Guitarist Zac Sokolow takes us on a tour of tropical guitar styles with a set of the cover songs that inspired the trio’s Los Angeles League of Musicians.
There’s long been a cottage industry, driven by record collectors, musicologists, and guitar-heads, dedicated to the sounds that happened when cultures around the world got their hands on electric guitars. The influence goes in all directions. Dick Dale’s propulsive, percussive adaptation of “Misirlou”—a folk song among a variety of Eastern Mediterranean cultures—made the case for American musicians to explore sounds beyond our shores, and guitarists from Ry Cooder and David Lindley to Marc Ribot and Richard Bishop have spent decades fitting global guitar influences into their own musical concepts.
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos” Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero” Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”
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Beauty and sweet sonority elevate a simple-to-use, streamlined acoustic and vocal amplifier.
An EQ curve that trades accuracy for warmth. Easy-to-learn, simple-to-use controls. It’s pretty!
Still exhibits some classic acoustic-amplification problems, like brash, unforgiving midrange if you’re not careful.
$1,199
Taylor Circa 74
taylorguitars.com
Save for a few notable (usually expensive) exceptions, acoustic amplifiers are rarely beautiful in a way that matches the intrinsic loveliness of an acoustic flattop. I’ve certainly seen companies try—usually by using brown-colored vinyl to convey … earthiness? Don’t get me wrong, a lot of these amps sound great and even look okay. But the bar for aesthetics, in my admittedly snotty opinion, remains rather low. So, my hat’s off to Taylor for clearing that bar so decisively and with such style. The Circa 74 is, indeed, a pretty piece of work that’s forgiving to work with, ease to use, streamlined, and sharp.
Boxing Beyond Utility
Any discussion of trees or wood with Bob Taylor is a gas, and highly instructive. He loves the stuff and has dabbled before in amplifier designs that made wood an integral feature, rather than just trim. But the Circa 74 is more than just an aesthetic exercise. Because the Taylor gang started to think in a relatively unorthodox way about acoustic sound amplification—eschewing the notion that flat frequency response is the only path to attractive acoustic tone.
I completely get this. I kind of hate flat-response speakers. I hate nice monitors. We used to have a joke at a studio I frequented about a pair of monitors that often made us feel angry and agitated. Except that they really did. Flat sound can be flat-out exhausting and lame. What brings me happiness is listening to Lee “Scratch” Perry—loud—on a lazy Sunday on my secondhand ’70s Klipsch speakers. One kind of listening is like staring at a sun-dappled summer garden gone to riot with flowers. The other sometimes feels like a stale cheese sandwich delivered by robot.
The idea that live acoustic music—and all its best, earthy nuances—can be successfully communicated via a system that imparts its own color is naturally at odds with acoustic culture’s ethos of organic-ness, authenticity, and directness. But where does purity end and begin in an amplified acoustic signal? An undersaddle pickup isn’t made of wood. A PA with flat-response speakers didn’t grow in a forest. So why not build an amp with color—the kind of color that makes listening to music a pleasure and not a chore?
To some extent, that question became the design brief that drove the evolution of the Circa 74. Not coincidentally, the Circa 74 feels as effortless to use as a familiar old hi-fi. It has none of the little buttons for phase correction that make me anxious every time I see one. There’s two channels: one with an XLR/1/4" combo input, which serves as the vocal channel if you are a singer; another with a 1/4" input for your instrument. Each channel consists of just five controls—level, bass, middle, and treble EQ, and a reverb. An 11th chickenhead knob just beneath the jewel lamp governs the master output. That’s it, if you don’t include the Bluetooth pairing button and 1/8" jacks for auxiliary sound sources and headphones. Power, by the way, is rated at 150 watts. That pours forth through a 10" speaker.Pretty in Practice
I don’t want to get carried away with the experiential and aesthetic aspects of the Circa 74. It’s an amplifier with a job to do, after all. But I had fun setting it up—finding a visually harmonious place among a few old black-panel Fender amps and tweed cabinets, where it looked very much at home, and in many respects equally timeless.
Plugging in a vocal mic and getting a balance with my guitar happened in what felt like 60 seconds. Better still, the sound that came from the Circa 74, including an exceedingly croaky, flu-addled human voice, sounded natural and un-abrasive. The Circa 74 isn’t beyond needing an assist. Getting the most accurate picture of a J-45 with a dual-source pickup meant using both the treble and midrange in the lower third of their range. Anything brighter sounded brash. A darker, all-mahogany 00, however, preferred a scooped EQ profile with the treble well into the middle of its range. You still have to do the work of overcoming classic amplification problems like extra-present high mids and boxiness. But the fixes come fast, easily, and intuitively. The sound may not suggest listening to an audiophile copy of Abbey Road, as some discussions of the amp would lead you to expect. But there is a cohesiveness, particularly in the low midrange, that does give it the feel of something mixed, even produced, but still quite organic.
The Verdict
Taylor got one thing right: The aesthetic appeal of the Circa 74 has a way of compelling you to play and sing. Well, actually, they got a bunch of things right. The EQ is responsive and makes it easy to achieve a warm representation of your acoustic, no matter what its tone signature. It’s also genuinely attractive. It’s not perfectly accurate. Instead, it’s rich in low-mid resonance and responsive to treble-frequency tweaks—lending a glow not a million miles away from a soothing home stereo. I think that approach to acoustic amplification is as valid as the quest for transparency. I’m excited to see how that thinking evolves, and how Taylor responds to their discoveries.
The evolution of Electro-Harmonix’s very first effect yields a powerful boost and equalization machine at a rock-bottom price.
A handy and versatile preamp/booster that goes well beyond the average basic booster’s range. Powerful EQ section.
Can sound a little harsh at more extreme EQ ranges.
$129
Electro-Harmonix LPB-3
ehx.com
Descended from the first Electro-Harmonix pedal ever released, the LPB-1 Linear Power Booster, the new LPB-3 has come a long way from the simple, one-knob unit in a folded-metal enclosure that plugged straight into your amplifier. Now living in Electro-Harmonix’s compact Nano chassis, the LPB-3 Linear Power Booster and EQ boasts six control knobs, two switches, and more gain than ever before.
If 3 Were 6
With six times the controls found on the 1 and 2 versions (if you discount the original’s on/off slider switch,) the LPB-3’s control complement offers pre-gain, boost, mid freq, bass, treble, and mid knobs, with a center detent on the latter three so you can find the midpoint easily. A mini-toggle labeled “max” selects between 20 dB and 33 dB of maximum gain, and another labeled “Q” flips the resonance of the mid EQ between high and low. Obviously, this represents a significant expansion of the LPB’s capabilities.
More than just a booster with a passive tone, the LPB-3 boasts a genuine active EQ stage plus parametric midrange section, comprising the two knobs with shaded legends, mid freq and mid level. The gain stages have also been reimagined to include a pre-gain stage before the EQ, which enables up to 20 dB of input gain. The boost stage that follows the EQ is essentially a level control with gain to allow for up to 33 dB of gain through the LPB-3 when the “max” mini toggle is set to 33dB
A slider switch accessible inside the pedal selects between buffered or true bypass for the hard-latch footswitch. An AC adapter is included, which supplies 200mA of DC at 9.6 volts to the center-negative power input, and EHX specifies that nothing supplying less than 120mA or more than 12 volts should be used. There’s no space for an internal battery.
Power-Boosted
The LPB-3 reveals boatloads of range that betters many linear boosts on the market. There’s lots of tone-shaping power here. Uncolored boost is available when you want it, and the preamp gain knob colors and fattens your signal as you crank it up—even before you tap into the massive flexibility in the EQ stage.
“The preamp gain knob colors and fattens your signal as you crank it up—even before you tap into the massive flexibility in the EQ stage.”
I found the two mid controls work best when used judiciously, and my guitars and amps preferred subtle changes pretty close to the midpoint on each. However, there are still tremendous variations in your mid boost (or scoop, for that matter) within just 15 or 20 percent range in either direction from the center detent. Pushing the boost and pre-gain too far, particularly with the 33 dB setting engaged, can lead to some harsh sounds, but they are easy to avoid and might even be desirable for some users that like to work at more creative extremes.
The Verdict
The new LPB-3 has much, much more range than its predecessors, providing flexible preamp, boost, and overdrive sounds that can be reshaped in significant ways via the powerful EQ. It gives precise tone-tuning flexibility to sticklers that like to match a guitar and amp to a song in a very precise way, but also opens up more radical paths for experimentalists. That it does all this at a $129 price is beyond reasonable.
Electro-Harmonix Lpb-3 Linear Power Booster & Eq Effect Pedal Silver And Blue
Many listeners and musicians can tell if a bass player is really a guitarist in disguise. Here’s how you can brush up on your bass chops.
Was bass your first instrument, or did you start out on guitar? Some of the world’s best bass players started off as guitar players, sometimes by chance. When Stuart Sutcliffe—originally a guitarist himself—left the Beatles in 1961, bass duties fell to rhythm guitarist Paul McCartney, who fully adopted the role and soon became one of the undeniable bass greats.
Since there are so many more guitarists than bassists—think of it as a supply and demand issue—odds are that if you’re a guitarist, you’ve at least dabbled in bass or have picked up the instrument to fill in or facilitate a home recording.
But there’s a difference between a guitarist who plays bass and one who becomes a bass player. Part of what’s different is how you approach the music, but part of it is attitude.
Many listeners and musicians can tell if a bass player is really a guitarist in disguise. They simply play differently than someone who spends most of their musical time embodying the low end. But if you’re really trying to put down some bass, you don’t want to sound like a bass tourist. Real bassists think differently about the rhythm, the groove, and the harmony happening in each moment.
And who knows … if you, as a guitarist, thoroughly adopt the bassist mindset, you might just find your true calling on the mightiest of instruments. Now, I’m not exactly recruiting, but if you have the interest, the aptitude, and—perhaps most of all—the necessity, here are some ways you can be less like a guitarist who plays bass, and more like a bona fide bass player.
Start by playing fewer notes. Yes, everybody can see that you’ve practiced your scales. But at least until you get locked in rhythmically, use your ears more than your fingers and get a sense of how your bass parts mesh with the other musical elements. You are the glue that holds everything together. Recognize that you’re at the intersection of rhythm and harmony, and you’ll realize foundation beats flash every time.“If Larry Graham, one of the baddest bassists there has ever been, could stick to the same note throughout Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Everyday People,’ then you too can deliver a repetitive figure when it’s called for.”
Focus on that kick drum. Make sure you’re locked in with the drummer. That doesn’t mean you have to play a note with every kick, but there should be some synchronicity. You and the drummer should be working together to create the rhythmic drive. Laying down a solid bass line is no time for expressive rubato phrasing. Lock it up—and have fun with it.
Don’t sleep on the snare. What does it feel like to leave a perfect hole for the snare drum’s hits on two and four? What if you just leave space for half of them? Try locking the ends of your notes to the snare’s backbeat. This is just one of the ways to create a rhythmic feel together with the drummer, so you produce a pocket that everyone else can groove to.
Relish your newfound harmonic power. Move that major chord root down a third, and now you have a minor 7 chord. Play the fifth under a IV chord and you have a IV/V (“four over five,” which fancy folks sometimes call an 11 chord). The point is to realize that the bottom note defines the harmony. Sting put it like this: “It’s not a C chord until I play a C. You can change harmony very subtly but very effectively as a bass player. That’s one of the great privileges of our role and why I love playing bass. I enjoy the sound of it, I enjoy its harmonic power, and it’s a sort of subtle heroism.”
Embrace the ostinato. If the song calls for playing the same motif over and over, don’t think of it as boring. Think of it as hypnotic, tension-building, relentless, and an exercise in restraint. Countless James Brown songs bear this out, but my current favorite example is the bass line on the Pointer Sisters’ swampy cover of Allen Toussaint “Yes We Can Can,” which was played by Richard Greene of the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, aka Dexter C. Plates. Think about it: If Larry Graham, one of the baddest bassists there has ever been, could stick to the same note throughout Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” then you too can deliver a repetitive figure when it’s called for.
Be supportive. Though you may stretch out from time to time, your main job is to support the song and your fellow musicians. Consider how you can make your bandmates sound better using your phrasing, your dynamics, and note choices. For example, you could gradually raise the energy during guitar solos. Keep that supportive mindset when you’re offstage, too. Some guitarists have an attitude of competitiveness and even scrutiny when checking out other players, but bassists tend to offer mutual support and encouragement. Share those good vibes with enthusiasm.
And finally, give and take criticism with ease. This one’s for all musicians: Humility and a sense of helpfulness can go a long way. Ideally, everyone should be working toward the common goal of what’s good for the song. As the bass player, you might find yourself leading the way.Fuchs Audio introduces the ODH Hybrid amp, featuring a True High Voltage all-tube preamp and Ice Power module for high-powered tones in a compact size. With D-Style overdrive, Spin reverb, and versatile controls, the ODH offers exceptional tone shaping and flexibility at an affordable price point.
Fuchs Audio has introduced their latest amp the ODH © Hybrid. Assembled in USA.
Featuring an ODS-style all-tube preamp, operating at True High Voltage into a fan-cooled Ice power module, the ODH brings high-powered clean and overdrive tones to an extremely compact size and a truly affordable price point.
Like the Fuchs ODS amps, the ODH clean preamp features 3-position brite switch, amid-boost switch, an EQ switch, high, mid and low controls. The clean preamp drives theoverdrive section in D-Style fashion. The OD channel has an input gain and outputmaster with an overdrive tone control. This ensures perfect tuning of both the clean andoverdrive channels. A unique tube limiter circuit controls the Ice Power module input.Any signal clipping is (intentionally) non-linear so it responds just like a real tube amp.
The ODH includes a two-way footswitch for channels and gain boost. A 30-second mute timer ensures the tubes are warmed up before the power amp goes live. The ODH features our lush and warm Spin reverb. A subsonic filter eliminates out-of-band low frequencies which would normally waste amplifier power, which assures tons of clean headroom. The amp also features Accent and Depth controls, allowing contouring of the high and low response of the power amp section, to match speakers, cabinets andenvironments. The ODH features a front panel fully buffered series effects loop and aline out jack, allowing for home recording or feeding a slave amp. A three-position muteswitch mutes the amp, the line out or mute neither.
Built on the same solid steel chassis platform as the Fuchs FB series bass amps, the amps feature a steel chassis and aluminum front and rear panels, Alpha potentiometers, ceramic tube sockets, high-grade circuit boards and Neutrik jacks. The ICE power amp is 150 watts into 8 ohms and 300 watts into 4 ohms, and nearly 500 watts into 2.65 ohms (4 and8 ohms in parallel) and operates on universal AC voltage, so it’s fully globallycompatible. The chassis is fan-cooled to ensure hours of cool operation under any circumstances. The all-tube preamp uses dual-selected 12AX7 tubes and a 6AL5 limiter tube.
MAP: $ 1,299
For more information, please visit fuchsaudiotechnology.com.