
Sam Fender shares a moment with his saxophonist and childhood friend, Johnny "Blue Hat" Davis, at London's O2 Brixton Academy in September 2021.
The British songwriter traversed the bleak thoroughfares of his past while writing his autobiographical sophomore album, Seventeen Going Under—a tale of growing up down-and-out, set to an epic chorus of Jazzmasters and soaring sax.
British songwriter Sam Fender hails from North Shields, England, an industrial coastal port town near the North Sea, about eight miles northeast of Newcastle upon Tyne. Fender grew up in this small village, which he calls "a drinking town with a fishing problem." He lived there with his mother on a council estate, a type of British public housing. This is the mise-en-scène for Sam Fender's coming-of-age autobiographical new album, Seventeen Going Under. On the album's cover, a photograph shows Sam sitting on a brick stoop.
"That was a back lane that I used to go down and smoke weed when I was about 15 with a bunch of tearaways," Fender says in his regional "Geordie" accent. "That back lane leads into this estate called Meadow Well, which was an estate that had 80 percent unemployment where we grew up. There was a lot of riots there back in the '90s. It was practically on fire for the whole of 1991. Parts of it were just a wasteland for teenagers, and that's where we used to go and sit and hang out and stuff."
About a mile from that stoop is the Low Lights Tavern, where Fender tended bar after high school, and it's also where he played his music in the early days. Fender's manager, Owain Davies, first heard him play guitar there in 2013 in the corner of the pub. Davies immediately took Fender on as an artist, telling U.K. music industry trade paper Music Week: "He's just an undeniable talent, he's hard to ignore."
Sam Fender - Seventeen Going Under (Official Video)
Indeed, Fender's lyrics stop you in your tracks. These are from the title track of Seventeen Going Under:
I was far too scared to hit him
But I would hit him in a heartbeat now
That's the thing with anger
It begs to stick around
So it can fleece you of your beauty
And leave you spent with nowt to offer
It makes you hurt the ones who love you
You hurt them like they're nothing
After hooking up with Davies, Fender doubled down on gigging and writing, gaining fans and traction, and eventually won the 2018 BRIT Critics' Choice Award before releasing his first album, Hypersonic Missiles, in late 2019. Taking a slow-burn route of building a following for six years before releasing a full-length likely contributed to that album instantly having wings, debuting at No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart. Fender's sound and identity as an artist coalesced, with his songwriting skills bucking pop formula. "Hypersonic Missiles" weaves a love story in between musings about "feeding the corporate machine" and "kids in Gaza being bombed." In "Dead Boys," Fender vulnerably grieves fallen mates, victims of the male suicide epidemic in Northern England. Jangly Jazzmasters and epic, chorus-drenched solos play a lead character through it all.
Thematically, Fender, who is 27, gazed outward on Hypersonic Missiles, but he goes deeply inward on Seventeen Going Under. It's literally the soundtrack of his adolescence. "It's mainly about self-esteem, growing up, and the political landscape of England, and how that affects the Northeast and how the Tories basically alienate my hometown and the people that live there," he says. These songs of tribulation are resonating strongly with Britons, and landed Fender another No. 1 album in the U.K. when Seventeen Going Under came out in October 2021.
TIDBIT: Seventeen Going Under was recorded at Wor House (Sam Fender's studio) in North Shields, England, and Grouse Lodge in Ireland. It was mixed by Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire) and produced by Bramwell Bronte.
"I feel like it's my first proper album," says Fender. "The first record was a hodgepodge of songs written over six years. Some of the songs were written when I was 19. I was a baby when I wrote some of the songs on that album. Whereas this is a collective piece of work written over the course of two years. And I feel like it's more cohesive as a piece of work. I think it has continuity. I think it has a sound."
The album might've turned out completely different if not for the pandemic, which resulted in a prolific writing period for Fender, who was forced to quarantine. "I've got a health condition, which affects my immune system, so I had to stay in the house. I was alone, so there was a lot of reflection, a lot of looking back at the past," he recalls. "I was doing therapy at the same time to try and get my head screwed on, and I ended up dissecting my whole childhood in therapy. And then learnin' about the reason why I was the way I was; the reason why I was reacting to things in certain ways; the reason why my relationships weren't goin' well; the reason why I wasn't being the most savory character or not being my own ally. I was kinda making life hard for myself."
And so, this reckoning unfolds throughout 11 tracks. The title song documents a dark time when Fender's mother was battling health issues and couldn't make ends meet. It's a banger that cuts right to the struggle of feeling helpless as a teenager—being old enough to know what's going on but being too young to fix anything.
Sam Fender's Gear
"I like a Jazzmaster through a Fender Twin," says Sam Fender. "I like a bit of compression, just to kind of give you that bite, and I love an old Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, just the original cheap chorus pedal."
Photo by Laura Brindley
Guitars
Fender American Pro Jazzmaster
1959 Fender Jazzmaster
Fender Stratocaster
Martin 000X1AE
Takamine acoustic (gift from Elton John)
Amps
- Fender '65 Twin Reverb
- Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb
- Fender '68 Custom Deluxe Reverb
Strings
- D'Addario EXL115 Nickel Wound (.011–.049)
Effects
- Electro-Harmonix Small Clone
- Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Phase Shifter
- Electro-Harmonix Green Russian Big Muff Pi
- Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Nano
- Electro-Harmonix Memory Man
- Electro-Harmonix POG2
- Electro-Harmonix Stereo Polychorus
- Fulltone OCD
- Origin Effects Cali76 Compact Deluxe
- Mooer Yellow Comp
- Strymon BigSky Reverberator
- Boss RE-20 Space Echo
- Way Huge Red Llama 25th Anniversary Overdrive
- Gamechanger Audio PLUS
"Spit of You" is about his dad and the complicated relationships between sons and fathers. "Me and my dad had a five-year period where we didn't get on very well," Fender shares. "He lived in a different country. As things have progressed with my career, we started hanging out a lot more. It's about a father and son's relationship and the inability to talk about anything other than DIY, music, or alcohol. If anything, it's a just declaration of love for my old man. And funny enough, it's his favorite song."
Not all the songs chew over familial dynamics. Fender dissects his own communication and romantic failures on "Get You Down," and there's externally pointed angst on the album's two political tracks: the rebellious anthem "Aye," which pokes and prods around class/wealth disparity, and "Long Way Off," which Fender says sounds like "a Bond movie theme" with its grandiose instrumentation.
"It's got 164 tracks of audio," Fender says of the latter. "It just built and built and built and became this huge orchestral track. It's about political polarity and how I feel a lack of identity with any of the political parties currently in my country. I think it's quite a unanimous feeling in a lot of places at the moment. A lot of working-class people in England feel displaced by it all, and in my hometown as well. It was written around the time when all the Trump supporters were storming the capital building. We're a long way off from sorting out the mess the world is in."
“It’s such a refreshing rehash of ’80s music. It makes me think that a lot of the sounds in the ’80s that sound jarring and cheesy, I feel like it was just because it was the early days with synthesizers and them sorts of guitar sounds.”
All of the songs were written by Fender, who played guitar, bass, piano, Hammond organ, synthesizers, glockenspiel, mandolin, and harmonica inside the North Shields studio he built by necessity during that time. The album has horns and strings across it, and Fender also wrote the string arrangements, though he didn't play those parts himself. His five band members, most of whom he grew up with—drummer Drew Michael, guitarist Dean Thompson, bassist Tom Ungerer, guitarist and keyboardist Joe Atkinson, and saxist Johnny "Blue Hat" Davis—play on the album as well. It was produced by Thom Lewis, aka "Bramwell Bronte," Fender's longtime collaborator who also produced Hypersonic Missiles.
Fender has a homespun grit much like his idol Bruce Springsteen, whose working-class ethos and songs from the heartland resonated with Fender at an early age. (The Boss connection has earned Fender the nickname of "Geordie Springsteen.") Fender's sound has a tinge of throwback and noticeable nods to his influences (cough, cough, sexy saxophone solos), but the magic lies in how he connects on so many levels with cinematic arrangements, bull's-eye lyrics, and sincere delivery. The songs are a baring of the heart, a showcase of human struggle.
His father and older brother (nine years his senior) are also musicians who gigged around town, obviously influencing Fender's journey down the troubadour road. "I got a guitar when I was 8 and started mucking around with it then. By the time I was 10, I was starting to get quite proficient," Fender shares. "And then as I got older, I realized at school there was always a couple of kids that could shred, and could really, really play. And I just thought, I don't wanna spend the rest of my life learnin' guitar just to be that—I wanna make songs, ya know?" As a kid, he was obsessed with Slash, Page, and Hendrix. "Then my brother started showin' us Springsteen and all that. I loved Oasis and all the British stuff as well."
“I felt like it could be powerful and delicate and all the things in between. That’s when I started singing properly, is after hearing Jeff Buckley.”
Photo by Charlotte Patmore
But a gamechanger came when Fender was 14 and his brother gave him Jeff Buckley's Grace. "I always had quite a high voice for a tall … I'm 6'1," he says. "Normally that means you're, like, a baritone, but I'm, like, quite a high tenor. When my brother gave us Jeff Buckley, I was like alright, he does that, and it's rock 'n' roll, and it sounds cool. That means I can do this as well [laughs]. I felt like it could be powerful and delicate and all the things in between. That's when I started singing properly, is after hearing Jeff Buckley. I always wanted to have a voice that was, like, "rawr"—gruff 'n' stuff—when I was a kid, but then I realized, well, that's not really who I am."
Sonically, the War on Drugs is one of Fender's favorite bands. Their impact on how he approaches crafting song parts can be heard in "Last To Make It Home," particularly the expansive guitar solo on the outro. "I had the Fender Twin up, like, so loud that my ears were bleedin', with my whammy bar," Fender says of recording that solo, "and whichever way I turned, I got that feedback. You get that sort of 'Champagne Supernova' endin'," Fender says. (WoD frontman Adam Granduciel had signed on to mix that track, but ultimately couldn't do it because he missed the master deadline for his own album.)
"I like Springsteen for the lyrics, and I love War on Drugs for the sound," Fender shares. "I think it's such a refreshing rehash of sounds we already know—it's such a refreshing rehash of '80s music. It makes me think that a lot of the sounds in the '80s that sound jarring and cheesy, I feel like it was just because it was the early days with synthesizers and them sorts of guitar sounds. I feel like the War on Drugs have refined it. It's beautiful and I think there's more to be looked down that avenue. That's why I'm quite chorusy-soundin'—I love that sound. It's nostalgic for me, even though I'm not from the '80s, I grew up in a house where that music was playing."
“I was doing therapy at the same time to try and get my head screwed on, and I ended up dissecting my whole childhood in therapy.”
Though his new album is bursting with layers upon layers of instruments, he undoubtedly has an ingrained sense of how to be impactful with just a guitar and his voice, which came from years of performing solo without a backing band. In a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge concert in early 2020, Fender did a solo performance of Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black," fingerpicking the melody and bass line, while nailing a rather ambitious vocal. His thumb bounces between the 5th and 6th strings, while his other fingers create a harp-like effect on the melody. "It's a strange move, but once you start getting the muscle strength, it's a constant thing and it's quite hypnotic," he says.
Fender describes his songwriting method as "chop and change." He noodles on his Jazzmaster, does some fingerpicking, or switches to another instrument. "A lot of the times I write a lot of songs on piano and convert to guitar. So, I find the chords on piano sometimes and then I'll find interesting variants of the chords on the guitar to make it sound pretty." He likes to experiment with tunings as well. Seventeen Going Under is mostly in C# standard, though he did play around a bit with Nashville tuning and light gauge strings.
When conversation turns to a special guitar he just bought, Fender lights up. "I've finally treated myself and allowed myself to buy something that was expensive because there's always an air of guilt," he says. "I've been lucky, Fender's always given us stuff. I've always had loads of free guitars because I've always been sponsored by them. But when it comes to buying stuff, there's still a part of us that thinks I'm still living in the flat with my mum on a council estate, and I still feel like I can't. I'm like, "ooh, that's a lot of money." It's like a subconscious thing. I was always quite frugal. I was always scrimpin'.
Fender primarily plays Jazzmasters, but he strapped on a Stratocaster for "Will We Talk?" at Hole 44 in Berlin, Germany, on November 4, 2021.
Photo by Chux on Tour Photography@chuxontour
"But I've just bought a ridiculous Jazzmaster. It's a 1959," he continues. "It's the second year of Jazzmasters, one of the very, very first ones. It's absolutely stunning. It's got a gold scratch plate, and it came with a packet of strings from 1959 from New Brunswick."
He explains his sweet spot for tone matter-of-factly. "I like a Jazzmaster through a Fender Twin. I like a bit of compression, just to kind of give you that bite, and I love an old Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, just the original cheap chorus pedal. I think it sounds great. And every other chorus pedal I put on I'm just like 'pfft whatever.' People go, 'try this boutique $300 fucking chorus pedal.' And I put it on and it's not as good as a Small Clone. Small Clone just sounds like a chorus. And it's one knob. It's idiot proof and I'm an idiot [laughing]. That's my go-to."
At the beginning of 2022, Fender will live in New York City while recording his third album at Electric Lady Studios, which is where he'd planned to make his second album before the pandemic made that impossible. He wrote 60 songs over the last two years, recording only 11, which means he has a good stash in his back pocket. The rest of 2022 he'll be headlining arena tours, as well as supporting the Killers on four dates in London and Dublin.
On the release of such a personal collection of music, Fender recently penned a letter to his 17-year-old self. In it, he tells young Sam not to be so serious. Present-day Sam's social media is light and carefree, with videos of him explaining how to make the best cuppa, eating jellied eels, and mini movies of strangers on the street with improvised voiceovers. So, it appears time has done the songwriter well. It's all in the new album, but 27-year-old Sam had this to say to 17-year-old Sam: "Art is the purest remedy for all internal conflict and you're taking a career in it. It's an honour to do what you will do, never forget that. You may feel alone currently but you will realise that your stories, when put to music, open up a side of you that actually helps people. A lot of these stories were originally about you but they belong to everyone, as everyone has their own, and they will be screamed back at you—from clubs and dive bars, even arenas. Some kid, 17, probably going through a boatload of similar shit that you experienced, will be front and centre, screaming these stories as if it's their last night on Earth."
Sam Fender - Live at Reading Festival 2021 Full Set
With two hit albums in the last two years but no touring because of the pandemic, Sam Fender was ready for Leeds Festival 2021. Witness one of his signature chorus-and-whammy solos at 12:50 on "The Borders" from 2019's Hypersonic Missiles.
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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 rivalsÂ, 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.