Yves Jarvis’ methods for simulating effects include using a whammy bar while riding his guitar’s volume for reversed guitar sounds. But many are done the old-fashioned way: manipulating tape on his TEAC reel-to-reel as it passes from one head to another.
Yves Jarvis—born Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet—is allergic to being complacent. “I don’t like to tune my guitar live,” the Canadian-born singer-songwriter says about his almost irrational fear of creative ennui. “I don’t even have a tuner. I like to make my entire set in the same tuning—that’ll be an alternate tuning, it’ll be something random. I force myself to find a way to reinterpret all my songs in the same tuning.”
In fact, Jarvis chooses one tuning for an entire tour. He does that although each of his songs first comes to life—as it is being written and recorded—in an original song-specific tuning. But tunings, at that early stage, are just compositional devices. Once a song is recorded, its tuning is forgotten, and when it’s time to hit the road, he relearns each song in the new tuning chosen for that tour. If he decides to reprise an older song, he learns it up yet again in that new tuning as well.
All that learning and tuning keeps Jarvis on his toes, which he finds exciting. “I get stuck in too many patterns, too many shapes, so I throw myself off,” he says. “I love being thrown off.”
Yves Jarvis - "Bootstrap Jubilee"
What was the tuning Jarvis used on his recent summer tour? Good question.
“I’m in D–A–D-something, that’s for sure,” he says. To figure out the rest, he brought his laptop—we spoke via Zoom—into another room with a piano. “Someone once asked me about my tuning at a show, and people think I’m being coy, but I actually don’t know what it is. I know how to get there with a guitar, but I don’t know what the notes are.”
He tuned up his guitar by ear, sat at the piano, and figured it out. It didn’t take long. His summer 2022 tuning was D–A–D–E–A–C#. It won’t be that again.
That type of unpredictable spontaneity is how Jarvis does everything. That explains his addiction to cheap gear, his aversion to pedals—which he never uses—and why he didn’t even bother with an amp on The Zug, his latest release, which he recorded at ArtScape, the artist-friendly place he was living in at the time. “It’s a subsidized-for-artists condo in Toronto [where rents are sky high] and the building is full of artists,” he says.
Yves Jarvis recorded his fourth album, The Zug, at Toronto’s ArtScape, a subsidized living space for artists. The Zug is a masterclass in lo-fi guitar orchestration on a limited budget.
The Zug is Jarvis’ fourth release since 2016 under the moniker Yves Jarvis (Jarvis is his mother’s maiden name), and prior to that he released the critically acclaimed Tenet under the name Un Blonde. In 2019, he was longlisted for a Polaris Music Prize. The Zug is an intimate collection of songs, and that means intimate, as in up close and personal. The vocals sound as if he’s whispering in your ear and letting you in on a joke. Jarvis plays all the instruments himself, and that includes an array of alternative timbres and sounds. “Noise was an issue,” he says about the challenges of recording in a condominium. “Nevertheless, I was playing the drums with chopsticks, but that was for feel, not for noise suppression.”
Chopsticks aside, most of the effects on The Zug were done with guitar. On songs like “At the Whims” and “Enemy,” Jarvis employs dramatic swells and backwards-sounding leads, which complement the more subtle fingerpicking and gentle warbles on “Prism Through Which I Perceive” and “You Offer a Mile.” The album is also a masterclass in lo-fi orchestration. Check out “Why” and, especially, “Stitchwork,” with its string-sounding pulses and layered effects that are, in a simple way, almost Beatle-esque. All done with guitar, and on a very limited budget.
But lo-fi also has its share of challenges. “I need to invest in a vocal mic because it would be nice to not have to do 100 takes of the same thing,” Jarvis says about his idiosyncratic multi-layered vocal sound. “It started out as an aesthetic thing, being that I wanted to create this texture that was inspired by D’Angelo—many voices at once, perfectly stacked. But then, layering became a necessity because I was not pleased with the single takes. In order for all the nuances of my voice to translate to the recording, I have to have multiple layers.”
“But I’m not averse, at all, to effects. I have just always gotten off on forcing myself to simulate my own effects.”
That labor-intensive effort is how Jarvis gets his guitar tones as well. As mentioned, he doesn’t use pedals. “I can’t imagine looking down at a pedalboard, frankly,” he says. “I think I’m getting there in my growth as an artist where I see the potential of using pedals. But that’s precisely the problem—too much potential. Although I see where I could benefit with experimenting with new tech.”
The distortion sounds were created by running his guitar into an old TEAC reel-to-reel machine—and a single, loved, beaten reel of tape—and then into the open-source DAW Audacity, which is ultimately where everything ends up. “It’s nice to manipulate sound with such an analog piece,” he says about his tape machine. “I also like stretching and distorting the tape. I’ve never really used a different reel of tape. It’s been the same reel on there for years and years and years, and the degradation of that reel has really played into the sound of the guitar. I think the best example of it on the record is at the end of ‘What?’ That electric guitar solo is the most quintessential sound of my TEAC, for sure.”
But Jarvis’ aversion to pedals doesn’t come from some purist notion of tone craft. Rather, similar to choosing a new tuning for each tour, he sees limitations as a creative tool, albeit with ideological strings attached. “Constraints are very helpful for me,” he says. “I don’t like options—especially in our culture today where everything is custom. You go into a restaurant, and you can customize your order, I hate that. Tell me what to get, or don’t tell me what to get, but constrain me. Two options are all I need. That’s where the experimentation comes from—from some sort of physical parameter like playing percussion backwards, for example, so that the feel is different—just little things like that. But I’m not averse, at all, to effects. I have just always gotten off on forcing myself to simulate my own effects.”
Yves Jarvis’ Gear
Yves Jarvis plays solo acoustic at the Colony in Woodstock, New York, in February 2022. His acoustic is a Fender he bought for $50 in Gravenhurst, Ontario.
Photo by Michael O’Neal
Guitars
- Fender acoustic
- Hondo Formula I
- Yellow S-style
Recording/Sound Manipulation
- Tascam Portastudio 424 MkIII
- TEAC Reel to Reel
Strings
- Any brand, heavy gauge, usually starting with a .012 for the high E
Jarvis’ methods for simulating effects aren’t completely outlandish. His reversed guitar sounds—which you can hear on The Zug’s “Enemy”—are done with a whammy bar and riding his guitar’s volume knob. Some of his delay-like effects are done the old-fashioned way: manipulating tape as it passes from one head to another.
Yet despite his embrace of the reel-to-reel, his first love is a Tascam Portastudio 424 MkIII multitrack cassette recorder. “I’ve gone through maybe a dozen Tascam 424 MkIIIs,” he says. “That’s the only piece of gear that I know about, which is crazy. Ten years ago, I got them for $100 bucks a pop every time. Now they’re $1,000 bucks.”
Another outgrowth of his quest for unpredictability is how Jarvis uses a capo, which he often places high up on the neck at around the 8th or 10th fret. He prefers it like that, with the strings taut, similar to a smaller-scale instrument like a ukulele or mandolin. It opens up a very different world of harmonics and other sonic possibilities, although he has more pedestrian reasons for using a capo, too, which is the difference in how he sings live versus the studio.
Once Jarvis records a song, its tuning is forgotten. When it’s time to hit the road, he relearns each song in a new tuning chosen for that tour. His 2022 tuning was D–A–D–E–A–C#.
Photo by Michael O’Neal
“I like my voice to be like a whisper on recordings, but live I like to really sing,” he says. “That’s the thing: The textural qualities that I’m looking to lay down on the record are not at all similar to what I’m trying to do live. Live, I like to be clear-eyed vocally, and with recordings I want it to be more of a whisper. That’s the main impetus for the capo, too. I usually perform the song much higher than the recording—although I also use a capo because I usually use pretty shitty gear—and I like the guitar to have that twang, that sharpness of a mandolin or something very taut.”
In Jarvis’ telling, that sharpness can take on a somewhat mystical feel as well. He’s searching for a certain synchronized resonance between his voice and the instrument’s natural vibrations. “I’m definitely making an effort to match those resonances,” he says. “The guitar on the chest, the guitar on the belly, and amplifying that, and amplifying each other. I feel that is a very deconstructive process in the studio, and then live it’s something that I’m trying to have as a unit, a package of songwriting.”
And just in case you think Jarvis doesn’t do enough to avoid becoming complacent, his instruments of choice are usually low-budget starter guitars, which, obviously, come with their own issues and quirks.
“I’m excited to plug in a cool guitar that I just got back. It’s a guitar I’ve had since I was a little kid: an electric Hondo. It’s an Explorer shape. It’s red and it’s got all these stripes on it.”
And his electric?
“I’m excited to plug in a cool guitar that I just got back,” he says. “It’s a guitar I’ve had since I was a little kid: an electric Hondo. It’s an Explorer shape. It’s red and it’s got all these stripes on it. I left it at my buddy’s when I lived in Calgary as a kid, and then he had it for 10-plus years. He fixed it up for me. He just gave it back and it sounds amazing. That’s a guitar that I’m really excited to have back because it’s just so dirty and gritty and sounds just straight off Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which is a beacon for me in terms of electric guitar tone.”
It’s not a gimmick. Jarvis is a unique, forward-thinking artist, and, ultimately, the tricks he employs make for engaging, compelling music—music that takes on new life with every retelling. “Because of the improvisational nature of the production, relearning my music and restructuring it in a more traditional format is really an exciting thing for me,” he says.
It’s exciting for his listeners, too.
Yves Jarvis - Full Performance (Live on KEXP at Home)
In this intimate acoustic performance recorded for Seattle’s KEXP radio, Yves Jarvis plays five songs with assistance from his faithful capo.
StewMac International House of Overdrive Pedal Kit, With Bare Enclosure
The IHOO is based on the Crowther Hot Cake, an overdrive that became available around 1976. It was one of the earliest hand-made boutique effects pedals available. The circuit was designed to be what is now referred to as a “transparent” overdrive. An effect that enhances the player's sound while keeping the original tone intact.
This circuit has undergone many changes since its inception, and we have further expanded on the design by returning to an earlier version most revered by players and removing the buffer, which resulted in a reworked circuit that is true bypass but still retains the charm of the design.
We also include the original LM741 IC chip found in the originals, as well as the TL071 that is found in later versions so you can experiment with which IC best suits your playing style.
“I’m a fan of the riff,” says Jerry Cantrell. “I’m always collecting ideas, and you never know when they’re going to come, or what they’re going to turn into
Over the better part of an hour, only a couple of points of discussion seem to stoke his ire. One would be ’90s-era culture writers who felt compelled to brand a wide range of interesting bands from the same city (Seattle) with the same hollow tag (grunge). “It’s just a fucking label,” he says. “But I get it. You gotta have a fucking descriptor.” (When he gets miffed, or especially enthusiastic, Cantrell’s F-bombs can progress from steady punctuation to military fusillade.)
Another pet peeve: Those who seem bewildered by the fact that his solo work often evokes Alice in Chains. “It always trips me out,” he says, “when I hear comments or get questions all the time, like, ‘Well, this sounds like Alice.’ Well, what do you think it was going to sound like? I’m the guitar player and the songwriter of Alice. That’s what I do. Do you want me to not be myself? It’s just a bizarre, bizarre thing.” A big laugh follows.
“I’m always collecting ideas, and you never know when they’re going to come, or what they’re going to turn into. I look at it like depositing money in a bank.”
Cantrell, 58, has a right to feel irked by such exchanges. After all, he and the classic Alice lineup of vocalist Layne Staley, bassist Mike Starr, and drummer Sean Kinney invented a mesmeric, instantly identifiable sound that continues to stand alone in heavy music. On paper, the Alice formula doesn’t indicate multi-platinum success outright: off-kilter vocal harmonies shared between Staley and Cantrell, which can call to mind arcane American folk music or the classical avant-garde; parts written in odd time; lyrics about the most wrenching depths of drug addiction, a black cloud that followed the band throughout its ascent and tragically claimed Staley’s life in 2002 and Starr’s in 2011.
But Cantrell and Alice were also dedicated students of hard-rock history, who, along with their Seattle peers Soundgarden, helped to reinvent chart-topping metal for the alternative-rock era. To be sure, the guitarist ranks among the great riff maestros, and his solos, whether all-out wailing or comprised of a few bluesy bends, always had weight and meaning within the context of the song. And with all due respect to Extreme, no other hard-rock act explored acoustic music with more brilliant results.
Boasting nine tracks and coproduced by Cantrell and Joe Barresi, I Want Blood keeps the guitarist’s expert riffs and lyrical solos front and center.
On their masterpiece, the 1992 album Dirt, Alice in Chains managed to take Black Sabbath’s template for molten riffs into stranger, more artful, and more desperate territory, yet they also crafted tracks chock-full of hooks. A seamless meld of pop moves and bone-crushing heaviness is something of a holy grail for hard-rock songwriters and producers, and Dirt nabs it. Think of tracks like “Them Bones,” with its 7/8 intro riff and aslant vocal-harmony verses that resolve into a punchy, satisfying chorus—among the pithiest assessments of mortality in rock ’n’ roll. Or “Rooster,” an homage to Cantrell’s Vietnam-veteran father, with its left-field R&B harmonies and molasses-drip tempo. Somehow, these are songs that can rattle around in your brain throughout entire road trips or workdays; as of this writing, Dirt has sold five-million copies in the U.S.
“Let the players find their songs, and the songs find their players.”
Cantrell’s new album, I Want Blood, is his fourth solo release, and it’s a strong argument that he should continue to sound like himself and his legacy. Coproduced by Cantrell and hard-rock studio wizard Joe Barresi, its nine tracks tap into the Alice in Chains aesthetic in a way that will hit a sweet spot for longtime fans. As on the albums that Alice has released since Staley’s passing, with vocalist William DuVall, that indefinable sense of unease, that smoky ambiance of dread, isn’t so enveloping. But Cantrell’s most crucial gifts—the riff science, the knack for hooks, the belief that solos should be lyrical, musical, singable—are front and center, and razor-sharp.
What’s more, he’s recruited fellow hard-rock royalty to fulfill this vision. In addition to Barresi, whose credits comprise Kyuss, Melvins, Tool, QotSA and many, many others, the album’s personnel includes bassists Robert Trujillo and Duff McKagan, and drummers Mike Bordin (Faith No More) and Gil Sharone (Marilyn Manson, the Dillinger Escape Plan).
Through Alice in Chains’ rise in the early ’90s to recent years, Cantrell’s hard-rock presence has remained unshakeable. Here, he strikes a timeless rock 'n' roll pose.
Photo by Jordi Vidal/PhotoFuss
I Want Blood is a ripper. “Vilified” couples a chunky metal riff with wah and talk-box accents and a wandering, Eastern-tinged melody; “Off the Rails” matches a line à la John Carpenter’s Halloween score with a groove-metal thrust, before a radio-ready chorus kicks in. Ditto the chorus of “Let It Lie,” whose verse riff is pure Sabbath bliss. The earworm title track is the stuff music-sync-licensing dreams are made of. When he dials the tempo back toward ballad territory, as on “Echoes of Laughter,” “Afterglow,” or “It Comes,” Cantrell’s instinct for songcraft seems to get even stronger. As with Alice’s best LPs, I Want Blood stays with you and grows on you until it’s in steady rotation.
So what of that songcraft? It’s been over three decades since Cantrell debuted on record, and he’s still mining heavy gold. What’s the strategy, and what’s the secret? Does Cantrell’s work get harder or easier as he edges toward 60? “There’s a duality to it,” he says. “So in one way, I can answer that it’s pretty easy for me to make music. And then also, it’s fucking incredibly difficult to make something good. It can be both.”
He details the three-part work cycle that has defined his adult life: “There’s the demo process of writing. There’s the preproduction and actual recording of a record. And then there’s the period where you go out and tour it, along with all your other material, in a set. During that last third of the process, I’m really not writing, but through all the phases I’m always collecting riffs.” He’s also continually listening to great music, and allowing it to seep in. In the previous week, Cantrell says, he’d “rocked a bunch of Bad Company, UFO, AC/DC, some Maiden, some Hank Williams, some Ernest Tubb, some ‘Jungle Boogie.’”
Jerry Cantrell's Gear
This photo, taken from underneath the stage, shows Cantrell in his element, performing with Alice in Chains at Lollapalooza in the early ’90s.
Photo by Ken Settle
Guitars
- G&L “Blue Dress” Rampage
- G&L “No War” Rampage
- Gibson “D Trip” Les Paul Custom
- Gibson Les Paul Junior
- Gibson Flying V
- G&L ASAT
Amps
- Bogner Fish preamp
- Friedman JJ-100 signature head
- Snorkeler (Bogner-modded Marshall JCM800)
Effects
- Dunlop Jerry Cantrell Firefly Cry Baby Wah
- MXR Jerry Cantrell Firefly Talk Box
- MXR EQ
- MXR EVH Flanger
- MXR Smart Gate
- MXR Timmy
- MXR Poly Blue Octave
- MXR Reverb
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Boss CE-5
- Boss DD-500
- Strymon Ola dBucket Chorus & Vibrato
Strings & Picks
- Dunlop strings
- Dunlop picks
“I’m a fan of the riff,” he adds. “I’m always collecting ideas, and you never know when they’re going to come, or what they’re going to turn into. I look at it like depositing money in a bank. Like if I’m in a dressing room somewhere and I’m just warming up, and I see [one of my bandmates] react to something that I’m playing—put it in the bank. If I have a superpower, it is being able to hear something that might be a cool thing to work up and develop into a full-on song.
“When I’m slugging out riffs and just jamming out, if it feels good to rock out and your head starts moving and your foot starts tapping and you got something good—you know. It’s got to hit on a primal level first, and satisfy in that way.”
Writing, then, is often the more cerebral duty of assembling the best of what Cantrell has accrued and documented. “Like Lego pieces,” he says. “That used to be one of my favorite toys when I was a kid—Legos. Building stuff, block by block.” But, Cantrell points out, the process can also be more straightforward; he’ll start with a single riff and attempt to build the song’s infrastructure out from there, “throwing options at it, and ideas,” he says.
Cantrell, pictured here at 27, has carried on his hard-rock legacy with confidence, defying those who question his support and continuation of Alice in Chains’ influential sound.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
“I don’t necessarily know where I’m going a lot of the time. I just know that I have an intention to get there, and I’ve been able to take that journey to completion and make some pretty decent albums and songs over the years. And so I have the confidence to know that I probably can do this again—if I just put my mind to it and go through the process and work my ass off in concert with a group of people who have the same thought process.”
“There should always be the threat that the train is going to come off the rails.”
Cantrell is most certainly a “band” guy. For I Want Blood, he decided to play through a bunch of the material with his famous friends in preproduction, rather than simply assigning them one or two songs to guest on: “Let the players find their songs, and the songs find their players,” as he puts it. “It might’ve been with a little bit of frustration, because they got day jobs in some pretty impressive bands.” Time wasn’t exactly plentiful, but he did get in some living-room jams and other sessions with Trujillo, Bordin, and McKagan that ensured each track had its best possible lineup. Fortunately, Cantrell’s coproducer, Barresi, is similarly averse to cutting corners. Cantrell describes him as “a long-haul trucker” who “doesn’t suffer fools.”
“I’m an architect who is also a builder. You know what I mean?” says the guitarist, alluding to the relentless, often tedious work of record-making.“There should always be the threat that the train is going to come off the rails,” he says. For both men, Cantrell explains, “When you’re done with the record is when you think you couldn’t have done it any better.” Or, as Barresi likes to say, “How do you know you’ve gone too far unless you’ve already been there?”
Barresi also has a kind of encyclopedic recall of rock sonics. “He’s a guy who knows where all the bodies are buried,” Cantrell says, “and any combo of stuff you want to achieve: ‘Like, you know that song in The Departed, the Stones tune where it sounds like the guitar is going through a Leslie?’ [“Let It Loose,” off Exile on Main Street.] ‘Yeah, I know that pedal, man. Let’s grab it.’ You give him a reference and he knows how to replicate it.”
“I love working with a lot of different colors,” Cantrell says. “So I’ll use any guitar or any amp or any pedal to get a certain sound, and that all comes with experimentation. But it always starts with the basics.”
“When you’re done with the record is when you think you couldn’t have done it any better.”
If you’re a faithful reader of Premier Guitar, you may already know what that means: two mid-’80s G&L Rampages and the Les Paul Custom that Cantrell relied on to write his 2002 solo album Degradation Trip (the instrument with the custom blowtorch finish job). In amps, his go-to was the Bogner Fish preamp that he immortalized in Alice in Chains, in addition to his Friedman JJ-100 signature head. Cantrell also mentions the Bogner-modded Marshall sound he’s known for—aka the fabled Snorkeler—alongside tones from Orange and Laney. Among the guitars that made the cut: a butterscotch Les Paul Junior that was a gift from Billie Joe Armstrong a couple years back. When asked about effects, picks, and strings, Cantrell responds that he’s “a Dunlop guy”—which includes his MXR Jerry Cantrell Firefly Talk Box and Dunlop signature Cry Baby wah pedals.
YouTube It
Live at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2021, Jerry Cantrell testifies to his status as one of the most iconic guitarists in hard-rock history.
Cantrell is a fount of anecdotes, and talking guitar is a great way to hear some of them. He first saw the Rampage onstage in a club, after moving from Washington to Dallas, Texas, in the mid-’80s. Later, he began jamming with some guys who played Rampages, and picked up a job at a music shop that their father managed. The shop was a G&L dealer, so Cantrell paid for his instruments in part by working there. The Rampage, he adds, “just felt right.”
“The guy who built the necks and bodies that Eddie used to build his guitars was right in my backyard.”
“You gotta give a lot of credit to Eddie Van Halen,” he adds. “[The Rampage] was basically Leo Fender’s answer to Frankenstein, to the Charvel/Jackson model. One tremolo, one knob, one humbucker; that’s it. No-nonsense, just a meat-and-potatoes rock ’n’ roll guitar.”
A few years before the Rampage—Cantrell pinpoints 1979, because Van Halen II was out—he obtained a neck that was originally intended for EVH, and used it on a Strat he built himself in woodshop. The neck was payment from Boogie Bodies, the legendary guitar-parts manufacturer where Lynn Ellsworth and Jim Warmoth laid the foundation for the Superstrat era. “That shop was in Puyallup, Washington,” Cantrell says, “and I lived in Spanaway, which was right next door.The guy who built the necks and bodies that Eddie used to build his guitars was right in my backyard.”
Cantrell was barely in his teens when he got a gig helping out around the shop, and earned a “beautiful bird’s-eye maple neck” that didn’t make it to Eddie because it had a small divot in the 3rd fret. Cantrell recalls today that his duties included sweeping up sawdust. Then, as now, it was all about the work.