
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
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.”
- Digging Deeper: Intro to Afro-Cuban Guitar ›
- Los Pirañas’ Twisted Colombian Gold ›
- Montunos Made Easy! ›
- Psychedelic Dreams: LA LOM's Faulkner & Sokolow Gear Guide - Premier Guitar ›
Lutefish, the real-time music collaboration device and platform, is excited to announce a suite of new features designed to simplify setup, streamline collaboration, and offer more flexible subscription options for Lutefish Stream users. These latest updates, Audio Presets, Automatic Session Recall, Improved Scheduling with Contact Visibility, and a new Yearly Subscription Plan, are all about making it easier than ever for musicians to jam together, no matter where they’re based.
Save Time and Stay in the Flow with Audio Presets & Session Recall
Musicians can now save and reuse their exact audio settings, reducing setup time and ensuring every session sounds exactly as they want.
- Automatic Session Recall: When users leave a session, their current audio levels are automatically saved and restored when they rejoin.
- User-Defined Audio Presets: Each user can create and name up to five custom presets, like “Band Practice,” “Studio Mic Setup,” or “Quick Jam,” making it effortless to jump back in with the perfect sound.
“These tools are all about saving time and hassle,” said Patrick Finn, Business Manager at Lutefish. “Musicians want to make music, not spend time rebalancing levels every session. With presets and recall, we’re giving them time back and helping them sound their best, every time.”
Smarter Scheduling and Contact Visibility
The latest update to Lutefish also made it easier to find collaborators and book sessions. Users can now:- View all their contacts at a glance when scheduling a session.
- Instantly identify which contacts own a Lutefish Stream device—so they will always know who’s ready to jam.
Go Yearly and Save 20%
Lutefish now offers a Yearly Subscription Plan, providing users with the same great access as the monthly plan at a 20% discount.
This option is now available within the Lutefish app and web platform, and current monthly users are eligible for a discount with an upgrade to a yearly subscription.
Lutefish’s mission has always been to empower musicians to connect and collaborate without boundaries. With these new updates, Lutefish Stream continues to break down barriers—whether you’re jamming with a friend across town or collaborating with a bandmate 500 miles away.
For more information and to start jamming today, visitlutefish.com.
Empress Effects is proud to announce the release of the Bass ParaEq, a bass-specific parametric EQ pedal.
Building on the success of their acclaimed ParaEq MKII series, which has already gained popularity with bassists, the Bass ParaEq offers the same studio-grade precision but with features tailored for bass instruments.
Basses of all types – including electric and upright basses with active and passive electronics – can benefit from the Bass ParaEq’s tone-sculpting capabilities.
The new pedal follows the success of the Empress Bass Compressor and ParaEq MKII Deluxe, which have become some of the company’s best-reviewed and top-selling products. The Bass Compressor’s popularity confirmed what Empress had long suspected: bassists are eager for tools built with their needs in mind, not just adaptations of guitar gear.
The Bass ParaEq retains the line’s powerful 3-band parametric EQ and studio-style features while introducing a bass-optimized frequency layout, a selectable 10MΩ Hi-Z input for piezo-equipped instruments, a dynamically-adjusted low shelf, and automatic balanced output detection—perfect for live and studio use alike.
The Bass ParaEq also offers an output boost, adjustable by a dedicated top-mounted knob and activated by its own footswitch, capable of delivering up to 30dB of boost. It’s perfect for helping your bass punch through during key moments in live performance.
Whether dialing in clarity for a dense mix or compensating for an unfamiliar venue, the Bass ParaEq offers precise tonal control in a compact, road-ready form. With 27V of internal headroom to prevent clipping from even the hottest active pickups, the Bass ParaEq is the ultimate studio-style EQ designed to travel.
Key features of the Bass ParaEq include:
- Adjustable frequency bands tailored for bass instruments
- Selectable 10MΩ Hi-Z input for upright basses and piezo pickups
- Auto-detecting balanced output for long cable runs and direct recording
- Three sweepable parametric bands with variable Q
- High-pass, low-pass, low shelf, and high shelf filters
- Transparent analog signal path with 27V of internal headroom
- Buffered bypass switching
- Powered by standard 9V external supply, 300mA (no battery compartment)
The Bass ParaEq is now shipping worldwide. It can be purchased from the Empress Effects website for $374 USD and through authorized Empress dealers globally.
Few musical acts did more to put their fame and fortune to good use than punk rock icon Wayne Kramer. Known for his enduring commitment to activism, especially in justice reform, his life story embodies the defiant, DIY ethos of punk, directly inspiring generations of bands and musicians who followed. Now, fans and fellow musicians alike can attempt to emulate Kramer’s incendiary sound with the new, limited-edition pedal.
Designed before his death in February 2024, Wayne Kramer—together with friend Jimi Dunlop (Dunlop CEO) and Daredevil Pedals owner Johnny Wator —the pedal features artwork from artist and activist Shepard Fairey (Obey Clothing founder). A majority of profits from the sale of the pedal goes directly to Kramer’s charity supporting the rehabilitation of incarcerated people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds.
In honor of his close friend, Tom Morello—the innovative guitarist behind Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, the Nightwatchman, and more—demoed the pedal, showcasing its sound and shining light on Wayne Kramer’s incredible legacy.
Tom Morello Introduces MC5 Wayne Kramer-Inspired Pedal For Charity: MXR Jail Guitar Doors Drive
"What they've tried to bake into the MXR® Jail Guitar Doors Drive distortion pedal is not just Wayne's sound but Wayne's attitude, and the grit and the rawness of Detroit and of the MC5," said Morello, one of Kramer’s best friends, during his demo of the pedal. "This is the guitar pedal that was used on the song 'Heavy Lifting' that I recorded with Wayne for the last MC5 record.
"Named after the late rocker's charity—which provides instruments and art workshops to incarcerated individuals as rehabilitation tools—the MXR® Jail Guitar Doors Drive pedal aims to capture all of the high-voltage energy of Wayne Kramer's sound. It features two uniquely voiced gain circuits cascaded together with a singular pot controlling both the output level of each circuit and the overall saturation level of the distortion.
Music makers looking to capture Kramer’s raw, fiery sound can pick up the new MXR® Jail Guitar Doors Drive pedal, exclusively on Reverb via The Official MXR Jail Guitar Doors Drive Reverb Shop for $199, here: https://reverb.com/shop/the-official-mxr-jail-guitar-doors-reverb-shop.
The veteran Florida-born metalcore outfit proves that you don’t need humbuckers to pull off high gain.
Last August, metalcore giants Poison the Well gave the world a gift: They announced they were working on their first studio album in 15 years. They unleashed the first taste, single “Trembling Level,” back in January, and set off on a spring North American tour during which they played their debut record, The Opposite of December… A Season of Separation, in full every night.
PG’s Perry Bean caught up with guitarists Ryan Primack and Vadim Taver, and bassist Noah Harmon, ahead of the band’s show at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl for this new Rig Rundown.
Brought to you by D’Addario.Not-So-Quiet As a Mouse
Primack started his playing career on Telecasters, then switched to Les Pauls, but when his prized LPs were stolen, he jumped back to Teles, and now owns nine of them.
His No. 1 is this white one (left). Seymour Duncan made him a JB Model pickup in a single-coil size for the bridge position, while the neck is a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound Staggered. He ripped out all the electronics, added a Gibson-style toggle switch, flipped the control plate orientation thanks to an obsession with Danny Gatton, and included just one steel knob to control tone. Primack also installed string trees with foam to control extra noise.
This one has Ernie Ball Papa Het’s Hardwired strings, .011–.050.
Here, Kitty, Kitty
Primack runs both a PRS Archon and a Bad Cat Lynx at the same time, covering both 6L6 and EL34 territories. The Lynx goes into a Friedman 4x12 cab that’s been rebadged in honor of its nickname, “Donkey,” while the Archon, which is like a “refined 5150,” runs through an Orange 4x12.
Ryan Primack’s Pedalboard
Primack’s board sports a Saturnworks True Bypass Multi Looper, plus two Saturnworks boost pedals. The rest includes a Boss TU-3w, DOD Bifet Boost 410, Caroline Electronics Hawaiian Pizza, Fortin ZUUL +, MXR Phase 100, JHS Series 3 Tremolo, Boss DM-2w, DOD Rubberneck, MXR Carbon Copy Deluxe, Walrus Slo, and SolidGoldFX Surf Rider III.
Taver’s Teles
Vadim Taver’s go-to is this cherryburst Fender Telecaster, which he scored in the early 2000s and has been upgraded to Seymour Duncan pickups on Primack’s recommendation. His white Balaguer T-style has been treated to the same upgrade. The Balaguer is tuned to drop C, and the Fender stays in D standard. Both have D’Addario strings, with a slightly heavier gauge on the Balaguer.
Dual-Channel Chugger
Taver loves his 2-channel Orange Rockerverb 100s, one of which lives in a case made right in Nashville.
Vadim Taver’s Pedalboard
Taver’s board includes an MXR Joshua, MXR Carbon Copy Deluxe, Empress Tremolo, Walrus ARP-87, Old Blood Noise Endeavors Reflector, MXR Phase 90, Boss CE-2w, and Sonic Research Turbo Tuner ST-200, all powered by a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus.
Big Duff
Harmon’s favorite these days is this Fender Duff McKagan Deluxe Precision Bass, which he’s outfitted with a Leo Quan Badass bridge. His backup is a Mexico-made Fender Classic Series ’70s Jazz Bass. This one also sports Primack-picked pickups.
Rental Rockers
Harmon rented this Orange AD200B MK III head, which runs through a 1x15 cab on top and a 4x10 on the bottom.
Noah Harmon’s Pedalboard
Harmon’s board carries a Boss TU-2, Boss ODB-3, MXR Dyna Comp, Darkglass Electronics Vintage Ultra, and a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus. His signal from the Vintage Ultra runs right to the front-of-house, and Harmon estimates that that signal accounts for about half of what people hear on any given night.