For Madison Cunningham, the greater good of the song always comes first. But while the song itself is always king for the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter/guitarist, her tunes are rendered with striking features that can’t help but draw the ear deeper. Whether you’re snared by her poetry, her beautiful voice, her wonderful sense of melody and composition, or her dexterous and often unexpected guitar playing, Cunningham’s songs tend to contain multitudes. She is the rare breed of artist who pens earworms with the kind of depth and intrigue that musos go crazy for. It’s a magic trick that’s earned her comparisons to the legendary Joni Mitchell (who Cunningham cites as a key influence), and it’s also earned her four Grammy nominations and plenty of famous fans as a songwriter’s songwriter.
With her highly anticipated third album, Revealer, Cunningham set out to discover who she truly is as an artist and songwriter beneath the layers she built up after a few turbulent years in the music business. The resulting collection of songs conveys a sense of honesty and authenticity that feels rare in the era of social media. Revealer cohesively blends sounds pulled from indie-rock living with chamber-pop arrangements, and Cunningham’s folk-songwriting fundamentals are supercharged with killer guitar ideas. And while those refreshing riffs form the foundation of many of Revealer’s songs, she contextualizes the guitar’s place in her world and on Revealer in her own words.
Madison Cunningham - Hospital (Live Performance)
Madison Cunningham plays all the instruments on this live performance of her single "Hospital"!
“This record was me trying to get back to my interest again,” she explains. “I went through such a weird, barren creative time before it that I was like, ‘God, what do I actually enjoy playing or writing?’ My whole journey as a guitar player, from the moment I started playing to now, has been trying to find my voice and my home in it. It’s such a versatile instrument and it’s been established by so many incredible innovators. I’m always trying to find a new way into it that feels like me. My sense of who I am is always changing, so there was certainly a lot of energy spent trying to figure out where the guitar belonged on this record, as opposed to the last one, where I felt a little more sure about where I was going. On this one, I was kind of happily lost in trying to figure it out.”
Cunningham admits that navigating the uncertainties made it a difficult record to make at times. However, the process yielded some incredibly cool guitar moments, including the album’s opening track, “All I’ve Ever Known,” a song that, Cunningham says, “feels very true to the way I view harmony and rhythm, overall.” The song opens with a playful, melodic hammer-on lick that recalls the late Jeff Buckley’s best work—a lick that Cunningham stumbled over at soundcheck during a dark period of a long tour and haunted her until she returned home.
“If someone’s only take-away from my music is, ‘Sick guitar tone, bro,’ I would be bummed. That compliment is always just slightly offensive to me, because it means you didn’t get anything from the song and the guitar stole the show.”
“That song and ‘Anywhere’ reflect back the things that I love most in songwriting,” she shares. “We were in the middle-of-nowhere Ohio, and it was literally nine below. We were cold and grumpy, and we were warming up onstage. I was just at the point where I’d toured so much that year that I was so tired of hearing the songs we were going to play that night, and that riff came out of nowhere. I just found it at soundcheck, and it made all sorts of sense in certain parts of the fretboard. My band and I jammed on it at soundcheck, and I have this voice memo of it that I took home with me. The first week that we were off tour, I just sat in my house and finished it. It all came out at once.”
Another standout guitar moment on Revealer is the fuzzy, snaky, baritone-esque guitar line that underpins the single “Hospital.” The riff opens the song and dances with Cunningham’s soaring vocal line and a lovely string part. It’s an idea that really shows off Cunningham’s knack for penning intriguing and fun guitar parts that don’t overshadow a song’s spirit; it’s simply a colorful character within the song. Cunningham describes the origins of “Hospital” as “a test to see if I could just write a simpler song with fewer chords and to not make it about the guitar.” And the composition came about in a different order than usual. “The song itself did come first and then I figured out what the guitar needed to be after the basics were written,” she says. “Usually for me, it’s the reverse.”
Writing her Grammy-nominated third album, Revealer, was an adventure in self-discovery for Madison Cunningham. Her creative team included producers Tyler Chester, Mike Elizondo, and Tucker Martine.
“Hospital” also provides a shining example of Cunningham’s clever approach to shaping unique tones. The guitar part on the song might sound like a baritone, but it’s actually a standard-scale guitar in standard tuning, pitch-shifted down to B standard with the help of a DigiTech Whammy pedal. Low tunings are a signature part of Cunningham’s sound. She typically tunes her favorite Fender Jazzmaster down to C standard, but the “wacky tone and sound” the Whammy’s pitch-shifter gave the riff won out over a guitar actually tuned down to B. “I found if I just tuned a guitar down to B, the weird thing I liked about the sound was gone,” she explains. “I use that pedal live, too, but since my Jazzmaster is tuned to C standard live, I don’t have to drop it as much with the Whammy.”
Revealer’s B-side boasts some of Cunningham’s most adventurous playing, including the off-kilter, Eastern-sounding stabs that lace up “Collider Particles,” and a proggy, finger-twister of a riff that punctuates “Your Hate Could Power a Train.” She wrote the pair of tunes in the studio with co-producer Mike Elizondo. “It was like I opened up the toy chest for a minute when we wrote them,” Cunningham shares. “There was so much of this record where I felt depressed and sad while making it, that these songs were some real bursts of joy for me. It felt like those songs on their own, without a body-of-work like the album, don’t necessarily represent the whole of me, but they represent an important part of me. I wanted a playful, curious element to be really an important element of the B-side of the record, and they gave me exactly that.”
Madison Cunningham’s Gear
Madison Cunningham plays the Sinclair, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2022. Her Jazzmaster is a made-in-Mexico ’60s reissue that she bought right off the wall at Guitar Center.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
Guitars
- MIM Fender Jazzmaster reissue
- 1960s Silvertone acoustic with Old Style Guitar Shop rubber bridge
Amps (typically recorded in stereo pairs):
- 1967 Fender Princeton Reverb (modified to black-panel spec)
- Early '60s Magnatone 670 Stereo
- Mid-’60s Gibson Falcon
Effects
- JHS Emperor
- DigiTech Whammy
- Maestro G-1 Rhythm N Sound Processor (vibrato on “Sunshine Over the Counter”)
- JHS Artificial Blonde Madison Cunningham Signature Vibrato
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario Flatwound (.013–.056)
- Dunlop Max-Grip 1.14 mm
For the Eastern-flavored guitar part on “Collider Particles,” Cunningham’s “toy chest” included one of the increasingly famous rubber-bridge guitars luthier Reuben Cox crafts at L.A.’s Old Style Guitar Shop, which was paired with a JHS pedal for a glitching effect. It’s an example of Cunningham and Revealer’s production team’s (which included longtime foil Tyler Chester, as well as Mike Elizondo and Tucker Martine) shrewd ability to include heavily effected sounds without allowing them to consume the track.
“I went through such a weird, barren creative time before it that I was like, ‘God, what do I actually enjoy playing or writing?’”
“The rubber bridge thing has been a distinctly Los Angeles sound, and the gospel of them is traveling, and it’s becoming a more universally used and sought-after sound,” says Cunningham. “They started to pop up around me and immediately sounded like an effect I liked and something I wanted to use. So, Tyler [Chester] lent me his during the pandemic and I just never gave it back. The rubber bridge is responsible for finishing a lot of the songs: “Who Are You Now” and “Anywhere” and “All I’ve Ever Known” … all those songs were kind of a result of that guitar. I couldn’t speak more highly about it, and now that it’s becoming a sound that people are using, I’m trying to find new ways to make it sound like something else, not just a rubber bridge. I still want to get the ‘what is that?’ effect, because I think that’s its original intent, to make people tilt their heads a little bit and go, ‘What the heck is happening with this?’ It’s the kind of guitar that has so much room to explore within it.”
Cunningham borrowed this 1960s Silvertone acoustic with an Old Style Guitar Shop rubber bridge from her producer, Tyler Chester, and never gave it back. She wrote several Revealer tracks on this guitar
Photo by Noah Torralba
Though Cunningham found the rubber bridge to be the perfect tool to finish much of the album’s songs, her trusty Jazzmaster did most of the heavy lifting. The guitar is a bone-stock made-in-Mexico ’60s reissue that Cunningham plucked off the wall at Guitar Center, bonded with immediately, and never looked back. “I never made the conscious decision to be like, ‘I’m a Jazzmaster girl now!’ That particular guitar was the first one I ever played, and it was just immediately comfortable for me, and very versatile,” Cunningham says of the sunburst offset. “And it immediately held all the deep tunings that I’m always tuning my guitars to. It was like, ‘This is the sound that I hear in my dreams.’ It became a staple for the last six years and I’m pretty married to this one because it’s got my imprint now. It feels like home.”
Another homebase for Cunningham, and font of inspiration, is Joni Mitchell, who returned to the stage this year for the first time in decades at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival. Cunningham reflects on the Canadian icon’s gifts and influence on her own path as an artist.
"It immediately held all the deep tunings that I’m always tuning my guitars to. It was like, ‘This is the sound that I hear in my dreams,’” says Cunningham of her Jazzmaster."
Photo by Tim Bugbee
“Joni’s playfulness is her strength. She wasn’t ever in the business of showing off before she was in the business of moving people, and those were firm priorities in her writing and performing. Those priorities stuck with me, and I’m very conscious as a guitar player to toe that line. There are moments to step out with it and to let it shine, but for me it’s all about the song. Hearing her records early on left a huge mark on me, especially as a guitar player. I played in open tunings and understood guitar, and I knew the nuance and the complexities of what she was actually doing and that no one could replicate that—she invented her own tunings! But all of that was supporting this theme and propping up the main point of the song, and it’s so powerful to be able to have her voice, her writing, and her guitar playing work together like they do. All three of those elements are always working so clearly for the same thing in her music. That is the most beautiful combination. I constantly strive for that, and I’m haunted by that way of thinking. If someone’s only takeaway from my music is, ‘Sick guitar tone, bro,’ I would be bummed. That compliment is always just slightly offensive to me, because it means you didn’t get anything from the song and the guitar stole the show. There are moments for big guitars, of course—balance is the key—but my priorities are the song first and everything else second.
“My whole journey as a guitar player, from the moment I started playing to now, has been trying to find my voice and my home in it.”
”Making Revealer was an undeniably cathartic process for Cunningham, but it was also a learning experience. As one who is dedicated to her own songcraft, but a reverent student of songwriting in general, she’s had time to analyze things now that the dust in Revealer’s wake has settled a bit. When asked if she has any advice for fellow songwriters, Cunningham’s clarity comes through in her answer:
“Don’t let your curiosity for the process die out because it is a process. I had to remember during this record that you need to have a lack of preciousness, and that’s not a lack of thoughtfulness, but it’s preciousness. You need to be able to break the song down again if it needs it, but you have to be led by the nose of your curiosity, and that has to inspire your bravery to go back in again and build a song up all over again if it isn’t quite there. And don’t let the business side of everything weigh you down, because in the end, none of that really matters. Putting the process and what it takes to build a good song before any other decision is the most important thing to me now.”
YouTube It
In this solo live performance of “Sunshine Over the Counter,” Madison Cunningham trades her usual Jazzmaster for a Telecaster. She uses a Maestro G-1 Rhythm N Sound Processor for the track’s unique vibrato.
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Revv G3 Purple Channel Preamp/Overdrive/Distortion Pedal - Anniversary Edition
The Revv G3 revolutionized high gain pedals in 2018 with its tube-like response & tight, clear high gain tones. Suddenly the same boutique tones used by metal artists & producers worldwide were available to anyone in a compact pedal. Now the G3 returns with a new V2 circuit revision that raises the bar again.
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
