Since blossoming from its experimentalist roots in the mid 1960s, psychedelic culture has produced some of the most exciting sounds of each generation it has touched. These days the term “psych” operates more as a conceptual umbrella than a distinct genre, which means it gets applied to music that includes almost any artist who seeks more adventurous routes to sonic expression. But that said, psych as a genre is currently in the throes of a renaissance.
Levitation—known as Austin Psych Fest for the past seven years—is the convergence of all that is good in the vast realm of psychedelia, and an event that serves as a signifier of psych’s new awakening. Taking place each spring over the course of three reverb-drenched days in the hallowed birthing grounds and perpetual hotbed of the psychedelic movement that is Austin, Texas, the festival has developed from a humble showcase for a few bands to a highly curated celebration of mind-bending sounds.
Artists and fans from around the world gather at a small ranch tucked into a corner of the city’s outskirts for a weekend of glorious sonic expansion and psychedelic immersion. This is the place to catch performances by psych’s brightest lights, emerging upstarts, and fabled heroes, and the 2015 lineup was one for the ages—especially for guitar fans.
When it comes to festivals with a focus on guitar-driven and guitar-infused music, Levitation is without peer. Among the artists wielding the instrument with passion and creativity this year were revivalist garage-rockers, British-invasion inspired acid-janglers, crushing shoegaze bands, and sludge-metal droners. The weekend also offered rare reunion performances by legends of the psychedelic institution, including the first appearance in more than 50 years by one of the genre’s undisputed originators, the 13th Floor Elevators.
There was something for guitar fans around every corner at Levitation 2015, and PG was on hand to take in all the action. Here’s the lowdown on some of the most vibrant bands in the current psych movement.
White Fence
Tim Presley of White Fence wields his beautiful, yet confounding 6-string—a modified Fender Jazzmaster with a humbucker in the bridge position and a Jaguar single-coil at the neck. Photo by Andrew Vincent.
Featuring plunky guitar tones and far-away vocals, Presley’s recorded output generally has a lo-fi, straight-to-tape warble that could be easily sold as the long-lost demos of some mysterious, mid-’60s British group. However, White Fence’s live sound is a much brawnier affair than its records would have you believe.
White Fence provided the soundtrack to the setting sun of Levitation’s first day. As Presley bashed crunchy chords on a modified Fender Jazzmaster (it has a humbucker in the bridge position and a Jaguar single-coil at the neck), ace skinsman Nick Murray displayed such impressive Keith Moon-ish drumming that many expected the set to end in smashed guitars and punctured grille cloth.
Nothing
Photo by Andrew Vincent.
Nothing absolutely revels in monolithic guitar sounds that are delivered at obscene volumes and switch without notice between gargantuan blasts of distortion and twinkling washes of echo. The result is as dynamic as it is jarring and places the group on our shortlist of psych-tinged artists to pay close attention to.
Bathed in a disorienting light show, the band performed to a fervorous audience from a stage strewn with malfunctioning television sets. Nothing’s figurehead, Domenic Palermo, appeared with a well-worn Fender Strat that made an ideal conduit for the squalling feedback and decimating fuzz he laced into lead guitarist Brandon Setta’s lines. Though Palermo has a well-documented history of destroying guitars on the road and does not think of them as particularly precious, he confessed that the Skreddy Zero high-gain fuzz pedal is integral to his sound, and both he and Setta rely heavily on the TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb for the band’s expansive tones.
Chelsea Wolfe
Wolfe’s music is an extremely eclectic mix of fingerpicked guitar and adventurous, no wave-inspired guitar soundscapes that are pulled together by the singer/songwriter’s sublime, gossamer vocals. The final result is dark, ethereal, and unbelievably potent. Certainly an original, Wolfe makes intellectual music with a visceral energy that seems to appeal as much to staunch metal fans as it does to folkies.
Brandishing a sunburst Gibson ES-335, Wolfe appeared for her set from a thick cloud of fog. While a light show playfully danced across a swath of tall trees surrounding the stage, Wolfe’s recently appointed guitar foil, Aurielle Zeitler, worked her magic on a white, late-model Fender Stratocaster. Wolfe used her deft, fingerstyle technique as a foundation for Zeitler’s EBow and delay musings, all of which were punctuated by occasional bursts of harsh synth. With the help of a few EarthQuaker Devices pedals, the pair of guitar heroines wove tapestries of outlandish sounds and dramatic textures that ebbed and flowed languidly throughout the set.
Black Angels
Photo by Andrew Vincent.
The Black Angels’ sound remains true to the early days of experimental psych, and you’d be hard pressed to find an instrument onstage that wasn’t built prior to 1968—or at least reissued as such. Guitar duties are chiefly handled by the group’s pair of left-handed players: Christian Bland, who favors a 37-year-old black Rickenbacker 345 (which was sadly destroyed by United Airlines shortly after the festival), and Jake Garcia, who used a Kurt Cobain Fender Jaguar for most of the set.
While the Black Angels’ gear and tonal choices are authentically retro, their sonic personality relies heavily on the unique vocals of Alex Maas, who narrates the hypnotic jams that shift between rivers of reverb and full-tilt fuzz freakouts. The band’s Levitation 2015 performance felt like a ritual every audience member had to fully absorb to complete the Austin Psych Fest experience.
Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators closing out Levitation Fest 2015. Photo by Andrew Vincent.
Big Reunions and Huge Legacies
Reunions and rare performances were a major part of Levitation 2015’s appeal, and none generated more excitement than the 50th-anniversary return of the original founding fathers of psychedelic rock—the 13th Floor Elevators.The band’s iconic frontman, Roky Erickson, has toured actively in recent years, but anyone who’s seen You’re Gonna Miss Me, the documentary on Erickson’s often tragic life, can attest that his late-career performances have the potential to be somewhat erratic. As such, a nervous energy seemed to fill the air of the festival grounds as the band prepared for its first performance in nearly half a century. However, with most of the original lineup intact (including electric jug player Tommy Hall), the Elevators took the stage and delivered on the promise of their past ... in spades. As Erickson and company launched into a raucous set of songs that have long been considered the sacred canon of psych, dancing fans filled the field in front of the main stage. It was a triumphant moment.
This month’s mod Dan’s uses a 500k linear pot, a 1.5H inductor (L) with a 0.039 µF (39nF) cap (C), and a 220k resistor (R) in parallel.
Don’t let the name fool you, this is a purely passive device—nothing is going to be boosted. In general, you can’t increase anything with passive electronics that isn’t already there. Period. But you can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent (so … “boost” in guitar marketing language). Removing highs makes lows more apparent, and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which create the magnetic field in a guitar circuit) and capacitors will create resonant peaks and valleys (bandpasses and notches), further coloring the overall tone. This type of bandpass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked, and it all works at unity gain.
“You can’t increase anything with passive electronics that isn’t already there … but you can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent.”
All the systems I mentioned above are doing more or less the same thing, using different approaches and slightly different component values. They are all meant to be updated tone controls. Our common tone circuit is usually a variable low-pass filter (aka treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through, while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap. Most of these systems are LCR networks, which means that there is not only a capacitor (C), like on our standard tone controls, but also an inductor (L) and a resistor (R).
In general, all these systems are meant to control the midrange in order to scoop the mids, creating a mid-cut. This can be a cool sounding option, e.g. on a Strat for that mid-scooped neck and middle tone.
Dan Torres offered his “midrange kit” via an internet shop that is no longer online, same with his business website. The Torres design is a typical LCR network and looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Dan’s design uses a 500k linear pot, a 1.5H inductor (L) with a 0.039 µF (39nF) cap (C), and a 220k resistor (R) in parallel. Let’s break down the parts piece by piece:
Any 500k linear pot will do the trick, in one of the rare scenarios where a linear pot works better in a passive guitar system than an audio pot.
(C) 0.039µF cap: This is kind of an odd value. Keeping production tolerances of up to 20 percent in mind, any value that is close will do, so you can use any small cap you want for this. I would prefer a small metallized film cap, and any voltage rating will do. If you want to stay as close as possible to the original design, use any 0.039 µF low-tolerance film cap.
(L) 1.5H inductor: The original design uses a Xicon 42TL021 inductor, which is easy to find and fairly priced. This one is also used in the Bill Lawrence Q-Filter design, the Gibson standard Varitone, and many other systems like this. It’s very small, so it will fit in virtually every electronic compartment of a guitar. It has a frequency range of 300 Hz up to 3.4 kHz, with a primary impedance of 4k ohms (that’s the one we want to use) and a secondary impedance of 600 ohms. Snip off the three secondary leads and the center tap of the primary side and use the two remaining outer primary leads; the primary side is marked with a “P.” On the pic, you can see the two leads you need marked in red, all other leads can be snipped off. You can connect the two remaining leads to the pot either way; it doesn’t matter which of them is going to ground when using it this way.
Drawing courtesy of singlecoil.com
(R) 220k: use a small axial metal film resistor (0.25 W), which is easy to find and is the quasi-standard.
Other designs use slightly different part values—the Bill Lawrence Q-filter has a 1.8H L, 0.02 µF C and 8k R, while the old RA Gresco Tone Qube from the ’80s has a 1.5H L, 0.0033 µF C, and a 180k R, so this is a wide field for experimentation to tweak it for your personal tone.
This mid-cut system can be put into any electric guitar not only as a master tone, but also together with a regular tone control or something like the Fender Greasebucket, or it can be assigned only to a certain pickup. It can be a great way to enhance your sonic palette, so give it a try.
That’s it! Next month, we’ll take a deeper look into how to fight feedback on a Telecaster. It’s a common issue, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!