To stay grounded—metaphysically speaking, that is—while playing, White always removes his shoes. While it helps with pedal control, there are indeed some negative effects: “If you play a smaller place with grounding issues, you get electrocuted that much more if you’re not wearing shoes.”
“I get nervous if I have my shoes on when I am playing,” says Andy White, the guitar half of the psychedelic, krautrock-style, jam-centric duo Tonstartssbandht [pronounced: tone-starts-band]. “For some reason, playing with shoes on just feels weird.”
How weird? That’s hard to say, but playing barefoot has helped the guitarist figure out a few tricks and use it to his advantage. “I want to be able to know I have the option to do what I need to do on the fly or, at the very least, feel myself grounded,” he adds. “It all comes down to pedals at the end of the day. Even if it’s not tweaking them, but just activating them, or turning them off.”
A duality—part mystical, part practical—describes White’s musical ethos as well as the history and evolution of Tonstartssbandht, which he founded in 2008 with his older brother and drummer, Edwin. The duo’s most recent release, Petunia, marked a new phase in their development, as they eschewed fuzz and lo-fi sonics in favor of cleaner tones. Despite capturing live instrumental takes, the album is very much a studio creation. The brothers took advantage of the downtime afforded by Covid—holed up together in their hometown of Orlando—and experimented with gear, holding out for perfect takes, and even built an iso booth.
“It definitely felt alien,” White says. “It was very weird, and I’ve second-guessed myself a lot of the time. ‘Should it be taking this long? Should it sound so high fidelity? Are people going to hate us or think we sold out?’”
Tonstartssbandht - Pass Away (Official Video)
Relative to the rest of their work, Petunia sounds like it was captured with Steely Dan-like precision. Their previous effort, Sorcerer, was recorded under completely different circumstances that illustrate the brothers’ ability to embrace serendipity and circumstance. “Sorcerer was recorded at our old place, when Ed and I were both living in Brooklyn in a big, shared living and art space called Le Wallet, in Bushwick,” White says. “If you could build a vocal booth within a vocal booth, you would not be able to escape the noise, because the building was surrounded on three sides by the elevated M train. I didn’t mind sleeping there, but you would not be able to get a quiet take unless you timed it perfectly for when the M wasn’t running for five minutes or so. We knew we were working with the ambient noise of a train going by, or a roommate making dinner across the room who wants to shout or something. There was no avoiding that.”
The much more delicate sound of Petunia is a fresh entry to the band’s discography. The album opens with “Pass Away,” a dreamy, spacious, falsetto-laden jam that grows and grows, and yet never forgets it’s supposed to groove. White layers chord extensions over an ostinato bass figure that’s played with his thumb and—check it out—isn’t overdubbed. In fact, none of the guitar parts are. Even the hypnotic, uneven delays that complement the melodic, upper register double-stops on “What Has Happened” were recorded as one complete take. White was able to create a rich, detailed sonic image by carefully dialing in his amps, plus mixing.
“I’ve second-guessed myself a lot of the time. ‘Should it be taking this long? Should it sound so high fidelity? Are people going to hate us or think we sold out?’”
“I have trouble sometimes,” he says. “If I set up mics in a room and I think, ‘This sounds nice and heavy for a two-man band,’ when I listen back to the recording, I can be disappointed because it doesn’t quite capture how heavy it sounded. If I am left to my own devices to mix—like we were on our previous albums—it’s just a lot of trial and error with EQ in post. With Petunia, we had all the carefully recorded takes to work with, and that’s why we brought it to other people to mix. It took us long enough to figure out how to record it how we wanted to, and we didn’t want to fuck up what we worked on so hard by trying to mix it ourselves.” That also paid off by showcasing the haunting qualities within White’s voice, which spins warm melodies and charms in airy falsetto for most of the album, but can drop into a growling attack when it’s time to bare teeth.
White uses two solid-state Lab Series amps—he has both the L5 and L6 models—which he finds break up to his liking and cover a broad tonal range. The Lab Series is from Gibson’s Norlin era, the 1970 to 1986 period when the company was producing some of its wackiest products, including offbeat guitars like the Marauder and Corvus, and solid-state amps that featured, for the time, cutting-edge electronics designed by sister Norlin company Moog. You don’t see Lab Series amps around that often, and for White, they’re perfect. “Some guitar guys tell me they have a tube sound without the finicky-ness of tubes, and I’ve always found them to be very reliable. I try to get a nice boost-y heavy bass from the amps, and when it comes to recording it, it’s luck and trial and error.”
The brothers White: Edwin (left), drums, and Andy (right), guitar.
White runs the two amps simultaneously and bounces his signal between both—not a dry signal in one amp and wet in the other—creating a ping-pong effect and fattening the sound. You can hear that in action on Petunia, especially on songs like “All of My Children” and the aforementioned “What Has Happened,” where he also leans heavily on an Electro-Harmonix Super Pulsar.
“It uses a quarter-note tremolo really hard—like a strobe—and then one repeat 100 percent wet and dry delay on the dotted quarter,” White says. “I used to dial that in on the fly on a live show and it would take forever to get it exactly right tuning the tremolo ratio and getting the delay to hit it just at the right swing. Now I just adjust the Super Pulsar and tune it to make it exactly how I like, and then save it as a preset.”
Andy White's Gear
Seen here at Brooklyn’s Market Hotel, Andy White splits his Strat’s signal into two vintage Gibson Lab Series amps to achieve maximum tone density and psyched-out ping-pong effects.
Photo by Tod Seelie
Guitars
- Danelectro 12-SDC
- Early ’70s Gibson SG with Bigsby
- Fender American Elite Stratocaster
Amps
- Lab Series L5 2x12
- Lab Series L6 1x15 bass combo
Strings
- Ernie Ball Power Slinky (.011–.048, for 6-strings)
- Ernie Ball (.010 sets, for 12-string)
Effects
Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner
Boss GE-7 Graphic Equalizer
Boss OC-3 Super Octave
Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff
Electro-Harmonix Super Pulsar
Electro-Harmonix Stereo Memory Man with Hazarai
DigiTech X-Series DigiDelay
Boss RV-6 Reverb
TC Helicon VoiceTone Create (for vocals only)
White’s recently developed pragmatic approach to gear applies to his guitars as well. He relies on three: an SG and a Danelectro 12-string that are tuned to D standard, plus a Strat tuned to a hybrid C# tuning of his own invention (C#–G#–C#–F#–G#–B), with its bridge stopped up with cork to disable the tremolo.
“I went to the local guitar guy in Orlando and had him set up my guitar in that C# tuning,” he says. “I can’t believe that I am 32 and I just figured out that may be a smart thing to do. It was very rewarding. I took three guitars on the road. I just couldn’t be bothered spending so much time tuning and retuning on stage, and it paid off. I think my brother really appreciated not sitting on the drums whistling to himself while I tuned in the middle of a live show.”
The guitarist fingerpicks with a raw style, using just his thumb and index finger, with his other fingers anchored to the pickguard. He plays with the flesh, or pads, of his fingers and doesn’t use his nails or fingerpicks.
TIDBIT: The White brothers made the best of the dearth of gigs incurred by the pandemic and took their time recording Petunia, creating the most high-fidelity and detailed recording in the band’s extensive discography
“I got into fingerpicking on an old nylon-string that was my first guitar,” he says. “I don’t remember a specific moment when I was like, ‘This is what I am going to do now,’ but I do remember that playing guitar for me was about using a pick—playing power chords or big open chords—and then one day I tried playing around with fingerpicking and realized I could use my thumb and index finger and that it wasn’t that hard. I started writing and fingerpicking as much as I could, and then I got into John Fahey and Davey Graham and that kind of British folk and blues fingerpicking. A few years later, when I was playing with my brother in Tonstartssbandht—our music, at first, was like noise and drone and vocal-looping based. Slowly but surely, and maybe it had to do with being able to express myself with tuning the amps correctly or finding the right guitar, fingerpicking became something we could comfortably do together. He could rip on the drums and I could fingerpick, and it wouldn’t sound too much like a hot mess. It was cohesive.”
Cohesion aptly describes the duo’s improvisations. They don’t jam in the soloist/accompaniment sense, but rather more in the group-focused style of ’70s-era krautrock bands like Can and Popol Vuh. “There are only two of us,” White says. “If only one of us is soloing, it’s going to sound pretty fucked up. We do our best to sound like a full band. If I am not playing chords and singing, I want to play leads like Michael Karoli. That feels funny—saying that Michael Karoli is my favorite guitarist—because you don’t listen to Can records for the guitars; you listen for the whole sound.”
“If only one of us is soloing, it’s going to sound pretty fucked up. We do our best to sound like a full band.”
Similarly, thanks to their combination of a practical, work-centric focus and just letting things happen, you listen to Tonstartssbandht for the whole sound. But the comparisons end there, because the members of Can, for the most part, usually wore shoes—you knew that was coming back—which, as White said, isn’t his M.O. He prefers the spiritual high and knob-twisting practicality of keeping his shoes off even if that does have its share of problems.
“It has come back to bite me,” he says. “If you play a smaller place with grounding issues, you get electrocuted that much more if you’re not wearing shoes. My dad has told me in the past, ‘Before you go on the road, go to Home Depot and get an insulated rubber mat to stand on in case you’re playing a place that has bad electricity. But as one is wont to do with their father, I hear his advice and think, ‘Shut up dad! That’s a stupid idea.’ But it’s actually quite a good idea. I should probably do it someday.”
“Falloff” by TONSTARTSSBANDHT live at Market Hotel, Brooklyn, NY, October 28, 2021
Witness the full effect of Andy White’s fingerpicked stereo sound in this vibe-y take of “Falloff,” from 2021’s Petunia.
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After eight years, New Orleans artist Benjamin Booker returns with a new album and a redefined relationship to the guitar.
That evening, Booker played a release celebration show at Euclid Records in New Orleans, which has become the musician’s adopted hometown. He spent a few years in Los Angeles, and then in Australia, where his partner gave birth to their child, but when he moved back to the U.S. in December 2023, it was the only place he could imagine coming back to. “I just like that the city has kind of a magic quality to it,” he says. “It just feels kind of like you’re walking around a movie set all the time.”
Witness was a ruminative, lonesome record, an interpretation of the writer James Baldwin’s concept of bearing witness to atrocity and injustice in the United States. Mavis Staples sang on the title track, which addressed the centuries-old crisis of police killings and brutality carried out against black Americans. It was a significant change from the twitchy, bluesy garage-rock of Booker’s self-titled 2014 debut, the sort of tunes that put him on the map as a scrappy guitar-slinging hero. But Booker never planned on heroism; he had no interest in becoming some neatly packaged industry archetype. After Witness, and years of touring, including supporting the likes of Jack White and Neil Young, Booker withdrew.
He was searching for a sound. “I was just trying to find the things that I liked,” he explains. L.A. was a good place for his hunt. He went cratedigging at Stellaremnant for electronic records, and at Artform Studio in Highland Park for obscure jazz releases. It took a long time to put together the music he was chasing. “For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do,” says Booker. “I just wasn’t interested in it anymore. I hadn’t heard really that much guitar stuff that had really spoke to me.”
“For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just wasn’t interested in it anymore.”
LOWER is Booker’s most sensitive and challenging record yet.
Among the few exceptions were Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and Dave Harrington from Darkside, players who moved Booker to focus more on creating ambient and abstract textures instead of riffs. Other sources of inspiration came from Nicolas Jaar, Loveliescrushing, Kevin Shields, Sophie, and JPEGMAFIA. When it came to make LOWER (which released on Booker’s own Fire Next Time Records, another nod to Baldwin), he took the influences that he picked up and put them onto guitar—more atmosphere, less “noodly stuff”: “This album, I was working a lot more with images, trying to get images that could get to the emotion that I was trying to get to.”
The result is a scraping, aching, exploratory album that demonstrates that Booker’s creative analysis of the world is sharper and more potent than ever. Opener “Black Opps” is a throbbing, metallic, garage-electronic thrill, running back decades of state surveillance, murder, and sabotage against Black community organizing. “LWA in the Trailer Park” is brighter by a slim margin, but just as simultaneously discordant and groovy. The looped fingerpicking of “Pompeii Statues” sets a grounding for Booker to narrate scenes of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Even the acoustic strums of “Heavy on the Mind” are warped and stretched into something deeply affecting; ditto the sunny, garbage-smeared ’60s pop of “Show and Tell.” But LOWER is also breathtakingly beautiful and moving. “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” and “Hope for the Night Time” intermingle moments of joy and lightness amid desperation and loneliness.
Booker worked with L.A.-based hip-hop and electronic producer Kenny Segal, trading stems endlessly over email to build the record. While he was surrounded by vintage guitars and amps to create Witness, Booker didn’t use a single amplifier in the process of making LOWER: He recorded all his guitars direct through an interface to his DAW. “It’s just me plugging my old Epiphone Olympic into the computer and then using software plugins to manipulate the sounds,” says Booker. For him, working digitally and “in the box” is the new frontier of guitar music, no different than how Hendrix and Clapton used never-heard-before fuzz pedals to blow people’s minds. “When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time,” he adds.
“When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time.”
Benjamin Booker's Gear
Booker didn’t use any amps on LOWER. He recorded his old Epiphone Olympic direct into his DAW.
Photo by Trenity Thomas
Guitars
- 1960s Epiphone Olympic
Effects
- Soundtoys Little AlterBoy
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe
- Soundtoys Little Plate
“I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary. I wanted a little bit of ugliness.”
Inspired by a black metal documentary in which an artist asks for the cheapest mic possible, Booker used only basic plugins by Soundtoys, like the Decapitator, Little AlterBoy, and Little Plate, but the Devil-Loc Deluxe was the key for he and Segal to unlock the distorted, “three-dimensional world” they were seeking. “Because I was listening to more electronic music where there’s more of a focus on mixing than I would say in rock music, I think that I felt more inspired to go in and be surgical about it,” says Booker.
Part of that precision meant capturing the chaos of our world in all its terror and splendor. When he was younger, Booker spent a lot of time going to the Library of Congress and listening to archival interviews. On LOWER, he carries out his own archival sound research. “I like the idea of being able to put things like that in the music, for people to just hear it,” says Booker. “Even if they don’t know what it is, they’re catching a glimpse of life that happened at that time.”
On “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” there are birds chirping that he captured while living in Australia. Closer “Hope for the Night Time” features sounds from Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market. “Same Kind of Lonely” features audio of Booker’s baby laughing just after a clip from a school shooting. “I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary,” says Booker. “I wanted a little bit of ugliness. We all have our regular lives that are just kind of interrupted constantly by insane acts of violence.”
That dichotomy is often difficult to compute, but Booker has made peace with it. “You hear people talking about, ‘I don’t want to have kids because the world is falling apart,’” he says. “But I mean, I feel like it’s always falling apart and building itself back up. Nothing lasts forever, even bad times.”
YouTube It
To go along with the record, Booker produced a string of music videos influenced by the work of director Paul Schrader and his fascination with “a troubled character on the edge, reaching for transcendence.” That vision is present in the video for lead single “LWA in the Trailer Park.”
Reverend Descent W Baritone Electric Guitar - Transparent White
