The Feelies (from left): guitarists Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, drummer Stan Demeski, percussionist Dave Weckerman, and bassist Brenda Sauter.
A casual listener might hear the Feelies’ version of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” from their 2023 live record, Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground, as a straight-ahead cover. After all, the legendary New Jersey-based underground rock ’n’ roll band didn’t change the chord structure around. They didn’t really alter the instrumentation. They didn’t give it a profoundly new feel that recontextualizes Lou Reed’s paean to a drug deal. No, they seem to simply convey the song with a svelte, efficient delivery.
But on the song, the Feelies do their thing, subtle though it might be. The band have had a knack for stripping songs to their necessary bits and making them their own since forming in the 1970s. Their slightly warped, minimal, high-speed take on the Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” set the tone on their debut, 1980’s Crazy Rhythms, and they’ve since made covers an integral part of their records and live shows.
The Feelies’ history with the music of the Velvets runs deep, including recording the band’s “What Goes On” for 1988’s Only Life. On Some Kinda Love, they paint a bigger picture as they cover 18 songs from the VU catalog. Throughout, the Feelies, in effect, convey an object lesson in how to approach the music of the Velvet Underground, offering refreshing lessons on how to rock ’n’ roll along the way.
Glenn Mercer's Gear
Glenn Mercer’s live rig consists of a modded Squier Telecaster, a simple pedal chain, and a modern Vox AV30 that he runs through a vintage Guild 1x12.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
Guitars
- Two modified Squier Telecasters
Amps
- Vox AV30
- ’50s Guild cab with JBL 12" speaker
Effects
- Boss Turbo Overdrive
- Boss Super Overdrive
- Boss Chorus
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL (.010-.046)
- Dean Markley triangle picks .50 mm
- Clayton picks
Let’s get back to “I’m Waiting for the Man” and consider its place in the rock canon with some extracurricular listening:
An early version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” appears on Words & Music, 1965, a collection of 23-year-old Reed’s demos for Pickwick Records, where he was a staff songwriter and session musician. It’s a humble slice of Greenwich Village folk, Reed’s vocal accompaniment a loose but grooving fingerpicked acoustic guitar figure.
In 1967, the song made its official debut on The Velvet Underground & Nico. The song is transformed and has arrived. The guitar figure has been boiled down to a droning two-chord vamp, with the exception of a four-measure turnaround that serves as the chorus. It’s electrified and distorted. Guitars sounds like they’re cutting through the tape. John Cale pounds piano clusters along with Moe Tucker’s propulsive tom and tambourine assault. Meanwhile, Reed coolly raps overtop. This is rock ’n’ roll in its most elemental form. All the energy, all the vibe, none of the frills.
“If you have to talk about stuff and work on stuff, then to me, you kind of lose the essence of what’s good about playing music. It’s all instinctual and telepathic.” —Glenn Mercer
A couple years later, in 1969, the band performed a live rendition of “I’m Waiting for the Man” for what would become 1972’s Live at Max’s Kansas City. By now, original Velvets Reed and guitarist Sterling Morrison were joined by the rhythm section of brothers Doug and Billy Yule, and together they deliver a tight, swaggering shuffle. Morrison reaches for the sky with bluesy bar-rock bends and trills and Lou howls and hollers. It’s loud, it’s alive. It’s also an indication of the Velvets’ evanescence. From folky strums to a pulsating psychedelia to proto-punk, nothing in their orbit remained the same in their short span.
There are other versions of the band playing the song, and the band’s approach varies—no matter what anyone tells you, don’t skip the pseudo-minimalist reading on the band’s 1993 reunion record, Live MCMXCIII. It’s not only great, but worth it for guitar nerds to hear Lou play the song in his headless-guitar phase. After their dissolution, Reed continued to reinvent on live albums; the John Lee Hooker-style approach he takes on Take No Prisoners is worth hearing. Tucker also recorded a delicately strummed, breathy version with moodier chords on I Spent a Week There the Other Night.
What the Velvet Underground did with the song within the band and beyond is one thing, but the perquisite reinvention in the hands of others affirmed its status as a rock ’n’ roll standard.
The Yardbirds seem to have been the first to cover “I’m Waiting for the Man,” not long after its release. Though it’s not on any official releases, it’s easy to find their energetic, rave-up version. Bowie’s popular cover glams it up, makes the turnaround chords a little more bluesy—replacing the dominant III chord that gives that part its doo-wop allure—and Mick Ronson plays some Spiders from Mars-era leads that seem take the song to a swankier part of town than Reed originally intended to describe. The U.K. Subs amplified the song’s punkish roots, Beck made a bachelor pad-friendly version, and Cheap Trick brought the song to arenas, with the histrionics that requires.
The Feelies evoke the VU by playing it straight from the heart. “We weren’t, like, super obsessed about it or anything,” says Mercer.
It’s against these covers that the nuances of the Feelies’ signature are laid bare. While other artists have looked beyond the limits set by the Velvets, on Some Kinda Love, the Feelies return “I’m Waiting for the Man” to its central musical premise. There is no stylistic reinvention. Nor do they kneel at the altar of the VU, copying every -ism of the original recording. They simply play the essential elements of the song.
Bill Million's Gear
Million says his preference for Gibson-style guitars evolved in response to Mercer’s Fenders, as a way to differentiate their sounds. Live, he runs his guitars and board into a Music Man with a vintage Gibson extension cab.
Photo by Matt Condon
Guitars
- 1985 Gibson ES-335
- 1986 Gibson ES-335
- Epiphone Hummingbird
- Epiphone J-160
Amps
- Music Man 112 Sixty-Five (no speaker)
- Gibson GA-100 extension cab with 12" JBL speaker
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky
- D’Addario Phosphor Bronze
- D’Addario Chromes (Flat)
- Dunlop picks .73 mm
Effects
- MXR Micro Amp
- Fulltone OCD
- Fulltone Fat-Boost
- Boss Chorus
- Maxon Overdrive
- DeArmond Volume Pedal
- Electro-Harmonix Canyon
- Electro-Harmonix Octavix
- Source Audio Vertigo Tremolo
- Ebow
As early as Crazy Rhythms, the band exhibited a kind of jittery, frenetic feel. As they moved from their early funkier art-rock inclinations to a more pastoral sound on 1986’s Peter Buck-co-producedThe Good Earth—on which they cemented their lineup—it stuck with them.
“I’ve never been that comfortable performing,” says Mercer. “I think that we took that nervousness, that stage fright element, and used it to our advantage. It made us appear to be the nervous awkward band or whatever.” Check out their performance in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild to see what the guitarist means as they take David Bowie’s “Fame” for a spin.
The connection between Mercer and Million is at the front and center of the Feelies’ sound. While they don’t shy from the traditional lead/rhythm route, their rhythmic hookup is notable. Together, they’re percussive, with chord stabs often bouncing between the two forming tense, funky interactions. To describe it, Million points to the Velvet Underground, but more so Keith Richards and Ron Wood’s classic “ancient art of weaving” approach to rhythm. “That’s the feeling I get when I’m playing,” he says. “We’ve been playing together so long that there is a lot of that guitar interaction. My approach is to weave between what Glenn’s doing, and what Stan’s doing as well with the drums, so there’s a reaction, little accents here and there. We’ve all become very good listeners over time with each other, so that stuff just falls into the pocket.”
The guitarists have had plenty of time to form their two-guitar thing—they’ve been playing together for about a half century at this point. “Originally, we started playing together in a different band,” Mercer points out. “Bill played bass, and I played guitar, and Dave played drums. So, that was just three instruments with a singer. Then, Bill suggested switching to guitar and getting a bass player. I think right from the start, we were just playing the songs, we didn’t talk about what each one was going to do. It was understood.”
“They had this sort of quiet energy. It’s just as much energy as the Stooges or the MC5, but in a different way.” —Bill Millon on the Velvet Underground
From that, their style coalesced and evolved, and Mercer says they haven’t second-guessed it. “It’s instinctual. I think if it was anything other than that, it wouldn’t have lasted as long. I mean, if you have to talk about stuff and work on stuff, then to me, you kind of lose the essence of what’s good about playing music. It’s all instinctual and telepathic.”
The Velvet Underground and Nico hanging on a Vox in 1966 (clockwise from top left): Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Moe Tucker, and Nico.
Their guitar tastes have even evolved around each other, and Million cites his own preference for Gibsons—using a Les Paul early on and switching to ES-335s in the mid ’80s, sticking to them ever since—as a reaction to Mercer’s Fenders, which these days are a pair of modified Squier Telecasters.
The two guitarists also share many influences; they both reference the Stooges, the MC5, the Beatles, and the Stones in our conversations. Mercer points to Ron Asheton as an influence on his leads, which on Some Kinda Love is audible in a simmering-just-before-the-point-of-boiling-over kind of way on “Rock & Roll” and on the tumbling double-guitar tangle-up at the end of “Run Run Run.” Notably, Million talks about being into the Velvet Underground in high school, citing Reed’s vocals, Tucker’s drumming, and how “the guitars were almost approached like drums in a way.”
“We took that nervousness, that stage fright element, and used it to our advantage.” —Glenn Mercer
Mercer, though, took a little longer to come around. “I didn’t like them,” he says. “A couple of songs I thought were pretty good. ‘Waiting for the Man,’” I really liked that. The rest of it just seemed like a hodgepodge of art stuff. I guess by the time the third record [1969’s self-titled album] came along it really sunk in.”
Lou Reed heard something he liked in the Feelies and tapped them to open for his 1989 tour in support of his New York album. He first linked up with the band at a holiday party for Long Island’s WDRE FM. Million remembers the party and says, when the band received their invite to perform, “I think it was me that said, as a joke, ‘If Lou plays a song with us, we’ll do it.’” The next thing they knew they were onstage together. “We were playing those songs at this really incredibly fast tempo! And he just seemed like he really enjoyed himself. Because of that he asked us to go on tour with him.”
Million remembers Reed as “very supportive of the Feelies,” and says they shared dinner with him before most of their concerts together. “There was one show,” the guitarist recalls, “where his soundcheck was running longer. They informed him that they would have to probably skip our soundcheck, and he just said, ‘If the Feelies don’t get a soundcheck, I’m not playing.’ So, that was our relationship with him.”
The young Feelies at Hurrah in New York City on September 11, 1980. From left: Mercer, Weckerman, Million, and drummer Anton Fier.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
It’s by pure kismet that after years of covering the Velvet Underground, and decades after playing the songs alongside Reed, the Feelies have come to pay tribute with Some Kinda Love. They received an invitation from the curators of The Velvet Underground Experience (the 2018 version of the 2016 The Velvet Underground: New York Extravaganza exhibit in Paris), and Mercer explains, “Their idea was to get a bunch of bands that were inspired by or influenced by the Velvet Underground to perform. They contacted us and we thought it would be cool to do.”
But it wasn’t to be. “They were a little bit delayed in moving the exhibit, so that in the interim, they lost their lease and had to find a new venue.” When that venue didn’t have space for a live rock band—though Mercer did end up performing—he says, “We were already kind of semi-rehearsed and getting excited about doing it. So we said, we’ll just do a concert on our own at a different venue.”
On October 13, 2018, the band played the Velvets set that would become Some Kinda Love at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey. (They also played a second set of Feelies songs and delivered three VU-less encores.) The record clocks in at 71 minutes, so it was a long night. And a thrilling one, no doubt. Because the Feelies deliver every song on the record—from their funky “There She Goes Again” to the driving, percussive strums of “Who Loves the Sun” to the droning, gothic “All Tomorrow’s Parties”—with the same natural vibe that they seem to bring to everything they do.
“We kind of use their arrangements as a little bit of a template, basically just to put in enough to evoke the original recordings,” says Mercer. “We weren’t like, super obsessed about it or anything.”
In contrast to every stylistically varied version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” considered here, the Feelies prove the VU’s music, like all truly great rock ’n’ roll, seems to demand nothing more than simplicity and honesty. Nothing more and nothing less.
The Feelies live in that world. It’s not complicated. And it’s not intellectual. It’s elemental. And once you tap into it, it’s inescapable.
And as Some Kinda Love proves, that attitude, that approach, might just make the Feelies the greatest interpreter of the Velvet Underground anyone could wish for.
YouTube It
The Feelies perform their groovy, percussive cover of “Run Run Run” that appears on Some Kinda Love.
Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
"When a guitar is “the one,” you know it. It feels right in your hands and delivers the sounds you hear in your head. It becomes your faithful companion, musical soulmate, and muse. It helps you express your artistic vision. We designed the Les Paul Studio to be precisely the type of guitar: the perfect musical companion, the guitar you won’t be able to put down. The one guitar you’ll be able to rely on every time and will find yourself reaching for again and again. For years, the Les Paul Studio has been the choice of countless guitarists who appreciate the combination of the essential Les Paul features–humbucking pickups, a glued-in, set neck, and a mahogany body with a maple cap–at an accessible price and without some of the flashier and more costly cosmetic features of higher-end Les Paul models."
Now, the Les Paul Studio has been reimagined. It features an Ultra-Modern weight-relieved mahogany body, making it lighter and more comfortable to play, no matter how long the gig or jam session runs. The carved, plain maple cap adds brightness and definition to the overall tone and combines perfectly with the warmth and midrange punch from the mahogany body for that legendary Les Paul sound that has been featured on countless hit recordings and on concert stages worldwide. The glued-in mahogany neck provides rock-solid coupling between the neck and body for increased resonance and sustain. The neck features a traditional heel and a fast-playing SlimTaper profile, and it is capped with an abound rosewood fretboard that is equipped with acrylic trapezoid inlays and 22 medium jumbo frets. The 12” fretboard radius makes both rhythm chording and lead string bending equally effortless, andyou’re going to love how this instrument feels in your hands. The Vintage Deluxe tuners with Keystone buttons add to the guitar’s classic visual appeal, and together with the fully adjustable aluminum Nashville Tune-O-Matic bridge, lightweight aluminum Stop Bar tailpiece, andGraph Tech® nut, help to keep the tuning stability nice and solid so you can spend more time playing and less time tuning. The Gibson Les Paul Studio is offered in an Ebony, BlueberryBurst, Wine Red, and CherrySunburst gloss nitrocellulose lacquer finishes and arrives with an included soft-shell guitar case.
It packs a pair of Gibson’s Burstbucker Pro pickups and a three-way pickup selector switch that allows you to use either pickup individually or run them together. Each of the two pickups is wired to its own volume control, so you can blend the sound from the pickups together in any amount you choose. Each volume control is equipped with a push/pull switch for coil tapping, giving you two different sounds from each pickup, and each pickup also has its own individual tone control for even more sonic options. The endless tonal possibilities, exceptional sustain, resonance, and comfortable playability make the Les Paul Studio the one guitar you can rely on for any musical genre or scenario.
For more information, please visit gibson.com.
Introducing the Reimagined Gibson Les Paul Studio - YouTube
Grissom and Paul Reed Smith’s first collaboration appeared in 2007 in the shape of theGrissom DGT—a signature instrument that’s seenmany iterations since. His Custom 30 amplifier followed five years later. But at 30 watts, that amp is pretty powerful for a lot of folks. So, this year PRS and their lead amp designer, Doug Sewell, unveiled the more club-friendly, tremolo-equipped DGT 15.
The basic architecture of the Indonesia-built DGT 15—single-channel, 2 x EL84 power section, 15 watts, and onboard reverb and tremolo—bears more than a little resemblance to a few important ’60s combo amps. But its 3-band EQ with presence, top-cut, and bright boost controls lends a lot of additional functionality and flexibility without cluttering the control panel or the playing experience. And, unlike some classic amps in this power class, the DGT 15 generates its wallop from a pair of output tubes in cathode bias, driven by three 12AX7s and one 12AT7 in the front end.
Feature Length
If the DGT 15’s control set were made up of just the EQ, presence, and top-cut controls, it would offer impressive tone-sculpting power. But the 3-way bright, boost, and master volume switches add exponentially more colors and gain contrasts. The bright switch is clever. It can be switched to always-on mode or set to disengage when the boost is on. The footswitchable boost, meanwhile, gives the single-channel DGT-15 the flex of a two-channel amp with a lead mode. Better still, you can set the amp up so you can activate the boost and master volume together—enabling access to the most headroom with the boost off and keeping the gain from running wild when the boost is engaged. The tremolo, too, can be activated via a mini-toggle or the included footswitch.
“While it’s basically clear, round, and full, depending on where you set the powerful EQ controls, you can reshape those tones into chunky, chiming, or sparkly variations on the clean theme.”Because the DGT-15 is cathode biased, the output tubes require no re-biasing when you change them. But the back panel includes jacks for monitoring bias levels, which is handy for matching tubes or diagnosing possible issues. The back panel is also home to the 5-pin DIN footswitch jack and three speaker outs for various combinations of 4 ohm, 8 ohm, or 16 ohm cabs. Our test unit came with the ported-back PRS DG 1x12 cabinet, which is loaded with one 60-watt Celestion Vintage 30. The DGT 15 head itself is a little bigger than lunchbox-sized (unless you’ve got a particularly hefty appetite). But it’s still an easy load at just 17.25" x 9" x 9.25" and a hair under 20 pounds. The 1x12" cab is relatively compact too, at 24" x 22.18" x 10.5", and weighs 27 pounds.
Tejas Tone!
If you read only the specs for the DGT 15 (or never had the pleasure of playing a Custom 30), you’ll probably expect a British voice. But the DGT 15’s core tonality leans as much toward the 1960s black-panel Fender camp, and it has a ready-to-rumble personality that shines through whether you match it to an ES-355 or a Telecaster.
With Fender single-coils in the mix, non-boosted settings are very clean right up to around 3 o’clock on the volume, where the amp starts to edge into breakup just a little. That’s a lot of clean room to roam. But while it’s basically clear, round, and full, depending on where you set the powerful EQ controls you can reshape those tones into chunky, chiming, or sparkly variations on the clean theme. Humbuckers push the DGT 15 to juicier, crunchier zones much sooner, of course. Even so, the amp remains crisp and taut without going muddy. With both single-coils and humbuckers, the overdrive and saturation generated by the boost avoid the sizzly sounds you hear from many modern lead channels and overdrives. It’s also very dynamic—easing into light distortion when you pick hard, and shedding its aggressive edge when you use a light touch or reduce guitar volume. Overdrive pedals (in this case, a Klon-like Wampler Tumnus Deluxe, Marshall-style Friedman Small Box, and a multi-voiced Tsakalis Six) gel with both the boost and clean modes, too. The reverb and tremolo are superb. The range of both successfully spans subtle and more radical sounds—and between these, a couple of drive pedals, and the Boost function, a gigging guitarist can wrangle a lot of flexibility out of this amp.
The Verdict
Using the single-channel, 2 x EL84/reverb/tremolo architecture as a jumping-off point, the DGT 15 scales new heights of versatility—not just via flexible switching and tone-shaping power, but by melding Vox-y edge with Fender clarity and body at a very accessible price.
Phat Machine
The Phat Machine
The Phat Machine is designed to deliver the tone and responsiveness of a vintage germanium fuzz with improved temperature stability with no weird powering issues. Loaded with both a germanium and a silicon transistor, the Phat Machine offers the warmth and cleanup of a germanium fuzz but with the bite of a silicon pedal. It utilizes classic Volume and Fuzz control knobs, as well as a four-position Thickness control to dial-in any guitar and amp combo. Also included is a Bias trim pot and a Kill switch that allows battery lovers to shut off the battery without pulling the input cord.
Silk Worm Deluxe Overdrive
The Silk Worm Deluxe -- along with its standard Volume/Gain/Tone controls -- has a Bottom trim pot to dial in "just the right amount of thud with no mud at all: it’s felt more than heard." It also offers a Studio/Stage diode switch that allows you to select three levels of compression.
Both pedals offer the following features:
- 9-volt operation via standard DC external supply or internal battery compartment
- True bypass switching with LED indicator
- Pedalboard-friendly top mount jacks
- Rugged, tour-ready construction and super durable powder coated finish
- Made in the USA
Static Effectors’ Street Series pedals carry a street price of $149 each. They are available at select retailers and can also be purchased directly from the Static Effectors online store at www.staticeffectors.com.