useful panning and stereo-routing options.
Interactivity among controls can yield some chaos and difficult-to-duplicate sounds.
$219
Boss SDE-3 Dual Digital Delay
boss.info
Though my affection for analog echo dwarfs my sentiments for digital delay, I don’t get doctrinaire about it. If the sound works, I’ll use it. Boss digital delays have been instructive in this way to me before: I used a Boss DD-5 in a A/B amp rig with an Echoplex for a long time, blending the slur and stretch of the reverse echo with the hazy, wobbly tape delay. It was delicious, deep, and complex. And the DD-5 still lives here just in case I get the urge to revisit that place.
Tinkering with theSDE-3 Dual Digital Delay suggested a similar, possibly enduring appeal. As an evolution of the Roland SDE-3000rack unit from the 1980s, it’s a texture machine, bubbling with subtle-to-odd triangle LFO modulations and enhanced dual-delay patterns that make tone mazes from dopey-simple melodies. And with the capacity to use it with two amps in stereo or in panning capacity, it can be much more dimensional. But while the SDE-3 will become indispensable to some for its most complex echo textures, its basic voice possesses warmth that lends personality in pedestrian applications too.
Tapping Into the Source
Some interest in the original SDE-3000 is in its association with Eddie Van Halen, who ran two of them in a wet-dry-wet configuration, using different delay rates and modulation to thicken and lend dimension to solos. But while EVH’s de facto endorsement prompted reissues of the effect as far back as the ’90s, part of the appeal was down to the 3000’s intrinsic elegance and simplicity.
In fact, the original rack unit’s features don’t differ much from what you would find on modern, inexpensive stompbox echoes. But the SDE-3000’s simplicity and reliable predictability made it conducive to fast workflow in the studio. Critically, it also avoided the lo-fi and sterility shortcomings that plagued some lesser rivals—an attribute designer Yoshi Ikegami chalks up to analog components elsewhere in the circuit and a fortuitous clock imprecision that lends organic essence to the repeats.
Evolved Echo Animal
Though the SDE-3 traces a line back to the SDE-3000 in sound and function, it is a very evolved riff on a theme. I don’t have an original SDE-3000 on hand for comparison, but it’s easy to hear how the SDE-3 bridges a gap between analog haze and more clinical, surgical digital sounds in the way that made the original famous. Thanks to the hi-cut control, the SDE-3’s voice can be shaped to enhance the angular aspect of the echoes, or blunt sharp edges. There’s also a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats. That also means you can take advantage of the polyrhythmic effects that are arguably its greatest asset.
“There’s a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats.”
The SDE-3’s offset control, which generates these polyrhythmic echoes, is its heart. The most practical and familiar echos, like quarter, eighth, and dotted-eighth patterns, are easy to access in the second half of the offset knobs range. In the first half of the knob’s throw, however, the offset delays often clang about at less-regular intervals, producing complex polyrhythms that are also cool multipliers of the modulation and EQ effects. For example, when emphasizing top end in repeats, using aggressive effects mixes and pitch-wobble modulation generates eerie ghost notes that swim through and around patterns, adding rhythmic interest and texture without derailing the drive behind a groove. Even at modest settings, these are great alternatives to more staid, regular subdivision patterns. Many of the coolest sounds tend toward the foggy reverb spectrum. Removing high end, piling on feedback, and adding the woozy, drunken drift from modulation creates fascinating backdrops for slow, sparse chord melodies. Faster modulations throb and swirl like old BBC Radiophonic Workshop sci-fi sound designs.
By themselves, the modulations have their own broad appeal. Chorus tones are rarely the archetypal Roland Jazz Chorus or CE type—tending to be a bit darker and mistier. But they do a nice job suggesting that texture without lapsing into caricature. There are also really cool rotary-speaker-like textures and vibrato sounds that offer alternatives to go-to industry standards.
The Verdict
The SDE-3’s many available sounds and textures would be appealing at $219—even without the stereo and panning connectivity options, a useful hold function, and expression pedal control that opens up additional options. The panning capabilities, in particular, sparked all kinds of thoughts about studio applications. Mastering the SDE-3 takes just a little study—certain polyrhythms can be dramatically reshaped by the interactivity of other controls and you need to take care to achieve identical results twice. But this is a pedal that, by virtue of its relative simplicity and richness and breadth of sounds, exceeds the utility of some similarly priced rivals, all while opening up possibilities well outside the simple echo realm
Reader: T. Moody
Hometown: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Guitar: The Green Snake
Reader T. Moody turned this Yamaha Pacifica body into a reptilian rocker.
With a few clicks on Reverb, a reptile-inspired shred machine was born.
With this guitar, I wanted to create a shadowbox-type vibe by adding something you could see inside. I have always loved the Yamaha Pacifica guitars because of the open pickup cavity and the light weight, so I purchased this body off Reverb (I think I am addicted to that website). I also wanted a color that was vivid and bold. The seller had already painted it neon yellow, so when I read in the description, “You can see this body from space,” I immediately clicked the Buy It Now button. I also purchased the neck and pickups off of Reverb.
I have always loved the reverse headstock, simply because nothing says 1987 (the best year in the history of the world) like a reverse headstock. The pickups are both Seymour Duncan—an SH-1N in the neck position and TB-4 in the bridge, both in a very cool lime green color. Right when these pickups got listed, the Buy It Now button once again lit up like the Fourth of July. I am a loyal disciple of Sperzel locking tuners and think Bob Sperzel was a pure genius, so I knew those were going on this project even before I started on it. I also knew that I wanted a Vega-Trem; those units are absolutely amazing.
When the body arrived, I thought it would be cool to do some kind of burst around the yellow so I went with a neon green. It turned out better than I imagined. Next up was the shaping and cutting of the pickguard. I had this crocodile-type, faux-leather material that I glued on the pickguard and then shaped to my liking. I wanted just a single volume control and no tone knob, because, like King Edward (Van Halen) once said, “Your volume is your tone.”
T. Moody
I then shaped and glued the faux-leather material in the cavity. The tuning knobs, volume knob, pickguard, screws, and selector switch were also painted in the lemon-lime paint scheme. I put everything together, installed the pickups, strung it up, set it up, plugged it in, and I was blown away. I think this is the best-playing and -sounding guitar I have ever tried.
The only thing missing was the center piece and strap. The latter was easy because DiMarzio makes their ClipLock in neon green. The center piece was more difficult because originally, I was thinking that some kind of gator-style decoration would be cool. In the end, I went with a green snake, because crocodiles ain’t too flexible—and they’re way too big to fit in a pickup cavity!
The Green Snake’s back is just as striking as the front.